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Page 104 Springs off the coast of the southeastern United States, midway between Georgia and South Carolina. It is inhabited by former slaves, descendants of one Sapphira Wade, a slave mistress of the island’s original owner, Bascomb Wade, who deeded the property to Sapphira’s African American progeny. The island is presided over by an old woman named Miranda. Naylor’s Miranda is a conjure woman, a witch with magical insights, if not powers over natural and reproductive phenomena. She is nearly one hundred years old, knows herbal remedies, and can summon lightning with her walking stick. She also knows the true story of “the great, grand Mother’’ Sapphira Wade, who in 1823 persuaded her master to deed the island to his slaves and killed him before she vanished in a burst of flame. Miranda wants to pass on the island’s history and her knowledge to her grand-niece, Ophelia, whose nickname is Cocoa, a woman as feisty and determined as her formidable female ancestors. Cocoa is married to George, a successful self-made businessman who has grown up and flourished in New York. When George accompanies his wife on a fateful visit to meet the country relatives in Willow Springs, Naylor’s two worlds—island and city—and the opposing realities they represent collide. The island is Black, exempt from the laws that obtain on the mainland, and free from racism; the city is multi-racial, racist, and governed by strict and inflexible codes of ambition and survival. When Cocoa falls victim to a spell cast on her by a rival witch, Ruby, George can save her only by renouncing the reason and self-reliance he has come to depend on and submitting to the folk wisdom of Mama Day, a woman he considers insane. George, however, is ultimately sacrificed for Cocoa. Diagnosed with a weak heart, he suffers a coronary in the aftermath of the great storm Miranda evokes on the island. After George’s death, Cocoa seems prepared to accept the responsibilities women like Sapphira and Miranda and her great-grandmother Abigail have voluntarily assumed for generations on the island of Willow Springs. Even from this simple plot synopsis, Shakespeare’s influence on the novel should be readily apparent. Mama Day may be structurally modeled after—and undeniably inspired by—The Tempest,1 but in lectures and interviews Gloria Naylor is quick to deny that the play exerted conscious influence on the composition of her novel. Acknowledging William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as primary influences, Naylor overlooks an obvious source for her story, just as a |
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