Jones, Gayl 1949–

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Gayl Jones 1949–

Writer

Literary Success Overshadowed by Marriage

Husband Committed Suicide in Violent Confrontation

The brutal and stylistically breathtaking novels of Gayl Jones have brilliantly fused two great strands in the tradition of African–American writing: they explore the psychic scars of slavery as manifested in sexual abuse and other forms of violence, and they experiment with ways to imbue the written word with the qualities of oral storytelling. A notoriously reclusive writer, Jones is known to the public partially for several sensational episodes in which her personal life became the stuff of headlines. But her novels, poems, stories, and other writings have steadily gained greater and greater attention on their own merits.

The daughter of a restaurant cook father and a storytelling mother who wrote her own tales, Gayl Jones was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on November 23, 1949. She attended the once all–white Henry Clay High School in Lexington’s newly desegregated school system. Although she was extremely shy, several of her teachers noticed her talent for writing fiction, and one of them encouraged her to pursue an education at a small northeastern college where her gift could be nurtured. She attended Connecticut College, graduating in 1971 with a degree in English and going on for graduate studies in creative writing at Brown University. By 1975 she had earned her doctorate, learned to speak six languages, and seen her first play, Chile Woman, produced.

Literary Success Overshadowed by Marriage

Despite these dazzling accomplishments, Jones seemed to be a lonely soul. “I never actually saw Gayl with anyone,” her high school English teacher Sue Ann Allen told the Boston Globe. But Jones’s pace only quickened after she took a job teaching writing at the University of Michigan in 1975. Her first novel, Corregidora, was published that year, and it was a sensation. With a Kentucky blues singer named Ursa Corregidora as its narrator, the novel tells the story of a line of women descended from a Brazilian Portuguese slaveholder, each reliving in her own way the psychic damage inflicted by the sexual violence he practiced. Corregidora was praised by writers as diverse as James Baldwin (to whom Jones was sometimes compared) and the patrician white novelist John Updike.

With a year, Jones had published her second novel, Eva’s Man —a story focusing on a woman, imprisoned for murder, who tells the story of her own largely abusive sexual life. By the time another year had passed, Jones had published a book of short stories, White Rat The speed and sheer virtuosity of Jones’s writing, combined with the uncompromisingly dark focus on America’s violent secrets, made Jones the talk of the literary world. “Her books were quite striking, and shook people up,” novelist John Edgar Wideman told the Boston Globe. “Actually, I think she scared people.”

Indeed, Jones avoided the literary limelight and withdrew into a cocoon–like existence with her boyfriend and later husband Bob Higgins, who eventually took the name Bob Jones. Higgins, a veteran of several clashes with police, was, some claimed, a paranoid personality. In 1983 he was arrested after threatening

At a Glance…

Born November 23, 1949, in Lexington, KY; married Bob Higgins, who later took name Bob Jones (deceased). Education: Connecticut College, BA, 1971; Brown University, MA, 1973; Brown University, doctoral degree, 1975.

Career: Professor of English, University of Michigan, 1975–83; published first novel, Corregidora, 1975; published novel Eva’s Man, 1976; lived in Europe, 1983–88; returned to live and write in Lexington, 1988; novel The Healing published, 1996; novel Mosquito published, 1999.

Selected awards: fiction award, Mademoiselle magazine, 1975; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1976.

Addresses: Home—Lexington, KY; Publishers —Lotus Press, P.O. Box 21607, Detroit, MI 48221; Beacon Press, 25 Beacon St., Boston, MA 02108.

a participant in a Michigan gay rights demonstration with a shotgun, and he and Jones fled the country. Jones resigned her position at Michigan with an angry letter that charged the administration with racism and, according to the New York Times, contained the sentences “Do what you want. God is with Bob and I’m with him.”

Lived on the Lam in Europe

The couple spent time in France and perhaps Sweden over the next five years, and Jones continued to write. Three books of her poetry were published by Detroit’s Lotus Press, but that arrangement came to an end after Jones’s editor there, against her wishes, revealed her location in Europe to a film–company agent. In 1988 Jones and her husband, now far from the spotlight, returned quietly to the United States and moved in with Jones’s mother back in Lexington. They rarely spoke or interacted with their neighbors.

Jones’s next book was a work of literary criticism, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature. It took up a theme that, Jones had said in an interview appearing in the book Sturdy Black Bridges, also had animated her fictional efforts: “One of things I was consciously concerned with was the technique from the oral storytelling tradition that could be used in writing.” The experimental re–creation of oral storytelling on the printed page also played a key role in Jones’s next novel, The Healing, which appeared in 1998; the central character in that book, a faith healer, recounts in reverse chronological order her experiences as a rock music star’s manager, the lover of an African–German horse breeder, the wife of a medical anthropologist, and a beautician.

At about this time, the lives of Jones and her husband reached a crisis point when Jones’s mother was stricken with cancer. The couple became convinced that the hospital was using her secretly in medical experiments and removed her from the hospital against doctors’ orders. Lucille Jones died on March 20, 1997, and Bob and Gayl harassed hospital administrators and local law enforcement officials but stayed clear of committing any actual crime. When Gayl Jones’s story surfaced in connection with the positive reviews The Healing had been receiving, however, Lexington police connected Bob Jones with an outstanding arrest warrant issued in connection with the 1983 gay–rights march incident in Michigan.

Husband Committed Suicide in Violent Confrontation

On February 13, 1998, police went to the Jones house to serve the warrant but found the door bolted and smelled gas. Gayl Jones, according to the Boston Globe, dialed 911 and screamed, “The state of Kentucky is damned. Get these cops out of here! The U.S. is damned. If you go to Iraq, I hope they destroy you. If you try to take my husband you’ll have to kill me. You killed my mother, you’ll have to kill me as well.” Officers entered the house and succeeded in restraining Gayl Jones, who was subsequently held in a Kentucky mental hospital for 17 days. Bob Jones slashed his own throat all the way through to the spinal cord and died instantly. “I’m sure you realize my brother–in–law was insane,” Gayl Jones’s brother Frank was quoted as saying in the New York Times.

Released from the hospital, Jones remained in Lexington and resumed her secluded existence. Her next novel, Mosquito, was published in 1999. That book featured as its central character an African–American truck driver from south Texas, named Sojourner Nadine Jane Nzhingha Johnson and nicknamed Mosquito, who becomes involved in a sort of modern Underground Railroad—an operation that gives sanctuary to illegal immigrants. The novel unfolds its story in the form of a series of reflections from Johnson on a great variety of topics; it was another narrative told in a highly detailed and stylized version of oral African–American storytelling. Library Journal called the book “by turns exhausting and exhilarating”—a description that might apply to most of Jones’s other writings, and, indeed, to her tumultuous life.