Mama Day (1988) Gloria Naylor

“When getting at the truth starts to hurt, it’s easier to turn away”

Glowingly recommended by John McWhorter, this novel explains the story of a girl named Cocoa who goes to live in New York City from the South, where she meets her husband-to-be, George. In particular, the story is about the mystical place she is from in the South, on an island that exists between Georgia and South Carolina but is claimed by neither, and her family, in particular, an elderly and respected woman named Miranda, “Mama Day,” who is her grandmother Abigail’s sister. Mama Day raises questions about the mystery of life, the real differences between men and women (stemming from biology, apparently a non-taboo subject in 1988), and offers a positive, common-sense narrative in the African-American lit genre.

· Cocoa seeks a job in New York City in the beginning of the novel. She narrates in her head she yearns for clarity of the past’s explicit racism, when, “[T]he want ads and housing listings in newspapers — even up north — were clearly marked colored or white. It must have been wonderfully easy to go job hunting then. You were spared a lot of legwork and headwork… I said as much at one of those parties… One of [my friend’s] certain people was so upset his voice shook: ‘You mean, you want to bring back segregation?’ I looked at him like he was a fool — Where had it gone? I just wanted to bring the clarity about it back — it would save me a whole lot of subway tokens.”

o “‘And not to be rude, Mr. Andrews, but I really would like to talk about my credentials for working here. Where I was born and what name I was given were both beyond my control. But what I could do about my life, I’ve done well. And I’d like to spend the few minutes I have left of your time being judged on that.’” Cocoa does not get hung up on the barriers to her self-betterment; she takes the attitude of what are the things she can do to make her life better. She does not demand that we make up go down, as does Jesse Singal in his recent The Quick Fix, with an illustration that we need “institutional reform” on behalf of private companies that do things like hire overly self-confident men who apply to positions they are not technically qualified for (positions women would not apply for, he says).

· Cocoa’s husband, George, was a prostitute’s orphan, and was raised in a home for boys by a Ms. Jackson, who tried to get the boy’s to see the tough-love demands of life, one of the best ways to see the necessity for doing this or that, to premeditatively answer the perennial question “Why.” One of the boys in his cohort gets told off by Ms. Jackson, “Bernie wouldn’t open his mouth for her and was getting his daily list of facts (she never lectured, she called it listing simple facts); If the remainder of his teeth rotted out from a lack of personal care, then the dentist would have to fit him for a full plate… That would lead to him spending twice as long being teased at school and restricted to a soft diet in the cafeteria. She said this like she did everything — slowly, clearly, and without emotion.”

o “Our rage didn’t matter to her, our hurts or disappointments over what life had done to us. None of that was going to matter a damn in the outside world, so we might as well start learning it at Wallace P. Andrews. There were only rules and facts. Mrs. Jackson’s world out there on Staten Island had rules that you could argue might not be fair, but they were consistent. And when they were broken we were guaranteed that, however she had to do it, we would be made to feel responsibility for our present actions — and our actions alone. And oddly enough, we understood that those punishments were an improvement upon our situations: become coming there, we had been beaten and starved just for being born.” No one asks to be born. But, the facts of life can be cruel, and they are best met facing them for what they are.

o “When I left Wallace P. Andrews I had what I could see: my head and my two hands, and I had each day to do something with them. Each day, that’s how I took it –each moment, sometimes, when the going got really rough… everything I was — all the odds I had beat — was owed to my living fully in the now.”

· Mama Day watches some television back in the South, including Phil Donahue, and likens what she sees on the TV to be what she thinks her “Baby Girl” Cocoa experiences in New York City, with some people who have it too good. “It gave her an idea of the kind of people Cocoa was living around… this show gave the audience a chance to speak, and what they had to say was always of more interest to her than the people on the stage who were running off at the mouth about being male strippers, lesbian nuns, or talking about some new book they just wrote… On all of these ‘fascinating topics’ she had one opinion and that could be summed up in two words: white folks. And when they found a colored somebody to act the fool — like the man from New Jersey holding up a snapshot of his cousin posing with a family of Martians — she expanded it to three words: honorary white folks… What she finally settled on… was that [the city] was… no worse or better than other places Baby Girl could have chosen to live in.”

