Gayl Jones’s Novels of Oppression - The New Yorker
Gayl Jones's Novels of Oppression
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In 1975, the professor and poet Michael S. Harper conducted a lengthy interview with Gayl Jones, a twenty-six-year-old writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Jones was a former graduate student of his in the literary-arts program at Brown University, and the occasion was the publication of her first book, "Corregidora," a short, baroque novel about love and history in Truman-era Kentucky. The novel had been edited by Toni Morrison, who was then working as a senior editor at Random House. (It was Harper who had first sent Jones's work to Morrison.) But Jones had attracted notice before she was accepted at Brown, in 1971; she'd had a modest upbringing, and the critic Elizabeth Hardwick, a fellow-Lexingtonian and a friend of a teacher who took a special interest in Jones, had helped her secure a scholarship at Connecticut College, where she majored in English. While there, Jones apparently jettisoned an early desire to write like Henry James and began to write like herself. In the interview with Harper, she explained that her writing had grown out of listening, that the stories she'd heard adults tell one another at home and the tales that her mother, Lucille, had written and then read aloud to Jones and her brother had had a profound effect on her. (Jones's grandmother Amanda Wilson wrote plays to be performed at church, and her father, Franklin, worked as a cook.) As a result, Jones told Harper, she was most engaged by writers "whose 'voice' I can trust and who I feel can 'hear.' " She went on:
In "Corregidora," people listen and respond to what they've heard, but the responses are, at times, delayed reactions to some other injury, a wound of memory, a deforming history, which sets off another reaction—a fight, or some other kind of physical abuse—that has nothing to do with the interlocutor's original intention. Usually, the person wanting to be heard is a woman. Like all of Jones's subsequent novels—her fifth, "Palmares," which came out in September, is the first she's published in more than twenty years—"Corregidora" is told in the first person and relies on long stretches of spare dialogue to keep the action going. Ursa, the narrator, is a twentysomething blues singer in Kentucky; when the book opens, in 1947, she's married to a brutish man named Mutt, who doesn't like the way other men look at her when she performs. So he knocks her down some stairs. She lands in such a way that the "doctors in the hospital said my womb would have to come out." There will be no "generations" from her.
Ursa's mother and her maternal grandmother were sired by Corregidora, a white Portuguese slaveowner who preys on Black women and who pimped out Ursa's Great Gram. Ursa's father was a Black man named Martin, who loved her mother and beat her, and is there much of a difference between the two in this novel, where love begets violence at nearly every turn? In an extraordinary scene near the middle of the book, Ursa returns to Bracktown, where she grew up, because, she says, "I couldn't be satisfied until I had seen Mama, talked to her, until I had discovered her private memory." Which is what? The story of the women who came before Ursa and who made her, a story that is inseparable from Corregidora's blood, Corregidora's savagery. At the close of the visit, Ursa's mother shares a memory that involves her own mother, who had absorbed some of Corregidora's distaste for Black men. One day, when Ursa's parents were living with Ursa's grandmother, her grandmother made sure that Martin—whom she called a "Black bastard"—would see her powdering her breasts and become aroused. She wanted to show her daughter that all men were alike.
Corregidora—a symbol of colonization and racial hatred—turns mother against child, Black against white, man against woman. Yet this antipathy is so normalized that Ursa's parents choose not to leave that hate-filled house: Martin even asks, when Ursa's grandmother and great-grandmother are out, to "take" Ursa's mother in their bed; he wants to do it where those who spite him sleep. Ursa's mother and Ursa herself narrate their lives as if the stories they're telling had happened to other women, a clear mark of sexual and racial damage: in order to survive it, you have to put it over there, while making it seem like just another part of the everyday.
