Suicide or Messianic Self-Sacrifice?: Exhuming Willa's Body in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills.

Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. (bell hooks, yearning)

Since joining the burgeoning canon of contemporary Black women's fiction, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985) has generated much critical discussion not only for its associations with Dante [1] but also its damning depiction of the Black bourgeoisie. [2] However, while scholars have read the novel along these and other lines, and also identified its heroine Willa Prescott-Nedeed as playing various narrative roles, from being a feminist critic [3] and historian [4] to serving as a triumphant heroine, [5] they have virtually overlooked the novel's concern with theology, particularly its advancing of a gendered version of millennialism/messianism in the context of Black liberation experience. Relatedly, the suggestion that Willa's death is self-destruction (Goddu 225) and, more specifically, a quick suicide (Homans 396, 398) raises a problematic that complicates the critical lapse. Deemphasizing the novel's biblical undercurrent, this very suggestion seems to question and indirectly condemn the kind of communit y redemption and Black-female subjectivity which Naylor, herself a feminist, proffers in the text.

Naylor's artistic interest in both the rescue of a transgressed (Black) world, Linden Hills, from Luther's satanic dispensation designed to last a millennium, and the need for a new (fictive) world order, created and symbolized in Mama Day, her next novel, magnifies the salvific functionality of Willa's character. It also locates Linden Hills' controversial resolution in the floor plan of Naylor's oeuvre. Naylor's handling of millennialism/messianism encases and also extends the treatment of theodicy in African American (women's) writings. Black womanist/feminist theologians such as Renita Weems, Kelley Brown Douglas, and Jacquelyn Grant [6] have, for instance, engaged the place of scripture relative to Black women's experience of race, sex, and class oppression. Also, on a creative level, ntozake shange's for colored girls and, especially, Alice Walker's The Color Purple address not merely the issue of "God" or of an otherworldly "confidant" in relation to Black/women's lives, but more so the idea of women rallying and intervening as radical "messiahs" to save other women, and men as well. Viewing Linden Hills through the lens of this tradition, the question arises as to whether Willa's death, which occurs during her consequential battle against Luther, is indeed suicidal/self-destructive.

This question is far more than a linguistic squabble, for although Naylor's narrator does not "classify" Willa's death as a coroner might, it does matter how scholarship checks her death certificate. Black-female suicides may be infrequent statistically, but they do occur in Black women's fiction (Laurel Dumont, for example, kills herself in Naylor's novel). The question matters because the strong connotations of either descriptor, "suicide" or "self-destruction," have interpretive ramifications both for the text's feminist thought and for the larger, religious/messianic meanings of Willa's death. Speaking broadly, what is really at stake here is the issue of how society in general, and the discourse on Black liberation struggle, specifically, (mis)represents Black women's lives, forcing us, sometimes, to dig up the dead--critically.

Two fundamental and inextricable goals guide this critical autopsy. One, I attempt to address and amend what I perceive to be problematic readings of Willa, specifically the suggestion that her death is both negative and futile. Two, building on that revision, I consider the novel's ignored engagement of theology and thereby suggest a different look at both Willa and the narrative. Drawing on the novel's religious overtones, and reading Linden Hills as a text which harnesses and signifies [7] upon the "Messianic themes of coming social liberation and redemption" grounded in Black culture (Howard-Pitney 12), I read Willa as an irregular messiah--as a gendered reification of both Moses and Christ. Willa's messianic death--her "self-sacrifice"--promises emancipation from Nedeed bondage for Linden Hills' erred citizenry, particularly the subdivision's abused women. As messiah, Willa is therefore the-savior-who-is-to-come (in Linden Hills), and whose coming has as its implicit precursor (a prophetic) Mamie Tilson (Sandiford 119). I suggest also that Willa's "sell-sacrifice" not only envisions cleansing of the (original) sin wrought on the world (of Linden Hills) by a male, Luther Nedeed, but also, in a larger racial/political sense, it (re)establishes the presence of and (re)locates strong Black womanhood at the center of Black liberation struggle and discourse.

Discussions of Linden Hills generally critique Willa alongside the other Nedeed women. This is of course understandable, considering how pertinent her story is in our knowledge and appraisal of her foremothers' lives and in Naylor's canon formation, or what critic Margot Anne Kelley nicely sums up as Naylor's "intertwined" narratives, her "multiple-text universe" (xiv-xvi). However, the suggestion that Willa commits suicide or self-destructs not only is problematic but also involves the related and equally interesting assumption that her rebellion is both futile and unrevolutionary (Homans 396; Goddu 225-26; and Montgomery, "Domestic" 53). Homans argues, for instance, that the novel reneges in its inferred promise to create a (sustainable) heroine through Willa's mirror of identity recovery and self-awareness (396). Reflecting bell hooks' criticism, in black looks, that many contemporary Black women writers seem to be unable or unwilling to constitute what she calls self-actualized, "radical female subjectiv ity" (50), Homans suggests that the novel fails to "institute [a] countertradition of strong Black womanhood to oppose the destructive legacy of patriarchy" (396), and she argues that Naylor's line of women, from the dead, Mrs. Nedeeds (Willa's foremothers) and Laurel Dumont to Roberta and Grandma Tilson, is depicted as being "inefficacious against the fathers--or can at best suicidally negate them" (396; emphasis added). In an attempt to examine these charges, we must reopen Willa's case file and exhume her fictive body, but to do that properly, we must first engage the semantics of the words suicide and self-sacrifice.

