Bailey’s Cafe
Bailey’s Cafe is a collection of deeply moving personal stories from (mainly) women deeply scared by life. Author Gloria Naylor reveals an extraordinary ability to imagine, create and relate the stories of half dozen people nearly destroyed by their pasts, yet getting some glimmer of hope in Eve’s boarding house, arrived at via Bailey’s Cafe. Naylor’s characters are desperately seeking salvation, or they will perish by their own evils that they have experienced in their lives.
One such character in need is Sadie, whose violent childhood at the hands of a drug-addicted prostitute mother leads her to seek quiet and cleanliness. Bailey’s Cafe is a sleazy little dive on the edge of nowhere, run by a guy who answers to the name of Baile wife, Nadine. They specialize in bad food and lost hopes, catering to a series of vividly drawn characters, all of whom have come to the end of a bitter road. In the first few lines, Bailey tells us that he was distraught at the horrors of combat and the destitution of war, and when he reached the point of giving in, he found this mysterious cafe, and began anew.
His experience is not unlike the other characters in the play. They all reach Bailey’s Cafe in the hopes of not being served a hot meal, but to regain something that was lost to them. A character who I liked the most is Sadie, who tried to win her abusive mother’s love by being the best, Syed 2 cleanest girl in the world. Yet after Sadie’s dream of having a home of her own is hopelessly thwarted, she escapes into alcoholism and works as a whore, earning only enough to support her habit of cheap wine.
Until she was four she thought her name was the one the coat hanger missed. When she did ask her mother what her name was her beat her viciously screaming “Sadie, Sadie, Sadie. ” At this young age she learned that the only way out of her situation was to love. “She didn’t know she loved this empty woman in order to survive. ” (Naylor, 42) Sadie was an aging wino and prostitute. Born only because her mother had botched an abortion, Sadie spent forty years of her life trying to find approval and love, first from her mother, then from an elderly husband.
After losing the home that had become her reason for existing, Sadie began to drink. Her wine dreams have become so fulfilling that when she finally is offered love, she chooses illusion instead. She knew the difference in the way her mother treated her and the way other parents treated their children had to be her fault so she tried to be as good as she could. Her mother forced her to become a prostitute at the age of thirteen and when she had her first abortion her mother had the doctor sterilize her.
After mother died she married the man who delivered the wood in whore house. He was like her mother so she kept his house clean and was always quiet. She always dreamt of having a house with a garden as a young girl and when her geraniums bloomed she had the garden she needed to complete dream. Syed 3 Sadie has suffered from the beginning till the end of her life. She was very strong and bold who had never given up. She sold everything she has and finally begins to sell herself.
Bailey’s Cafe isn’t defined by just one character, but rather its world, a way station on the edge of any city anywhere, the place before there’s no more places. This is a novel which depends greatly on the observations of a forthright unsophisticated who describes himself, dispiritingly, as ‘majoring in Life’. it is good for getting a feel of what is really out there and that no one is perfect it really shows you that you can find help in anything and that when you least it expect it and you’re at the bottom something is bound to come by and pick you up.
