"Corregidora" & also "Eva's Man" -- both by Gayl Jones

Jones' work is tough to read/but in the best way. Her fiction is raw & powerfullly seductive. But there is nothing 'nice' abt either of these novels. My friend Toni in NY & I are having an ongoing discussion of Jones' work via telephone. I had never heard of her until Toni hipped me to her last month -- she was nominated for a National Book Award for "The Healing" (her 1st novel in 20 years). But Jones lost out to someone named Alice McDermott/ whom I'm not familiar with. At least they didn't give it to Tom Wolfe/who truly doesn't need the accolades at this point in his career. Reading "Eva's Man" was like climbing inside the head of someone on the verge of slipping into insanity/but still sane enuf to realize she's walking the razor's edge. Which is part of the moral conundrum you walk away w/at the end -- Did she deserve what she got/or were there mitigating circumstances that cd excuse her actions? It is told in the 1st person narrative w/Eva's thoughts intercutting in a surreal, stream-of-consciousness monologue btwn the present/events from the distant past/& the acts that lead up to her confinement in a psychiatric prison. And while there have been a lot of Black women writers exploring the issue of female sexual degradation over the past 2 decades/in this case, I can't get past the fact that every man Eva chose was fucked up. I mean/basic probability alone we have her run into at least 1 or 2 Brothers who weren't all abt treating her like a sex toy/or lashing out verbally when they hit on her & she wasn't interetsed. Not a single man in her life ever treated her like a human being. And for me/at some point a woman has to be responsible for the choices she makes. Meeting Eva at the beginning of the novel & realizing what lead to her imprisonment is like witnessing a slow-motion train wreck. But thruout the entire book/I kept wanting to scream at this woman "Why don't you wake the hell up & leave that jerk alone?" In the story/Eva only alludes briefly to the many years she spent alone w/no man/traveling & working to support herself. She'd been to Kentucky/NYC/New Orleans/New Mexico -- as a single Black woman in the 1950's (the appx. timeframe of the story/but this isn't explicitly stated) this was quite expectional. And I simply couldn't reconcile how someone w/the courage & self-reliance to be alone for so long cd suddenly meet a man in a bar & be drawn into a realtionship that was basically all abt sex. I can see her wanting to get her groove on after a long dry spell. But if she was so miserable w/the guy/why not just step? And he wasn't beating her or going off on her -- it was more of a mind fuck... I got the sense that each of them wondered when one of them was going to say "Enough of this -- Later!" & walk out of that little room that seemed to be their entire world. "Corregidora" was somewhat more interesting for me. The novel spans a period from the late 1940's to the early 1970's w/flashbacks to Ursa Corregidora's childhood. It focuses on the themes of miscegenation & rape during slavery /& the legacy those acts inflict on the female descendants of slaves. But the book begins w/Ursa being abused by her husband/& ends w/her seeing him years after they have divorced & ending up in bed w/him. Which took the edge off much of the pain she'd suffered/no matter how stunning the words describing that pain had been. By the last page/I felt Ursa deserved whatever misery she was abt to slide into again w/this man -- the sins of her forefathers nonwithstanding. It made me want to slap her. My girl Toni says I am looking at these women thru post-feminist eyes & the haze of educational & life expereinces that didn't exist fopr them in their time. And she is partially correct -- in those days/no one talked abt rape/no one went into therapy/no one spoke abt the sexual abuse of children or a woman's right to be treated w/basic human respect. Even today/within Black academia/very few people are talking abt these issue. But in spite of the power of Jones' prose & the strength of her female characters/I find it hard to swallow that women like Eva (who was educated) & Ursa cd be so strong yet so spineless & stupid at the same time. Surviving evils that you cannot avoid is one thing. But allowing yrself to be victimized by men when you have what it takes to make it alone is something I just can't get my mind around. Very little is known abt Gayl Jones. Her secretiveness & aversion to publicity rival J.D. Salinger's. She doesn't give interviews. She has never met her publisher -- they comminucate solely thur e-mail. No one even knows where she is living since she left the mental institution she was sent to last year. But you can read a piece abt her from Salon magazine: http://www.salonmagazine.com/media/1998/02/26/media.html} (If I can post the damn link correctly.) If anyone else @ Sorabji had read any of her work/I'd be interested in hearing what you think of Gayl Jones.