Attempts to clarify the differences between self-caused deaths are sometimes beset by the problem of typing. In "Suicide, Self-Sacrifice and Coercion," William E. Tolhurst concedes to the dilemma of categorization. He notes that this difficulty arises not from absence of empirical evidence but from "the lack of a clear account of what makes a particular self-caused death a case of suicide" (105). While the descriptions of "suicide" and "self-sacrifice" may sometimes seem blurry, scholars recognize differences between the two. For Tolhurst, "a person has committed suicide if and only if that person has brought about his death intentionally"; this intent has to be strong and also have "the right sort of causal history, roughly one which is caused by the agent's beliefs and desires in the right way" (111). Tolhurst states that there are, however, cases of altruistically inspired self-killings which would not satisfy this definition--for instance, when a pilot, hoping to save people below, refuses to eject from his malfunctioning plane and stays to steer it to an unpopulated crash site. Another example would be the case of a soldier who shields his fellow officers from a live hand grenade by sacrificing his own body to the explosion (108).

Margaret Pabst Battin writes that the above scenarios qualify as cases of "self-sacrifice," or of "martyrdom" and "heroism." According to Battin, self-sacrifice (of which Christ's death serves as one model) defines situations "in which one person directly benefits another by sacrificing his or her own life in order to spare the life or to promote the welfare of someone else" (101). That the earlier mentioned cases are not understood as suicide is, as Battin argues, mainly because the word suicide, like its

predecessors in English, self-murder and self-slaughter, carries with it severely negative moral connotations.... this linguistic distinction rests primarily on the distinction between suicide and laudatory self-death rendered by the traditional Catholic principle of double effect: heroism, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom are excused as situations in which... the agent directly and primarily intends his or her own death. (101; emphases added)

Building on the above premise and on circumstances evident in Laurel Dumont's tragedy, one can more readily discern what separates Laurel's situation (a clear case of suicide) from Willa's death.

As one of the couples who have descended to Linden Hills' Tupelo Drive, and hence perilously close to Luther, the Dumonts are considered "successful." Laurel has become "the biggest woman at IBM." She is considered to be "an Amazon." Her husband, Howard Dumont, is "the first black D.A. in Wayne County and handpicked to be the next state attorney general" (Linden 227-32). But Laurel is also a sad Black woman, one battling a deepening crisis borne of marital unfulfillment, familial emptiness, cultural alienation, and spiritual fragility. She has a house but no home in Linden Hills. Worse yet, Luther diabolically aggravates Laurel's present malaise by intimating her virtual nonexistence in Linden Hills outside of a male/man--her husband, Howard. Shortly after, an overwhelmed Laurel jumps headlong into an empty swimming pool, killing herself as Luther, who would not "lift a finger" to stop the tragedy (258), watches. Dr. Daniel Braithwaite, Linden Hills' apathetic, existentialist, and egotistical historian, who technically assumes the role of the sub division's coroner, helps certify Laurel's death as suicide, explaining, in a statement to Lester, that Laurel had been "on that [suicidal] path" for months (256).

In the context of suicide, Laurel's self-killing is evidently neither in resistance to Luther nor altruistic. Ungrounded both spiritually and culturally in a constricting suburb that critic Luke Bouvier calls "the black space par excellence" (140), Laurel was "losing" her battle against the powers of androcentrism. Luther is unquestionably a factor in her death. But also, as the narrative indicates, Laurel kills herself because, significantly, she refuses her grandmother's prescription of cultural ways of dealing with one's blues. Unlike Willa, Laurel seems unable or unwilling to locate alternative paths of self-validation besides materiality, maleness, and marriage-- hence the negative associations of her death.

The association of Willa's death with messianic self-sacrifice is even clearer and more justifiable when one examines Linden Hills in the context of (Black) messianism. According to Wilson J. Moses, [8] "Black messianism is a very American tradition" (5) which essentially grew out of Black people's experience with white oppression and their conception of themselves as having a redemptive destiny in the New World. Africans, enslaved and oppressed in the New World, oftenidentified with the victimized children of Israel, and this identification led the slaves, in Houston Baker's words, "to a type of black messianism--a feeling that they were the chosen people whom God would deliver from cruel oppressors" (8). Extending this thought, Howard-Pitney writes that

Messianic themes of coming social liberation and redemption have deep roots in black culture. The biblical motif of the Exodus of the chosen people from Egyptian slavery to a Promised Land of freedom was central to the black socio-religious imagination. Afro-Americans, by virtue of their unjust bondage, felt that they had a messianic role in achieving their own and others' redemption. (12)

Interrogations of Black messianism in African American letters, whether encrypted as elements of the jeremiad tradition, [9] as aspects of the apocalyptic mode, [10] or within other layers of Black liberation politics, have tended generally to privilege male authors and, significantly, visible Black-male "redeemer" figures, especially those who did big, notable, rational, and public things. The list often includes such popular names as Nat Turner, David Walker, Martin R. Delany, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Father Divine, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Mohammad, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. In Garvey's case, for instance, his mother envisioned him to be a Black Moses, one who would lead his people (see Cronon 5). Indeed, there are even some non-political, non-militant messianic figures such as the then-twenty-year-old boxer Joe Louis Barrow, whose monumental boxing victory over Primo Carnera inspired Black "group solidarity and ethnic pride," forcibly elevating him to the status of a symbolic Black leader of Mosaic proportions (Moses 156). Some White leaders such as John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, W. D. Fard, and Reverend James Warren have also come to be regarded as "Black messiahs," either intentionally or otherwise (Moses 1-16).

