This fall saw the publication of Palmares, Gayl Jones’s first novel in 22 years. Jones was a literary phenomenon for three decades, vastly influencing Black women novelists in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Toni Morrison, who edited Jones’s early work, famously said of Jones’s first novel, Corregidora, “No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this.” Jones’s artistic influence—her deft understanding of how memory, violence, and cadence affect one’s consciousness; her innovation around narrative arc and timelines—can be traced, or found echoes of, in nearly every piece of major African-American literature of the last 30 years. But Jones hasn’t published a novel since 1999. Palmares, out now from Beacon Press, represents the return of a literary giant.
Below, three writers currently flourishing in the literary scene—Deesha Philyaw, Jason Reynolds, and Angela Flournoy—reflect on the Gayl Jones novels that shaped how they think of reading and writing.
Penguin Random House
Deesha Philyaw
Palmares
Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies; finalist for the 2020 National Book Award
For some bizarre reason, in 1975, The New York Times assigned its white male restaurant critic and food editor to review Gayl Jones’s acclaimed debut novel. Corregidora—the novel that Toni Morrison edited and prophesied about, and that James Baldwin called a “brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women”—according to the Times reviewer, was “a book with virtually no other subject than sex.” No matter that, significant to the novel’s story, some of this sex is rape in the context of slavery. Inexplicably, this reviewer also referred to the main character, Ursa Corregidora, and the three generations of mothers that precede her, as a “family”—in quotation marks, as if all they endured rendered them not really a family. And this was a positive review.
So here’s what I’ve learned from Gayl Jones: When there’s a lot of sex in your stories, regardless of the context for it, you risk having people who you aren’t writing for anyway fixate on the sex, to the exclusion of what is most significant about your work. And when you write unapologetically about Black people and Black life, whether in Kentucky or Brazil or elsewhere, you risk having your stories and characters misunderstood, mischaracterized, and reduced by people who you aren’t writing for anyway. At the same time, you take comfort in the fact that people who will see themselves and their histories in your characters also have the capacity and the willingness to grasp the depth, breadth, and nuances of your stories.
I learned from Gayl Jones that writing what feels true and real and important to me is worth all the risks.
Jones’s latest novel, Palmares, definitely takes risks. The title refers to an actual place, a community of freeborn and escaped, formerly enslaved Africans in 17th-century colonial Brazil, where the story is set. The book has been described by one reviewer as requiring patience, and I love this description. I love that Jones has dared to write a novel that is dense and nonlinear, full of weighted silences, and that sometimes reads like a fever dream. Love, in Palmares, is compelling, but unsentimental. I love the questions that Jones gives Black women to grapple with in Palmares: What is wisdom? What is knowing? What is freedom?
Penguin Random House
Eva’s Man
Jason Reynolds, author of numerous young-adult books, most recently,
Stuntboy, in the Meantime and the 2021 winner of the U.K.’s The CILIP Carnegie Medal
One of the debates in which I’m frequently engaged is the one around trauma in narratives about Black people. I often find the discussions reductive. They sometimes seem to conflate novels that contain traumatic moments that are part of the human experience, with the idea that the totality of the Black human experience can be reduced to one long traumatic moment. The latter is, quite simply, an example of a poorly written story. Gayl Jones’s second novel, Eva’s Man, proves that argument flawed. Though it is relentless in its darkness and at times—many times—grotesque in its brutality, it is without a doubt, exquisitely written. And though I don’t believe I have the gumption (or desire) to write anything like it, and, to be honest, I may never have the stomach to read it ever again, Jones’s ability to expertly wield device—repetition, jagged narration, the moments written in a kind of free verse—alchemizes her words into acid, burning Eva’s torment into the consciousness of the observer, her multilayered imprisonment churning in the body of the reader. At least that’s what it felt like for me. And that’s what I hope my work feels like for someone else.
Penguin Random House
Photographer: LaToya
Corregidora
Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House
Gayl Jones’s 1975 novel, Corregidora, follows the story of Ursa, a Kentucky blues singer who learns that she is unable to have children after her husband assaults her. This news is crushing for Ursa, because she was mandated by her foremothers to “make generations” in order to keep the memory of the sexual abuse and exploitation they suffered at the hands of their Brazilian slave masters alive, because “when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up.” The novel explores Ursa’s journey to find some other mandate, some other purpose for living.
The way that memories—her own and her ancestors—impede on the present narrative and confront Ursa at will is a testament to Jones’s brilliant handling of point of view and characterization. Scene by scene, Jones builds Ursa’s consciousness as one that is never solely in one moment, but always marrying the current situation to past experiences via disembodied dialogue, stream of consciousness, and even verse. After reading an early manuscript version of Corregidora, Toni Morrison, who was Jones’s editor, famously wrote that she was so impressed with the work she thought that “no novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this.” Would memory work the way it works in Morrison’s 1987 masterwork, Beloved—weaving in and out of present thoughts, making the past feel alive while driving the narrative forward—had it not been for Corregidora? It seems unlikely.
Corregidora is visceral, and its depiction of Ursa’s sexual desire nuanced, as is Jones’s mapping out of the relationship between pain, desire, money, and power. After leaving her husband, Ursa is effectively homeless. Most of the people who take her in expect something of her; mainly sex, but also the sort of shrinking of self that many feel entitled to from a Black woman. I have always been struck by Ursa’s determination to continue to reach for a more equitable relationship, forgoing one kind of safety—shelter, a steady paycheck—for an environment that feels safe for every part of her. It is a way of approaching the world that feels in conversation with the writings and teachings of Black feminists during the 1970s, but struck through with the particular blues-inflected dialogue of Jones’s Kentucky and her fierce opposition to easy resolutions.
Toward the midpoint of the narrative, a club owner remarks on Ursa’s voice. “The kind of voice that can hurt you,” he calls it. “I can’t explain it. Hurt you and make you still want to listen.” Corregidora is the kind of novel that does the same.
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Gayl Jones Wrote the Future
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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