Real Talk: Gayl Jones' The Unicorn Woman

by Emily Moore

The poet Gwendolyn Brooks said that she didn’t ‘have any special religion’, that her religion was ‘PEOPLE. LIV—ING’ [1]. One certainly feels this when reading any of Brooks’ work. Her characters are complete and entire, filled out from every angle, with voices that make them come alive, and contradictions that make them human. Her work has this in common with that of Gayl Jones. Indeed, it’s one of the qualities for which Jones admired Brooks. Jones wrote of Brooks’ “In the Mecca”, that it was ‘about individual, particular Afro-American human beings’ [2]. Jones’ work oozes the same faith in aliveness, takes the same joy in rendering characters in all their human vitality, in all their beauty and all their flaws.

We can see this from Jones’ first novel Corregidora, published in 1975 to much critical acclaim. The protagonist Ursa is as alive in her taciturn silences as she is in the blues she sings. Both help her to make sense of, accommodate, absorb, and heal from her lovers’ abuse and the trauma of Brazilian plantation slavery with its attendant sexual violence inherited through her foremothers. Eva, of Jones’ second novel Eva’s Man, published in 1976, tingles with this same aliveness, despite her fall into an intense psychosis, despite the fact that she commits an atrociously violent crime, and despite the hostile critical response by figures such as June Jordan who wrote that the novel ‘perpetuate[s] “crazy whore”/“castrating bitch” images that long have defamed black women in our literature’ [3]. Nevertheless, we feel Eva’s aliveness in the shadow of her past. We experience it in her madness, her psychic breakdown, the fracturing of her point of view, and the hallucinatory turn of her language. As Jones wrote of the protagonists of this novel: ‘that man and woman don't stand for men and women – they stand for themselves, really’ [4]. And we see this same human vitality in Harlan and Mosquito, the protagonists of her 1998 and 1999 novels The Healing and Mosquito. These novels, which broke Jones’ first long literary silence, mark a stylistic shift in her oeuvre. They represent the inauguration of a rambling, meandering, conversational tone – a distinctly prosodic real human voice. And it's in these novels, in this more conversational tone, that Jones starts to consider the idea of the human more explicitly; its relation to freedom, agency, racialisation, and oppression. Finally, Almeyda of Jones’ 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist Palmares – the sweeping and lyrical first-person account of Almeyda’s escape from slavery and search for her lover Anninho and the settlement for escaped slaves Palmares – has an aliveness that is fantastical, magical, and multi-dimensional.

There are some constant elements of Jones’ innovative, incantatory style that nurture this aliveness. Her powerful orality – the repeated ‘like I said’s, the ‘I acknowledge y’all’s and the ‘Ain’t I told y’all that?’s – means there is an implicit assumption that we can really hear her characters, really see them, even talk to them, ask them questions and receive answers. Her intertextuality achieves the same thing. Her novels are littered with “easter eggs” like the allusion to the Spider Web bar in The Unicorn Woman, which is also mentioned fifty years earlier in Corregidora: ‘not the Spider where I was to work later, but the old Spider Web that was long since torn down’. Characters reappear in different novels – the newsletter of a secret society in Mosquito contains references to The Birdcatcher’s Catherine, The Healing’s Joan, and Amanda Wordlaw, a phantom writer who features in several of the novels. The “Jonesiverse” is like a kind of truth claim. The characters and the places they go to have real lives that extend beyond the confines of their novels and seep into others. And Jones talks about her characters like they are real, agentive beings. She says, ‘I really did think Ursa would stay with Tadpole. I really didn't expect him to do what he did’ [5]. Her characters have their own lives, their own wills, and make their own decisions independently of their author.

We might take Jones’ commitment to her characters’ aliveness for a kind of humanism. Famously reclusive, publishing in flurries of activity between long silences, and having given no interviews for over twenty years, Jones hasn’t explicitly engaged with the debates swirling within the field of Black Studies between the Afropessimists and the Humanists: debates as to whether the anti-Black violence which has excluded Black people from the category of the Human – as theorised in the Enlightenment and upon which modernity relies – has effected a unique kind of social death; or whether it might be possible to replace this exclusionary idea of the Human with a multifarious, inclusive, and fluid planetary humanism.

So, we don’t explicitly know what she thinks about how to deal with the legacy of slavery’s dehumanisation. But she does seem to share Brooks’ commitment to using the tools at her disposal, her literature, to represent Black people in the fullest, most vibrantly ambivalent reality possible. Hers is a humanism then, of storytelling. Her characters come alive in books. Maybe we can contextualise this idea within the history of Black people being banned from literacy in the US during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. And we might also relate it to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s which celebrated oral tradition in literature – real Black human voices. But Jones’ humanism is about more than just finding a voice in the textual, and its more than empowering oral traditions by embedding them in literature. Her storytelling performs a kind of healing work – a revivification. She redraws the concept of the human by creating Black characters who are irrepressibly and incontrovertibly alive. She undoes social death by declaring social life. The concept of the social is important because Jones’ humanism is of the world. It’s not the liberal humanism of 1950s New Criticism that saw texts as independent of social, political, and historical contexts and assumed the fixed and stable nature of the human subject. Her humanism, rather, entails many implications and contexts. It’s important to talk about the social here, because Jones’ stories aren’t just about humans, but the relationships between them: between characters; but also, in Jones’ words, ‘between the teller and the hearer; and ‘between the storyteller and the story’. These are the virtues Jones recognises in “storytelling” – it’s inherent ‘human connections’ [6].

