What is the significance of the year ? What role does it play in the legend of Sapphira Wade? How has it crept into the popular speech of present-day Willow Springs? How are Mama and Abigail Day related to Sapphira? What peculiar geographical circumstance has kept Willow Springs the sole property of the descendants of slaves?
New York 1. How do George and Cocoa meet? Why does Cocoa seem so wary of men, and so cynical about people in general? What terms does she use to describe other African-Americans, whites, Asians, and Jews?
Where—and how—was George brought up? How has his upbringing shaped his view of the world? Whom is she named after? How do Mama Day and Abigail greet each other? What is the origin of this custom? In what ways does it sum up the rest of their relationship? In what way have the Day women been unlucky? What was Cocoa like as a baby? In what ways did her behavior then foreshadow her character as an adult? Who is Dr. How does he make his living?
Describe his relationship with Mama Day. What is the state of their relationship? How does Cocoa sum up the respective roles her grandmother and great-aunt played in her upbringing? Willow Springs 1. What does this story tell us about her character?
How does Mama Day go about diagnosing her? How would you describe the kind of medicine she practices? Why are authorities on the mainland reluctant to meddle in the affairs of Willow Springs?
What kind of help does Frances request from Mama Day? Why does she refuse? What is the meaning of the expression "working roots"? Why did Abigail name her first child Peace? Why did Mama Day beg her not to do this? What does she mean when she thinks, "[Abigail] only lost one of her babies to Mother, I lost them all" 95? On what pretext do George and Cocoa go on seeing each other?
Why is Cocoa so surprised by George? What do those changes indicate about the change in her feelings for George? How does George change as he draws closer to Cocoa? What crucial thing do George and Cocoa have in common?
What is Candle Walk? What holiday does it replace on Willow Springs? What are its supposed origins and how has the story of those origins changed over the generations? What do we learn about Ruby, Frances, and Junior Lee? Why has Frances gone mad? How has Bernice changed? What gift do she and Ambush bring Abigail and Miranda? How do the sisters react to it?
What is "the other place"? Why does Abigail refuse to go there? Why does Miranda start to weep while on her way to the other place? Who was the man who died of a broken heart? The more deeply Cocoa falls in love with George, the angrier she becomes at him. Why is this so?
How do these disappointments affect his behavior toward Cocoa? How are they related? What significance does she see in them? What transpires between Mama Day and Bernice at the other place? How does George see Cocoa when he watches her sleeping beside him ? What are the eventual consequences of this flaw? How has Bernice changed since the preceding section? Whose voices do we hear when Miranda and her great-niece visit the cemetery? Why does Miranda send Bernice, Dr. Buzzard, and Junior Lee away before Cocoa can join them?
Why is Bernice so angry when people call her son "Chick"? Why might she be so protective of him? How do Cocoa and George eventually make peace? What lesson has she learned from her great-aunt and grandmother? What is the meaning of the sentence, "Any summer we crossed over that bridge would be the summer we crossed over" What figurative or symbolic meanings are suggested by the phrase "crossing over"?
Book II: 1. What does Clarissa find underneath the trailer? What is its significance? Why does he feel envious? What similar dreams do George and Cocoa have on the same night? How do these dreams foreshadow events later in the book? What secret is Bernice keeping from her husband?
Why do men on Willow Springs keep playing poker with Dr. Buzzard, even though they know he always wins? These notes suggest that Naylor was looking toward a more substantive revision, perhaps after she had completed a draft of the entire novel. These materials include handwritten notes and photocopied articles or book chapters about the nineteenth-century western Sahel. These include, for instance, indigenous African spirituality and the spread of Islam in West Africa from the tenth through the nineteenth centuries.
She researched at length the differences between the cattle-herding Wodaabe who practice an animist spirituality and the Fulani people who settle in villages and adhere more strictly to Islam. Perhaps the biggest question the archive raises is whether Naylor, after decades of dreaming and writing about Sapphira, ever wrote her story.
If she did so, that document is not among the materials included in her archive. The fact that Naylor donated the original handwritten draft, rather than a copy, and that she also donated the extensive research materials that she had assembled implies, I think, that she was moving away from the project—at least as she conceived it in While his attempts to suspend his disbelief ultimately fail, resulting in his own fatal heart attack, George's sincere efforts help heal Cocoa, and Naylor implies that his sacrifice is necessary for her recovery.
Throughout Mama Day, Naylor presents three different narrators. Much of the novel involves Cocoa and George speaking in passages that occur after his death and within their separate and shared consciousness. At the very end of the work Naylor's all-knowing narrator looks forward to Cocoa assuming the matriarchal role after Mama Day passes on. Gloria Naylor b. View all related items in Oxford Reference ».
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