Corregidora

Here is Gayl Jones’s classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the nineteenth-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.

Shifting between scenes of nineteenth-century slave life in Brazil and contemporary urban America, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora examines continuities between the physical enslavement of black women and modern cycles of abuse. Although the Corregidora women are subjected to immense violence and exploitation, Jones foregrounds their demand to overcome and commemorate their traumatic history.

From the back cover: “History and fiction have yielded little about those black slave women who were mistress and breeder to their white owners. There are some facts and figures, but they tell us nothing about the women themselves: their motives, their emotions, and the memories they passed on to their children. Gayl Jones’s first novel is a gripping portrait of this harsh sexual and psychological genealogy….Jones’s language is subtle and sinewy, and her imagination sure.” –Margo Jefferson, Newsweek