Mama Day

Cocoa, so nicknamed by her family for the color of her skin, is the granddaughter of Abigail Day and the grandniece of Miranda Day. She is 27 at the start of the novel and 32 by its end. A confident but sometimes stubborn woman, Cocoa is determined to establish herself as a working New York City professional; however, she is also deeply tied to her family history in Willow Springs. She often seems conflicted about these competing aspects of her identity. On the one hand, she contradicts George’s here-and-now philosophy when she thinks, “A person is made up of much more than the ‘now’” (213), which suggests that she embraces and appreciates her past. However, she often implies that she also wants to escape it.

Like Willow Springs, Cocoa occupies a state of liminality, of between-ness: she finds herself caught between her new world in New York and Willow Springs, and she struggles to navigate the vast differences in the two cities’ respective rituals (though she certainly does a better job of it than George). The reader can observe this through the way Cocoa’s dialect subtly changes depending on where she finds herself. In the interview with George, for example, she steers away from the colloquialisms that would characterize her as a woman from the South.