Just don’t stray too far

Born in 1949, Gayl Jones is enjoying a dazzling late-career renaissance. The Unicorn Woman is her fourth outing since the slavery-era epic Palmares (2021), The Birdcatcher (2022), which concerned a female sculptor who periodically descends into madness, and Butter (2023), a collection of stories and fragments. All of these books – which arrived after a publishing hiatus of some two decades – build on the reputation established by Jones when, still in her mid-twenties, she published her debut novel, Corregidora (1975), an unsparing account of relations between Black men and women told through the travails of a young blues singer.

Always more interested in voice than in plot – events in her prose drift, jump, fall out of sequence – Jones gives the narration of The Unicorn Woman to a Black man. Buddy Ray Guy (in other words, Everyman) hails, like the author, from Lexington, Kentucky; he is a former soldier, having served as an army cook during the Second World War. In no hurry to return to the segregationist US, he travels around Europe before eventually coming home to mend tractors for a living. One day, visiting a travelling carnival and wandering into the freakshow tent, he witnesses something that will change his life: a beautiful Black woman, sitting perfectly still, with a horn protruding from her forehead.

Captivated by this silent figure, who shows no sign of being aware of his presence, Buddy visits the carnival whenever he can, noticing that the entry price ratchets up each time. It is a form of courtly love, an idealized passion. It spoils other relationships for him.

The unicorn woman herself brings together other elements in the novel, but she is perhaps best understood as a central component of the Black experience in her guise as a multidimensional individual who is reduced by the gaze of others to a single physical component. Buddy has a memory of his mother hearing from a teacher that his hair, worn in emulation of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, was too long: “it makes him too visible. She says you notice his hair before you notice his inquisitive mind”.

In his quest to uncover what kind of creature the unicorn woman is, Buddy consults his Aunt Maggie and “Doc” Leeds, a female herbalist, traditional healing (whether spiritual, psychological or physical) being one of Jones’s recurrent themes. In pointed contrast to white observers of Black lives, Leeds sees every client as an individual; a tincture for one woman’s thinning hair will not work for someone else. “Now, Mag, there are no two people that have the same constitution. They may resemble each other. You might resemble Fedora Doppler, but you’re not her.”

With a few brushstrokes Jones suggests a whole society: Black college professors, poets, preachers, farmers, businesses and hoteliers who cater solely for people of colour: for Indigenous “Indians” and Asians and all the darker-skinned people of the world making common cause. At the same time race is seen here as something of a mirage, shifting and changing according to context. On first meeting Doc Leeds, Buddy takes her for Irish, while on a later visit he reads her darker. There is curiosity about Africa; some are wistful for lost heritage, others relish a blank slate and the opportunity for reinvention. “Our people originated from everywhere”, says Aunt Maggie. Views on discussing “that old history” differ. Buddy’s mother says, “Sometimes I don’t like to hear it”, while his father avidly collects memorabilia: “He says we are continuing the struggles of the old slaves in this modern day and age and time”.

Jones might be giving voice to members of an older generation more concerned with keeping their heads down than in overt activism, but her characters are far from passive and unobservant. Buddy notices that on his trips to gawp at the unicorn woman he is brusquely told to move along, unlike the other punters – that is, white punters, though he doesn’t have to say it. “Don’t stray too far”, warns the proprietress of a Memphis boarding house. “I stroll only through the colored part of town. I suppose that’s what she meant.” A restaurant sign reading “take-out service” means Black people cannot eat in, and in “the badlands” Buddy makes use of the indispensable Green-Book. Even in possession of it, he doesn’t like to travel “further south than Tennessee or further west than Indiana”.

Through Buddy’s picaresque journey, Gayl Jones shows her mastery of both dialogue and interiority. There is a bare minimum of scene-setting and little indication of actions such as standing, sitting or leaving a room. Instead we find encounter after encounter with richly individuated characters, each sporting his or her own verbal idiosyncrasies, as noted by a well-read travelling man with an acute ear for speech patterns, just like his creator.

Suzi Feay is the former literary editor of the Independent on Sunday and hosts a YouTube channel of author interviews, Suzi’s Book Bag

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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