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Whenever we reach the end of Mama Day, most of my students are outraged, just as I was when I first read the novel, that Naylor kills off the likable George. The question of why George has to die has haunted criticism. Most answers emphasize his flaws. As Elizabeth Hayes writes, when Miranda, or Mama, Day gives him the instructions she says will save Cocoa, his wife and her grandniece, from a seemingly fatal illness, he follows the first part, to enter the chicken coop and search the nest of the fierce red hen, but not the second part, to bring back to Miranda whatever he finds, instead "venting his fury" by killing all the hens, bringing on his heart attack (679). "He is unable," Lindsey Tucker puts it, "to make a genuine surrender of belief to Miranda, and hence loses his life" (183). Margaret Earley Whitt sees "his resistance to surrender logical thought to the ways of Willow Springs" as responsible for his death: "George lives in a world that must and can be tested, measured, proven; he values empirical data above all. And this position is his undoing" (144). She adds that "He refused the help of those who could have made the difference" (152). He refused to give himself to the power of community and tradition. For Daphne Lamothe, his death "signifies," among other things, "the defeat of his Western, masculinized rationality to the Africanderived matriarchy that rules over the island" (167).
Yet George is not a rigidly conceived representation of scientific rationality or masculine stereotypes.1 His passion is football, but what compels him most about the game is the influence a crowd can exercise over the results on the field through the sheer emotional force of their communal will and belief. And while Cocoa sees the people of New York in superficially conceived and mocking ethnic categories, he sees them with a novelist's eye as varied and interesting individuals in richly distinct neighborhoods; his descriptions of New York are even lyrical. As for his death, it is directly caused by his heart condition, which Miranda herself, unlike some critics,2 does not identify with a flawed emotional nature, calling him "a good-hearted boy with a bad heart" (170). Indeed, that Miranda is...