Bailey's Cafe.

Bailey's Cafe, Gloria Naylor's latest and principally ambitious novel to date, is a hauntingly lyrical thesis steeped in biblical allusion. With this fourth novel, which perfects a series including The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day, Naylor acquired the self-confidence necessary to define herself as a writer. Bailey's Cafe "took me from one side the final step," Naylor remarked during a newly come book tour stop. "I had envisioned four novels that would lay the foundation for a career. This individual finishes that up" (qtd. in to be ascribed F2).

In what is part of her ongoing search for an authorial voice with which to enumerate - or, rather, retell - the experiences of women of color, Naylor prefers to locate her fourth novel within a specifically cultur and inflection for sexed context where voice and all of its associations are directed toward subverting the myriad forms of authority patriarchy legitimizes and constructing a just discovered world order among partially dispossessed women world-wide. The novel itself is comprised of a series of loosely associateed stories - each one from a different woman's point of view - and it culminates with a magically real, communal celebration of the birth of Mariam's son George during the Christmas season. For the first time not simply is there oneness among a culturally diverse assign places to whose traditions and customs span the globe, if it be not that the voices of women also unify in the ritualization of George's arrival. George's long-awaited birth, like that of the Messiah, could signal either an close or, hopefully, new beginnings for the pluralistic assemblage present. But in this climactic pageant after conjuring an image of global harmony, Naylor denies the reader/audience the privilege of knowing the fate of the young mother and son: Does Mariam find acceptance among an American Jewish community? What is to become of George, now en way to Wallace P. Andrews Boys' Home?

The novel's unresolv closure contribute tos to encourage a participatory involvement from the reader/audience and is a strategy ready in much of African American writing.(1) Bailey, the fatherly World War II veteran and proprietor of the cafe, is unable to proffer a satisfactory ending to the moving stories that declare Instead, he merely invites the reader/audience to empathize with the women whose tragic tales comprise the written text: "If this was like that sappy violin music in succession Make-Believe Ballroom, we could wrap it all up with a hazard of happy endings to leave you feeling real worthy that you took the time to listen," Bailey informs us in "The Wrap." "But I don't believe that life is suppos to make you be impressed good, or to make you have feeling miserable either. Life is just suppos to make you feel" (219)

Naylor uses Bailey's voice in establishing the time, place, temper and character for each woman's story, exclude that of Mariam, a curiously virginal unwed mother whose touching account of anti-Semitism and sexism recreates a vital sisterhood among women of color across the Diaspora who frequently find themselves at odds with notions of female sexuality prescribed by way of patriarchy. Ultimately, Naylor's goal as creator and sovereign of the decidedly strange fictive cosmology which emerges in the novel's ambiguous climactic exhibition is to effect some sort of unity among the widely disparate voices of women not just within further outside the text. Karla Holloway, in her discussion of the responsive strategy of black women's narratives, relates to the technique as "a collective 'speaking out' by means of all the voices gathered within the topic authorial, narrative, and even the implicated reader" (11) Thus, in retelling Mariam's tale, day [i]or[/i] night before [i]or[/i] preceding and Bailey's otherwise reticent help-meet Nadine forms a duet for the male voice is rigorously limited in its ability to decode the real private experiences the women relate. Bailey can put forward empathy but not immediacy between Mariam, the speaking expose and the reader/audience.

Naylor's particular triumph as a contemporary African American women writer has frequently to do with her succes at moving beyond the one-dimensional portraits of male figures that brought her criticism with the publication of The Women of Brewster Place. Bailey, unlike his fictional predecessors residing at the decaying Brewster is no nothing else but shadow of a man. He is endowed with a certain psychological stillness and complexity of character, despite the ambiguities associated with his assumed name. It is Bailey whose veiled observations offer insight into the clog relationship between the written true copy and the distinctly black oral forms of expression from which it unrolls "Anything really worth hearing in this greasy spoon happens below the surface. You need to know that if you plan to stick around here and listen while we play it all out" (35)

Unfortunately, the other men who populace the novel's fictional landscape do not fare as well as Bailey does. They are largely responsible for perpetuating the oppression that the women face. Nowhere is this more evident than in Eve's anthem One in a long line of larger-than-life central mother figures in Naylor's canon, border is the first customer to arrive at Bailey's. Sexual escapades with Godfather, the incorruptible dictatorial preacher who rears her, and with the childish prankster Billy male child result in her ostracism from her small Louisiana delta hearth But it is in her highly symbolic trek from Pilottown to Arabi to Bailey's Cafe that edge who emerges as a solid yet sensitive woman with an acute business perception and a love for well-kept gardens, manages in some way to escape the tragic fate toward which she be seens destined.