The Anatomy of Returning Home as a Stranger: A Review of Gayl Jones’ “The Unicorn Woman” https://southernreviewofbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/the-unicorn-woman-gayl-jones.png
For veterans returning from military service, literature, as life, has shown that the battle often begins when they return home. Why do men and women feel unrewarded for their sacrifices? Why do the ideals for which they served suddenly seem undefined? Why do their communities of origin seem like the foreign lands they came home from? The Unicorn Woman, Gayl Jones’s latest novel, captures this sense of disconnection and disillusionment in the context of the African American veteran experience.
Set in the early 1950s, The Unicorn Woman tells the story of Buddy Ray Guy, a Black Army veteran who returns to the post-World War II Jim Crow South. A former Army cook, now intermittently employed as a tractor repairman, Buddy drifts between his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, and Memphis, Tennessee, taking his “vacations,” as he calls his sporadic periods of unemployment, encountering wise, protective women, past and occasionally present lovers, and spiritual advisors of questionable intent.
Buddy first encounters a woman called the Unicorn Woman at a carnival in Lexington. When he first sees her, she is “like any ordinary woman . . . clad in a brown, broad-shouldered, sequined dress, brown herself,” different from the “white freaks” he discovers at most carnivals. Roped off from curious spectators yet still close enough for someone to touch, “You didn’t dare touch her or her horn. You looked but didn’t touch.” She was like a work of art in a museum. As Buddy explains to his Aunt Maggie Guy, “It’s just something that’s not done, sort of an invisible law.”
The horn appended to the woman’s forehead seems odd and freakish to the spectators, yet to Buddy, it becomes a natural extension of her body. “I wondered whether she’d polished the horn,” Buddy thinks. “I imagined her brushing it after she’d brushed her teeth.” The woman appears to be “made out of brass,” with “the sort of expression one sees on mannequins, except for an occasional flash of an indescribable expression that lets you know she has a spirit.” After several visits, the woman barely acknowledges Buddy; he is unsure whether she considers him “an obsessed man, a jokester or a lunatic.” He does not speak to her, yet she is constantly in his head, becoming a product of his private mythology.
While the Unicorn Woman is distantly mythical, the women in Buddy’s life are very real and vibrantly portrayed by Jones. Aunt Maggie, a doily maker prone to superstition, is Buddy’s confidante and moral anchor. A lighter-skinned woman of color, she expresses contempt for the ridiculous and demeaning blackfaced portrayals in Amos and Andy, a television show devotedly watched by her friend Doc “Vinnie” Leeds, an herbalist and beautician, whom Buddy later asks to “cure” the Unicorn Woman. Doc Leeds, a devoted follower of George Washington Carver, talks to flowers and claims she can “look into the heart of a rose.” Equally memorable are Buddy’s past and present lovers, perplexed by Buddy’s continuous questioning of the world, his nomadic curiosity, and his refusal simply to accept things as they are. Esta, his hometown girlfriend, works as an after-hours janitor in the public library, which does not permit Black people to borrow books. Esta is grateful for the books her boss allows her to sneak out in a laundry bag, yet she acts like Esta is “the first colored person to open a book.” Avia, a woman with whom Buddy briefly lived after the war ended, settles for a simple life in a French village where she has become a pariah while she pines for the German soldier who abandoned her and her child. Like Buddy, she is an outcast, and like Esta, she accepts her life as it is. Gladys, Buddy’s lover in Memphis, expects little from a relationship, resigned to Buddy’s lack of commitment and intermittent affection.
It is through Buddy’s distance from women that we witness his detachment. Whenever he visits Gladys in Memphis, Buddy says, “I’d bend over backwards … to make sure that she realized that my feelings for her weren’t any stronger than friendship or fondness. We were lovers but we weren’t in love.” Once, he impulsively buys Gladys a ring in a five-and-dime store, thinking it would look nice on her “piano fingers” and calls it his “almost proposal.” “I truly felt that we’d be friends forever. And yes I’d actually said ‘forever.’” Yet for Buddy, little is forever. Everything seems like an almost.
The novel’s biggest asset is its strong narrative voice. The reader is pulled into Buddy’s psyche as it drifts seamlessly through childhood memories, wartime recollections, and vivid dreams. Buddy, self-educated, deeply introspective, and cerebral, notices every detail of his surroundings. In Buddy’s mind, all experience is connected, whether real or imagined, yet ironically, Buddy feels little connection in his life.
Jones’s portrayal of life for Black people in the Jim Crow South is quietly intense – a mixture of frustration, disappointment, and hope. Having served their country, Black men return to a segregated and hostile America. White people are ungrateful for their service and more than willing to let them continue to sacrifice. Men like Buddy may be tolerated, but they are not accepted. As Gladys’s landlady reminds him, “I don’t want you to be nobody’s easy kill. You’re a stranger, even if you know the territory.”
Readers will wonder about the significance of the Unicorn Woman. Is she merely another example of Buddy’s fixation on life’s details – a chance curiosity on which he becomes infatuated, someone he is intent on understanding even if she is incapable of being understood? Or is she a larger metaphor for post-World War II Black identity, marked, ridiculed, and surrounded by “invisible laws”? Buddy overhears carnival spectators mock the woman’s horn and assume it is rooted in evil; “it’s some sin that made it grow.” Doc Leeds declines Buddy’s request to “cure” the woman. “Because that horn is her signature,” she tells Buddy. “[I] t has significance. I don’t know what that horn might mean and neither do you. . . . Maybe that horn is as special to her as her soul is. Or maybe it doesn’t have any meaning at all.” The reader is left pondering the meaning of the horn even as Buddy struggles with the significance of the woman in his life.
Jones’s novel deftly captures the disaffectedness of returning to a home that does not feel like home. Buddy Ray Guy makes a wise choice: not to commit, not to belong, not to become too comfortable. Sometimes, living in one’s own mythology is safer than making sense of reality. Sometimes, it is better to be a stranger.
FICTION The Unicorn Woman
By Gayl Jones
Beacon Press
Published August 20, 2024
0 Commentaires