Because of Black people's complex relationship to white America, Black redeemer figures have had to navigate between what Moses describes as the symbolic poles of "Uncle Tom" and "Nat Turner" (49-66). Bestriding the ideals of biblical Christ and Moses, they have sometimes performed as either agents of peace and racial reconciliation or militant agitators for Black nationalism, or both. Perhaps more than the historicized differences between the racial-uplift strategies of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King's advocacy of Gandhian nonviolent protest and Malcolm X's more combative approach exemplify the contrasting courses that Black messianic figures have taken in response to the amoebic, sometimes violent character of American racism.

Not only do King's and Malcolm's violent, untimely deaths have implications germane to Linden Hills, since their deaths highlight the huge risks involved in radical opposition of a doggedly vicious oppressor, but thanks to media inundation and a male-centered historiography of Black liberation, King's (male) death and face, arguably more than any other, now symbolize Black martrydom--the Black blood shed for racial emancipation. This idea of male-as-messiah and/or Black-male-death-as-model conflates and hence overshadows Black women's equally tragic sacrifices, from Angela Davis's incaceration to the white-supremacist bombing deaths of four little girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, church. It also finds literary cognates, one being Harriet Beecher Stowe's nineteenth-century figuration of the character Uncle Tom as a martyr, a suffering Christ-persona who, as Henry Louis Gates also notes (198-99), employs "silence" as resistance and, unlike Naylor's Willa or Martin Delany's Henricus Blacus, will not strike his a ssailant back. Delany's Blake, as Gates observes, "revises and critiques Stowe's representation of the personal messiah as masochistic martyr by ... figuring a [revolutionary/messianic] hero" (199).

Although the Black racial messiah is typically figured as male, and Black women's roles have been assigned a peripheral place in discussions of Black leadership (Smooth and Tucker 241-55), [11] women's contributions to Black liberation politics continue to defy both mislabeling and erasure. Contemporary Black women writers and scholars, including Barbara Smith, Michelle Wallace, Alice Walker, Paula Giddings, and others too many to mention here, have led an intensive search-and-recovery effort to unearth and celebrate Black women's buried and sometimes distorted history. And as shown in Willa's dugouts in Luther's basement, what the women retrieve is often startling.

A post-Civil-Rights-Movement novel, Linden Hills appropriates religious imagery to treat the idea of messianism in the context of an affluent but twisted Black world in dire need of both spiritual and sociopolitical salvation from almost two centuries of Nedeed hegemony and intraracial sexism. The novel's plot spans a discursive prologue and, tellingly, the six days before Christmas day, December 25, which in Judeo-Christianity marks the birth/arrival-day of Jesus the Christ, the biblical messiah. Naylor's framing of the narrative around a season with such an immense religious--or messianic/millennial--import cannot be accidental. Nor is it, in character with today's perversion of the Christmas season, merely a convenient backdrop to Linden Hills' bourgeois exhibitionism. Rather, the date squarely places the narrative within the dialectic of messianism, hence interfacing Christ's male liberation mission with Willa's female activism although, suggestively, Willa's is actualized on December 24, a day before Ch rist would arrive/start his.

Subtly borrowing from and inverting the messianic motif by situating it in a gendered space, Naylor has cleverly retold the Exodus story in her tale of victimized Black women (and men) held in protracted captivity in the Nedeed/Linden Hills neo-slave plantation, the fictive equivalent of Pharaoh's Egypt. The narrative signifies on the two biblical deliverers who have captured prominent spaces in African American folk, religious, and literary imagination: Old Testament Moses and New Testament Christ are collapsed and reconfigured in the persona of an "ordinary" wife and mother, Willa.

Like the ancient Hebrew mashiahs, or like Black redeemer figures who at different historical moments were "mandated" by the plight of Black people to revolutionize America's unjust system, Willa's narrative calling is to serve as an authorial (one might say God-sent) agency, a vehicle to help nullify the Nedeed plan for a tyrannical, millennial dynasty. Naylor told Toni Morrison in "A Conversation" that she envisioned the novel ending with the destruction of this dynasty (231). The question was how: Who or what was she to send to attack and dethrone Luther Nedeed's massive army, an army constituted in all the gendered, racial, economic, and ideological privileges that motivate, empower, and sustain his autocracy?

Framed within the structural and metaphoric arrangement of Linden Hills as a land of Lutheran tyranny is not just the crucial issue of immanent evil and (unmerited/gender) suffering but also the question of deliverance. Both of these questions, significantly, are central in Black racial messianism. As the story progresses, slowly unraveling Luther's/Linden Hills' layers of dysfunctionality, one almost senses the narrator insinuating the need for and possibility of (divine/authorial) intercession in the subdivision's intraracial corrosion. But the rootedness of this moral loss and, particularly, the Nedeed women's prolonged lamentations, inscribed in their memorabilia and in Willa's "long, thin wail," her "plea for lost time" (Linden 60), raise another theological problematic of when and how this deliverer will come to save "His" people from Lutheran despotism.

Linden Hills articulates, as does Alice Walker's The Color Purple, the question of a scriptural messiah/"God," a deliverer alien to the women in terms of race, gender, social experience, class, culture, and location. This issue of a regular deliverer's existence with regard to the subdivision's objectified, Christian women is most directly couched in Luwana Packerville-Nedeed's resigned conclusion, generations earlier, that" 'there can be no God.' "Luwana's conclusion, which follows her incursions mostly into the books of the Old Testament, enunciates this enslaved and alienated woman's search for answers, companionship, and spiritual strength. It also indicates a desperate hope on her part for some kind of divine intervention and guidance consistent with Christian religious/biblical doctrines to which she, a slave, subscribes. Luwana's utterance indirectly queries both the nature and the efficacy of the socio-theological order operative in the text's fictive universe. To borrow from African American oral tr adition, Luwana has on several occasions "called" on her Christian God, but without a "response." As Willa muses, on first encountering Luwana's Bible and its inscription in the basement," 'This house couldn't be standing if there were a God'" (93).

