Mama Day by Gloria Naylor

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Mama Day (1988)

by Gloria Naylor

Willow Springs, South Carolina

South Carolina:  11/14

   Mama Day is an intergenerational family novel written from a variety of perspectives about an matriarchal African American clan that managed to obtain title to an island in between South Carolina and Georgia in the time before the United States was a country.  Every since, the clan has lived between and apart from the surrounding world creating a distinct African-American world that operates in the absence of white people. As is always the case, the use of multiple perspectives telling the same set of events once, twice and three times over slows down the pace of reading.   Particularly, the main plot line, about Ophelia AKA "Baby Girl" AKA "Coco" the scion of the imperial line of Days, and her relationship with George, a self-made orphan who has risen to be a co-owner of his own engineering firm in New York City, is told first by Ophelia then by George, or vice versa, for the entire length of the book.   As it turns out, despite interesting moments, neither character is particularly insightful about their situation, George having been raised without a family full stop and Ophelia having been raised in a matriarchy with literally no strong male role models.  

  Neither one of them has a clue, and that might have made for an interesting book, but after the couple head back to Ophelia's home island, the book bogs down in a magical-realist witchcraft plot that does no favors to any of the characters.  Mama Day was a swing and a miss for me, with some interesting moments- honestly, ANY African American characters who aren't totally poverty stricken are a welcome break from the usual tone of the titles selected by editor Susan Straight, and the scenes set in New York City, specifically the courtship between George and Coco, fit this bill.  However, the scenes that are set down in the South are tedious, and the idea that this whole book eventually boils down to (spoiler alert) Coco being voodoo hexed by a rival struck me as preposterous- and that's writing as a fan of magical realism, not to mention speculative fiction.