Mining Magic, Mining Dreams: A Conversation with Jewell Parker Rhodes

Jewell Parker Rhodes writes with salvation and liberation as her guideposts. When reading her work, one is at first most conscious of the fact that she is a wonderful storyteller, that hers is a creative process of gifting and sharing the magic of story. Then, one starts to sense language, to feel the results of her efforts to reconcile her political and spiritual sensibilities with language’s necessary inability to match experience. She is a Black woman novelist whose place in the tradition is being cleared as you read this.

In her first novel Voodoo Dreams, she wrote about the most powerful and famous Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau. Voodoo Dreams is something of an epic, embracing fiction as history (and vice versa) and celebrating the possibilities for a Black woman to heal self and others. But Rhodes set out to do something else with the work, at least in part as a result of the racist, sexist and utterly Euro-centric responses to her subject matter during the creative process: she wanted to celebrate other ways of knowing as being legitimate. “Knowledge systems are different,” she says. “We should value the different ways of understanding our world. There is something everyone of us knows about the world. There is something that none of us know about the world. Mysteries. Dreams. A world beyond.” The acquisition of knowledge as a process is central to understanding her work, and parallel to the healing that happens in the world of Voodoo Dreams.

Her new work, Magic City, was published in June 1997 by HarperCollins. It fictionalizes the 1921 bombing and destruction of Deep Greenwood by white Oklahomans and the U.S. National Guard. Magic City, “a re-imagining [of] history,” earns from her writing of her previous novel. “I learned while writing Voodoo Dreams that history lies, obscures, twists truth, particularly about women and African Americans, [or in general] those who may have been disempowered because of race, religion, class or gender. My role as a novelist is to tell better lies which, paradoxically, I hope will convey an emotional truth which far outweighs inaccurate historical texts.” In re-writing (and righting) history, Rhodes engages the most serious of literary traditions—especially the ones established by Black women—to tell real stories that have spaces where hope can be imagined and enacted. Her work negotiates the many sites of writing that Afrocentric and/or feminist scholars such as Deborah McDowell, bell hooks, Barbara Smith, Patricia Hill Collins and Barbara Christian have claimed are central to Black women as writers, including an engagement of the psychic self as epic landscape; revelations of the body and spirit as epistemological; and the interfacing of past with present. These conventions come together in new ways in her growing canon. Rhodes gives us magical dream stories that we know are true because we have lived them.

I had the opportunity to be in conversation with this amazing woman, a conversation which reminded me of the power and necessity of, as Toni Morrison terms it, “doing language.”

QUASHIE

I’d like to start with Voodoo Dreams, because one of the things that I think is interesting in that novel is the idea of the woman as a kind of trickster figure, with the awareness that the trickster figure has most often been represented as male. In a sense, I think that you deal with this in your comments in the author’s note at the end of the novel, and also in the essay “Voodoo and the Literary Imagination” where you describe how women’s magical powers as means of survival are often denounced and called witchcraft, while men’s powers are affirmed, revered, and considered reasons for sainthood. I like the idea of Marie Laveau as a new trickster figure, so that her life explodes and furthers what trickster means.

RHODES

You know, I didn’t really think of her as a trickster figure in the whole tradition of the trickster figure, but certainly in terms of using strategies in order to survive and make her...