Word: gayle
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Life imitates art" is a cliche, but that may be the best explanation for what happened to Gayl Jones. The writer made her name in the mid-1970s with transfixing tales of sexual violence and madness, stories of women skating the edges of insanity and the men who shoved them toward thin ice. On Feb. 20, a similar tale seemed to unfold in Jones' home in Lexington, Ky. When police tried to serve a warrant from a 15-year-old weapons conviction on her husband Bob Jones, he barricaded the couple inside their house and threatened that they would kill...
...Gayl sat under suicide watch in a mental hospital, her brother attempted an explanation. "I'm sure you realize my brother-in-law was insane," said Franklin Jones. His sister, he said, had been dashing toward literary stardom "until she met him." And so it seemed. In 1975, the 25-year-old Gayl stunned the literary world with Corregidora, a fiercely written novel about incest, slavery and abuse. Jones mined the same brutal field in Eva's Man, in which the protagonist bites off a man's penis. Toni Morrison was her editor; John Updike praised her work. Another book...
Many of those who knew Gayl say her strange life with Bob was less about tragic accident than gothic design. "Gayl was not a puppet. She fell in love," says author and friend Nettie Jones (no relation). Since childhood, Gayl had seemed lost inside her own head. As a student, she sat in class swallowed under layers of clothes, just her face and huge eyes peeking out, speaking only when spoken to. But what she said was often brilliant. "Other students would turn to her and say, 'O.K., Gayl, what's the answer?' She always had the answer," remembers...
CORREGIDORA by GAYL JONES 185 pages. Random House...
...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 male-female relations. No black American novel since Richard Wright's Native Son (1940) has so skillfully traced psychic wounds to a sexual source...