Luwana's exasperation, which Willa years later vocalizes in her own grief, interjects the novel's engagement of theodicy. Luwana's embitterment echoes the sense of vexation that enslaved Africans were wont to show with the Christian God. It equally alludes to the need for immediate change. As Benjamin E. Mays has written, the Spirituals depict a God whose attributes include sovereignty and revengefulness. God punishes sinners, destroys the wicked, and, most significantly, "answers prayer" (21). God is just and is a male. "But if God was all-just and all-powerful, why did the innocent suffer and injustice reign?" asks Albert Raboteau (313). This question and its resonances continue to intrigue Black theologians. [12] Judeo-Christianity promises a futuristic heaven, but in the case of Linden Hills' oppressed women, as Maxine L. Montgomery puts it, "the seemingly unchanging situation of oppression demands a rejection of an otherworldly ethos and emphasizes achieving progress now" (Apocalypse 11).

The implied need for immediate action is enlarged when one considers the fact that not only has the Nedeed reign of terror lasted 150 years in narrative time but also its very foundation and longevity are sustained though a systematic dehumanization of women as papa-copying machines. We are told about the rumor that Old Luther, coming from Tupelo, Mississippi, had "actually sold his octoroon wife and six children for the money that he used to come North and obtain the hilly land" (Linden 2). He dreamed of transforming Linden Hills, a ragged, worthless and suggestively V-shaped sod plateau that White farmers ridiculed, into a space of delineable Black power, an "ebony jewel," "a beautiful, black wad of spit [that would land right] in the white eye of America" (9). But that dream would be debased. Its actualization would come to depend on the exploitation and silencing of Nedeed wives/mothers--Priscilla McGuire, Evelyn Creton, and Willa Prescott--who are discarded once they replicate the fathers, becoming what Luwana herself calls "'the innocent vessel for some sort of unspeakable evil'" (123).

Also, by construing residency alone in the "ebony jewel" to be the ultimate sign of Black success and power, and by ensuring that the residency is itself contingent on marriage, motherhood, and maleness, Luther has contrived a scheme that escalates Linden Hills' flaws, especially its misuse of women. Winston Alcott comes to realize, for instance, that to reside in Linden Hills he must dump his gay lover David, renounce his homosexual lifestyle, and get married to a woman and that this woman would hopefully conceive a son to whom he would transfer his millennial lease in the subdivision. Similarly, no sooner does Chester Parker's wife Lycentia die than he starts erasing familial evidence of her existence in readiness for marriage to another woman. Even more, what finally triggers Laurel's plunge to death is Luther's insistence that she has no place in Linden Hills without either a husband, who maintains residency in the subdivision, or children, who will inherit the property Luther's family leased for a thous and years to the Dumonts in 1903 (243-44).

Naylor suggests then, that, for the Nedeed wives and the novel's other dispossessed women, especially, Linden Hills is a site of bourgeois-male gutlessness. It is a modem slave plantation, as in The Color Purple (see Hernton 1-36), in which women must either become "God" and fight now for themselves (and hence for others) or be subjected to an endless cycle of physical and psychic infamy. As hinted in the narrative, it would be both ludicrous and illusory for Linden Hills' subjugated women, especially the Nedeed wives, even to conceive of a male mediator, because most of the suburb's males have been dis-abled by, are willing accessories to, or are just apathetic toward the vile machinery set in motion by the Nedeed men. In choosing his tenants, Luther II carefully screened out potential militants in favor of those ravenous for status and willing to trade their color and souls for it: "He [did not want] to cultivate no madmen like Nat Turner or Marcus Garvey in Linden Hills" (11-12).

Nedeed intent to escape opposition seems to have worked. One observes, for instance, that Reverend Hollis's criticisms of Luther and of Linden Hills' spiritual decadence are hypocritical and self-serving. As the narrative indicates (156-87), Reverend Hollis is as egotistical, materialistic, and morally flawed as Luther. Also, as demonstrated during the vigil of Lycentia (130-33), Linden Hills' hardlining residents, particularly the men, would be hard-pressed to concede an inch of their boundary of power and privilege to the underclass living next door to them in Putney Wayne. This obsession with socioeconomic power dramatizes what Franklin E. Frazier has described as the Black bourgeoisie's "pathological struggle for status within the isolated Negro world" (176).

Also, Lester and Willie, the two males through whose narrative excavations we discern much of this disjointed Black world, are not exactly revolutionaries, although they do exhibit radical, bi-gender, and anti-materialistic sensitivities. In their roles as poets, guides, commentators, and carriers of an authorial moral pulse, twenty-year-old Lester and even more so his friend Willie are really functional outsiders who can only reveal and criticize character action and narrative development; they are not equipped practically to alter the configurations of Linden Hills' evil. In fact, as reviewer Jewelle Gornez puts it, Willie and Lester are the novel's weakest characters: Trivial in their pursuits, lacking in "wisdom or naivete," unnecessarily rebellious, and without any "driving vision of their own," they "cannot compete dramatically with the really extraordinary characters" (7-8). It appears then that the novel's women, like their slave counterparts whose rebellion sometimes took unconventional means such a s religion, flight, arson, and sabotage (Raboteau 305), must fight in ways more consequential than Mamie Tilson's signifying though prophetic defiance of the ancestral Luther.

