Word: corregidora
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...CORREGIDORA by GAYL JONES 185 pages. Random House...
...seems unpromising material for a novel, and the author's plot is apparently more suited to pulp melodrama than to serious fiction. Her book begins with a young black woman improbably named Ursa Corregidora and plunks her down in a seedy Kentucky dive in the 1940s where she works as a blues singer. Enter Ursa's jealous husband, Mutt Thomas, who hurls the heroine down a staircase, injuring her so badly that her womb has to be removed. Twenty years pass. Ursa's second marriage fails. Her career takes her no higher than another dive across town...
Such a story hovers between horrific realism and howling symbolism (the loss of a womb equaling not merely the loss of fruitfulness but the whole power to love). Indeed Corregidora could be dismissed as musings on the sordidness of some of life's more desperate characters if the novel did not manage to illuminate the wider question of the way all men need women. Mutt is the masculine principle in its surly, street-brother aspect. For him pride seems uppermost-the pain is mainly hers...
...Ursa the question of biological imperatives perpetuates her family's history. On her great-grandmother's lap at the age of five, the child began to hear about the slave family's special bondage to a corrupt 19th century Portuguese coffeegrower called Corregidora. He took first Ursa's great-grandmother and then Ursa's grandmother-his own child-out of his Brazilian plantation fields and turned both women into enthralled concubines and whores. With considerable dignity First Novelist Gayl Jones explores black female sexuality and the remnants of slave brutality that still fester in black...
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