{"id":144550,"date":"2020-04-23T13:52:02","date_gmt":"2020-04-23T17:52:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144550"},"modified":"2020-04-23T16:19:46","modified_gmt":"2020-04-23T20:19:46","slug":"re-covered-a-black-female-beat-novel-from-the-1960s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/04\/23\/re-covered-a-black-female-beat-novel-from-the-1960s\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Covered: A Black Female Beat Novel from the Sixties"},"content":{"rendered":"

In her monthly column,<\/em>\u00a0Re-Covered, Lucy Scholes exhumes the out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn\u2019t be.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

When I read the extract from the writer and activist J. J. Phillips\u2019s novel Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale<\/em> in Margaret Busby\u2019s groundbreaking Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present<\/em> (1992), I immediately knew that I had to track down a copy. Phillips\u2019s writing is raw, but it\u2019s astonishingly lyrical, too, mesmerizingly so. Later, trying to find out more about the book, I came across the novelist and academic John O. Killens\u2019s verdict in Ebony <\/em>magazine, congratulating Phillips for having \u201ccaptured the beauty of Negro language and put it down without fear.\u201d This is all the more impressive a feat considering she was only twenty-two years old when this, her debut novel, was first published in 1966.<\/p>\n

Reading Mojo Hand<\/em> in its entirety only confirmed my initial impression; it was unlike anything else I\u2019ve read. It was also a book I\u2019d never heard any mention of outside Busby\u2019s anthology, which seemed particularly bewildering given its strange, unique power. I quickly came to agree with the American historian, novelist, music critic, and longtime\u00a0Village Voice<\/em> columnist Nat Hentoff, who, in 2015, described it novel as \u201cthe most neglected book I know.\u201d Perhaps this disregard has an explanation. Reading it today, it\u2019s clear that Phillips was a writer ahead of her era, and Mojo Hand<\/em>, as summed up by the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning poet Carolyn Kizer, was simply \u201ctoo rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.\u201d<\/p>\n

Drawing on the majesty and might of a Greek myth, it tells the story of a light-skinned black woman from San Francisco named Eunice Prideaux, who has abandoned the comforts of her middle-class life and traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, in search of Blacksnake Brown, a blues singer whose music has cast a powerful spell over her: an \u201cOrpheus with a diamond in his teeth,\u201d who \u201cheralded the sun\u201d with his guitar, \u201cthe instrument that became a part of him.\u201d Blacksnake is loosely based on the real-life blues musician Lightnin\u2019 Hopkins, whose music Phillips became obsessed with when she was eighteen. The Blacksnake in her novel is old and mean and treats Eunice badly, but she\u2019s a woman possessed. It\u2019s a love story, for sure, but not one that deals in anything close to romantic stereotypes. As one reviewer described it, Eunice and Blacksnake\u2019s entanglement is \u201ca nasty love.\u201d As such, it\u2019s perhaps unsurprising that when the book first appeared, its strange mixture of mystical, musical, and sexual enchantment elicited both impassioned praise and fervent condemnation. Some, like Killens, applauded the arrival of a talented new voice, while others found fault with a work they simply couldn\u2019t get a handle on. Writing in the Negro Digest<\/em>, Hoyt W. Fuller declared the book formally defective, while the literary and jazz critic Albert Murray completely tore it to shreds in The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture <\/em>(1970), accusing Phillips of both terrible writing and perpetuating unflattering racial stereotypes:<\/p>\n

That its young author would rather be a novelist than a social science expert is somehow clear enough; but as yet her conception of the art of fiction is as aboriginal as that of certain widely patronized Negro literary figures who have yet to realize that banal sayings, slang anecdotes, dirty remarks, and bad song lyrics do not become literature simply because they are published in book form.<\/p>\n

