Gayl Jones' New Novel

Below, I've pasted an article on Gayl Jones' hotly anticipated new novel. I have written a seminar paper on and will write a dissertation chapter on her 1977 novel, Eva's Man. In Eva's Man, a Black woman is being held for murder charges. While fucking her man, Eva bites off his penis as she remembers being a little girl in a tenement house, where an old white man would beat off as she walked by, and where a little white boy would chase her around with two dirty popcicle sticks, shouting, "Let me zammin you agin!" The novel speaks to a history of sexual violence against Black women at the hands of white men, most notably, through the early practice of American gynecology.

Dr. J. Marion Sims (photo above, left) first practiced his gynecological theories on Black slave women at who were suffering from what he called vaginal fistulas. In the backyard areas of the Tuskegee Institute, Sims would use spoons to pry the slave women open and to perform his (in)famous "silver sutures" procedures to mend the tears in these women's vaginas. Note, though, that these tears were often from having mass quantities of children, many, I'm sure, were from forcible rape by slave-holding men like Sims. He offered these women, in return, opium, to which they became addicted (not that I'm knocking opium, but it's an interesting example on forced addictions for people of color in the U.S.) Eva's Man invokes this history and links it, eventually, to the political violence enacted on and through the bodies of Black women in the Black Nationalist movement of the 60's, 70's and beyond. Much of early Black Nationalist rhetoric was rife with misogyny (and not the good, healthy kind), and is evident in novels like Richard Wright's Native Son. In biting off her Black lover's penis (talk about vagina dentata!!) as she thinks about the history of white male violence against Black women's bodies, Jones creates an inexorable link between political and physical/sexual violence against women, at the hands of both White and Black men. At any rate, Eva's Man is totally disturbing and totally brilliant, in a way that only someone like Kara Walker could match (see photo above, right).
If you have the stomach for provocative work about horrific histories, check out either Eva's Man or its predecessor, Corregidora. I plan to buy and read The Healing as soon as possible (since I received a Border's gift card for my birfday, I can get it now!) and will try to write a review of it when I am done. Here's the Salon review:


THE TERRIBLE MYSTERY OF gayl jones_____

WHY DID A BRILLIANT NOVELIST'S LIFE SPIRAL INTO OBSESSIVE HORROR?
BY SALLY ECKHOFF The last lines in "The Healing," the new novel that marks Gayl Jones' return to literary prominence after more than 20 years of mysterious absence, are charged with anticipation. The protagonist, a woman named Harlan Jane Eagleton, has been all over the world, mastered an incredible array of skills and is about to reach a crossroads. She knows that in the room she's about to enter, someone is waiting, someone from out of her past she desperately wants to see. "But the man standing here is the last man in the world I expected to find. Or maybe the first man I'd hoped for."
"The Healing" leaves readers teetering, leaning out to catch the news that its heroine will finally get her wish. Surely, it seems, something heavenly must be swimming toward the author's grasp as well: This book, the first of hers to be seen in the United States since her 1977 novel "Eva's Man," has been roundly praised by a new generation of critics and deemed "a major literary event" by Newsweek.
But there have apparently been dark clouds massing in Jones' life for longer than any of her admirers, old or new, could have imagined. And last Friday, in Lexington, Ky., in a small, water-streaked green house surrounded by a chain-link fence, they burst.
At the enigmatic center of Jones' tale stands her husband, Bob Jones. Bob Jones, who had a long history of bizarre behavior, had become increasingly unhinged. He had recently started threatening people through the mail, and insisted he had a gun. Acting on a 14-year-old assault warrant on the novelist's husband, the police came calling. They found the Joneses barricaded in their little cottage with the gas turned on. After three hours, having ascertained to their satisfaction that the man inside was unarmed, the police burst in. They couldn't have seen the knife. The novelist's unfortunate husband, the man she had given up her career to follow and protect, slit his own throat. He died later that day. She was taken to a state mental hospital because authorities believed her own suicide was imminent. When she will be released is not yet clear.
There's little information available about Jones. Her junior and senior high school yearbooks have no pictures of her. According to her teachers, she was brilliant but painfully shy. Sue Ann Allen, her English teacher at Henry Clay High School in 1966, remembers, "When other kids were just messing around, she'd say, 'I want to write like Henry James.'" Jones went to Connecticut College and got a Ph.D. from Brown. Later, at the University of Michigan, Professor Wendy Steiner taught with her. "I remember one time saying hello and she actually looked up and smiled at me," Steiner told Newsweek before Jones' world fell apart, "and I thought it was an incredible development." In her new book, the space on the book jacket where the author photo goes is ominously empty. Jones refused to talk on the phone to anyone, not even her own publisher. She communicated through e-mail. She and Helene Atwan, the director of the Beacon Press in Boston, which published "The Healing," never had a single conversation.
The New York Post unearthed a photo to use along with their horror coverage, a Jill Krementz publicity shot that presumably graced the cover of one of Jones' first, celebrated works. Jones looks wide-eyed and very young, a printed cloth wrapped around her head. She's pixielike and rather gorgeous.
As best as one can piece together the story, the seeds of trouble were sown back in 1983. Jones had published her first two novels, "Corregidora" (about a blues singer who was the product of a violent rape) and "Eva's Man" (in which the protagonist is thrown into a hospital for the criminally insane after not only poisoning her lover but castrating him with her teeth), and had been praised by figures like James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, John Updike and Margo Jefferson. She was teaching at Michigan, where her husband-to-be was a student. Bob Jones was born Bob Higgins; he took his wife's name when they married. Higgins had a reputation as a loose cannon: When he got a D in German in 1976, he accused six professors of "conspiratorial malice." One day he showed up at a gay rights rally, shouting about AIDS and "about burning in hell." He left, got a shotgun, returned to the rally and sat in his car. He was arrested. The couple fled to Paris before the trial; Higgins was convicted in absentia of "assault with intent to frighten." Gayl Jones' letter to the university, a copy of which went to President Ronald Reagan, tendered her resignation and said, "I reject your lying, racist shit."
Nobody noticed when the couple returned to America in 1988, moving back to Gayl Jones' birthplace of Lexington to be near her mother, Lucille Jones, who was critically ill with cancer. When Lucille Jones died last February, things began to spiral out of control. Bob Jones was convinced that the hospital where Lucille had died was guilty of a racist conspiracy and that they'd kidnapped and killed his mother-in-law. He began a "villains-rats-s..s[sic]" list whose members included the district attorney and the Lexington Herald-Leader's medical reporter, Jim Warren. Gayl and her husband started a foundation "dedicated to exposing the alleged wrongful death," according to Margaret Kannensohn, the Fayette County district attorney.
Bob Jones' angry letters became nearly apoplectic as the first anniversary of Lucille Jones' death drew near. Kannensohn became worried, as did the staff at the cancer center where Lucille Jones had died. Other people began getting mail threats: Police Maj. Anthony Beatty, Police Chief Larry Walsh and University of Kentucky President Charles Wethington. According to an article in the Sunday Herald-Leader, "At some point, the Lucille Jones Foundation approached former Lexington Mayor Jim Amato about becoming its attorney," perhaps because Jones' father had once worked as a cook in Amato's restaurant. Two days later, Mr. Jones himself called the police.
All this information leads up nicely to an emotional explosion and a suicide, but it doesn't explain how the police knew they were dealing with a man who had been on the lam from assault charges in Michigan for 14 years. They never would have found out -- and might not have swooped in when they did -- if District Attorney Kannensohn's assistant, Lee Turpin, hadn't read the Newsweek article praising "The Healing." Some of the raving letters hammered out by the man calling himself Bob Jones mentioned his wife Gayl, the brilliant novelist. In the Newsweek article, Bob Jones was referred to as Bob Higgins, as he was known back in Ann Arbor. The district attorney ran a police check on Higgins. "When we realized this brilliant woman was living with someone who was angry and confused, we were concerned," Kannensohn said.
Once upon a time, Gayl Jones let it be known that she, like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger, wanted to appear to the world only through her work -- her portable fortress. She is going to walk out of Eastern State Hospital when she's ready, probably not to join the world as most of us know it but to try to rebuild that fortress -- one that made a metaphoric appearance in her most recent work.
In one of the "The Healing's" strange, glowing side trips into Harlan Jane Eagleton's past, her grandmother, a beautician, tells how she once joined a circus side show as a Turtle Woman. She wore an enormous mother-of-pearl shell. Reminiscing about her youth, the grandmother remarks that if she could grow another shell, she'd go back to the traveling show. "But once you's a human being, you hunger for being human."
http://www.salon.com/media/1998/02/26media.html