Bailey's Café by Gloria Naylor

First published: 1992

The Work

Set in 1948, Bailey’s Cafe, Gloria Naylor’s fourth novel, is her self-described “sexual novel.” Similar to The Women of Brewster Place, it tells the tragic histories of female characters who suffer simply because they are sexual. The underlying structure of blues music recasts these feminist rewritings of biblical stories. The characters’ own blues-influenced narrations provide the equivalent of melody, and the male narrator supplies the connecting texts linking one story to another.

The proprietor of Bailey’s Cafe, who is the narrator, sets the pattern by telling how he was saved by Bailey’s Cafe, a magical place. It is a cafe that does not serve customers, and its magic is not the redemptive kind. The cafe provides “some space, some place, to take a breather for a while” by suspending time. Not fixed in any one city, it is “real real mobile,” so that anyone can get there. It features a back door that opens onto a void where patrons re-create scenes to help them sustain life, or, alternatively, to end it. The street on which Bailey’s Cafe may be found contains three refuges that form a “relay for broken dreams”: Bailey’s Cafe, Gabe’s Pawnshop, and Eve’s Boardinghouse and Garden.

Eve transforms her suffering into a haven. She aids only those women who know what it means to “walk a thousand years.” Her boarders include Esther, who hates men because of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child bride; Peaches, a woman so beautiful she disfigures herself; Jesse, a spunky heroin addict; and Mariam, a fourteen-year-old Ethiopian Jew who is pregnant but still a virgin. The community also includes men. The unforgettable Miss Maple is a man who forges a strong identity despite the racism that threatens his manhood. The novel explores positive models of masculinity and steadily subverts the idea that sexual women are whores. Such a characterization oppresses all women, who must transcend the personal consequences of this destructive label.

The arrival of the outcast and pregnant Mariam threatens to disrupt the characters’ safety because the birth could destroy their world: “For all we knew, when that baby gave its first cry, this whole street could have just faded away.” The women on the street fear they will find themselves back in “those same hopeless crossroads in our lives.” Instead, the baby is born in Mariam’s homeland, magically re-created in the void. All the characters gather to celebrate its arrival. Their participation in the Jewish birth ceremony brings hope for the future and shows the healing power of a diverse community.

Bibliography

Byerman, Keith. Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Includes a chapter comparing the representations of desire in Bailey’s Café and Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992).

Jones, Marie F. Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. Library Journal 117 (September 1, 1992): 215. Succinct, useful review. Jones argues that the characters and their sufferings determine the direction of the novel. Calls the characterizations in Bailey’s Café Naylor’s most interesting since The Women of Brewster Place.

Kaveney, Roz. “At the Magic Diner.” Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. Times Literary Supplement, July 17, 1992, 20. An unfavorable review. Kaveney praises the book’s subject matter but argues that Bailey’s Café fails because of its structure. Kaveney calls the novel “a poor book from an admirable writer.”

Naylor, Gloria. “Gloria Naylor.” Interview by Mickey Pearlman. In A Voice of One’s Own: Conversations with America’s Writing Women, by Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. Superb interview by a major scholar. Pearlman enters the writer’s home, discusses some interesting biographical matters, and elicits significant opinions, particularly about women’s perceptions of space, memory, and identity.

Naylor, Gloria. Introduction to “Moon: Indigo, from Bailey’s Café.” Southern Review 28 (Summer, 1992): 502-503. Naylor looks back on her first four novels as a “quartet” conceived while she was writing The Women of Brewster Place. In each, the “content carved its own landscape” and determined its form. Bailey’s Café, “which addresses our perceptions of female sexuality,” demanded a jazz framework, with a blues base, which could show the “sadness embodied in any might-have-been.”

Naylor, Gloria, and Toni Morrison. “A Conversation.” Southern Review 21 (Summer, 1985): 567-593. Lengthy interview of Morrison conducted as a conversation between the two writers, who find common ground both as women and as members of the community of black women writers. A useful introduction to Naylor’s works.

Stave, Shirley A., ed. Gloria Naylor: Strategy and Technique, Magic and Myth. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. Includes a chapter by Carol Bender and Roseanne Hoefel on the importance of empathy in Bailey’s Café.

Steinberg, Sybil. Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. Publishers Weekly 239 (June 15, 1992): 83. Favorable review, praising Naylor’s realistic picture of African American life in mid-century. Steinberg asserts that the novel’s Ms. Maple segment recalls the best fiction of Ralph Ellison.

Wakefield, Dan. “Nobody Comes in Here with a Simple Story.” Review of Bailey’s Café, by Gloria Naylor. The New York Times Book Review, October 4, 1992, 11. Admires Naylor’s “virtuoso orchestration of survival, suffering, courage and humor.” Notes that the redemptive ending is not the “unearned kind” Bailey would shun, but one that both the characters and their creator have indeed earned.