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The named and the nameless: Morrison's 124 and Naylor's "the other place" as semiotic chorae
African American Review, Winter, 2004 by Elizabeth T. Hayes
She searches her memory and then her unconscious for hours, trying to connect with Sapphira, to bring the Mother into being by naming her. The name, she intuits, is "the missing key to an unknown door somewhere in that house. The door to help Baby Girl" (280, emphasis mine). Plainly, the Mother is conflated with the house; indeed, with the historical proof of her existence--the bill of sale--"built into" the peak of the roof of the other place, Sapphira appears to have imbued the very wood and shingles of the house with her absent presence. Miranda knows that the unknown "door" in the house, unlocked by the "password," the Mother's name, will lead her to Sapphira, who will lead her to a way to save Cocoa. Going to bed at the other place that night, Miranda "pray[s] to the Father and Son as she had been taught. But she fails asleep murmuring the names of women" (283). The name-of-the-father is not going to help her here--only the name of the Mother.
Sleeping, Miranda continues to search for Sapphira. In her dreams, she "opens door upon door upon door. She asks each door the same thing: Tell me your name. And her answer is to have it swing open so she's facing another" (283). At last, when she is too exhausted to open even one more door, she reaches the nameless Mother, who cradles and nurses Miranda at her full breast. The pre-verbal semiotic communication between mother and infant is emphasized in this passage: "Daughter....[Miranda] can't really hear [the word] 'cause she's got no ears, or call out 'cause she's got no mouth. There's only the sense of being. Daughter" (283). If, as Freud believed, rooms symbolize wombs and doors the entrance to wombs, then Miranda's dream symbolizes a return to the enfolding security of the womb, a nourishing, comforting, blissful preverbal (re-)union with the mother. In the end, it is "the beating of [the Mother's] calm and steady heart" (283) that "tells" Miranda how to find the answer she is searching for: she "knows" (283) that she must uncover the old well in the garden and look past the pain.
In ancient Greek mythology, wells are sacred to the Mother. At Eleusis, the center of the worship of the Mother for many centuries, the well around which the celebrants danced in a circle during the Mysteries was called the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (omphalos), "the navel of the world"; it was believed to be the umbilical cord connecting the upper world to the chthonic (Earth) Mother. (3) The well at the other place is a similarly liminal, semiotic choric space. From the silent well, "with a force that almost knocks [Miranda] on her knees" (284), come the screams of women in pain: Miranda's baby sister Peace, Miranda's mother Ophelia, who tried to throw herself down the well where Peace had drowned, and Miranda's great-grandmother Sapphira, begging Bascombe Wade for her freedom. When Miranda "looks past the pain," as the Mother has instructed, she intuits what she--and George--must do to save Cocoa. (4)
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