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Novelist Gloria Naylor’s Newly Rediscovered ‘Sapphira Wade’ Was Worth the Wait
An unfinished manuscript has recently been published for the first time
Seven years shy of her death, in 2009, novelist Gloria Naylor donated her archive to Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. The capsule contained her life’s work, from unpublished plays, letters, writing, and even a screenplay based on the unethical conditions of Parchman prison in Mississippi. (As Naylor was affixed to a tradition of female-leading stories, she took the formerly segregated prison and reconstructed it with a Black feminist take on the prison industrial complex.) Without the infiltration of White consciousness, her work was fixated on African American and Africana womanism. Alongside one-act plays including Candy and Madear, Naylor’s wealth of materials provided greater context into not only her unfinished work, but also her efforts to piece together the capstone of her anthology, Sapphira Wade.
Throughout her writing career, Naylor often referenced Sapphira Wade, the follow-up to the 1988 novel Mama Day, as her magnum opus, formulating the idea for the former manuscript while attaining her master’s at Yale University. Though the seeds of Sapphira Wade were sown, Naylor was intensively focused on other novels in her catalog, notably The Women of…