As in Richard Wright's work, the cruelty of Jones's novels is sometimes flaked with sentimentality. At the end of "Corregidora," Ursa takes up with Mutt again, even though she resents him. They go back to his hotel room to have sex: Mutt wants Ursa, the singer with the open throat, to blow him. As she does, she tries to understand what drove Corregidora's abuse of her forebears:
Growing up, I very much admired one of my four older sisters, the one closest to me in age. She was an activist who wrote poetry and sometimes made music, and she had a great ability to synthesize all manner of abstract thought and make a narrative out of it. In the nineteen-seventies, I spent many hours with her at protests around New York, where some of the talk was about racial uplift and the natural dignity and power of the Black man. Sometimes I tried to read the books she brought home—books by Sonia Sanchez, by Margaret Walker—in the hope that, if I read enough, I'd be able to meet the challenge of her beautiful mind. One writer I saw on her shelf was Gayl Jones. I must have read "Corregidora" first. And, although I couldn't identify with any of Jones's characters, I recognized, or thought I recognized, that the blood she spilled in the book was a metaphor about brutality, and, more precisely, about the ways in which women could be shoved to the margins of their own lives. I had seen some version of that process in real life, and had seen, too, how that marginalization could either strengthen women's bonds or alienate them from one another.
From the beginning, Jones's writing stirred conflicting feelings in me, between what I believed was artistically true in her books—the flat affect of her distinctly American prose—and what I saw as a blind spot, which is to say, the absence of joy, of the kind of prolonged pleasure that can be transformative and can enrich a story, let alone a life. For a time, I wondered if slave narratives—those first-person stories of familial separation, punishment, and horror, by Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Keckley, and far too many others—were an influence that Jones wasn't directly aware of. But, though Jones's books have the dehumanization of those narratives, they lack the rhetorical fire and uplift. When I read "Corregidora" and Jones's second novel, "Eva's Man" (1976), now, I see them less as books than as specimens, evidence of a youthful inability to understand that to be oppressed you must first have had the things that oppression took from you: innocence, a sense of freedom, a sweet belief in Santa Claus. Jones plunks her women down in hopeless, filthy muck from the start, and the characters don't question it because everyone's in the shit. Jones, it seems, doesn't grasp that even the most miserable life or work of art can have its dose of tenderness and dreams.
When we meet Eva, of "Eva's Man," she's forty-three and sharing a cell in a psychiatric prison with a predatory bootlegger with bad teeth named Elvira. Eva says of her fellow-inmate, "They let her go out more than they do me because they say she's got more control than I have. It ain't nothing I've done since I've been in here. It's what I did before I came." What Eva did before she came was kill her lover, Davis. We flash back to the day she met him, at a bar in upstate New York. When Eva first sees Davis, he reminds her of her ex-husband, but then he is "just himself." That self calls Eva the "coldest-ass bitch." Pages later, she's with Davis in his hotel room. She has menstrual cramps. Davis throws her a tin of aspirin. He doesn't like the smell of blood. And one wonders if Eva likes her own smell, her own body. Does she value it at all? When Davis asks if he should wear a condom, she declines. How long will Eva be plagued with her lady problems, Davis wants to know. She stays in his little room for a number of days, and, even though he leaves the door unlocked, she can't escape his apparent need for domination. ("He wouldn't let me comb my hair. I don't know why, but he kept me in that room and wouldn't let me comb my hair.") Sexually enslaved and psychologically abused, Eva experiences with Davis a sort of extension of everything she's ever experienced with men: capture, hurt, extreme violence. At the end of the novel, Elvira performs oral sex on Eva, but there's no possibility of love there: Elvira and Eva are two women in a cage at a prison that America has built to house the madness it generates in women of color.
In a 1976 interview with Esquire, Toni Morrison talked about publishing these two novels within a year of each other. "I knew perfectly well that the similarities between the first two [books] might be unfortunate," she said. "Someone might say, 'Gee, all her books are about women tearing up men.' But I wanted that element of carnal, raw, economic, sinister sensuality. I took the risk. And it worked." "Corregidora" and "Eva's Man" went on to be published in paperback, and "Corregidora" was bought for the movies. (A film has yet to be made, but, given the current fashion for narratives centered on Black degradation, now might be the moment.) But what was it that worked? What Morrison saw in Jones's writing, beyond the raw sensuality, was a willingness to address race and the legacy of slavery in a personal way. Whereas Black writers at the time had "all sorts of philosophical attitudes about 'the predicament' " of race, Morrison told an interviewer, Jones looked at "the weight of history working itself out in the life of one, two, three people: I mean a large idea, brought down small, and at home, which gives it a universality and a particularity which makes it extraordinary." Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writing about Jones in the Times in 1999, remembered how "the excitement that this new voice generated in the mid-70's, especially the sense it generated that no subject for a black writer was now taboo, inspired a new generation of black women writers to testify about being black and female in a wide variety of forms."
Morrison likely also saw Jones's novels as examples of what Black women could do when writing about sex, specifically, and about the atomization of intimacy between men and women, generally. But there were many writers, including Morrison herself, and others whom she edited—Toni Cade Bambara and Lucille Clifton—who knew that, for the pain and the loss and the disconnect to matter, there first had to be a desire to connect. Jones's women don't connect; they fuck. "Eva's Man" strikes me as the more interesting of the two novels, in part because it aims to describe insanity, shifts in consciousness, and how women of color can be destroyed when they don't fit the standards of white beauty. After Eva poisons Davis and then castrates him with her teeth, she goes to a gas-station rest room to refresh herself and comb her hair: "I'm Medusa, I was thinking. Men look at me and get hard-ons. I turn their dicks to stone. I laughed. I'm a lion woman. No, it's the men lions that have all that hair." In her troubled and troubling internal monologue, one hears echoes of Pecola Breedlove, the fractured Black girl in Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" (1970), who longs for blue eyes—another symbol of acceptable female beauty.
" 'Eva's Man' may be one of the most unpleasant novels of the season. It is also one of the most accomplished," the critic John Leonard wrote in the Times when the novel came out. But not everyone was impressed by it. The poet June Jordan, also writing in the Times, in 1976, said:
Part of the problem with Jones's novels is their lack of spiritual value: most of her characters have little faith, even in themselves. Has America done this to them? Is Jones's dead despair the result of a kind of internalized racism that says Black people are thieving misogynists who suck pork and cabbage out of their teeth after a murder because that's how they do? One could argue that the core of Jones's writing is existentialist, that her novels are a Black American version of Albert Camus's "The Stranger," but that would be wrong: Camus was sick about humanity and the ways in which power can alienate one from oneself. Jones's writing in these early books is closer to the vision of degradation in movies such as Craig Brewer's "Hustle & Flow" (2005) and "Black Snake Moan" (2006) and Lee Daniels's "Precious" (2009) and "The United States vs. Billie Holiday" (2021), or to the "surreal" Black world of Deana Lawson's photographs. In these works, Black people are greasy artifacts from the old colored museum, a place where racist views are celebrated and Blackness is always a curse.
Jones's 1977 short-story collection, "White Rat," was the last book she worked on with Morrison. By the time it was published, Jones was teaching at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and keeping company with a man named Bob Higgins, who had come back to Ann Arbor in 1975—he'd graduated from the university there—after a run-in with the Staten Island police. Publishers had rejected Higgins's treatise on Hegel, and he had become so incensed that the cops were called; there was a standoff, the police teargassed his apartment, and Higgins jumped from the sixth floor to get away. The Times reported that Higgins had been abandoned by his mother, who eventually died, homeless and mentally ill, of alcoholism. He had grown up with relatives and in a series of foster homes. After returning to Ann Arbor, Higgins told the story of his Staten Island escape, as a way of proclaiming his "godliness." His relationship with Jones quickly intensified, and soon he stepped in as her agent, a move that alienated Morrison so much that she stopped working with Jones. Then, with Higgins facing charges for assault, after attending a gay-rights parade where he declared that aids was divine retribution, Jones resigned from the university, and the couple fled to Europe.
Jones and Higgins stayed overseas for five years, living mostly in Paris. They returned to Lexington in 1988, and moved in with Jones's mother, whose health was starting to fail: Lucille, the storyteller, had throat cancer. According to the Times, Jones's devotion to Higgins was "seemingly total":
While Lucille was being treated, and after she died, in 1997, Higgins, using the name Bob Jones, issued numerous statements and letters claiming, among other things, that she had been kidnapped by the hospital that cared for her and that she was the victim of nefarious white forces in the medical community, and threatening the president of the University of Kentucky. Still, Jones continued to write and had started working with Helene Atwan at Beacon Press, which had, in the eighties, published the paperback editions of her first two novels. In early 1998, Beacon published "The Healing," Jones's third novel. To commemorate the occasion, the author conducted an interview via e-mail with Newsweek, in which Higgins's cover was inadvertently blown. The police realized that Bob Jones was, in fact, the Bob Higgins who was wanted for assault in Michigan.
