Corregidora
by Gayl Jones
This Saturday will mark Gayl Jones’s 75th birthday. Celebrate the occasion by reading her powerful novel Corregidora, first published in 1975 – 50 years ago next year.
Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University and has taught at Wellesley and the University of Michigan. Her novels include Corregidora (1975), Eva’s Man (1976), The Healing (1998), which was a National Book Award finalist, Palmares (2021), which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, and The Birdcatcher (2022), which was also a National Book Award Finalist.
In the eighties she married the activist Robert Higgins, who campaigned against the University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center hospital, where Jones’s mother was treated for throat cancer. His threats led to a standoff with the police at their home in 1998, during which Higgins took his own life. Jones then took a twenty-year hiatus from writing novels and has never appeared in public or given interviews since.
In Corregidora, the Kentucky blues singer Ursa is consumed by hatred for Corregidora, the nineteenth-century Portuguese Brazilian slave master who fathered both her mother and her grandmother. Her mother charges her with ‘making generations’ to bear witness to the abuse embodied in her family name, but Ursa Corregidora finds herself unable to keep this legacy alive after an accident involving her violent husband Mutt Thomas and the staircase behind Happy’s Café.
Set in the 1940s, Jones’s fragmented narrative is haunted by generational trauma, domestic and sexual violence and the psychological residue of slavery.
First published in 1975 by Toni Morrison, when she was a senior editor at Random House, Corregidora was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, winning widespread acclaim:
‘Corregidora is the most brutally honest and painful revelation of what has occurred, and is occurring, in the souls of Black men and women,’ said James Baldwin.
Jones is ‘an American writer with a powerful sense of vital inheritance, of history in the blood,’ said John Updike.
This is ‘a tale as American as Mount Rushmore and as murky as the Florida swamps,’ said Maya Angelou.
‘No novel about any Black woman could ever be the same after this,’ said Toni Morrison.
Corregidora paved the way for novels such as The Colour Purple (1982) and Beloved (1987), but it fell out of print for a long time, before being reissued in 2019 by Beacon Press in the US and Virago Modern Classics in the UK.
Buy a copy of Corregidora through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US) and Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!