Jones’ most recent publication, her seventh novel, The Unicorn Woman, is a contemplation and confirmation of her particular iteration of humanism. It tells the story of Buddy Johnson (Mosquito’s uncle), a tractor repairman and WWII veteran. Having returned to Kentucky from France, ‘sometime after the Second World War’, he sees the Unicorn Woman (a woman with the horn of a unicorn in the middle of her forehead) at a carnival and is enthralled [7]. The search for her – or ‘hunt’ as the novel puts it – consumes him. He consults doctors and healing women with questions about her and all other romantic partners fall short of her image in his mind. Although populated by women griots, healers, jokesters – the kinds of alive woman that we’re used to getting to know in Jones’ novels – Jones’ humanism is expressed differently here. The Unicorn Woman – as a motif, as a symbol, as a woman, and as a character in a story – becomes a way of thematising and contextualising the humanism evident across Jones’ oeuvre. She is a way of invoking and inspecting the fraught relationship between Blackness and the notion of the Human: the way in which the modern definition of the Human has depended on the degradation, dehumanisation, and oppression of a racialised Black other.

There is the implicit suggestion throughout that we might take the Unicorn Woman’s horn as an analogy for Blackness. Though this is certainly not a straightforward analogy. It is complicated, for example, by the fact that the Unicorn Woman is herself Black. One spectator says, ‘“They don’t have colored unicorns. All the unicorns I’ve ever seen have been white”’. It is complicated also by the gender dynamics at work in Buddy’s pursuit of her. And finally, that the Unicorn with its horn is a decidedly European symbol disrupts this easy comparison. Tentatively overlooking these confounding elements, however, let’s pursue this thread a little further.

If the Unicorn Woman’s horn functions as an analogy for Blackness, it is not Blackness as an essentialised, unchanging, innate quality, but Blackness as a racialised construct that has been used to enact oppression and dehumanisation. It’s the thing for which the Unicorn Woman is fetishised – ‘“maybe it’s easier to ask people about the horn than the woman”’. It’s the thing people use to declare her non-human – ‘“He thinks my horn means I’m a devil”’. It’s the thing that prompts consideration of what makes anyone human – ‘“That would be something wouldn’t it? If every human being had a horn?”/“Yes, it would sure be something. But if we all had horns, it would just be a natural thing.”’ It represents something for the people that come to see her – ‘“it’s the horn, not me. It represents something for ‘em”’. But there is also the acknowledgement that it’s something that might empower her – ‘“Because that horn is her signature. I mean it has significance. I don’t know what that horn might mean and neither do you. And I don’t know what might be in that horn. Maybe that horn is as special to her as her soul is”’. And it prompts consideration of what everyone’s own “horn” is – ‘“A horn can be anything [...] I ain’t gonna tell you what my horn is though”’. Thus, the horn might provide a way of relating to one another. The Blackness the horn is compared to then, has many implications and meanings.

Alongside this analogy is the novel’s insistence on the humanness of the Unicorn Woman. We often overhear spectators of the carnival show asserting this, saying things like, ‘“She’s a human woman; she ain’t no goat or a lamb”’. But there’s more to the novel’s elaboration of Jones’ humanism than this insistence. It’s not simply that Jones equates the Unicorn Woman’s horn with Blackness and then insists that she is human. Rather, the horn is a way of contextualising the uses of this Blackness.

The symbol of the Unicorn Woman is a way of deftly reminding us of the painful aspects of the history of Black performance. Either explicitly or implicitly, Jones alludes to various ways in which Blackness has been (and, as she reminds us, continues to be) treated as a spectacle. She acknowledges the bleak and disgraceful history of Black individuals being spectacles at exhibitions, sideshows, and carnivals. One character talks about avoiding carnivals because of an exhibit called ‘The African Dodger’, which involved ‘“making fun and games out of hitting colored people and throwing balls at them"’. There’s an oblique reference to Sarah Baartman (a woman exhibited in the early nineteenth century as “The Hottentot Venus”) as Buddy talks about ‘Venus of Willendorf hips’ in a story he writes. He also dreams that he himself has become a sideshow exhibit: ‘“What makes him a wonder? He looks like an ordinary colored man to me”’. Jones invokes the coerced and misinterpreted incidents of song or dance at terror-laden performance sites such as the auction block, the coffle, or in front of enslavers by reminding us that ‘“the struggle of the old slave continues into this day and time”’. Finally, Jones makes reference to the unruly and uncontainable legacy of minstrelsy and Blackface performance and the exploitative, fetishistic, and exoticising elements of the modern Black entertainment industry. Spectators’ comments make this connection for the reader: ‘“She kinda remind me of Billie Holiday, Lady Day”' and ‘“She reminds me of a songstress”’. All of these references are present in the figure of the Unicorn Woman. She becomes a symbol for this painful performance history.

