The named and the nameless: Morrison's 124 and Naylor's "the other place" as semiotic chorae

Like 124 in Beloved, the other place in Mama Day is a semiotic chora that embodies or represents the Mother/Other. Sapphira, "the great, grand Mother" (49), was a creator and nurturer of life with extraordinary nonrationalist ways of knowing. A root doctor, healer, and midwife of mythic skill, her pharmacopoeia, the center of her healing practice, was located at the other place. There, as legend has it, she made medicine of magical potency by "grab[bing] a bolt of lightning in the palm of her hand [...] to start the kindling going under her medicine pot [....] She turned the moon into salve [...] and healed the wounds of every creature walking up on two or down on four" (3). As midwife, mother, matriarch, and archetypal Mother, Sapphira embodied maternality. The women's magic she enacted on Bascombe Wade at the other place literally gave birth to the community of Willow Springs: Bascombe Wade was conjured into freeing his slaves in his will and deeding them the entire island. The beneficiaries of this powerful conjuring, the free, property-owning, self-governing African Americans of Willow Springs, revere Sapphira as their founding mother and the other place as her sacred space. The house was also the literal birthplace of Sapphira's seven sons--a magical number. When she gave the surname "Day" to her sons, she cast herself as a maternal Creator, mother of all of the Days/days, an identity Miranda underlines by referring to Sapphira as "the Mother who began the Days" (262). (2)

The house is also the birthplace of Miranda, eldest daughter of the seventh son of the seventh son (an exponentially magical male) of the Mother. "Mama" Day is the inheritor of Sapphira's supernatural powers, as well as inheritor of the sacred space of the Mother, the other place. As midwife in Willow Springs for 70 years and matriarch of the community for 40 or 50 years at the time the novel begins, the childless Mama Day is the figurative mother of all the islanders. Though she no longer lives in the house (and thus, it is her "other place" rather than her domicile), she spends a great deal of time there. Her extensive garden and fruit trees are at the other place--in fact, she has restored Sapphira's garden exactly, mostly by intuition, over the course of 65 years after a hurricane destroyed it in 1920--and she dries herbs on Sapphira's drying-hooks, grinds them with Sapphira's mortar and pestle, and cooks them in Sapphira's medicine pots at the other place. And of course in privacy at the other place, she performs what even she admits are "amazing things" with her "gifted hands" (89). Thus, the other place has been regarded as a matriarchal magic circle, a chora, for nearly two centuries.

When Miranda realizes that Cocoa is dying from the effects of Ruby's fix, the other place is where she immediately goes for help. Miranda moves out to the other place; here she and Cocoa are both grounded, and here she must be to "hear" the Mother's counsel. After all, she muses, "all that Baby Girl is was made by the people who walked these oak floors, sat and dreamed on that balcony" (278). The house has been damaged in the hurricane, however, and Miranda must first make some temporary repairs to the leaking roof. While nailing up matting in the attic, she discovers Bascombe Wade's plantation ledger, folded in half and wedged into the point of the roof, hidden there purposely by her father, she intuits. Inside the ledger, as water-damaged, stained, and unreadable as the ledger pages, she finds the bill of sale for her legendary great-grandmother, whose name no one in Willow Springs knows. Almost all that she can make out is "Sold to Mister Bascombe Wade of Willow Springs, one negress answering to the name of Sa" (280).