In Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day, Reema's boy comes from university to conduct anthropological studies in Willow Springs, novel's mysterious setting. Attempting to preserve cultural identities against hostile social and political parameters, he frustrates Willow Springs's residents, for he does not to stories they have to tell him. With this character, Naylor introduces text's central theme, necessity of establishing narrative authority: Think about it: ain't nobody really talking to you. We're sitting here in Willow Springs, and you're God-knows-where. It's August 1999 - ain't but a slim chance it's same season where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: only is your own. (10) This passage foregrounds Naylor's persistent concern throughout literary career - establishing individual voice. In famous interview with Toni Morrison, Naylor candidly discloses anxiety about outside established traditions: I wrote because I had no choice, but that was a long road from gathering authority within myself to believe that I could actually be a writer. The writers I had been taught to love were either male or white. And who was I to argue that Ellison, Austen, Dickens, Brontes, Baldwin and Faulkner weren't masters? They were and are. But inside there was still faintest whisper: Was there no one telling my story? And since it appeared there was not, how could I presume to? Those were frustrating years. (574) That own be heard, it is necessary for Naylor to clear a space for her own a among texts. Her ambitious narrative project is in essence a declaration of independence - an acknowledgment of academic canon's value, but also an assertion of racial and gender difference. Without repudiation of that she obviously loves, she can tell story, but never at expense of own unique narrative voice. Naylor's quest for own voice is, of course, a central concern for most African American writers, discovered in the tension between oral and written modes of narration that is represented as finding a in writing (Gates 21). Her experimentation with in Mama Day represents a dramatic advance in artistic talent over two previous works. Unlike both The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills, where narrator's is distinct from voices of characters, and where there is occasionally a tone of condescension, Naylor achieves in Mama Day what Gates calls a speakerly text - one that would seem primarily to be oriented toward imitating one of numerous forms of oral narration to be found in classical Afro-American vernacular literature (181). Mama Day's serves as a spiritual ballast in narrative, a guide to elemental (religious) truths that other characters must discover to set themselves free. But Naylor's employment of free indirect discourse throughout novel metaphorically unites with Miranda; distinction between writer's authority and speaker's set of communal values in Willow Springs is mitigated, if not erased. The free indirect discourse, then, acts as Naylor's thematic commentary, a sign not only of strength of black oral but also of transcendent solidity of Mama Day's thoughts and feelings.(1) Naylor thus situates herself at center of contemporary critical discussions of texts. Criticism has in past twenty years reformulated notion of literary history as a dynamic interplay of texts: We are now led to see a single work not simply as an autonomous, free-standing edifice but intertextually, as a that talks with and to other texts. J. Hillis Miller characterizes literary work as inhabited . . . by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts (446). Similarly, Roland Barthes describes as a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash . …