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• 1 media/Mama_Day_bookcover.jpg media/cabretta-beach.jpg 2024-04-23T16:46:40+00:00 Key Text: Mama Day 10 Written By Gloria Naylor image_header 2024-04-23T18:12:05+00:00 Willow Springs’ historical timeline is not mutually exclusive from the timeline of dispossession in the Sea Islands. The Willow Springs residents are witnesses to the dispossession happening on other islands: “Hadn’t we seen it happen back in the ‘80s on St. Helena, Daufuskie, and St. John’s? And before that in the ‘60s on Hilton Head?” (1988, 6). The developers, according to the narrator, began coming to Willow Springs in the nineties. Here, the communal narrator of the text witnesses the same timeline of development laid out in the Daufuskie Island Adventure document. But by setting the novel’s opening in Willow Springs in 1999, as the islanders are still resisting developers’ attempts to purchase their land, Naylor narratively preempts the inevitability of developers stealing land from the entirety of the Sea Island archipelago. In Willow Springs, 18&23, as a historical marker and an ongoing temporal marker, both precedes and exceeds the development timeline. Mama Day’s own life history serves as another timeline that contests the development timeline as well. “And if some were waiting for her to die, they had a long wait,” Naylor writes. “She says she ain’t gonna. And when you think about it, to show up in one century, make it all the way through the next, and have a toe inching over into the one approaching is about as close to eternity anybody can come” (1988, 6–7). In this instance, Mama Day’s life, not the development timeline, is the timeline with the most inevitability. These revisions of time contest both the finality and inevitability of history and future of development in the Sea Islands that the Daufuskie Island Adventure document puts forth.