everyday experience and of storytelling to be rich
with possibility when she began her career. Writ-
ing narratives was also a part of her family heri-
tage. Her grandmother wrote plays for the church,
and Jones’s mother, Lucille, began writing when
she was in fifth grade and later created stories to
entertain her children. Jones herself began writing
stories when she was seven or eight.
In addition to this personal education, she re-
ceived training in the public schools of Lexington,
which were segregated until she was in 10th grade.
From Lexington, she went to Connecticut Col-
lege, where she majored in English and received
prizes for her poetry. After graduating in 1971, she
undertook graduate studies in creative writing at
Brown University under the direction of William
Meredith and MICHAEL S. HARPER. While still at
Brown, she published her first novel. After receiv-
ing her B.A. in 1976, she went on to teach at the
University of Michigan. Since then, she has lived
and taught in France and the United States.
In her fiction, Jones creates worlds radically dif-
ferent from those of “normal” experience and of
conventional storytelling. Though the narrators of
her early novels and short stories are close to if not
over the edge of sanity, the experiences they record
reveal clearly that society acts out of its own obses-
sions, often violently. The authority of these depic-
tions of the world is enhanced by Jones’s refusal
to intrude on or judge her narrators. She remains
outside the story, leaving the readers with none of
the usual markers of a narrator’s reliability. She
gives these characters the speech of their region,
which, by locating them in time and space, makes
it more difficult to dismiss them; the way they
speak has authenticity that carries over to the sto-
ries they tell. The results are profoundly disturbing
tales of repression, manipulation, and suffering.
CORREGIDORA (1975), Jones’s first novel, is what
she calls BLUES narrative, in the sense that it deals
with both the pains and pleasures of human re-
lationships. As Ursa tells the story of her female
ancestors suffering in slavery under the title char-
acter and then the story of her own abuse at the
hands of her husband, she shapes experience into a
song in which forgiveness for both herself and her
husband becomes possible.
Eva’s Man (1976), Jones’s second novel, is much
more radical than Corregidora in plot, theme, and
narrative structure. Refusing to accept the tension
of men and women, love and hate, that Ursa ac-
cepts in her last scene, Eva commits an act of vio-
lence—sexual dismemberment—that lands her in
a hospital for the criminally insane. Through her
obsessive narration, she articulates the experiences
that led her to rebel against male domination in
such an extreme way. But her story cannot be dis-
missed simply as the ravings of a psychotic woman,
since the tale she tells is, in exaggerated form, the
tale of all women in a male-dominated society. By
pushing common events beyond their usual limits,
the novel forces the reader to reconsider the “nor-
mality” of such events.
The stories in White Rat (1977) continue to ad-
dress concerns with sexuality, violence, madness,
and race. “Asylum,” for example, is in some ways
an abbreviated version of Eva’s Man. The narrator
is a young woman committed to a mental hospital
for her irrational behavior. She will not allow the
doctor to examine her genital area, even though
she was admitted for deliberately urinating in the
living room when her nephew’s teacher visited
their home. Her madness is apparent in her ob-
session with acts of violation and in her graphic
expression of resistance to such acts.
Song for Anninho (1981), a long narrative poem,
addresses similar themes but in the very differ-
ent context of 17th-century, slave-holding Brazil.
Though a poem, this book began as a novel titled
“Palmares,” and it retains much of the storytell-
ing force of fictional narrative. It is the story of
the love between Anninho and his wife Almeyda,
the narrator, residents of the maroon community
of Palmares. They are separated when Portuguese
soldiers overrun the camp, and Almeyda attempts
through memory to recapture their lives together.
In the process of coming to terms with past and
present, she demonstrates, as did Ursa Corregi-
dora, the impact of history and society on the
human psyche, but also the power of love to tran-
scend degradation.
Jones’s books of poetry that follow Song for
Anninho can be seen as developing this notion
of women’s songs of love and trouble. Euclida,Jones, Gayl 287