Gayl Jones: "Corregidora"

The author of Corregidora (1975), Gayl Jones, never allowed her face to be seen on the covers of her books. Although she always wanted to keep her privacy and, like J.D. Salinger, desired to be known only by her work not by her personal life, various stories concerning her private dramas have been circulating in the media. One particularly tragic story concerns Gayl Jones and her husband Bob (Higgins) Jones, whom she met at the University of Michigan, where she was a teacher and he a student. Mentally unstable, Bob accused his professors of "conspirational malice" when he got a D in German. Then in the late 1970s he appeared at a gay rights rally with a gun, shouting slogans about "burning in hell", for which he got arrested. Before the trial the couple managed to flee to Paris to return to the U.S. many years later. The novelist always stood by her husband, who finally committed suicide by slitting his throat, and Gayl Jones herself was taken to a mental hospital because the authorities feared she might commit suicide as well.

In her fiction Gayl Jones often portrays violence in order to illustrate the repercussions of slavery for twentieth-century African American families, where racism and sexism permeate the most intimate spheres of life, resulting in brutalization of women and degradation of men. The novel's heroine, blues singer Ursa Corregidora, slowly recovers from trauma and mutilation caused by her jealous husband, who pushed her down from pub stairs because she refused to stop appearing on stage. As a result, she lost her child and her womb. Ursa marries her old-time friend and admirer, Tadpole, who finally dumps her for another girl because Ursa, unable to feel anything during sexual intercourse, failed to give him what he wanted. In the novel Ursa struggles to reconcile the knowledge that she is somehow flawed as a woman because she cannot have children with her sexual desire which has not disappeared with the disappearance of her womb. Ursa is constantly aware of the space between [her] thighs. A well that never bleeds and regrets the silence in [her] womb, bemoaning the inability to feel anything those times he didn't touch the clit.

Ursa's sterility and focusing her sexuality on her clitoris rather than her womb creates a problem because she has been told by her mother and grandmother that without a womb she cannot function as a woman. This logic is a heritage of slavery, which reduced women to being sex objects of exchange: for Corregidora, their father and owner, Great Gram and her daughter were valuable because of their vaginas, which was reflected in his calling each woman his gold pussy. Ursa learns from the stories told her by her Gram what it meant to be a woman under slavery:
Cause tha's all they do to you, was feel up on you down between your legs see what kind of genitals you had, either so you could breed well, or make a good whore. Fuck each other or fuck them. Tha's the first thing they would think about, cause if you had somebody who was a good fucker you have plenty to send out into the field, and then you could also make you plenty money on the side, or inside.

Paradoxically, man-woman relationship based on sexual ownership has not disappeared with the end of slavery: Ursa's abusive husband also calls her his pussy, and Ursa remembers him asking me to let him see his pussy. Let me feel my pussy. It turns out then that in her marriages Ursa is reduced to her vagina and her womb to the same extent to which her Great Gram's sexuality was turned into product by Corregidora, who fathered her daughter and her granddaughter. Thus, Corregidora, who is absent from the novel as a character, becomes an emblem of sexual abuse and violence perpetrated on the "Corregidora women". Ursa's blues singing plays then a symbolic function in the novel, as she bears witness to the pain and survival of her family: I am Ursa Corregidora. I have tears for eyes. I was made to touch my past at an early age... Let no one pollute my music. I will dig out their trumpets. I will pluck out their eyes.

Gayl Jones wrote a novel of extraordinary beauty and lyrical sadness, in which she also dared to raise questions concerning desire's fusion with hatred and to point to the tangled coexistence of desire and abuse. Ursa wonders: Corregidora was theirs more than [Mama's]. Mama could only know, but they could feel. They were with him. What did they feel? You know how they talk about hate and desire. Two humps on the same camel? Yes. Hate and desire both riding them. . . . Still, there was what they never spoke . . . what they wouldn't tell me. How all but one of them had the same lover? ...what I never had the nerve to ask. . . . How much was hate for Corregidora and how much was love? It is for the ability to explore such disquieting issues that I loved the novel best.

Edward P. Jones: "The Known World"

Edward P. Jones's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel takes its readers to antebellum Virginia and to fictional Manchester County, in which a former slave, Henry Townsend, becomes an owner of his own plantation and 33 slaves. His first and oldest slave, Moses, an overseer and major character in this incredibly populous panoramic novel, is also one of the many points of view (or voices heard) in The Known World.

The following passage neatly introduces the issue which Jones's book takes under scrutiny: Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

The novel thus delves in a very perplexing problem of black people, well familiar with the slave-owner's whip, buying other black people and treating them with similar cruelty, as does Henry Townsend. Bought out of slavery by his father, who decided to never own a person, Henry is more loyal to his former owner than to the father. Though he originally plans to treat his slaves better than white people do, his ex-master, William Robbins, persuades him to change his mind as follows:

Henry, the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. . . . But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter if you are not much darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you need. You will have failed in your part of the bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter. Immediately after he hears this humiliating sermon, Henry hits Moses on the face and sends him to live in a shed.

This whole episode is told in flashback though, as in the novel Henry dies first and his young wife Caldonia runs the plantation with huge help from Moses. Despite her efforts, the plantation comes undone: slaves run away one by one, they start fighting among themselves and the work is not done properly and on time. The degeneration of the Townsends' plantation seems to be the linking motif of the otherwise very fragmentary novel, which presents a range of minor characters' stories. The inclusion of so many characters turns the book into a picaresque novel of an episodic structure and roguish characters: no one here is absolutely positive and no one, even the most influential white citizen of the county - Robbins - is absolutely negative. Moses himself is a living example of what slavery does to people: separated from the woman who he said was his "family", Moses later mistreats his wife and son. Moreover, seeing that a black man can be freed and become a slave owner, he intends to take his master's place by romancing with widow Caldonia. Finally, he persuades his wife to run away with the child and abuses the power which he has as an overseer by sending a pregnant woman to hard work in the field, which results in miscarriage.

Apart from the issue of black people's owning other black people, the novel uncovers some other facts concerning the reality of life under slavery, the most eye-opening to me being the practice of selling free black people into slavery again by so called slave "speculators". Now the burlesque ending of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck and Tom free Jim, who is already freed by his owner, does not seem so entertaining at all: you might need to free a freed slave again and again. Moreover, another conclusion can be drawn at this juncture: namely that once a person becomes a slave, they will always remain slaves.

The most interesting episode, however, is connected with the character of Alice Night, a woman who "was kicked in the head by a mule" and became crazy. She wanders alone at night singing funny songs and talking nonsense to strangers. When she succeeds in running away from slavery, she becomes an artist and has her own art gallery. The story of Alice Night is the most poignant commentary on the debilitating effects of slavery on both owners and the owned. Though not even close to the power of Toni Morrison's Beloved (but then, what is?), Jones's novel is definitely worth giving it a try.