Corregidora by Gayl Jones

I wanted a song that would touch me, touch my life and theirs. A Portuguese song, but not a Portuguese song. A new world song. A song branded with the new world. I thought of the girl who had to sleep with her master and mistress. Her father, the master. Her daughter's father. The father of her daughter's daughter. How many generations? Days that were pages of hysteria. Their survival depended on suppressed hysteria. She went and got her daughter, womb swollen with the child of her own father. How many generations had to bow to his genital fantasies? They were fisherman and planters. And you with the coffee-bean face, what were you? You were sacrificed. They knew you only by the signs of your sex. They touched you as if you were magic. They ate your genitals. And you, Grandmama, the first mulatto daughter, when did you begin to feel yourself in your nostrils? And, Mama, when did you smell your body with your hands?

Ursa Corregidora is a singer in a blues club. When her husband, Mutt, throws her down the stairs, she goes to live with Tadpole, the club owner and her employer. Tadpole is protective, but perhaps possessive, too, and soon she is divorced from Mutt and married to Tadpole, though Mutt and his associates seem to always be watching from outside the door of the club. The incident makes Ursa begin to rethink her relationship with the men in her life, and it forces her to think about the story of Corregidora, the Portuguese slaveowner who was the father of both her great-grandmother and her grandmother--if you catch by meaning. Ursa is one of "Corregidora's women," a phrase that originally referred to those enslaved women who Corregidora pimped out--to himself, his wife, to others--but now refers to those who, through the cumulative effects of history, bear Corregidora's thumbprint.

In her memories, Ursa reflects on her grandmother's and great-grandmother's urging to do what must be done "for the generations," that is, the lineage of children and grandchildren that bring their heritage--and Corregidora's--into the future. But Ursa is pregnant with Mutt throws her down the stairs, and she loses not just the baby but her uterus as well. No matter what she thinks of her ancestors' urging, Corregidora's lineage will end with Ursa. But the shadow of Corregidora lives on in the men, both Mutt and Tadpole and others, who, despite being the descendants of slavery and oppression themselves, enact the same slaveowner logic that characterized Corregidora's life. Tadpole's consideration veers quickly into a resentment and possessiveness that mirrors Mutt's. The most profound suggestion Jones makes in Corregidora is that patriarchal masculinity and enslavement are intertwined, and that while the latter may no longer be around, the former still acts upon "the generations."

One of the interesting, and rather muted, things about Corregidora is that, while it's set in Kentucky, the particular story that Ursa tells has its roots in Brazilian, not American slavery--if I'm understanding it right. It took Brazil another quarter century after the civil war to outlaw slavery--a whole generation. That contributes, perhaps, to the vividness of the memory of Corregidora that Ursa still carries, but Jones also suggests that the psychic and sexual wounds of slavery are not easily forgotten or left behind. The prose alternate between a kind of fractured modernism, like the quote up top, and the brisk march of dialogue. Famously, it took the championing of Toni Morrison to get Jones' novel into print, and though it's a much different novel than Morrison's richer, more complex books, it's not hard to see what she saw in it.

Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton

The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things.  In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things.  And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor for shame.  It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love.  The world our words have attempted to classify, to control and even to despise (because they could not contain it) comes close to us, for silence teaches us to know reality by respecting it where words have defiled it.

I took a trip to Kentucky last week.  We drove only a few minutes past the monastery where Thomas Merton, surely the most famous American monastic, lived for most of his life, and where he wrote Thoughts in Solitude.  It was easy, rising early as we did, to understand the attraction of solitude in the landscape of the Bluegrass region of Kentucky: the mist rising on rolling hills, the frost on grass like glass, etc., etc.

But my impressions, tied as they are to place and time, are really a kind of lie: Merton's solitude is as achievable, and as difficult, in the city as well as the country or the desert.  It's a kind of way of being, an accommodation with the creation that is the self, and therefore with a manifestation of God.  Because we are "a transient expression of Your inexhaustible and eternal reality," we know God by better knowing ourselves.

Merton's meditations on solitude and the spirit probably won't interest non-spiritual people.  They might, as I was, be interested in Merton because of the obsession of Ethan Hawke's beleaguered priest in last year's First Reformed.  (That guy ought to remember that Merton advises, "The God of peace is never glorified by violence.")  Skeptics might be surprised by Merton's version of monasticism, which is really nothing like the flight from the world that the non-spiritual imagine it to be.  One of Merton's themes, in facts, is that a spiritual life must recognize the essential totality of an individual, that because we are fully human we must turn to God with our whole selves: social, professional, all of it.  He certainly wouldn't recommend a monk's life to most.  But his version of solitude is more than a turning away from others; it's a kind of complete attention to the self that directs to God.

The prose style of Thoughts in Solitude seems like something a monk might produce: clear, strong, but also abstract, developed with a slow care that seems like it could only be achieved where the writer has the luxury to devote his entire attention to every word.  You can tell that Merton has taken to heart his own advice about books:

Books can speak to us like God, like men or like the noise of the city we live in.  They speak to us like God when they bring us light and peace and fill us with silence.  They speak to us like God when we desire never to leave them.  They speak to us like men when we desire to hear them again.  They speak to us like the noise of the city when they hold us captive by a weariness that tells us nothing, give us no peace, and no support, nothing to remember, and yet will not let us escape.

There's an impeccable wisdom in that.  It feels true.  It feels, also, inexplicable, as if to say anything else would obviate the ability of Merton's words to "bring us light and peace and fill us with silence."  So I won't say any more.

Clear Springs by Bobbie Ann Mason

An actual dialogue between myself and a friend:

Me: Holy crap, this book is boring.

Her: I like it. Doesn't it remind you of your childhood? You know, lightning bugs and milking cows and stuff?

Me: My childhood didn't have a damn thing to do with cows, thank you.

That pretty much sums up what I think about this book. Bobbie Ann Mason is a well-known author of "grit lit" from Kentucky whose work takes a very unadorned approach toward the minutiae of daily life. This is her memoir which recounts her time growing up in rural Clear Springs, Kentucky, through her career as a writer and academic and spends a lot of time detailing the personal lineage and history of her parents. It is well-written in a sort of unassuming way, and certain parts of it are interesting, but as a whole it is rather dull and I'm not sure why I should care, nor am I sure why exactly, out of the thousands upon thousands of novels and memoirs written by Southern authors, I should have to read this one.

That is all.