rested on the seventh day and accordingly re-
named her family Day. However, despite such gifts
of freedom and African conjure power, tragedy
ensued for her generations. Sapphira lived only a
thousand days after this.
Mama Day, Sapphira’s descendant and a power-
ful local practitioner, must now teach Cocoa what
it means to be the lineal descendant of the seventh
son of this African conjure woman. First, a fitting
consort, a truly greathearted black man, must be
found for her. She begins a stormy love relationship
with George, a black New York professional man
conjured by Mama Day’s special powders whom
she subsequently takes home on the annual August
pilgrimage to Willow Springs. These two special
lovers, on whom the future rests, fall quickly into
Mama Day’s conjuring designs until Ruby, a jeal-
ous rival practitioner, curses Cocoa with a deadly
infestation of worms. When George fails to believe
in Mama Day’s African conjure powers and relies
only on his love and physical strength to save her,
he dies needlessly of a heart attack. However nec-
essary and effective his sacrifice for love, it need
not have resulted in his death.
In the context of this cautionary tale, Naylor
deconstructs disabling oppositions between Africa
and America, North and South, science and reli-
gion, pragmatism and faith, print and oral culture,
Afromysticism and Christianity. Out of a mixture
of Sea Island Afromystical and Christian rituals,
Gullah folkways, the Bible, Shakespeare, and the
contemporary urban black experience, Naylor’s
text bridges contemporary African-American hy-
bridities and transformations in an effort to knit
back together the traditions and generations of the
Great Migration. From her sea island stage emerge
voices from beyond the grave; beneficent, bogus,
and evil conjurers; a gigantic storm; an old grave-
yard; a haunted house; a tragic family saga; true
lovers; plantation history; and the whole North-
ern urban experience. Cocoa and George must
bridge them all by growing into the potent legacy
of Sapphira’s black matrilineage, by healing the rift
between black men and women, and by claiming
their shared African-American history. Theirs is
the cosmic sexual union of god and goddess that
will realign the tilted cosmos of the African di-
aspora. As textual conjurer, Naylor builds on the
foundation of their love a brave new black world
that will transcend colonial history. Together
George and Ophelia span Africa, the Middle Pas-
sage, and the Great Migration.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Awkward, Michael. “A Circle of Sisters.” Dissertation
Abstracts International. Diss. Michigan University,
1987.
———. Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision,
and Afro-American Women’s Novels. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991.
Felton, Sharon, and Michelle Loris, eds. The Criti-
cal Response to Gloria Naylor. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1997.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Gloria
Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New
York: Amistad Press, 1993.
Gloria CroninMammy
Mammy is a fictional character created in slavery
and perpetuated in the present day. Her founda-
tion is in the mythical world of the “Old South.”
African-American female slaves who took care
of the plantation owner’s white children were
referred to as “Mammies.” Mammy as a job title
became a mask that could be placed on African-
American women. This mask erased their individ-
uality and objectified them. They could be made
into the image of perfect slaves: genuinely loving
their oppressors, thus justifying slavery. As type,
Mammy is depicted as a large, black, head-ragged,
African-American woman. She made her first ap-
pearance in American art—often depicted in the
background of a white family’s portrait. Her ap-
pearance in art has been used as proof of the genu-
ine Americanism of the work.
One of Mammy’s earliest appearances in litera-
ture was in James Paulding’s The Dutchman’s Fire-
side (1831). She also made early appearances in
children’s literature such as Louise-Clarke Pynelle’s332 Mammy