· In an example that illustrates the all-too-human propensity to think one knows everything about a situation, and furthermore our propensity to dismiss the old, Mama Day had forced Cocoa to write a note to George, at the time her prospective employer about the position to which she had applied, thanking him. George had already filled the position, but he then passed Cocoa’s resume onto another company, which then hired her. Thus, it was because of the note Cocoa sent, at the behest of Mama Day, that she had a job. But, she doesn’t know this chain of events; she only knows she is hired at a firm other than George’s. “And you don’t know the satisfaction when I found out that [George] Andrews & Stein was one of our engineering contractors. Well, so much for you, buddy, and your call-me-George. Now, I’m managing the accounts of the man you’re working for. Life goes ‘round, doesn’t it?… I wanted to let Mama Day know how wrong she was about my sending you the note — they did give the position to someone else. I know these big cities, while her whole impression of what’s happening up here comes from the Phil Donahue Show.”

· Cocoa maintains a good attitude about life, on her potential romance with George, “I was never in that camp of a night out with someone is better than a night alone. I was someone, and there was always something to do with me. I actually enjoyed polishing my nails or washing my hair and sitting in front of the mirror to admire the effect — for myself. Anything that gave me pleasure wasn’t a waste of time.”

o Cocoa, a black woman in New York City, explains fear about change and uncertainty about the surrounding World, and why she speaks of other people the way she does, calling them colorful names for their ethnicities, “I was scared when I came to this city… Because just when you think you’ve gotten a handle on it, there’s a new next-door neighbor or the Laundromat at the corner becomes a hole in the ground and the next year it’s a high rise with even more people for you not to know. A whole kaleidoscope of people — nothing’s just black and white here like in Willow Springs. Nothing stays put. So I guess the way I talk is my way of coming to terms with never knowing what to expect from anything or anybody. I’m not a bigot, but if I sound like one, I guess it’s because deep down I’m as frightened of change and difference as they are.” Some people have a hard time with uncertainty, a condition for which we should have compassion.

· George gives color to the peril’s of groupthink and herd mentality, and also to what might also become of a tourist or a new resident. He criticizes how Cocoa has gone about her existence in NYC, “You live and play in the ghettoes for our permanent tourists. And like any ghetto resident, you pay more for cramped, shoddy housing and the local support services than the rest of us…. [Y]ou’ve bought the illusion that this is where you have to live — midtown is New York, and you try to stay as close to it as possible… Most people are confined in ghettos by economic circumstances, so there’s no chance for them to grow and explore, to be enriched by the life of a city. And I just think it’s a little sad that here, of all places, the young and talented confine themselves by choice.” All of this a metaphor for life, how life should be lived, vs. how it could be lived, if not for self-imposed constraints.

· Mama Day protects her family, and as with much literature, the novel gives color to the fact that man is and can in fact be an animal. Regarding the school principal when Cocoa was in high school, “Told him we weren’t raising no public toilet for him to be doing his business into… Leaned over and whispered that I could fix it so the only thing he’d be able to whip out of his pants for the rest of his life would be pocket change.”

· Mama Day has some thoughts on religion and life.

o “If pearl thinks all God got to worry about is two young people hearing some of that silly boogie-woogie music y’all like, then He ain’t worth serving.”

o “The only thing I can give you is some good advice — and by the looks of you, you ain’t willing to take that tonight.” Cannot make the horse drink.

o “He [George] said, ‘She has all I have.’… The boy ain’t said, ‘All I have is hers.’ We both know that’s a lot of nonsense, ’cause nobody would — or could — give away all of themselves to somebody else. That person is an out-and-out liar, or if they was of that mind, they wouldn’t be nobody worth living with. No, he said — ‘She has all I have.’ That means sharing… He’s got a dream, he’s gonna take her along. If he got a life Abigail, he’s saying that life can open itself up for her. You can’t ask no more than that from a man.”

o “Someone addle-brained as Reema shouldna had child the first, and for that child to go on and have children was a sin before God… If you ain’t got sense enough to marry nothing but a pitiful specimen of a man like Reema’s oldest gal, Carmen Rae, did… Giving him six babies to keep raggedy and underfed down there in that shack. Wading in filth up to their ankles. Soap and water wouldn’t put nobody out of more than fifty cents — nobody. And push come to shove, you could get away with just the water. Try as she might, she couldn’t understand these women who balked at killing a baby before it got here and then living so they’re sure to kill it after.” No amount of public policy is ever going to “fix” poverty when people are allowed to procreate at will.

