Extending the Line: From Sula to Mama Day

Abstract

Lyrical, seductive, and justly celebrated, the prologue of Gloria Naylor's 1988 novel, Mama Day invites the reader into a fictive world that in its location, history, customs, and beliefs is a world elsewhere. Belonging to the United States, but part of no state, Willow Springs can be located only on the map that the front matter of the book helpfully provides. A place that has been black owned and self sufficient since 1823 when an enslaved conjure woman compelled her master to deed the land to her and her descendants, its existence is anomalous in the extreme. What renders this unfamiliar world accessible to many readers is the narrator's language. The use of black vernacular English and the direct address to the reader create an illusion of intimacy that is reinforced by the narrator's invitation to include readers in on a joke that is told at the expense of a resident of Willow Springs. "Reema's boy" is mocked as a classic example of an educated fool. Schooled on the mainland, Reema's boy, in the only identity the narrator grants him, has returned with a tape recorder and an addled brain. He has subsequently published his ethnography of Willow Springs in which he identified the island's "unique speech patterns" and specified examples of "cultural preservation." His "extensive field work" has yielded what seems to those on the island who read even the introduction of his book an inane conclusion. The "18 & 23s," the all purpose phrase that encodes something both of the island's history and its philosophy, he has determined, is actually an inversion of the lines of longitude and latitude on which Willow Springs was once located on maps. From this observation, Reema's boy has extrapolated the conclusion that inversion is the key to the worldview of Willow Springs, a place where in order to assert their cultural identity, people had "no choice but to look at everything upside-down" (8). Such a conclusion may impress his fellow academics, but the people of Willow Springs dismiss him and his findings. They wonder "if the boy wanted to know what 18 & 23 means, why didn't he just ask?" (8). Then they go on to admit that they would not or could not have told him. Had he learned to "listen," however, he would have found out for himself. 1