Following a 1986 reprint, and UK publication the following year, Mojo Hand <\/em>garnered a smattering of further critical acclaim. Most of these write-ups acknowledged that the novel hadn\u2019t received the attention it deserved the first time around; audiences in the eighties didn\u2019t regard the book as anywhere near as problematic as some in the sixties had. No one, for example, reiterated Murray\u2019s complaints. Although there were\u2014and are\u2014still obstacles to overcome, much had changed in the twenty years that had passed between editions. Today, we\u2019ve come closer to understanding that representations of characters of color should be afforded the same privileges as those of their white counterparts, including the privilege of weakness and imperfection. A character ought to be able to be flawed\u2014whether complicated and cruel or misogynistic and violent\u2014without the charge that this reflects badly on the rest of their race. \u201cIn a decade during which American readers are rediscovering and celebrating the misprized (and even suppressed) voices of black women writers,\u201d wrote James A. Snead in the Los Angeles Times<\/em> in 1986, praising the relevance of the novel\u2019s reissue, \u201cMojo Hand <\/em>represents a most timely and impressive spiritual chronicle.\u201d I firmly believe that audiences today would be even keener to embrace what\u2019s clearly a trailblazing work of fiction. In fact, despite its uniqueness, if I had to compare the novel to anything, it would be to Fran Ross\u2019s brilliant Oreo<\/em> (1974)\u2014the story of a young biracial fourteen-year-old who runs away from her black grandparents, with whom she lives, and goes in search of her white, Jewish father\u2014which was reissued to much praise by New Directions in 2015. They\u2019re completely different books\u2014not least because Oreo<\/em> is a rollicking picaresque comedy, which Mojo Hand <\/em>certainly isn\u2019t\u2014but they both broke the mold and completely defied expectations when it came to the subjects readers expected from young black women writers. They\u2019re both loosely based on a Greek myth\u2014Oreo <\/em>on the myth of Theseus, and Mojo Hand <\/em>on that of Orpheus\u2014and each is an unexpected take on a certain political moment. Ross\u2019s novel was published at the height of the Black Power movement but it\u2019s a story about a black woman on a mission to find her whiteness, while Phillips\u2019s novel was a far cry from the serious \u201csocial issues\u201d work many surely expected a young civil rights activist to pen in the early days of the civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Having, at the very beginning of the novel, arrived in Raleigh with nothing but her guitar, Eunice soon finds herself living with Blacksnake, working at a hotel-cum-whorehouse, and spending her meager wages on beer and gin. Murray\u2019s criticism that the book perpetuates racist stereotype aren\u2019t entirely baseless. The men Eunice encounters, Blacksnake included, are, by and large, drunk, abusive, and only after one thing. They treat women terribly, using them for sex, or as unpaid laborers. And the women, although unfairly put-upon, aren\u2019t much better; they drink and talk dirty. Fuller\u2019s complaint that the novel is \u201calmost plotless\u201d is also a fair observation. There\u2019s a virtuosic early interlude during which, having been mistaken for a prostitute, Eunice is locked up in the county jail for two weeks. Then, toward the end of the book, after her relationship with Blacksnake has soured, she travels as far as Lake Charles in a half-hearted attempt to escape his clutches, only to find herself drawn back into his orbit. Otherwise, not that much happens. The pleasures of Mojo Hand<\/em> lie elsewhere: in Phillips\u2019s powerful portrait of her protagonist\u2019s search for her black roots, her depiction of the magnetism of Blacksnake and his music, and the hypnotic rhythms and power of her unvarnished yet luxuriant prose. Mojo Hand<\/em> is infused throughout with the smoky, boozy atmosphere of a late-night blues joint. It\u2019s a novel of intense feeling\u2014something that contemporary readers are now finally more familiar with\u2014in which Phillips creates a potent sense of place and mood. Her portrait of downtown Raleigh, where most of the book is set, is a sort of underworld\u2014\u201cunpaved streets crowded with ramshackle houses as close together as a mouth full of rotten teeth,\u201d with its pool halls and beer parlors\u2014fueled by cheap liquor and love, where violence, jealousy, and pain lurk in dark corners.<\/p>\n

