14 The New York ReviewAlmeyda’s grandmother declares early
on. When Palmares is published in Por-
tuguese, it seems certain to invigorate
and expand this debate among Brazil-
ians about their country’s past.Like many novelists, Jones sometimes
bends history to suit her own ends. She
presents the European response to Pal-
mares as uniformly hostile, when in re-
ality it was at times more nuanced. The
Instituto Ricardo Brennand in Recife,
the capital of the modern- day state of
Pernambuco, houses the world’s larg-
est repository of material about Dutch
Brazil, and documents in the archives
there indicate that Nassau, for exam-
ple, sent multiple missions to Palmares,
hoping to establish both a trading rela-
tionship and a military alliance against
the Portuguese.
Jones seems willing to argue that ra-
cial solidarity only goes so far and that
the perversions of slavery leave their
mark even on those not in bondage.
“Do you think that because I’m a col-
ored woman I don’t have the right to
give orders or that I won’t punish you
if you don’t obey them?” Almeyda is
asked after being hired out to a free
seamstress of mixed race who is bit-
ter at what she self- loathingly calls her
own “defect of blood” and the result-
ing social restrictions imposed on her.
“You think because you’re looking at
your same color, there’s no distance
between us, and that I’m the same as
you and have no right to demand your
respectful silence.”
Jones also scrambles the historical
timeline. At one point Anninho de-
vises a plan for Palmares to enrichand strengthen itself through coastal
trading with other European colonies
and mentions the name of a potential
ally in New England named Cuffee, a
black shipbuilder and businessman.
Paul Cuffee was a real figure: the son
of a Wampanoag indigenous woman
and an African captured in present-
day Ghana who was brought to Rhode
Island as a slave and eventually manu-
mitted, he was born free in Cuttyhunk,
Massachusetts, and became a prosper-
ous farmer, whaler, and shipyard owner
who also founded the first racially inte-
grated school in the United States. But
the real Cuffee was born in 1759 and
died in 1817, more than a century after
the events depicted in Palmares.
More curious is Jones’s decision to
eliminate Zumbi’s real wife, Dandara,
from the story and make the king’s chief
consort a white woman. From what lit-
tle is known of daily life in Palmares,
Dandara not only supervised tradition-
ally feminine activities like child care
and the cultivation of cassava and other
crops but was important in political
and military affairs. It was apparently
she, for instance, who urged Zumbi to
kill his uncle and predecessor, Ganga
Zumba, after the older man sought to
negotiate a peace treaty with the Por-
tuguese; historians also know that she
organized, trained, and led a phalanx
of women warriors who fought along-
side the men whenever white forces at-
tacked, and they acquitted themselves
with distinction.
In one such confrontation in 1694,
however, the Portuguese overwhelmed
Dandara’s troops and, rather than sub-
mit to capture and a return to slavery,
she and several of her subalterns arebelieved to have jumped to their death
from a cliff. As a result, Afro- Brazilian
feminists today celebrate her as a sym-
bol of resistance, and Dandara has
become a fashionable first name for
the daughters of such activists. As the
Brazilian Encyclopedia of the African
Diaspora notes, Dandara’s “actual
existence is still shrouded in an aura
of legend,” which makes her a blank
page on which Jones could have writ-
ten whatever she wanted. Instead, by
inexplicably choosing to erase Dan-
dara altogether, she has squandered
an enormous creative opportunity and
also undercut her theme of black fe-
male agency. Did she perhaps fear that
Dandara and her real deeds might out-
shine the imaginary Almeyda?
In that long- ago interview acknowl-
edging her interest in Latin America
and its literature, Jones singled out
Gabriel García Márquez for praise,
and Palmares certainly has flourishes
of magical realism: genitalia that dis-
appear in moments of peril and then
reappear, characters who seem able to
change their age at will, time collapsing
or expanding, and plenty of mysterious
potions, herbs, and spells. But overall,
Palmares is remarkably consonant in
tone and style with Jones’s previous
work. She has often been praised for
the mixture of incantatory and collo-
quial speech that infuses her novels,
for example, and that is again present
here, expanded to speakers of lan-
guages other than English. There are
occasional errors of gender or spelling
in Portuguese phrases inserted here
and there, but some of her translations
are charming: I especially liked “pain-
ing” instead of “hurting” as a closer- to-
literal rendering of doendo.
This continuity is thematic as well.