Linden Hills' adaptation and revision of biblical motifs to imagine a Black woman deliverer is also evident in what reads as Naylor's recreation of the prophet John. In the Bible, John foretells the arrival of Jesus, the awaited messiah. In a similar vein, Mamie Tilson is cleverly positioned in the novel as a prophetic forerunner in a reconstructed biblical narrative concerning the coming of the text's real deliverer, Willa. Before Willa, Mamie Tilson figures as the one strong female character in Linden Hills who foresees, defies, and, in a seeming jeremiadic style, condemns the vile Nedeed plot. Though a personal repudiation of the ancestral Luther, who wanted her evicted in order to have more land with which to expand the subdivision, Mamie Tilson issues a "curse" of Old Luther--communicated in her spitting of "a wad of tobacco...near [Luther's] wing-tip shoes" (Linden 12-13)--that marks him as a despicable thing, as the cursed embodiment of an immoral order which must either cease or be confronted and jud ged. Mamie Tilson's damning of Luther slides into the novel a hint of major confrontation yet to come. An impalpable tension therefore hangs over Linden Hills as to that day of reckoning for Luther. There is an air of expected messianism, an unvocalized signal that this Nedeed reign must not continue unabated.

In the context of Willa's messianic mission in Linden Hills, that awaited day dawns when she, the savior-who-is-to-come, marries into the bourgeois Nedeed family. While Willa, like the other women, does so "primarily in hopes of finding an identity within a staunchly middle-class setting" that ends up excluding them (Montgomery, "Domestic" 60), her future will be different in that it is imbued with an oppositional and salvific destiny. It is through her maternity and activism that the Nedeed blueprint for a demonic millennium comes to be deified in a manner that is methodical, costly, decisive, and, above all, irrevocable.

Using a striking narrative technique, Naylor has deployed Willa's (ir)regular birth as a teleological commentary, as an act, intrinsically symbolic, of (mother) nature's counterintelligence against the Nedeed/Linden Hills praxis of messing with nature's order. A silent coup, Willa's (ab)normal birth, through which the departed spirits of effaced Nedeed mothers/wives insurgently assert their presence, subjectivity, and caste, stands as the text's most subtle yet repercussive statement of female/maternal disobedience. This tacit corruption of Nedeed patrilineage almost recaptures the way in which slaves employed sabotage as a weapon of resistance (Raboteau 12). As the first highly consequential assault on Luther's immortality, Willa's birth initiates the chain of discursive events that facilitate the destruction of the Nedeed millennial plan. Luther quickly realizes that his wife has

given him a son, but a white son. The same squat bowlegs, the same protruding eyes and puffed lips, but a ghostly presence that mocked everything his father had built. How could Luther die and leave this [Willa's son] with the future of Linden Hills? He looked at this whiteness and saw the destruction of five generations. (Linden 18)

Willa's unusual birth translates maternity as a site of female clairvoyance and collaboration, extending, as it were, the notion of women's solidarity charted in much of contemporary Black women's fiction. The birth, for which Luther imprisons her on the suspicion of marital infidelity, reads as an inevitable, indirect "response" by another woman to the five-generation plaintive "calls" for help by the Nedeed women. Willa's dual offensive against Luther--first in thwarting his sacred patrilineage through an anomalous birth and, second, in her defining attack--serves as a non-verbal, non-literary reply to Luwana Packerville's resigned notation in her Bible that "there can be no God" (125). Willa's portentous motherhood alludes to the availability of that (woman's) "God," an everyday She--Black, maternal, bereaved, earthly, and commissioned empathically to address the needs of Now. The birth completes the call-and-response continuity of a woman's collective. In a broader sociocultural and political sense, it s hows how women respond to each other's adversity, work through each other, and often entrust their salvation to a woman's community. For example, having found "savior" in Shug Avery, Celie stops writing to "God" in The Color Purple; the women in for colored girls find "God" in themselves; and, in Morrison's Beloved, a redemptive women's collective rids Sethe of Beloved's vengeful spirit. As Larry R. Andrews has observed, this idea of a strong sisterhood among Black women recurs in Naylor's fiction.

Linden Hills alludes further to that unique, spiritual bond, especially in Willa's transfiguration through her re(dis)covery of and communion with the empowering testaments left by the dead Mrs. Nedeeds in Luther's morgue/basement. Willa's meeting and "conversations" with her maternal forebears are highly significant and suggestive. They help demystify Luther's false omnipotence and also represent another critical milestone toward--indeed, a dress rehearsal for--Willa's December 24 opposition to Luther. The outcome and unambiguous undertones of sacrifice evident in this confrontation favor a reading of Willa's role as the (irregular) messiah who, finally, is to come in the text. In locating the text's final and most decisive act of female intransigence on the night of December 24, a day earlier than the birthday of Christ-the-Savior in the Christian calendar, Naylor seems to reclaim messianic intervention into a gendered space by suggesting rather niftily that, in the framework of gender and community redemp tion, sometimes ordinary (Black) women have been there and sacrificed their lives in combating injustice, as does Willa, even before males show up, before those historical events and dates commonly conceded to male-redeemer figures.

