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Following her act: sequence and desire in Gayl Jones's The Healing

African American Review, Spring, 2007 by David LaCroix

Near the end of The Healing (1998), Gayl Jones's protagonist and narrator, Harlan Eagleton, undergoes an examination that compresses one of the novel's central issues: a struggle for power couched as a contest over sequence. When her employer and associate Joan Savage draws random names of Kentucky Derby-winning horses from a racing reference book, she requires Harlan to name the rider. "Who was Aristedes' jockey?" Joan asks, beginning in 1875 with the first Derby. "O. Lewis," Harlan responds. "Vagrant?" The answer: "B. Swim" (227). After moving year by year to 1882, Joan shuffles the order--1898, 1899, 1894, 1918--as if hoping to defeat any chronological mnemonic on which Harlan might rely. Even so, Harlan correctly identifies 18 jockeys. After throwing the book at Harlan in frustration, Joan ends the sequence in 1977: Seattle Slew and J. Cruquet. But this battery of questions becomes a prelude to a more personal incursion, as Joan shifts from horse racing to personal history. "Tell me some more about that ex-husband of yours," she demands, asking about a fraught time in Harlan's life. "Seem like you got a good memory for everything but that" (227). While the change of subject ends the sequence of horses and jockeys, it sustains Joan's ongoing efforts to thwart or embarrass Harlan. Earlier in the story, Joan finds her ex-husband in bed with Harlan, and the two black women become more like antagonists than friends. Despite Harlan's substantial knowledge of racing history, in this exchange Joan seems to get the better of her. Signifying on Harlan's sexual history, Joan adapts the conversational sequence to exploit the other woman's vulnerabilites.

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At the level of plot, Harlan seems to accept the sequences dictated by Joan's sense of injury, for she rarely resists Joan's aggression. But at the same level of structure, Joan's sequence is cancelled by Harlan's command of the narrative. Harlan (as narrator) defers her response (as character) until after a formal division. "My [ex-] husband, Norvelle, like I told you, is a medical anthropologist," the next chapter begins (228). The break further insulates Harlan from Joan's antagonism by directing the answer toward an audience beyond the novel, a "you" or "y'all" whom Harlan has occasionally directly addressed since the opening chapter. Harlan employs the resources of her vantage point as storyteller to embed Joan's maneuvers in a narrative sequence. She shifts among levels of sequence, and not only outdoes Joan by repeating her tactic, but gestures by extension to the use of sequence as a device of power in the world beyond their relationship. Both Jones and her characters know that to break a sequence is to make a counter-argument about the intention or ideology that the sequence supports. These interpersonal, conversational, and narrative uses of sequence have real-world equivalents outside of the novel that shape protocols of reading and of race. In this focus on sequence, The Healing retains the critique of white supremacy and its effects on the lives of black women who have been a significant part of Jones's earlier writing. The further force of this novel however, comes from its analysis of the ways that individuals are taught to replicate oppressive structures in their own lives.

Just as Joan's antagonism and Harlan's responses to it shift among levels of sequence, Jones's novel works at multiple registers to advance a combined project. Her experiments with narrative parallel her characters' preoccupation with "following," the uncritical adoption of chronological, narrative, and causal sequences. Following suspends one's agency in favor of another's direction. Jones communicates her arguments through experiments with conventions of novelistic order and meaning. The chapters unfold in a sequence that defies attempts to reconstruct a complete story-line, as Harlan places disparate events in close apposition to highlight their mutual relevance despite their distance in time. (1) She and other characters describe multiple versions of key events. The central incident of the story--when Harlan saves herself from an otherwise mortal knife wound at Joan's hands--is effectively absent, discussed only in a few lines. The narrative turns on this failed murder attempt, which precipitates a miraculous transformation: Harlan heals her wound instantaneously. Then she heals wounds and ailments all around her, for "when you discover you can heal yourself, that you simply put your hand to a wound and it heals, you soon discover that you can heal others" (281). Taken together, it appears that Harlan's physical intellectual, and narrative powers are based on the same premise: because she is not easily captivated by sequences, she has the capacity to remake them. But these disparate powers also make the same promise: that a formal revision of the apparent content of one's life could enable one to alter sequence-dependent ideologies, and transform them from controlling assumptions to pliable tropes. Jones suggests that this promise is nowhere more applicable than in resistance to racism, sexism, and white supremacy.

Following her act: sequence and desire in Gayl Jones's The Healing

African American Review, Spring, 2007 by David LaCroix

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