When, in his poem, Anninho says to Al-
meyda that the most difficult question
they face as a couple is “how we could
sustain our love/at a time of cruelty,”
he is succinctly restating the problem
that preoccupies the twentieth- century
black American characters of both
sexes who drive Corregidora and Eva’s
Man (1976), Jones’s second novel. Sim-
ilarly, the witches and conjurers who
guide Almeyda on her journey can be
seen as ancestors of the itinerant faith-
healer who is the main character in The
Healing, which was shortlisted for the
National Book Award in 1998. So while
Palmares may offer more historical
sweep and take place in a very differ-
ent time and place than its antecedents,
its kinship with Jones’s previous novels
is unmistakable: once again black lives
and bodies are presented as vessels of
trauma.Jones has led a turbulent life herself,
and articles about her that preceded
the publication of Palmares tended to
focus on that as much as—if not more
than—her literary achievements. Born
in Kentucky in 1949, she attended a
segregated elementary school and then
helped integrate Henry Clay High
School in Lexington, where she distin-
guished herself academically. With the
support of Elizabeth Hardwick, also
a Lexington native, Jones was admit-
ted to Connecticut College, where her
mentors included the poets William
Meredith and Robert Hayden. She
then moved on to earn a master’s de-
gree and a Ph.D. in creative writing at
Brown, where her adviser was the poet
Michael Harper.Harper saw such great promise in
Jones’s early writings that he called
them to the attention of Toni Morrison,
then an editor at Random House. Mor-
rison was also impressed: she edited
Corregidora and wrote that “no novel
about any black woman could ever be
the same after this.” James Baldwin
shared that opinion, writing in 1975
that Corregidora “is the most brutally
honest and painful revelation of what
has occurred, and is occurring, in the
souls of black men and women.” Eva’s
Man (1976) and a collection of short
stories, White Rat (1977), followed in
quick succession. Jones seemed well
on her way to a distinguished literary
career, an impression cemented when
she won literary prizes and became a
tenured professor at the University of
Michigan.
Things began to unravel, though,
after she married the political activ-
ist Robert Higgins. At a gay rights
event in Ann Arbor in 1983, he was
reported to have harangued marchers
with claims that he was God and that
AIDS was divine punishment; struck
in a scuffle, he left and then returned
with a shotgun and was arrested. Faced
with the prospect of a four- year prison
sentence, he fled the United States and
Jones accompanied him, resigning her
job and sending a note of protest to
Ronald Reagan. “I reject your lying,
racist shit, and I call upon God,” she
wrote. “Do what you want. God is with
Bob and I’m with him.” With Higgins
convicted in absentia of “assault with
intent to frighten,” the couple settled in
Europe, where in 1986 Jones published
a novel in German, Die Vogelfängerin,
which will be issued this fall in English
as The Birdcatcher; around 1988, they
returned to the United States, where he
lived under an assumed name.
In the 1990s Jones published her
only book of literary criticism, Liber-
ating Voices: Oral Tradition in Afri-
can American Literature (1991), and a
pair of novels, The Healing and Mos-
quito. By then, she and Higgins were
living in Lexington and caring for her
mother, who had cancer. The death of
Lucille Jones in 1997 provoked more
outbursts from Higgins, who began
sending letters to hospitals, doctors,
and politicians that the police deemed
threatening, and early in 1998, just as
The Healing was coming out, they at-
tempted to serve a warrant to extradite
him to Michigan. With Jones in the
house, he resisted; a SWAT team was
called, he committed suicide, and she
was hospitalized and put on suicide
watch. Until the publication of Pal-
mares, Jones had remained silent and
consistently declined interviews, in-
cluding for this essay.
Even more than most writers of fic-
tion, Jones thus seems fated to have
to endure readers and critics combing
through her work looking for congru-
ences with her own biography. But to
do that would be a particular disservice
to Palmares, which is a work of great
imagination and remarkable depth and
richness. In writing this novel, Jones,
like Dandara and other inhabitants of
Palmares, took a courageous leap into
a void, not knowing how she would
land. “The metaphor here... is that
rather than jumping to their deaths,”
she says of them in her stage directions
to The Ancestor, “they sprouted wings,
became birds, and flew away.” Jones
can’t quite pull off that feat, but her
prose soars, and this book with it. Q- 2021 New York Times Notable Book of the Year
- 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award Winner
- 2020 National Book Award Finalist
- 2020 Story Prize Winner
- 2020 LA Times First Fiction Award Winner
- 2018–2021 Weatherford Award for Appalachian
Studies Winner
WVUPRESS.COMWest Virginia
University Press
“A new publishing heavyweight.”
—Rachel Toor,
Chronicle of Higher EducationRohter 10 15 _alt.indd 14 5 / 26 / 22 3 : 37 PM