The novel begins with Eunice stepping off the train into the \u201cblack heat\u201d of the South. It isn\u2019t until she winds up in jail that we\u2019re afforded a glimpse of where she\u2019s come from: a world of cotillions and \u201csociety women of eternal agelessness\u201d gathering for \u201ctea and talk.\u201d Bored and restless at one such soiree, Eunice thumbs through a stack of records, switching out the classical tune playing on the phonograph for Blacksnake Brown\u2019s \u201cBakershop Blues.\u201d The effect is instantaneous. She hears \u201cshouts and shrieks\u201d from the other room: \u201cEveryone had relaxed. Some women were unbuckling their stockings, others were loosening the belts around their waists. Someone had gotten out brandy and was pouring it into the teacups.\u201d It\u2019s a moment of Damascene clarity: Eunice realizes that \u201cshe had to go find the source of herself, this music that moved her and the others, however much they tried to deny it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the novel, the blues aren\u2019t just something people play, they\u2019re bound up in the very essence of blackness, something one\u2019s \u201cborn with,\u201d even if\u2014as is the case with Eunice\u2014they weren\u2019t strictly born into<\/em> it:<\/p>\n

Until this night she had been outside of the cage, but now she had joined them forever. The wizened jiving man had been the instrument by which she acknowledged her kinship to him and all those others who daily were squeezed into nonexistence, and nightly, in the ripe heat, violently asserted their being. His music was the music of such nights, the music of the evening resurrection of an entire people.<\/p>\n

Phillips\u2019s \u201cinsider\u2019s knowledge\u201d of the blues, as Kizer described it, was much praised by the critics who recognized the novel\u2019s brilliance. \u201cWhat comes through is music: the music of language, the music of the blues, the anguished music of black America,\u201d declared the Baltimore Sun<\/em>. Phillips conveys the eroticism of the music, how the blues tell stories of sex and love, and pain and damage, music-making bound up in lovemaking. As she describes Eunice and Blacksnake playing together:<\/p>\n

He had told her not to sing so much, yet he sang violently as he plucked the accompaniment from her pliable essence. Desisting and yielding like a properly drawn string, being was given and taken and given again. Raucously and inaudibly the blues spilled forth, whirled down and sprang up again, with only a creaking bed to hold the demands of their tension.<\/p>\n

But Mojo Hand <\/em>is also a portrait of a woman ensnared and ill-treated. Fuller\u2019s description of Eunice as moving through the book \u201clike a somnambulist\u201d is perfect. But whereas he sees this as a flaw\u2014indicative of Phillips\u2019s inability to account for or explain her character\u2019s motivations\u2014on the contrary, I would argue that this is absolutely integral to the novel\u2019s peculiar, hypnotic power. It\u2019s less a love story about individuals and more a tale of mystical, mythic proportions. \u201cMojo Hand <\/em>is as sophisticated as primitive sculpture, and has the same element of magic,\u201d critic Harriet Doar concluded in the Charlotte Observer<\/em>. \u201cThe characters move along invisible threads, as if under a spell.\u201d This enchantment reaches out beyond the margins to intoxicate the reader. After the first flush of attraction with Blacksnake has faded, Eunice sinks lower and lower into \u201cthe drudgery of the days,\u201d caught in \u201cthose treasonous blues and the man weaving sabotage in her with the craft of his hands.\u201d At her wit\u2019s end, she seeks out a \u201cspiritual mother\u201d called Madame Karplus, who ties up a \u201cmojo hand\u201d\u2014a magical charm that induces luck, in this case bad luck\u2014against Blacksnake. Theirs is an affair that, \u201cgiven the Orphic parallels,\u201d according to Snead, \u201cends with tragic predictability.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

