Gloria Naylor on Black Spirituality: An Interview

Abstract

Gloria Naylor is a novelist, editor, screenwriter, teacher, and essayist who was born on January 25, 1950, in New York City. Her parents, Roosevelt Naylor, a transit worker, and Alberta McAlpin Naylor, a telephone operator, moved to New York shortly before Naylor's birth to ensure that their child would not endure the hardships of southern (black) life, namely cotton sharecropping and Jim Crow segregation, as they had in their hometown of Robinsonville, Mississippi. Naylor graduated from high school in 1968 and joined the Jehovah's Witness faith that same year. Over the next few years, she would continue to work as a missionary for the Jehovah's Witnesses, eventually traveling throughout the southeast as a fulltime minister. But, in 1975, Naylor left the sect because she no longer wished to take part in organized religion. In search of her life's purpose, Naylor returned to New York and enrolled in Medgar Evers College to study nursing. She soon realized that she had a stronger love of literature (a passion her mother encouraged through her own love for reading) and transferred to Brooklyn College to major in English. While at Brooklyn College, she read Toni Morrison's inaugural novel The Bluest Eye, an experience that both introduced her to the world of African American literature and provided possibilities for her own writing. Inspired now to develop her own artistic talent, Naylor completed her formal education and began her career as a writer. She graduated from Brooklyn College with a BA in English in 1981; she earned an MA in African American Studies from Yale University in 1983; the prior year, she had also published her first novel The Women of Brewster Place (1982). Quickly becoming a prolific fiction-writer, Naylor has authored five other novels to date: Linden Hills (1985), Mama Day (1988), Bailey's Cafe (1992), The Men of Brewster Place (1998), and 1996 (2004). She is currently at work on a seventh novel, Sapphira Wade, a prequel to Mama Day. All of her novels use time, space, and place to capture various African American experiences. Included among her numerous professional and artistic accolades are the American Book Award for first fiction for The Women of Brewster Place in 1983 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. Naylor reveals in this interview the issues that matter most to her: slavery, history, the current plight of the black community, politics and art, healing, literary criticism, human creativity and resilience, the power of truth-telling, self help, and spirituality. It is the last topic, spirituality, that has interested me the most over the years as an avid Naylor scholar. As this interview demonstrates, I am fascinated by the way in which Naylor has organized two of her novels, Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe, around tropes of spiritual power and Biblical revision. I believe that her thematic overtures in these texts (themes that are also found in most of her other works) provide strategies for addressing certain social ills and even posit ways in which societies can be re-organized to better benefit their citizens. But, as Naylor points out, works of imagination cannot enact change. Such change really requires that we use more overarching and systematic means to alter policies. Still, her works reflect her general concerns for society and offer viable ideological starting points. This conversation occurred as apart of Naylor's visit to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Black Cultural Center in March of 1999. Tomeiko Ashford: Black women writers in the last few decades have offered mechanisms of spiritual healing through their texts. Do you feel that there's a need for healing among your black audience specifically? Gloria Naylor: Definitely. I think we're still struggling under the scars of slavery, and I think that the Civil Rights Movement did not work. The country is almost as divided as it was before. Okay, there are a few things that have changed and certain blacks have gained ascendancy. …