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Gayl Jones 493 Gayl Jones from Mosquito The elusive, reclusive, and highly praised author Gayl Jones was born in 1949 in Lexington, the daughter of a cook and a housewife. She attended Connecticut College and earned a Ph.D. at Brown University; she then taught at the University of Michigan, which she left to move with her new husband, Bob Higgins, to Paris, where they lived for some ten years. In 1988 they moved to her hometown, where her husband’s violent nature and erratic demands sometimes caused him to clash with the police. On February 20, 1998, they barricaded themselves in their home against police who were trying to serve Higgins with an arrest warrant on a Michigan weapons charge. The house began to fill with natural gas, in an apparent suicide attempt, and the police burst in as Higgins cut his own throat; he died later that night. Jones was taken to a mental hospital and placed under a suicide watch. In the 1970s Gayl Jones published two novels and a short story collection that established her as a bold, new voice in contemporary fiction. Her stories often dealt with the degrading sexual relations between sometimes violent black men and their submissive women. Corregidora (1975) is about a blues singer consumed by her hatred of the slave owner who fathered both her grandmother and her mother. In a review in the CourierJournal , John Filiatreau called the novel “what may well be the finest and most unflinchingly honest book ever written about black men and women, their history and their souls.” Her second novel, Eva’s Man (1976), is the story of a prostitute whose own sexual odyssey is characterized by fear, self-loathing, and loneliness and who, in an act of desperation, kills her latest lover. The Healing (1998), her third novel, is told by a faith healer who travels from town to town, commenting on everything from Clark Gable movies to the tools of the cosmetology trade. Mosquito , published in 1999, is about Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson, also known as Mosquito, who makes her living as a truck driver. The story is set in a Texas border town, where Mosquito gets involved in “the new underground railroad,” which provides sanctuary for Mexican immigrants. She develops a romance with Ray, a nonviolent revolutionary and philosopher. The conclusion to the novel is a good example of the energy and power of Jones’s writing. h People thinks that I am Mrs. Mendoza. Ray and I encourages the thought and likes to tease peoples. Everybody that comes in the restaurant I praises Ray to them and tells them he’s like a Aztec god, and he’s always telling peoples I’m like a African goddess. I has seen photographs of some African 493 494 The Kentucky Anthology goddesses and they does kinda resemble me, or I should say I kinda resembles them. I kinda likes the fact that they is goddesses that I resembles. However, I am still a Perfectability Baptist. All my peoples is Baptists except them who is Catholics, and the ones who ain’t Catholics is African Methodist Episcopals and there is a few Witnesses for Jehovah amongst us, and they says that some of us ancestors was Mohammedans and us mighta even had some Buddhists. My uncle Buddy Johnson, rumor has it, were the first amongst us to become a Perfectability Baptist.We have even added Gladys Knight Pipism to the church. Originally Perfectability Baptism combined only Southern Baptism, Holler Roller Theology, Scientific Christianity, and African Methodist Episcopalism. “Do not submit to your own ignorance”; the motto of the Daughters of Nzingha is actually derived from a speech given by Malcolm X. That is what is different about the Daughters of Nzingha. They don’t just include wisdom derived from Afro-womanhood but also includes Afro-manhood wisdom books in they archives, books which I has in my memory. I first heard that quoted by the Daughters of Nzingha, though, in a newsletter as one of the requirements for being an archives keeper. To tell you the truth, I am an archives keeper and I have been submitting to my own ignorance since preschool. I still submits to my own ignorance unless I’m in the presence of someone who refuses to allow me to submit to my own ignorance. I try not to submit to other people’s ignorance, but I have certainly been known to submit to my own ignorance. Of course, once...

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