NAYLOR, Gloria

Born 25 January 1950, New York, New York

Daughter of Roosevelt and Alberta McAlpin Naylor

In four novels published in only six years, Gloria Naylor demonstrated a talent to match her ambition. Her elaborately detailed, precisely drawn fictional worlds represent the complex social worlds of late twentieth-century African Americans. Always conscious of class and gender distinctions, as well as racial difference and sexual preference, Naylor crafts nuanced and varied representations of black life. All reflect a particular concern with black female character and with the problem of preserving a distinctive cultural heritage during a period of social and cultural assimilation. Larded with literary allusions to both classical Western texts and African-American fiction, Naylor's novels deliberately call attention to themselves as literary artifacts. They have enjoyed critical and commercial success.

Among their most striking elements is the keen evocation of place. Naylor maps a fictional geography that encompasses Brewster Place, an inner-city neighborhood that is home to those with nowhere else to go; Linden Hills, a suburb to which successful blacks aspire; and Willow Springs, a mythical island off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia that constitutes an ancestral home. Geographically disparate, these sites are connected through the genealogies of the characters who inhabit them. With each novel, the dimension of Naylor's project becomes clearer.

The Women of Brewster Place (1982) was published one year after Naylor graduated from Brooklyn College and embarked on a career as a writer. Subsequently, she earned an M.A. in Afro-American studies from Yale (1983). Earlier she had been a missionary for Jehovah's Witnesses (1968-75) and a switchboard operator. The Women of Brewster Place won the 1983 American Book award for best first novel. In 1989, without Naylor's involvement, it was adapted for television.

Walled off from the rest of society, Brewster Place is a literal and figurative dead end; yet its women (each "an ebony phoenix") have the will to make it home. Their poverty imposes a familiarity—the buildings are too cramped for privacy—that they mold into community. Mattie Michael, a Southern-born, hardworking, religious woman, is the book's moral center. A failed mother, whose spoiled son's betrayal has compelled her move to Brewster Place, Mattie redeems herself and her maternal power. In a powerful scene, she saves a young woman's life by "rocking" her through the pain of a lost child. Like racism and poverty, sexism fractures families. Under the weight of these interlocking oppressions, the novel asserts, black women must rely on each other to survive. When they fail, as in the story of the lesbian couple whom the community ostracizes, the consequences are fatal.

Kiswana Browne is the character who provides the link to Naylor's second novel, Linden Hills (1985). This daughter of the bourgeoisie moves to Brewster Place to be with "the people." Women gently mocks her naive idealism; Linden Hills illuminates its source. Founded by an ex-slave as a challenge to racism, "a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America," Linden Hills has been passed down through five generations of Luther Nedeed's heirs and namesakes. Despite its subversive intent, it is a monument to patriarchal power and materialism. Kiswana could find no community here.

Within a structure borrowed from Dante's Inferno, Naylor inserts the voices and perspectives of the Nedeed wives, whose legacies are buried in the letters, recipe books, and photograph albums that Willa Nedeed discovers in the family cellar. Their words and images empower Willa. Similarly, through a series of allusions to, and revisions of, texts by Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, Naylor pays homage to the literary predecessors who enable her work.

Mama Day (1988) confirms Naylor's consciousness of participating in multiple literary traditions. Echoes of Shakespeare's The Tempest resound against the mythic voice of the slave woman, Sapphira, whose rebellion secured Willow Springs for her descendants. Prominent among these are the title character, Miranda (Mama) Day, a healer, conjure woman, and dispenser of wisdom, and her grandniece Ophelia; Willa Nedeed is their kinswoman. The plot depicts Ophelia's courtship and marriage to George Andrews, by birth an orphan, by training an engineer, and by inclination a rationalist. The couple's sojourn on the island builds to a climax in which the forces of faith and reason, history and progress, collide.

As Linden Hills draws on Dante and Mama Day on The Tempest, Bailey's Cafe (1992) reimagines biblical women—Eve, Mary, Jezebel, Mary Magdalene—in a late-20th-century netherworld. A novel "about sexuality," according to Naylor, it is "structured…like a jazz set." Using a kaleidoscopic point of view, Naylor tells stories of sin and redemption, love and hate, damnation and salvation. The cafe, presided over by Maestro Bailey, is both the end of the world and the beginning of new life for those who gather there.

Some critics question whether Naylor's characters are strong enough to carry the historical and philosophical burdens she imposes on them. They point to elements of melodrama and sentimentality as well. But Naylor's strengths transcend these occasional weaknesses. Through lyrical yet gritty prose and sharply delineated characters, she advances a vision too challenging to ignore.

In the late 1990s Naylor continues to create stories that capture the range of the African-American experience. She won the National Book award for The Women of Brewster Place, which she followed with Linden Hills, Mama Day, and Bailey's Cafe. She also edited Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995), and this anthology provides the companion volume to Langston Hughes's 1967 classic, The Best Short Stories by Black Writers. Naylor presents the finest African-American short stories of the last three decades. The volume is arranged in four thematic sections: "Remembering," "Affirming," "Revealing the Self Divided," and "Moving On." Featured in the volume are works by Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Terry McMillan, and Ntozake Shange, among many others. The 37 stories included capture the many facets of the black experience in America.

Naylor returned to the site of one of her own most powerful locations in The Men of Brewster Place (1998). A collection of short stories, this book serves as a companion to the earlier work. The book is set in the same physical place, the Brewster Place apartments in an unnamed American city, but with different characters. The men are not so much male versions of the women in the first book but individuals with their own stories. Yet their stories do follow similar themes as the original: personal tales involving relationships, sex, and violence. In rich and expert detail, Naylor examines masculine triumph and failure: the sexually confused husband who visits a dominatrix; the guilt-ridden son who jumps bail and causes his mother to lose her house; the Baptist preacher-hustler who manipulates the fortunes of his poor congregation in order to get his way; the Afrocentric community center counselor who gets his young charges to respond to thugs with Shakespearean poetry.

Several critics questioned Naylor's decision to revisit Brewster Place, finding the connection between the two books tenuous. Since the Brewster Place apartment building does not figure as a main character the way it did in the first novel, there appears to be little reason to have placed them in the same location. These critics would have preferred Naylor to let these men be themselves. Yet none of the critics dispute the continuing power of Naylor's ability to craft a story. In The Men of Brewster Place she displays the same rich grace, humor, and compassion that is a distinguishing characteristic of her writing.

Naylor's most recent novel, Saphhira Wade, is a sequel to Mama Day. She created her own production company, One Way Productions, which is intended to present positive images of the black community to as many people in the U.S. and around the world as possible.

Other Works:

"Love and Sex in the Afro-American Novel," Yale Review (Autumn, 1989). "A Message to Winston," Essence (November, 1982). "A Conversation," with Toni Morrison, Southern Review, (Summer, 1985).

Bibliography:

Awkward, M., Inspiriting Influences (1989). Christian, B., "Gloria Naylor's Geography: Community, Class, and Patriarchy in The Women of Brewster Place and Linden Hills," in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (1990). Felton, S., and M. Loris, eds., The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor (1997).

Reference works:

African American Writers (1991). Black American Women in Literature (1989). Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature (1992). FW (1996). CA (1983). CANR (1989). CLC (1984, 1989).

Other references:

African American Review (1994, 1996). Black American Literary Forum 24 (Spring 1990). Boston Globe (interview, 21 Oct. 1992). CLAJ (Sept. 1989, March 1991). Contemporary Literature (1987, 1988). Great Women Writers (1994). Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (26 Apr. 1998). Quarterly Black Review (1995). Seattle Times (2 June 1998).

—CHERYL A. WALL,

UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE