The American Century: Literature since 1945 675happens to be written as a series of letters. It achieves its meaning precisely by being
an epistolary novel: by returning to one of the oldest forms of prose fiction and
using that as the source, the key to the opening up of the self. Celie writes herself into
existence, into contact with herself and communion with others. And those others
include the readers, since the letters are ultimately addressed to us.
Like Toni Morrison, whom she has acknowledged as an influence, Gloria Naylor
(1950–) achieved critical success with her first novel, The Women of Brewster Place
(1982). Consisting of the interrelated tales of seven African-American women, all of
whom end up in a dead-end street in a Northern ghetto, it focuses in particular on
male insensitivity and violence. The women range in age from their twenties to their
fifties but, like so many of the characters of Alice Walker, they all suffer at the hands
of men from their own families and community. With her second novel, Linden Hills
(1985), Naylor moved from the ghetto to a middle-class community. Set in the 1980s,
the novel traces the journey of a young African-American poet, in the company of a
fellow poet, through an exclusive black neighborhood, looking for odd jobs. The
resemblance of the two to Virgil and Dante, and of Linden Hills itself to the Dantean
Inferno, becomes inescapable. This is a place, it seems, that lost souls inhabit; it is full
of those who have sold out to the dream of success. It is also a place that shares its
general geography with Brewster Place: Naylor shares, not only with Morrison but
with Faulkner, an interest in the determining impact of setting and the intention of
creating her own fictional map. Her third and fourth novels, Mama Day (1988) and
Bailey’s Cafe (1992), extend that map. In Mama Day Naylor superimposes the two
settings of Willow Springs – an island off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia –
and New York City. In Bailey’s Cafe she centers the action on a New York City
restaurant of that name. These two novels also substantially enlarge her formal
range. With Mama Day, for instance, Naylor has said that her aim was to analyze the
nature of belief. Reiterating the existence of an ancient African-American folk tradi-
tion here, she allows the consciousness of the island to narrate some of the novel;
she dramatizes exchanges between the living and the dead; and, in effect, she invites
the reader to participate in that willing suspension of disbelief that magic, religion,
and fiction all share. Bailey’s Cafe is different to the extent that it is written in the
form of a jazz suite. But it also combines the grimly material and the strangely
mythic. The all-night café is a kind of way station for the lost souls who wander in
there, and lurking behind it is a realm of fantasy: a dock on the water that is evidently
capable of meeting the desperate hopes, the dreams of these lost souls by miracu-
lously transforming reality. In 1998 Naylor published The Men of Brewster Place,
which returns to the men whose violence and indifference made the lives of the
women of her first novel miserable. It also grants them a voice. The novel is perhaps
less formally daring than some of her earlier work (so for that matter is 1996 (2005),
Naylor’s fictionalized memoir about her experience under government surveillance),
but it shows the same imaginative compulsion to map out the mundane facts, the
magical dreams, and monstrous nightmares that belong to one particular place.
Friendship between women is a common theme in the fiction of Naylor, Walker,
and Morrison, and also in the novels of Terry McMillan (1951–) and Sherley AnneGGray_c05.indd 675ray_c 05 .indd 675 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM