is not as alienated, in the end, as the black worker,
who is left “outdoors,” as TONI MORRISON might
say. To the white reader, this poem may be slightly
confusing, but the African-American reader al-
ready knows the ending by the third line. In the
end, however, the workers have a common bond.
Currently, Cornish teaches at Emerson College in
Boston in the department of writing, literature,
and publishing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cornish, Sam. Folks Like Me. Cambridge, Mass.: Zo-
land Books, 1993.
———. Generations, and Other Poems. Baltimore:
Beanbag Press, 1964.
———. Songs of Jubilee: New and Selected Poems.
Greensboro, N.C.: Unicorn Press, 1986.
Doreski, C. K. “Kinship History in Sam Cornish’s
Generations.” Contemporary Literature 33, no. 4
(1992): 665–687.
Metzger, Linda, et al., eds. Black Writers: A Selection
of Sketches from Contemporary Authors. Detroit:
Gale Research, 1989.
Ryan Dickson
Corregidora Gayl Jones (1975)
This critically acclaimed novel begins with Ursa
Corregidora’s miscarriage of her child and a dis-
ruption of the path her foremothers have ordained
for her. Ursa is the descendant of Portuguese slave
owner Corregidora, who prostituted both Ursa’s
great-grandmother and grandmother and im-
pregnated, in turn, both her great-grandmother
and his own daughter. Ursa’s responsibility, as was
her mother’s before her, is to create a girl child
who can be a living evidence of this history of
slavery and sexual violence. Ursa is constantly
told, “the important thing is making generations.
They can burn the papers but they can’t burn con-
scious, Ursa. And that what makes the evidence.
And that’s what makes the verdict” (22). With her
miscarriage and subsequent hysterectomy, Ursa
can no longer fulfill the expectation of both bear-
ing witness and giving birth to a new witness. The
novel explores Ursa’s struggle to understand the
agency, if any, she has in the world without this
assigned reproductive role.
Critics have focused on the means by which
Jones explores the trauma of slavery and on the ties
between black mothers and daughters who carry
the psychic scars of a history of sexual violence
and oppression. Most critics have been interested
in the role of the BLUES as a mode of agency and
expression for Ursa, who uses the blues to express
her feelings about relationships between black men
and women that she cannot successfully articulate
otherwise. With her stark prose style, Jones often
has her characters exchange what she calls “ritual-
ized dialogue,” a patterned exchange of dialogue
that mirrors blues syntax. Ursa moves from the
ritualistic recounting of her foremother’s histories
to her own unproductive rituals with men—par-
ticularly with her former husband, Mutt. Jones
values the power of family histories and rituals in
relationships, but she also explores the ways that
such patterns can be oppressive.
Gayl Jones has been critiqued for presenting
pathological stereotypes of black men and women.
Such criticisms, however, cannot diminish the
novel’s power and contribution to black literature.
With its focus on the violence in the lives of Afri-
can-American women and men, its exploration of
how the trauma of slavery continues to have effects
in the 20th century, and its treatment of a blues
aesthetic as an important social and psychologi-
cal tool, Corregidora is one of the most important
works of African-American literature at the end of
the 20th century.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Dubey, Madhu. “Gayl Jones and the Matrilineal
Metaphor of Tradition.” Signs: Journal of Women
in Culture and Society 20, no. 2 (Winter 1995):
245–267.
Harper, Michael. “Gayl Jones: An Interview.” In Chant
of Saints, edited by Michael S. Harper and Robert
B. Stepto, 352–375. Champaign: University of Il-
linois Press, 1979.Corregidora 121