SOURCE: “Gloria Naylor's Mama Day as Magic Realism,” in The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor, edited by Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris, Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 177-86.

In the following essay, Hayes describes the magic realism of Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day and the writing of other African Americans as “postmodern subversiveness at its best.

Three days before the hurricane of the century has even been predicted by the National Weather Service, Miranda (“Mama”) Day is in her kitchen peeling peaches for a pie when suddenly she “feels death all around her” (226). Looking out the back door of her trailer to find “wind steady from the southeast and not a cloud in the sky,” she nevertheless unequivocally knows that not only will a hurricane hit Willow Springs, but it will “be a big, big storm,” a hurricane “born in hell” (227), “an 18 & 23er” (228). No one in the world except...