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.