§ “Carmen Rae gets read the riot act: A sow takes better care of her young. And don’t be sitting there whining about a no-good daddy — if he ain’t never here, it means he ain’t stopped you from cleaning this house. And he ain’t the cause of you stuffing this child with white bread and sugar lard to keep him quiet while you’re watching them soap operas.”

o “She likes the way that boy [George] walks, kinda free and bouncy. And he holds his head up high. A man should have starch in him, especially a colored man. There’s too much out there to mow him down permanent if he ain’t got the where-with-all to spring back.”

o Self-centered thinking and religion. “‘Abigail, stop your foolishness. All God got in mind is to send you a hurricane? It ain’t got nothing to do with us, we just bystanders on this earth. Sometimes I think we was only a second thought — and a poor second thought at that.’ ‘Well, the Scriptures do say it: man was the last thing the Lord made.’ ‘He shoulda quit while He was ahead.’”

o “Folks done without telephones for longer than they’ve had ’em, without lights or gas to boot. Spoiled. That’s all it’s about — can’t live without this, can’t live without that. You can live without anything you weren’t born with, and you can make it through on even half of that.”

· Echoing Orwell, Ghandi, and others on the hard-heartedness of the educated, “That’s what happens when you send ’em off to fancy schools and they settle beyond the bridge [of the island] — they start forgetting how to talk to folks.”

· When people have it too good, they enter the “labyrinth of egoism” (Ortega Y Gasset). Bernice badly wants a baby. “Some folks just don’t deserve the trouble they bring on themselves… And look at the mess up int his freezer — frozen pizzas, Sara Lees. And a cabinet full of canned soup, pork and beans, Jiffy cornbread mix. That’s why she finds it hard to be patient with all this time on her hands. Don’t she know that baby she want so bad is gonna run her ragged? They give ’em throwaway diapers to buy now, packaged formulas, but ain’t no such thing as instant love.” People have life too easy, and wonder why it is they are unhappy and unfulfilled. They take on no life-project.

o “When you raise a god instead of a child, you’re bound to be serving him for the rest of your days.” This parallels with commentary from Lawrence E. Harrison on child-rearing practices that make the man feel extra special can lead to violent and chauvinistic behavior in a culture of honor.

· Naylor, a woman, writes the in-head narrative of George, who is thinking about the touch-and-go of the flirtatious stage at the beginning of a new relationship. “But I found out most women just didn’t have Mrs. Jackson’s pragmatism about the whole thing… No, you had to join her in fantasy land, and each one had a different threshold for you to cross over: she wanted to be pretty, to be intellectual, to be engrossing, to be adored, needed — special… you’re getting absolutely nowhere if you give them the truth: How can there be anything personal about you to turn me on? At this stage of the game, it’s my own hormones. See, then you’re a smart ass, and even one of those ‘liberated’ ladies will swivel around on her bar stool and find someone else to tell her what she wants to hear.”

o “When women run around screaming that men lie to them, it’s because we’ve learned that they want — or even need — to be lied to. They aren’t programmed to accept the fact that in the beginning, sex is sex.”

o From the perspective of Cocoa, “The more you began to mean to me, the more I was losing control and I hated it. I wasn’t angry at you for phoning later than you said you would, for ending an evening early because you were genuinely tired — I was angry at myself for allowing it to matter that much. And when I was brooding or sarcastic after you finally called, it never seemed to bother you. You’d laugh it off, and that would make me angrier. It was horrible feeling that I needed you more than I was needed. And so I would push you, making petty demands. If you cared, you’d do X. If you cared, you’d do Y… He just wants to glide on through this, he doesn’t care. If he cared, he’d… What? Fear is unreasonable, and that’s what I was being.”