So what of Phillips\u2019s relationship with Lightnin\u2019 Hopkins, the real-life Blacksnake Brown? Phillips grew up in Los Angeles, in a progressive African American family\u2014\u201cfor all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Caucasians in visage and speech.\u201d \u201cFrom early on,\u201d she told Alan Govenar, author of Lightnin\u2019 Hopkins: His Life and Blues <\/em>(2010)\u2014the only analysis of the novel and the author\u2019s life that I\u2019ve been able to find\u2014\u201cI was exposed to varieties of cultural expression, including dress, food, music, language, dialects, idiolects, ways of looking at the world and inhabiting it.\u201d All the same, her first year at Immaculate Heart College broadened her horizons even further. In guest lectures by the musicologist Peter Yates, she was \u201cgrabbed\u201d by the folk and blues music he introduced. Then, that summer, spurred on by \u201cthe galvanizing force\u201d of the previous years\u2019 Freedom Rides, she went to Raleigh to join the civil rights movement. There she participated in the voter registration program organized by the National Student Association, going door to door to sign up unregistered black voters. Afterward, she remained in town \u201cto engage in independent direct action strikes just to shake up the status quo.\u201d While participating in a CORE-sponsored sit-in at the local Howard Johnson\u2019s restaurant, Phillips was arrested, convicted of trespassing, and sentenced to thirty days in the Wake County jail. It was an episode that, looking back on it in an essay she wrote in 2016, she described as \u201can immersive intensive in which I got the kind of real-life education I could never have obtained otherwise.\u201d It also provided her with firsthand experience on which to draw when writing about Eunice\u2019s time in lockup.<\/p>\n

Back in Los Angeles for her sophomore year, Phillips delved ever deeper into black roots music. She found herself captivated by Samuel Charters\u2019s description of the enigmatic Lightnin\u2019 in The Country Blues <\/em>(1959). Charters had traveled to Houston to track the elusive musician down, and Phillips wanted to see if she could do the same. Thanksgiving break, 1962, she and her roommate Krista Balatony each told their parents that they were going to spend the holiday at a friend\u2019s house in nearby Montecito. Instead, they took the Sunset Limited\u2014\u201choboing in coach by keeping one step away from the conductor\u201d\u2014all the way to Houston. Once there, they asked around until someone was able to help them find the man they were looking for. They spent every night of their stay in the Snowboat Lounge listening to Lightnin\u2019 play. Phillips\u2014who\u2019d bought along her guitar\u2014jammed with him after hours.<\/p>\n

Their trip was brief; they soon returned to school. But, only a few months later, Phillips was expelled. The official reason given was violation of her dorm curfew, but as she wrote in the 2016 essay, \u201cit is my firm conviction that I was railroaded out of this almost exclusively white, Catholic women\u2019s college because I had become an \u2018inconvenient Negro\u2019 and the administration considered my race and my civil rights activities liabilities.\u201d There was, as she pointed out to Govenar, no small irony in her situation: \u201cI\u2019d gone to Raleigh to help eradicate racism, I\u2019d gone to jail and <\/em>I\u2019d been a passenger in a car that was chased by the Klan\u2014I literally put my life on the line for my convictions, only to return to Los Angeles to be done in by the very beast I had gone South to slay\u2014at the very institution I had naively put my trust in.\u201d<\/p>\n

