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she feels from George, who has just asked her out again after a couple of bad dates, Cocoa exclaims to herself, “Surely, he jests” (referring to Romeo and Juliet 2.1.43), then concludes disparagingly that such a quotation “had to be something from my high school Shakespeare”:

“Just proves that Shakespeare didn’t have a bit of soul—I don’t care if he did write about Othello, Cleopatra, and some slave on a Caribbean island. If he had been in touch with our culture, he would have written somewhere, ‘Nigger, are you out of your mind?’”

(Naylor 1989:64)

Naylor suggests here that Othello may not have been the “tawny Moor’’ that the majority culture, following Samuel Taylor Coleridge,2 has claimed him to be for centuries; she also implies that Cleopatra and Caliban are Black as well as African, which again has not generally been granted in the tradition of Shakespeare scholarship.3 Most of all, she playfully demonstrates the whiteness of Shakespeare. However concerned with African issues he may be in these and other plays, he is still a White European and his plays need “darkening.”

Naylor’s signifying on The Tempest in Mama Day begins fast and furiously with the naming of the titular character. If The Tempest is about Papa Prospero, Naylor may give Mama Day the name of Shakespeare’s ingénue, Miranda, to signify that the daughter of Prospero is now in control of the text. Mama Day combines the qualities of Shakespeare’s daughter and her wizard/father. Like her younger counterpart in The Tempest, Old Miranda wonders at the magical properties of the island—much more than Prospero ever does, for it is Caliban who is sensitive to its mystical beauty—and, initially at least, admires her grand-niece’s choice of mate from the “brave new world” (The Tempest 5.1.186) of New York. But she is also Prospero’s female counterpart. With her decidedly “sympathetic” magic, Mama Day calls down, or at least cannot call off, a fearsome tempest that isolates inhabitants and urban visitors alike on the island. She instructs the young couple from New York, George and Ophelia, in the art and obedience of love, as Prospero instructs Ferdinand and Miranda. Finally, she controls the magic, the marriages, and most of all, the reproductive activity on the island, including the fertilization, pregnancy, and delivery of one Bernice, who gives birth to a Black “little Caesar.” But unlike Prospero, who has been

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