§ And from the perspective of George, “The more you were beginning to mean to me, the more close-mouthed I became, waiting And waiting for what? Something more than temper tantrums about whether it was a Monday or Tuesday night I was free to see you — those weren’t about me, they were about you… I guess I was waiting for some action — words would not suffice — that said, Yes, I’m doing this because he makes the difference.” George wanted to be more than just the man on the opposite end of the relationship. And he felt he could be interchangeable based on how he was being treated.

o “The inequality in our social system intensified your [Cocoa and women’s] innate envy of us [George and men] — the ‘tampon complex,’… The shape of our sexual organs reminded you of the cruel trick biology had played on you. It became clear to me that I was never going to find a totally objective guide to what was going on inside of females, I was on my own… And when you were irritable, I thought, the easiest way would be to ask if it was something I was doing or that your body was doing… We got into some awful fights that way… How was I going to understand if I didn’t ask? No, I found out very quickly that when living with a woman, the shortest distance between two points is by the way of China.” Naylor here starts to make her case of the genuine difference between men and women, on the burden placed onto women by nature, that can manifest in women being unreasonable, and that it is often times required of men to tap-dance around an issue or say what they know the other party wants to hear.

o George and Cocoa get into a huge fight regarding Cocoa’s asking George, in essence, how she looked, and George made the mistake of answering the question honestly. Cocoa thinks, “And then to get back at me you refused to tell me what you knew I needed so desperately to hear. Of course that foundation wasn’t the right shade, but couldn’t you lie? I had to be perfect that evening and I was shattered.” Is lying a necessary illusion for the happy coexistence of man and woman?

§ George retorts, “Don’t you ever ask me anything again, okay? I was trying to be serious. And when you say I don’t talk to you, this is why. You’re hopeless. You can take the ignorant and turn it into the sublime… Your ignorance is a deliberate choice.” Do we owe it to those we care about to partake in willful ignorance?

· Ruby is an insecure woman who lives in Willow Springs with a good-for-nothing husband, Junior Lee. “Fact is, you can’t tell Ruby nothing lately, and if you a female over seven and under seventy, you better not stop by that porch to yell a good morning. Folks thinking Ruby is close to losing her mind over Junior Lee.” The insecure person is not reasonable and drives themselves crazy.

o “He was a dog, she said, an out-and-out dog. And she’d let him run loose too long. You had to watch your menfolk when they were weak like him, given to all kinds of temptation.” Why bother with such a relationship? Leave.

o “…killing’s too good for somebody. Naw, death is peace. Ruby deserved burning in that hell which don’t exist.” Ruby poisoned Cocoa in her hair braids for Junior Lee having hit on Cocoa. But, is Ruby a metaphor for the great great grandmother Ophelia, that woman without peace, as she tried to kill Cocoa? This is where my interpretation of this plotline muddies.

· “[I]t ain’t really what you’d call change. It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again with a different set of faces. So time’s doing what it’s always done, standing still this summer here in Willow Springs… We’re finally gonna see this [Cocoa’s] new husband, while he ain’t gonna see nothing new at all.” Everything in life is more or less the same.

· George tells Mama Day that when you do a job, you do it right. Mama Day likes to hear this. She explains, in literature form, that there are multivariate causes and explanations for everything, and all is perspective. “She hopes Baby Girl knows what she’s got. It would be a crying shame for them to go the way of so many of these young people nowadays. Just letting things crumble apart, ’cause everybody wants to be right in a world where there ain’t no right or wrong to be found. My side. He don’t listen to my side. She don’t listen to my side. Just like that chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, an outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth… When getting at the truth starts to hurt, it’s easier to turn away.”

· George was not so much a believe in God, and explains why, and thus also explains the religious impulse for many. “When things were under control — and I lived my life so that was usually the case — there was no need to think about having to deal with some presence that might be governing what was beyond my own abilities… Every now and then when a day went haywire and I felt overwhelmed by unforeseen barriers to some goal I’d set for myself, I might take a deep breath and say, God help me, really meaning, Let the best in me help me. There wasn’t a moment when I actually believed those appeals were going beyond me to a force that would first hear, secondly care, and thirdly bend down to insert influence on the matter. No, I saw the Bible as a literary masterpiece, but literature all the same; and Christianity owed its rules and regulations to politics more than anything else, while filling its pews with uncertainty and fear. Substitute the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, a synagogue, a mosque, a temple, for all the above and the formula still worked perfectly. All the bloodletting and chaos, the devotion and beauty, martyrdom, and even charity could be reduced to a simple formula of politics and fear. But the winds [of the Hurricane] coming around the corner of that tiny house on that tiny island was God… Pure power. What a magnificent ending to an insignificant existence… You yearn for company then, any company, to have some minor evidence of your worth reflected back at you.”

· One theme that weaves through the book and culminates at its end is the mystical “Other Place,” where the Day family has an abandoned plot of land and a now-uninhabited large Southern house, where Abigail and Mama Day had been partially raised. A slaveowner, Bascombe Wade, had set his slaves free, and they had had children, who were the Day family and its descendants. There was a woman who “could not find peace” and a man in the family had loved her. Mama Day (Miranda) hears voices/whispers in the Other Place, “She ain’t bringing that boy home mid-August.” That great-grandmother Ophelia lost her baby at the bottom of a well, then closed herself off from her husband and kids.

o “What had Miss Miranda said — he had a claim to her body, but not her mind? Yes, that house resonated with loss. A lack of peace. And both had begged for peace. What caused those two people to tear each other apart in this old house with a big garden?” Why do so many people lack inner peace?

o “You play with people’s lives and it backfires on you.” In this sense, this is talking about whatever mystical thing is going on in the Other Place, but is this a good metaphor for all of life?

o George thinks, “You have a choice, she said to me. I can tell you the truth, which you won’t believe, or I can invent a lie, which you would. Which would you rather have?” This was to explain why it was Cocoa had worms in her, and was dying, and why George needed to do things with artifacts from the Other Place, and a rooster, to save her life. But, this is a great quote that parallels well to life. The truth can hurt, even that truth which could help people if they understood it.

o “In all her years she could count on half her fingers folks she’d met with a will like his. He believes in himself — deep within himself — ’cause he ain’t never had a choice. And he keeps it protected down in his center, but she needs that belief buried in George. Of his own accord he has to hand it over to her. She needs his hands in hers — his very hand — so she can connect it up with all the believing that had gone before…. A fingertip to touch hers here at the other place. So together they could be the bridge for Baby Girl to walk over. Yes, in his very hands he already held the missing piece she’d come looking for.” Alas George does not want to give to her of her own accord, and so his heart explodes fighting the rooster with the artifacts of the Day family, saves Cocoa’s life, and dies himself. Not sure what all of this means.

o After George is dead, “Mama Day only said that for a long time there would be something to bring on tears aplenty; but she was saving her comfort for the day when I had stopped crying for myself and would have that one final cry — for you. God, I thought her cruel. How could my grief be about anything but you? It took me years to know what she meant.” The self-centered way of interpreting the World, vs. the perspective that one gains with maturity. Cocoa cried because she was alone, because her dream was dead, her life ruined, she did not weep for the actual loss of George’s life.

· Wrapping things back around to Phil Donahue and her positive way of interpreting the World, Mama Day enjoys New York City on their trip back their to bury George and settle the couple’s affairs. And Mama Day likes Midtown, New York City, that very thing which George had said wasn’t “real” New York, similar to how Angelenos disparage Hollywood. She finds “real” people right there in MidTown and doesn’t have to go see all the other parts of the city. So, ultimately, you see what you want to see. Cocoa says, “I tried to tell her that what she saw in midtown was not New York, when she jumped in to tell me that the man who owned that little coffee and sandwich shop squeezed in between all them high risers… why, it had been in his family for three generations. And she had written down the recipe for his mama’s homemade sausage. And surely I remembered that there woman we passed last week, sitting near the railroad station, the one with the red umbrella — she used to be an opera singer. And down in all them tattered bags she had a picture of herself shaking hands with the head of Carnegie Hall. Told her all about the place — Lincoln Center, too — so it was one stop she didn’t have to bother to make. No, she’d seen plenty of New York right in midtown to last her. Any city is the people, ain’t it? And she finally realized how I’d found somebody like you: New York was full of right nice folks. I didn’t have the heart to bring up the drugs and twelve-year-old prostitutes in Times Square, the dark subway corridors where she could have gotten her throat cut for the spare change in her pocketbook, the filthy shelters that made her opera singer prefer the rainy streets. But I should have known that Mama Day had taken all of that into account as well.”