When officers arrived at the Jones home with a fifteen-year-old warrant, Higgins shut the door on them and ran to the back of the house, where he grabbed two knives and pointed them at his throat. If they attempted to enter, he said, he'd kill himself. A swat team surrounded the house a few hours later, and Jones called 911. The Times published part of the call transcript, and it's excruciating to read. It's like being back in Eva's mind. Jones tells the operator that the police want to kill her husband like they killed her mother. She mentions the "full-page article" about her that had appeared in Newsweek. She says that she and Higgins have turned on the gas in the house. Were they trying to kill themselves, or blow up the whole neighborhood? After evacuating the nearby houses, officers entered the home and Higgins stabbed a knife into his throat. He died at the hospital. Jones was handcuffed and taken to a state psychiatric hospital, where she was held for more than two weeks, until she was no longer considered a danger to herself.
I was already working at this magazine when the Jones story broke, and there was much discussion in the office that day about what could be written about it, and whether we could reach Jones or Harper, her former adviser, who, despite Higgins's efforts, was still in touch with her. But Jones was not talking to anyone. In my heart, I knew that no article would be written with Jones's help: if she spoke to the press, it would not only be a betrayal of Higgins and his Black masculinity; it would negate her role in the creation of that masculinity.
Michele Wallace, in her seminal 1978 text, "Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman," argues that the ideology that informed the Black nationalism of the sixties wasn't so much revolutionary as it was reactionary: for Black men to be men—and to enact the myth of the "bad nigger," say—somebody had to crack the eggs, or get cracked in the head. I had seen some version of this my entire life. I had sat at rallies in Harlem while one of my sisters, charged with babysitting me, listened to a confused and confusing talk about nation time, a separate economic system, and how a "sista" was there to lift up her man. But what if that man was violent? Or crazy? There were many broken men who concealed their brokenness under a cloak of Blackness. Higgins believed in the power of his machismo because it was all he had. What could any woman do for him but serve the madness that his motherless loneliness had created? I wonder if Jones felt that she needed not just to live out one of her early stories but also to apologize for it—apologize for creating a Mutt who'd throw Ursa down the stairs, or a Davis who didn't like the smell of a menstruating woman.
Jones's relationship with Higgins seems to have been in part a performance of gender minstrelsy, with her walking a few yards behind him and covering her face. She was not allowed, as Wallace might say, her own subjectivity. Still, she took that subjectivity back, and what she has done with it is both sad and triumphant. Sad because "The Healing," "Mosquito" (the novel that followed "The Healing," in 1999), and "Palmares" are not good books; triumphant because, in writing them, she was still fighting to hold onto her own vision. Subjugation takes your options away but, in some cases, releases your mind: with so few choices to be made, you can allow yourself to imagine.
The narrator of "The Healing," Harlan Jane Eagleton, a faith healer, grew up in a world of women: her mother and her grandmother own a beauty salon in Louisville, and for a while Harlan, too, worked as a beautician. We first meet her on a bus as she eats sardines, slurps mustard sauce, and ruminates on the beauty of the passing landscape. Harlan is a healer, not a preacher, and she makes that distinction early on—this is, after all, what Flannery O'Connor called the "Christ-haunted" South, where faith is synonymous with Jesus. In a sense, Harlan is her own Jesus, and the Scripture she reads has to do with the junk of the modern world. McDonald's, Sally Jessy Raphael, Taco Bell: these are as much a part of America as the tepees in Wigwam Village, where people stay when they want to feel like they're Native American.
To enhance her cred, Harlan has her old friend Nicholas come down from Alaska to describe to her followers his experience of witnessing her first healing—even though he's implied that he'd like to retire from performing that particular truth. Nicholas, Harlan says, looks like the colored fellow in the Village People, "like them men that dances for them women in the nightclubs, you know, usually they costumes theyselves to resemble the masculine stereotypes of men." She adds, "I thought about hiring me another 'witness' but that would be duplicitous and Nicholas the true one witnessed the first true healing." These lines are fairly typical of the book as a whole, which veers associatively from one thought to the next, not so much to indicate the movement of Harlan's mind as to encompass all that Jones wants to talk about: gender roles, faith, America.