But there are dangers in this analogy. Does this symbolism strip the Unicorn Woman of her humanity? Is her voicelessness a problem? Do we as readers somehow become complicit in her dehumanisation?

Firstly, although Jones reminds us throughout of the fact that the Unicorn Woman is ‘“a human woman”’, she ends up bearing huge symbolic weight. As a symbol of Black performance history, an exemplar of the process by which modernity’s Man is defined opposite and against the racialised other, the Unicorn Woman becomes not quite human. She represents historical and fetishised Blackness. Of all Jones’s literary creations then, she remains most enigmatic, most bereft of the vital humanity that usually characterises them.

And secondly, what of the fact that, despite the reminders of her humanness, we don’t ever hear her actual voice? It’s often ventriloquised through Buddy’s dreams and imagination, but the Unicorn Woman herself remains silent. This is striking in light of Jones’ deep association between voice and personhood; between ‘the liberated voice’ and the ‘“whole consummate being”’ [8]. Is this an unfortunate coincidence? This is Jones’ first novel written from a male perspective. It’s an attempt she has long been planning. (In 1988, she wrote ‘I should probably try that with a novel—just to try it—to see how the man would order his world’ [9].) By finally realising her desire to explore the male perspective in this novel, has she set up a plot that inadvertently accomplishes the very thing she has spent her career railing against?

It’s hard for us to believe strongly in the humanness of the Unicorn Woman, to undo the process of fetishisation when she remains so resolutely abstract and voiceless. So, she does end up becoming the spectacle, the gazed-upon oddity, that we are told she is not. Are we lured into believing too rigidly in the analogy between her horn and Blackness? Do we thus become complicit in her fetishisation? In rendering her non-human? Is Jones, as she so often does, making us uncomfortable on purpose? Why does Jones’s Unicorn Woman partake in the silencing of the protagonist’s humanism that she elsewhere fights against?

Jones must be doing this on purpose. The novel must be a deliberate demonstration of dehumanisation. It enacts the dehumanisation process, enacts the impossibility of love under conditions of inequality, enacts the impossibility of escape from the traumata of Black history in the US. It enacts exactly the dangerous error noted by the poet Audre Lorde in her poem ‘The Black Unicorn’ where ‘The black unicorn was mistaken/for a shadow/or symbol’ [10]. The plot becomes a metaphor. The novel, or rather, storytelling becomes a tool in making clear to us what is at stake in the idea of literary aliveness.

And it’s not only the plot that serves as a metaphor. Buddy’s storytelling voice, his interest in words, sounds, meaning, and naming achieves something similar. He gives us the sense that language is not what it at first seems. There are slippages, doublings, and contradictions. As a child he hears his name, Bud, in the expression ‘a little bird told me’; he refers to ‘a din of iniquity’; he confuses ‘farmer soldiers’ and ‘former soldiers’, ‘colored flours’ and ‘colored flyers’. The mishearings go on and on, multiplying meanings each time, highlighting the audibility of the words and the contingency of meaning upon sound. All of this relates back to the novel’s meditation on spectacle and racialisation. These mishearings parallel the effect of the Unicorn Woman’s horn. The horn means many things at once. It’s made to stand for one thing, but many possibilities lurk beneath, like the various meanings veiled behind the words on the page, hidden in sound, in unexpected aural similarities. Language then, like plot, becomes a metaphor, a metaphor for the novel’s blurring of the line between reality and unreality, between the reality of a human woman and the unreality of a mythical unicorn, or, analogously, between a Black human woman and a Black woman figured as non-human. In this way, writing, words, and storytelling become tools to resist dehumanisation and degradation. Once again, they are a means of declaring Black humanity, not just by representing Black voices, but by being wrung for all their power, all their aesthetic, representational, symbolic magic. In Jones’ own words, ‘The language is no longer flat and one dimensional. You have the sense that [storytellers are] trying to make the language do things. And it's not just to be playing with words, either; they have a stake in it’ [11].

The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones

London: Virago, 2024

https://www.virago.co.uk/titles/gayl-jones/the-unicorn-woman/9780349016931/

Notes

[1] Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003) p. 102.

[2] A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 201.

[3] Jordan, June, “All About Eva: Eva’s Man”, New York Times Book Review (16 May 1976), pp. 36.

[4] Harper, Michael S., ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 18, No 4 (Winter 1977), pp. 701.

[5] Harper, ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, p. 696.

[6] Harper, ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, p. 695.

[7] All citations of the text from Jones, The Unicorn Woman, (London: Virago, 2024).

[8] Jones, Liberating Voices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991) p. 178.

[9] Jones, ‘About My Work’ in Porter, H. A. (ed.), Dreaming Out Loud: African American Novelists at Work (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), p. 111.

[10] Lorde, Audre, ‘The Black Unicorn’, (London: Penguin Classics, 2019) p. 4.

[11] Harper, ‘Gayl Jones: An Interview’, p. 706.