The crucial events of December 24, which occur during the novel's final chapter and yield an allegedly ambivalent [13] and problematic ending, remain memorable to readers of the novel. The chapter also reveals why Willa's death, which is both real and speakerly, would not qualify, derogatorily, as "suicide." Naylor's narrator makes it clear that the Willa we see marching back upstairs, after her bereavement, banishment, and epiphany, is a woman who has been severely tortured, is possibly demented, but is also alert and determined to live and, unlike Laurel, rebuild her life.

It is important to revisit the novel's battle scene on December 24, even at the risk of repeating the obvious, in order to better situate Willa's death in the tradition of Black women's activism and self-sacrifice. Following Willa's return to the family's living room where Willie and Lester are busy helping Luther with his customary Christmas decorations, the narrator notes that

Luther Nedeed made two mistakes that cost him his life: he thought Willa was leaving the house, and he read the determination in her eyes as madness. She was heading for the piles of boxes and loose paper in the corner by the hail door. But she kept walking when he called her, walking when he touched her, so he blocked her path with his body. That brought them face-to-face. He had never encountered the eyes of a lone army ant, marching in defiance of falling rocks and rushing water along the great Amazon, the wingless queen who cannot fly from danger, blindly dragging her bloated egg sac as long as at least one leg is left uncrushed; so the dilated pupils in front of him registered insanity. Her fist lashed out and caught him across the Adam's apple, making him bend and choke. As she brushed past him, he sprung up, grabbing her tightly behind the shoulders, pulling her away from the door. He was trying to force her down into the chair. But that leather chair was back toward the kitchen, and the kitchen led to the basement door, and the door opened on twelve concrete steps leading to the morgue.... Every cell in her body strained against his hands and he found himself being pulled toward the hall.

Then he reached for the child. The moment his fingers touched the wrapped body, making a fraction of space between it and Willa, her arms loosened enough for one to shot around his neck, the other his waist, and the three were welded together. Luther tried to wrench free, but they breathed as one, moved as one, and one body lurched against the fireplace. The trailing veil brushed an ember, the material curling and shrinking as orange sparks raced up its fine weave. There was no place in her universe to make sense out of the words, "My God, we're on fire." No meaning to his struggle except that it was pushing her back into the kitchen. And now no path to the clutter by the door except through the lighted tree. They went hurling against it, the top smashed a side window, and the December wind howled in. (299-300)

I have quoted this crucial passage at length for the clarity it offers in a discussion of Willa's death and the accompanying sacrificial undertones. As the passage indicates, Willa in this defining battle exposes her life to grave danger by engaging a Satan named Luther. In their discussions of this scene, some critics have remarked that the identity of good wife and mother which Willa longs to repossess by confronting Luther is constructed and circumscribed by patriarchy, the same oppressive force that delimited her life and that of the women before her. Why would Naylor have her reenter that space of male hegemony?

Naylor told Donna Perry in an interview that, while writing the novel's final chapter, she was surprised to see Willa take on a will/life of her own. Instead of Willa deciding to "go up there and kick his [Luther's] butt," as Naylor had originally thought, Willa elects to go back to that repressive space in order to reclaim her role as wife and mother (231). [14] Although an unsettling choice, this decision is extremely significant. In reclaiming this role, Willa is (re) affirming her importance in the Nedeed-controlled family, a domain which would seek to bastardize and depreciate the incalculable worth of a good wife and mother. Earlier in the novel, Willa herself indirectly reflects on this point: All "she had wanted [was] a home. A husband. Children. That was all, and that was so little. To ask for so little and have it taken away. No, it wasn't wrong. It wasn't sick. If there was any sickness, it was in this house, in the air" (204). Willa's resolve seems comparable to the "very high value" African Amer ican women, like their African foremothers, have historically placed on good motherhood (Sudarsaka 21). But the magic and majesty of a wife's/mother's priceless position are both defiled and made to look unappealing when (Black) women are subjugated in the marital, familial, and public spheres. It is little wonder, then, that some of Naylor's critics would question the wisdom of her heroine's decision.

If Willa intends to reassume her role against the critical reader's better judgment and at the risk of harm, it seems to be because, like the physically debilitated but unstoppable insect against which the narrator models her, she is on a defining (deliverance) mission. According to Jacqueline de Weever, "Chthonic metaphors based on images of creatures of the earth [such as snakes, spiders, bees, and ants, among others] generally appear at turning points in the lives of the characters" (88). This is clearly the case with Willa. Naylor has used the image of "the lone army ant, the wingless queen who cannot fly from danger" (Linden 300) to concretize Willa's activeness and productivity as a female in the familial space and her courageous resolve to face risk. Also, the metaphor underscores the seriousness and the difficulty of escape in the battle she, an outraged and bereaved mother, single-handedly wages against death/Luther. Ants are "tiny creatures," de Weever suggests, but they can "wreak destruction on l arger entities" (84). Not unlike many Black Civil Rights activists who in public defied death in confrontation with racial injustices, Willa in the private sphere carries through an assault on a bigger, vicious opponent who is both male and a universal ideology. In standing up to Luther, Willa prosecutes both him and, indirectly, his patrilineage for their past misdeeds and also serves notice that the Nedeed/male dominion will no longer go unchallenged. Mamie Tilson's "words" have come to pass.

And when death, dressed as an accidental fire, visits the Nedeed dominance and household during the confrontation, Willa's sacrificial actions are again exemplified. Significantly, Willa's defiance does not suggest any inclination on her part to attenuate an attack upon Luther. Nor are we told that she attempts to extricate herself from the tangle with both him and the dead child, whom she names Sinclair, even as she realizes that they are on fire. In fact, it is Luther who tries to wrench free, but fruitlessly. Facing death, Luther seems intent on upholding his male power. Just as white separatists used terror tactics to keep African Americans forcibly in their alleged "place," Luther struggles to push Willa back toward the stereotypical positions of "chair" and "kitchen" (300). Willa dies, sacrificing her self in the course of battling the text's symbol of an evil order.

Naylor insinuates much in this final scene. Because the apocalyptic battle takes place in a private space, without any witnesses--Willie and Lester are outside the Nedeed house, freaking out; the neighbors, caring less, turn off their lights--how will Dr. Braithwaite, for instance, historicize both what occurred inside this house and Willa's final moments? How will he read her role relative to Linden Hills' liberation discourse? Will he call her a messiah?

As we await Braithwaite's account, one thing is clear: It seems one of Linden Hills' major thematic goals, in fact its ultimate narrative trajectory, is the irrevocable incineration of Lutheran evil(s) through a messianic Willa and the paving of a new path for "unrestricted choices" for women and men who have had to live and deal with oppressive institutions, at times through imposed and/or flawed judgments. Linden Hills' rooted disease of male hegemony and female objectification could be seen as being only a trope of the many unjust locations of power which (Black) women dismantle not by awaiting scriptural intervention or through normative dissent but by effecting change, sometimes through stealth and through revolutionary acts.

Even more, considering the duration and complexity of the Luther/ Linden Hills tyranny against women (and men), the strength of this single biological/maternal act--for which Willa becomes (mother) nature's "chosen" interventionist--must be seen in its fullest importations. While Ruth Anderson's simple life and abiding love for her husband Norman merely contrast with Linden Hills materialism, and while Mamie Tilson's defiance only prophesies protest, Willa's revolt and victory collaborate as well as conclude the women's generational fight for face and voice. Also, one must not overlook the strength of character that informs Willa's unpopular decision to reclaim her position as a good wife and mother in a Black suburbia stratified along lines of caste, career, and class. When we analyze Willa's courage to risk her life and ultimately die, thereby indirectly delivering Linden Hills' other inhabitants from Lutheran shackles, she qualifies as a symbol of strong womanhood.

Willa's death then must not be seen narrowly as indicating some feminist text's (Linden Hills') inability or unwillingness to create a sustainable heroine capable of both defeating and outliving patriarchy, as some critics have posited. Instead, it is an emphatic, positive metaphor of Black women's liberatory activism, at a time when societal adversity and personal shortcomings weaken men's ethical resolve, when the justice system looks away, and when theology brings no relief. In the larger context of Black nationalism, a movement whose centering of Black male leaders subordinates Black women's roles, Willa's defiance figuratively portrays the Black woman as critical to the nationalist struggle (Giddings 299-324). [15]

Willa's rebellion and death exalt the legacy of public and private sacrifices made by "grassroots" Black women. Whether it be slaves resisting dehumanization in British Columbia or the "Aba riots or 'Women's War' of 1929 in Nigeria, when a number of Ibo women were killed protesting against a tax imposed upon them by the British Government" (Bush 147-63), Black women in the Diaspora have fought injustice alongside their men. Like Willa, these ordinary women become messiahs of sorts--irregular messiahs, often unacknowledged, whose culture of resistance, as Patricia Hill Collins has argued, is often miscoded because it fails to satisfy mainstream definitions of sociopolitical agitation.

As a corrective messianism, one that supports the proactive subjectivity of subaltern women, Willa's death allows Linden Hills to read and revise the biblical Eve story. Judeo-Christian axiology, specifically the Genesis story, alleges that damnation entered the world upon mankind's "fall" from grace through the indiscretion of a woman--Eve--and that the burden of this original sin is washed away in Christ's death. Linden Hills' signifying reading of this myth argues the antithesis: that damnation entered the world (of Linden Hills) through a male, Luther, and through a woman's death, Willa's, that burden is lightened.

Willa's death is an enabling sacrifice, not a narrative or feminist flaw, as critics Margaret Homans and Teresa Goddu [16] suggest, based on the fact that only males, Willie and Lester, walk out of Luther's burning house. Their going over the chain fence and crossing Patterson Road is figurative; it is also communal in its (bi)sexual outlook. It is not uncommon for Black women to serve as trailblazers for others, and Willa's revolt "has inspired Willie to continue his spiritual odyssey wherever it takes him" (Ward 192).

It should also be noted that, in Linden Hills' motif of inversions, the novel's end is not an end per se, but a beginning, if one looks both beyond the text's present time and considers Naylor's stated intent to create a universe of interactive novels. The story's end technically heralds a new millennium, a period of cleansing, a new dispensation engendered by Naylor's woman(ized) deliverer--her figuration of a biblical Moses, Christ, and, hence, "God." "The destruction of the Nedeed home," writes critic Maxine L. Montgomery, "is an apocalyptic prelude to the creation--in Mama Day--of Willow Springs, a post-apocalyptic Eden peopled by semi-divine women" ("Domestic" 63). In other words, in the grand layout of Naylor's canon formation, death brings forth life. A sinful regime passes away, and a New World Order, a fictive New Jerusalem, sort of, is created in its wake, in Mama Day.