What does Harlan heal? Sometimes pain or an ailing mind—and sometimes her presence alone is a comfort. (She comes from a line of Spiritualists, including her grandmother, who is convinced that she was a turtle in another life.) Eventually, Harlan meets a singer named Joan, and, as with other female relationships in Jones's books, the connection is fraught. Joan is a richer character than, for instance, Elvira, in "Eva's Man," but she is still subject to Jones's tendency to define women in degrading language. Here's how Harlan introduces her:
Joan hires Harlan to do her makeup and then to be her manager. She wants stardom but never achieves it, despite Harlan's hard work. They fight on the road. They talk about "everything" in long passages of dialogue. Joan wonders if she is just another stereotype, "playing the Nigger Entertainer. . . . Maybe I'm the Archetypal Nigger Entertainer and not the Stereotypical Nigger Entertainer." "The Healing" has political intrigue, failed marriages, and many other diversions and anecdotes, but no amount of verbiage—and there's a great deal of it in the book—can make these thin characters whole. Jones's real subject is fracture, and it is as hard for her to create a complete female character as it is for her to feel love for her broken ones.
The marvellous thing about the new novel, "Palmares," is that Jones here allows women to get close without trying to destroy one another. Those feelings, however, still emerge under the dreadful cloud of oppression. Set in seventeenth-century Brazil, the novel revolves around Almeyda, a Black slave girl, who lives on a plantation with her watchful mother and her caustic grandmother. Almeyda recounts her life in flashback, and Jones forgoes her usual mixup of past and present. Instead, she interrupts the narrative to insert other narratives, all of which are told in a flat voice that feels less like seventeenth-century Portuguese than like Kentucky by way of Sugarloaf. Dropping in the occasional Portuguese word doesn't help. Still, Almeyda has a story to tell, one that she has learned through quiet observation. "Look at Almeydita, how she's watching with her ojos grandes," someone says early on. What Almeyda sees with those big eyes is colonialism at work. She is taught to read by a Franciscan priest named Father Tollinare, who is having an affair with Mexia, a half-Black, half-Indian woman, whom Almeyda is drawn to for her silences, just as she's drawn to the words—the language—that Tollinare teaches her.
One day, a white artist named Dr. Johann shows up at the plantation; he wants to paint a portrait of Almeyda, and as he does so he touches her hair and her face, while her mother stands silently nearby. In the end, it's not Almeyda whom Johann wants but her mother, who disappears with Johann for a "sitting," and then returns, still silent. Silent, silence, silenced: the women of color in "Palmares" have so little that they can share with their casual or brutal assaulters—to talk back is to court death. But Almeyda has the language of her mind, which is filled with fascinating observations, like this one:
As I read this, I thought of the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's 2017 masterwork, "Zama." Set in a remote colonial outpost during the eighteenth century, the movie is creepy with Old World ways that make little sense in this dry, dusty New World. Martel focusses on a small cast of characters, knowing that the intimacy—the heart—of the film comes from the way it burrows into them as they trade insults, don ill-fitting wigs, and get sick. "Palmares," however, avoids that kind of immersion by piling on more and more people, more and more plot.
One day, another man arrives at the plantation, looking for the blood of a Black virgin, which he believes will cure him of a venereal disease—another revealing detail of the surreality of colonial and colonized life. After Almeyda's mother makes a drink that protects her daughter from the man, she is sold off. Eventually, Almeyda reaches Palmares, a settlement for escaped slaves, where she marries a man named Anninho. The couple are separated after Portuguese soldiers attack Palmares and destroy it. Almeyda then embarks on a journey with Luiza, a mystic, who guides her through the vast, treacherous terrain of Brazil as she searches for Anninho and for freedom. The connection between Luiza and Almeyda feels forced at times—Jones's attempts at magical realism in "Palmares" are more dispiriting than they are transporting—and one's patience wears thin with the introduction of yet another significant character, especially one who embodies the virtues of silent womanhood and maintains a knowing, almost supernatural distance. Editing is a delicate process, and part of the job entails listening for what the author cannot hear. Reading "Palmares," I thought of Toni Morrison, the editor who helped Jones become an author. Morrison often read with a pencil in hand; in the margins of this book, she might have jotted, "I hear you, but it's missing something. How about a bit more life?" ♦
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