Review: Bailey's Cafe, by Gloria Naylor

"Godfather always said that he made me, but I was born of the delta...I had no choice but to walk into New Orleans neither male nor female—mud. But I could right then and there choose what I was going to be when I walked back out." -Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe

There is an Eve in this book. She is born of the earth alone, not born of man, and she is forced to make a pilgrimage. From the delta, the fertile womb of the earth, she walks to New Orleans, arriving caked in earth, stripped of the gender that has long been her assignment of sin. What she is when she walks back out is what makes this story a contemporary African American tale even more than the struggles endured by the rest of its characters, because she isn’t Eve of the bible and she isn’t the mother figure of European pagan beliefs. She is part earth, part magic, and she can conjure like a voodoo queen.

Eve's story is just one of many told here, but she is more ubiquitous than she at first seems, while the seemingly omnipresent personage of the narrator, Bailey, turns out to be just a supporting character. Bailey, after all, is Christianity's representative, and those in power get to write the histories, even those of contemporary Eve and her wards. Eve lets him tell it. That's the smallest of her battles. Religion as we know it, after all, and secular culture, are a man’s world, and Eve, as drawn by Gloria Naylor, has arrived to reclaim it.

I am a huge fan of Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day", which I read for the first time back in college and have revisited at least twice since, and Bailey's Cafe is another beautiful example of contemporary African American writing by this talented author. I love this book. I love its primal, driven message and the words with which it is told. Naylor's writing is clean and concise—she does not spend vocabulary on setting the scene, but uses every word to take the reader deeper into the lives of her characters, and her characters are most certainly deep. While at first glance, Bailey's Cafe is a handful of character studies tied together by a shared narrator, a member of their unique and mystical community, Naylor's real story is embedded in the depths of her characters and in the religious symbolism throughout. This isn't your run of the mill twentieth century religious symbolism, but a message about the violent struggle being played out between women, particularly African American women, and the patriarchal religions of the world.

Book 9 on my way to 52 in 2011