JONES, Gayl

Born 23 November 1949, Lexington, Kentucky

Daughter of Franklin and Lucille Jones

Gayl Jones grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, a setting that is clearly influential in her novels. She earned a B.A. in English from Connecticut College in 1971. While there, she received the college's award for the best original poem in both 1969 and 1970 and the Frances Steloff Fiction award for "The Roundhouse," a short story that establishes the themes that dominate Jones' work—the problems and possibilities of relationships between black men and women, the uniqueness of women, and the complexities of communication. Jones received graduate degrees in creative writing from Brown University.

Corregidora (1975, reprinted 1988) is a lean book narrated by Ursa, the descendant of slaves and their Portuguese owner, in a dialogue style that Jones describes as "ritualized." Despite the spareness of its presentation, the story is complex. At one level, it is an account of Ursa's matrilineal heritage and her relationship to a line of female ancestors who are preoccupied with perpetuating, and perhaps redeeming, their oppressive history in new generations. This background illuminates Ursa's attempts to create a constructive and loving relationship with a man despite centuries of misunderstanding between the sexes accentuated by profound social and economic injustice. Because an accident early renders Ursa incapable of producing her generation of children, the blues she sings and the tale she tells become her testimonial—her "generation"—for ultimately the novel itself passes the story on.

Jones has said Corregidora is a "Blues Novel" and in doing so compared it to her moving poem "Deep Song." Stylistically, the book depicts the black female experience in terms of the unique language and oral tradition of the blues. Jones defines "Blues Art" as that which expresses the simultaneity of good and bad feelings; she says that she often creates "blues relationships" between men and women. Critics have praised her for her skill in adapting the linguistic, cultural, and emotional perspective of the black woman to the form of the traditional novel.

Eva's Man (1976, 1987), Jones's second novel, is the story of Eva Medina Canada, a so-called "savage woman" who murders her lover by dental castration. Eva narrates the story from her cell in a psychiatric prison. Although the novel shares much in theme and setting with Corregidora, the emphasis here is more social than personal, as it points to the terror and squalor of Eva's past, the destructiveness inherent in male-female relationships, and the violent nature of sexuality. Relationships between men and women in Corregidora mingle tenderness and brutality, but cultural and emotional brutality triumph in Eva's Man. Jones says, "In many ways, Eva's Man is a horror story. It really is.… Their ritual isn't a blues ritual. I don't know what it is."

Jones has published excerpts from another novel and a collection of short stories, White Rat (1977, 1991). Her powerful title story, "White Rat," is being included in collections of short fiction. Jones, a versatile and prolific writer, has also written several plays and numerous poems, but her major works are the two novels. Although her writing is neither polemical nor explicitly political, it reveals a central concern with the issues of racism and feminism. Admirers of Jones' novels of the 1970s assert that her construction of black women questions the "naturalness" of racist and sexist attitudes. Others, however, have faulted what they see as her lack of positive images of African American characters, especially of black men.

In the 1980s, Jones' work changed substantially, although it is unclear whether the transformation stemmed from criticism of her novels. Her three collections of poetry have received little attention. Still interested in the slave history of colonial Latin America, Jones continues to use mutilation themes as well as the richness of the oral tradition to create accounts of female subjectivity and the continuity of history. Set in 17th-century Brazil, Song for Anninho (1981, reissued 1999) tells of the atrocities committed by the Portuguese in their attacks on Palmares, an independent settlement of escaped African slaves. The poem is told by a young African woman who also relates others' stories. Similarly, the title poem in Xarque and Other Poems (1985) weaves the voices of three women into a history told by a single female, the granddaughter of Almeyda from Song for Anninho. Thus tales of survival and oppression become a matrilineal heritage that finds its voice in song.

The Hermit-Woman: Poems (1983), which also develops voices from colonial Brazil, includes two self-referential pieces. One of these, "Stranger," closes the book with a couple's love-making, "fierce / strong / soaring," so that the joy of sexual union heals an African past of sundered relationships. The theme of tenderness in all three books is a departure from the brutality between black women and black men that critics had objected to in her fiction. While that tenderness exists often only in memory and is experienced through the pain of recollection, it closes the gap between women and men and locates violence in racist atrocities. By exploring memory's painful burden as a necessity for the survival of the African race, Jones alters the feminist polemic many had noted in her novels to a dialogue of racial unity.

Jones has received a number of literary awards, including fellowships from Yaddo (1974) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976), and the Henry Russell Award from the University of Michigan (1981), where she was professor of English from 1975 to 1983. In the later 1990s, Jones continued to write and travel.

Other Works:

Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991). The Healing (1998). The Healing; Corregidora; Eva's Man (bound together, 1998). Mosquito (1999).

Bibliography:

Allen, D. E., "The Role of the Blues in Gayl Jones' Fiction" (thesis, 1993). Baker, H. A., and P. Redmonds, eds., Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s (1989). Bell, R. P., et al., eds., Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979). Bloom, H., Black American Women Fiction Writers (1995). Bloom, H., Contemporary Black American Fiction Writers (1995). Broome, L. J., "Sex, Violence, and History: Images of Black Men in the Selected Fiction of Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison" (thesis, 1990). Burwell, S. L., "The Soul of Black Women: The Hermeneutical Method of Analysis as Applied to the Novel Corregidora " (thesis reissue, 1981). Coser, S., Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones (1995). Dubey, M., "Winged, But Grounded: A Contextual Study of the Fiction of Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones" (thesis, 1989). Flora, J. M. and R. A. Bain, Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1993). Fossett, J. J., and J. A. Tucker, Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century (1997). Gottfried, A. S., "Confessions and Accusations: Violence and Redemption in Contemporary U.S. Women's Fiction" (thesis, 1994). Intemann, C., "The Blues Ache in Corregidora " (thesis, 1988). Kerr, L. A., "You Are My Face; You Are Me: Kristeva's Semiotic as Site of Self-Erasure in Gayl Jones' Corregidora and Toni Morrison's Beloved " (thesis, 1995). Kester, G. T., "Writing the Subject Structure, Tropes, and Doubleness in Five African-American Novels" (thesis, 1991). McKoy, S. S., "Insanity and Creativity: The Psychic Trauma of Women in Texts by Gayl Jones and Gloria Naylor" (thesis, 1991). Murphy, C. M., "Shaping Space: Quilting Aesthetics and Black Feminist Writers" (thesis, 1990). Porter, S. D., "The Search for Wholeness is Completed: Gayl Jones' Corregidora as a Rewriting ofJean Toomer's Cane " (thesis, 1991). Richards, C. S., "The Empowerment of Orality in the Novels of Gayl Jones" (thesis, 1992). Robinson, S., Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction (1991). Stallings, L., "Creating a Bodily Text: Orality and Sexuality as Means of Empowerment in Gayl Jones' Corregidora and Eva's Man (thesis, 1998). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Walker, S., Stories from the American Mosaic (1990). Wilcox, J., "Constructed Silences: Voice and Subjectivity in the Resistant Texts of Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara" (thesis, 1995).

Reference works:

Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches (1989). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). Who's Who in Black Americans (1992).

Other references:

American Poetry Review (Sept.-Oct. 1976). Ariel (1992). Callaloo (Winter 1984). CLAJ (1984, 1986). MELUS (Winter 1980). MR (1977). New Republic (28 June 1975, 19 June 1976). Studia Africana (1977). YR (1976).

—JUDITH P. JONES,

UPDATED BY JOELLEN MASTERS