Olympia Vernon’s Children of Opinion

I was a child of opinion. Every thought created within me, from birth, was like this one bright star, circling the kitchen of my mania. . . .

—Olympia Vernon, Eden

Olympia Vernon writes fiction that embodies moments of testimony and opinion. She makes central to her three novels, Eden (2003), Logic (2004), and A Killing in This Town (2006), an articulate narratology dependent upon the voicing of individual subjectivity, even when that subjectivity is in process and incompletely comprehended. As a result, Vernon’s fiction emerges as its own distinguished ventriloquy of subjective expression. The missing or obscured aspects of voice circle provocatively on the edges of consciousness and allegory, while the distinctive embodied presence imparts a substantial grounding in materiality and reality.

Vernon’s spatial ground is Mississippi and Louisiana, where she was born on May 22, 1973, and where she grew up a Gemini child at home in contiguous but different worlds. The stories from history and memory that relatives told and those from imagination and dream that Vernon writes are drawn from aspects of rural and small town life functioning on the edges of cities: Jackson, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. A native of Bogalusa, Louisiana, a birthplace she shares with the poet Yusef Komunyakaa, Vernon has spent much of her life in Mount Hermon, Louisiana, Osyka, Mississippi, and Magnolia, Mississippi, where she attended South Pike High School. Like several of the recent African American women fiction writers from the South, including Tayari Jones and Jesmyn Ward her age cohort born in the 1970s, Vernon studied creative writing in an advanced degree program. She received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 2002, after completing an undergraduate degree in Criminal Justice at Southeastern Louisiana University and initially planning a career in law enforcement.

In focusing her attention on a familiar part of the American South, with Mississippi at its center, Vernon uses her considerable gift with words without reducing that location to vernacular predictability. She instead produces in her writing an expressive culture that offers in both language and thought the possibility of new formations. As Clyde Woods reminds his readers in writing about modern Mississippi: “The blues epistemology is a longstanding African American tradition of explaining reality and change. This form of explanation finds its origins in the processes of African American cultural construction within, and resistance to, the antebellum plantation regime” (25).¹ Woods refers specifically to blues, but his data base was Mississippi itself as participating in and reflecting the popular consciousness of African Americans as they not only respond to crisis within their inherited racially disparate environment but also as they work to create changed cultural spaces marked by freedom, equity, and justice. Vernon accesses racial memory of a Mississippi past to write fiction that is disturbing in the way that only a brilliant creative writer can—to get beneath the surface of horror, pain, suffering, cruelty, and insanity to recast that past and reconstitute it in a new black space of potential, even if that potential resides in a dream of the future emerging out of a transforming, in-process present. And out of her expression of the dream or nightmare possible in black Mississippi life, Vernon offers hope, however slight, that the airing of seemingly despairing and tragic situations can provoke change.

In her three Mississippi-centered novels, Vernon links testimony and opinion as key aspects of a narratology dependent upon voice whether for the style of telling or the sequence of actions told. Testimony is what we recognize in the narratology of Vernon’s making. Testimony in her narratives comes as a gift of presentation, an offering of experiences, to demonstrate ways of navigating the social rituals that can lead to destruction. By standing in the narrative space of bearing witness and declaring personal experiential knowledge, Vernon uses testimony as a transit to overcome catastrophe or tragedy. The other, opinion, is what Vernon’s characters come to understand not only about their own articulations, both verbal utterance and physical presence within the texts, but also about comparable articulations of other characters. Opinion functions for her characters as a form...