No longer tethered to the West Coast, Phillips returned to Houston in 1964, embarking on a sexual relationship with Lightnin\u2019 that lasted for the next five years. As Govenar clarifies, Mojo Hand<\/em> is in no way straight autobiography; many of the details are entirely invented\u2014Blacksnake\u2019s physical violence toward Eunice, for example. But much of the background color of the story was gleaned from Phillips\u2019s firsthand experience, not least the existence of a rival for Lightnin\u2019s affections: the woman he referred to as his wife, Antoinette. In the novel Blacksnake has a spouse in Lake Charles, to whom he returns toward the end of the story, leaving Eunice \u201clike some lonesome ghost.\u201d In reality, however, Phillips was the one who realized that her relationship with Lightnin\u2019 was no longer tenable. Her parents were threatening to come and drag her back to California by force, and Antoinette was promising to do her some damage\u2014\u201cput some Louisiana hoodoo on me or shoot me\u201d\u2014so she cut her losses, bowing out gracefully. Back in Los Angeles, she got a job as a fry cook and began work on Mojo Hand<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Phillips didn\u2019t sit down to write the novel with publication in mind. She wrote it entirely for her own satisfaction\u2014in an attempt to compose something that \u201cincorporated some of my experiences and impressions of that most memorable summer\u201d in Raleigh, her self-confessed \u201cfascination\u201d with Lightnin\u2019, and what she described as her \u201cabiding interest in herpetology, especially the blacksnake\u201d\u2014but when she showed it to one of her old teachers (also a writer) at Immaculate Heart, \u201cbecause I hoped he would tell the nuns that I could actually accomplish something even though they\u2019d expelled me,\u201d he sent it straight to his agent, who sold it almost immediately. It took Phillips\u2014who is still alive today\u2014thirty years to publish her follow-up, The Passion of Joan Paul II: A Pasquinade <\/em>(1996), a slim work of satire on the papacy. And only one further work has appeared since, a poem, Nigga in the Woodpile: A Rant and Commentary <\/em>(2008). Both were released by small independent presses and received scant critical attention. Had Mojo Hand<\/em> marked the beginning of the celebrated writing career it seemed to promise, surely it would be better known today.<\/p>\n

Although it\u2019s definitely not a depiction of the civil rights activism of the sixties\u2014indeed, Phillips slyly includes a scene in which an NSA representative comes knocking on Blacksnake and Eunice\u2019s door to try to register them to vote, but neither of them sees any point in doing so\u2014Mojo Hand <\/em>was forged in that climate of radical resistance and revolution. Speaking with Govenar, Phillips explained that in its own way, the novel reflected her personal political awakening, something its detractors universally failed to recognize. She describes it as \u201ca story of one person\u2019s journey from a non-radicalized state to the radicalized real world, as was happening to me.\u201d I can understand that it might have confused some readers; given the active role Phillips had taken in the civil rights movement, Mojo Hand <\/em>is probably not the novel many would have predicted she would write as a consequence of her experiences. But in my mind, this only makes it more interesting. \u201cIt was against the grain when it was written, inasmuch as it is a political novel at all it is deeply skeptical,\u201d John Williams astutely observed in his review of the book in the British magazine The Face <\/em>in 1988, \u201crather it\u2019s a kind of female beat novel.\u201d I couldn\u2019t agree more; Mojo Hand<\/em> is the story of a young woman\u2019s quest for her own identity and empowerment. And, inasmuch as the personal is the political, it\u2019s no coincidence, for example, that as the story draws to a close, it\u2019s Eunice\u2019s music\u2014music that in the course of the novel has become increasingly powerful and evocative\u2014that\u2019s replaced Blacksnake\u2019s: \u201cThey say that when a man gets the blues, he catch a train and rides, and when a woman gets the blues, she hang her head and cries,\u201d she sings, \u201cbut when this woman gets the blues, she puts on her black wings and flies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Re-Covered here<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Lucy Scholes is a critic who lives in London. She writes for the\u00a0<\/em>NYR Daily,<\/em>\u00a0The Financial Times,<\/em>\u00a0The New York Times Book Review,\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Literary Hub, among other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As summed up by the Pulitzer-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, this book was simply \u201ctoo rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1670,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[46439],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-re-covered"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRe-Covered: A Black Female Beat Novel from the Sixties by Lucy Scholes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 23, 2020 \u2013 As summed up by the Pulitzer-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, this book was simply \u201ctoo rich a mix for the time in which it appeared.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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