With the publication of The Men of Brewster Place in 1998, following Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, Naylor comes full circle in her creative journey. She comes "home" to a familiar trail and trope, Brewster Place, whose men narrate their own blues, tieing them into and furthering, implicitly, the polyvocality initiated in Naylor's oeuvre by the women of Brewster Place, whose socio-political agitation and self-sacrifice serve as ancestors to Willa's messianism in Linden Hills. With her latest novel, Naylor has positioned herself as a major writer who will be read far into the twenty-first century of American and African-American literary history. By locating, in Linden Hills, the woman at the heart of women's rebellion against and liberation from oppression, Naylor affirms the ethos of Black women's fiction and the feminist/womanist dialectic. The increased movement of many Blacks into the American middle class and also the racial, economic, cultural, spiritual, and gender consequences of such a climb make Linde n Hills a timeless caution. Also, it is important that Black women's positively unorthodox activism as well as their indispensable roles in the black liberation struggle, at home and in the public sphere, not be overlooked, trivialized, or, worse yet, misread.

As Naylor suggests in Linden Hills, some abominations are so entrenched and diabolic that their cleansing might imperil human life. But that life boldly committed for self, racial, and intra-community freedom must not always be figured as a male's, nor should the messianic deed itself be constituted solely on acts that are big, notable, rational, and public. Willa's death should be revisioned not in the pejorative sense of suicide and self-destruction but as positive, as deliverance and self-sacrifice that open a new millennium with the possibility of multiple choices for the subdivision's residents, particularly its Black women.

Christopher N. Okonkwo, a doctoral candidate in African American and postcolonial African literature at Florida State University, will be joining the English faculty at the University of Missouri-Columbia in the fall. He would like to thank Professors Maxine L. Montgomery, Carol Batker, and Jerrilyn McGregory for their stellar critique of an earlier version of this essay.

Notes

(1.) See Catherine Ward's "Linden Hills: A Modern Inferno."

(2.) Virtually all critics of Linden Hills touch on this central concern of the novel; that is, its critique of how the quest for materialism and upward mobility deceives some members of the black middle class into losing sight of what is really important spiritually, racially, sexually, and culturally.

(3.) See Wallinger (Salzburg) 179.

(4.) See Sandiford 133.

(5.) Catherine Ward notes that, "although Willa and Luther are destroyed in a flash fire that sweeps the house, still Willa is triumphant. She has put an end to the Nedeed dynasty and has inspired Willie to continue his spiritual odyssey wherever it leads him" (192).

(6.) In White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response, Jacquelyn Grant examines the subject of Christology, especially the place of Scripture in the context of Black women's experience with racial, sexual, and class oppression.

(7.) In his introduction to The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., discusses signifyin(g) in the context of how Black writers and texts read and revise other writers and texts, especially Western canonical ones, but do so with what he calls an authentic Black difference.

(8.) Wilson J. Moses takes an in-depth look at the interchangeable concepts of messianism and millennialism in the context of Black experience. He argues that the term messiah derived from mashiah, a word used by the ancient Hebrews to refer to the anointed one, a "future great deliverer" sent from God and charged with the mission of effecting change both politically and culturally." Early Christians, believing "Jesus of Nazareth [to be] the long-awaited messiah (...the anointed one)," appropriated the term, after Jesus' death, in anticipation of his second coming, during which time "he would inaugurate a messianic era of a thousand years' duration. This belief came to be known as millennialism." Moses therefore defines messianism as "the perception of a person or a group, by itself or by others, as having a manifest destiny or a God-given role to assert the providential goals of history and to bring about the kingdom of God on earth" (4).

"A messianic people," Moses adds, "are a chosen or anointed people who will lead the rest of the world in the direction of righteousness. The messianic people traditionally see themselves as the conscience of the rest of human race--sometimes as a suffering servant or a sacrificial lamb, sometimes as an avenging angel" (5).

(9.) See David Howard-Pitney's The Afro-American Jeremiads: Appeals for Justice in America.

(10.) See Maxine L. Montgomery's The Apocalypse in African American Fiction.

(11.) I have used Black Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1982), edited by John Hope Franklin and August Meier, as a discursive text to illustrate how Black-women leaders are inadequately represented in discussions of Black leadership. Although not altogether startling, I find it interesting that, of the fifteen leaders discussed in the book, only three are women: Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mabel K. Staupers.

(12.) Black theologians have continued to engage this concern with theodicy relative to the Black experience. For further discussion, see, for instance, James H. Cone's A Black Theology of Liberation, William R. Jones's Is God A White Racist?, and Kelly Brown Douglass's The Black Christ.

(13.) Wallinger (Salzburg) sees the novel's resolution as ambivalent (183).

(14.) I believe Naylor wants us to recognize the fact that Black women come in all colors and career strivings. Working in an executive capacity with IBM is wonderful, but Black women who have made other honest and seemingly "unambitious" choices, whether as domestics or as mothers, must not be demeaned and should be equally acknowledged and dignified. However, that a women decides to be a good wife and mother should never be misconstrued as an invitation to male control, for husbands and fathers to flex their "male muscles."

(15.) Black feminist historian Paula Giddings has noted, for example, that during the Civil Rights Movement Black women and men, especially students, cooperated purposefully at the onset of the Movement. Later, however, the women had to deal with the intraracial problem of Black-male chauvinism, which sought to subordinate Black women's roles. Black women were "asked to man the telephones or fix the coffee while the men wrote position papers and decided on policy" (qtd. in Dubey 18).

(16.) Critic Teressa Goddu shares Margaret Homans's concern over the failure of Linden Hills to institute a tradition of strong womanhood to both oppose and outlive patriarchy. Goddu characterizes Willa's death as "self-destruction and disappearance" and wonders why "... two Adams [must] go forth from the ruins of this inverted paradise and no Eve" (225-26).

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