Praise for Gayl Jones

‘A literary giant, and one of my favourite writers’ Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage

‘Jones’s writing powerfully blends narrative and lyricism … Her imagination seems to thrive on outstripping one’s expectations’ Margo Jefferson, author of Constructing a Nervous System

‘Gayl Jones is a literary legend … A once-in-a-lifetime work of literature, the kind that changes your understanding of the world’ Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of there are more things, on Palmares

‘A fascinating meditation on Black female creativity … Vivid characters shimmer through the pages’ Guardian on The Birdcatcher

‘As a Black women writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humour and incisiveness, is unmatched’ Imani Perry, author of Looking for Lorraine

‘Tremendous. A masterfully absorbing, mythic work from a vital voice. The gods have conspired to gift us a new book from Gayl Jones and my what a gloriously eddying read’ Irenosen Okojie, author of Nudibranch, on Palmares

‘Page after breathtaking page, her prose is intricate, mesmerizing, and endlessly inventive and subversive’ Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, on Palmares

‘After suffering the author’s absence for far too long, we – the witnesses longing for texts like hers, the borderline sacred – can rejoice at her return’ Robert Jones, Jr, New York Times on Palmares

‘Jones is an outstanding writer … a shining segment of the American literary canon has been restored’ Times Literary Supplement on Palmares

‘Gayl Jones, recognized since the 1970s as one of America’s most important black writers, is breaking new literary ground and performing a laudable act of historical redemption’ New York Review of Books on Palmares

‘Jones’s feats of linguistic and historical invention are on ample display … She has boldly set out to convey racial struggle in its deep-seated and disorienting complexity – Jones sees the whole where most only see pieces’ Atlantic on Palmares

‘An intricate, imaginative story of love and brutality … After a two-decade absence, Jones is back with a formidable novel’ Observer on Palmares

About the Author

Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, and has taught at Wellesley and the University of Michigan. Her books include Corregidora, Eva’s Man, and The Healing, which was a National Book Award finalist; Palmares, which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in fiction and longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize; and The Birdcatcher, which was a 2022 National Book Award finalist.

ALSO BY GAYL JONES

FICTION

Corregidora

Eva’s Man

White Rat

The Healing

Mosquito

Palmares

The Birdcatcher

Butter

POETRY COLLECTIONS

Song for Anninho

The Hermit-Woman

Xarque and Other Poems

Song for Almeyda and Song for Anninho

OTHER WORKS

Chile Woman

Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African

American Literature

THE  
UNICORN
WOMAN

GAYL JONES

Copyright

Published by Virago

ISBN: 978-0-349-01690-0

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2024 by Gayl Jones

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Excerpt(s) from INVISIBLE MAN by Ralph Ellison, copyright 1947, 1948, 1952 by Ralph Ellison. Copyright © renewed 1975, 1976, 1980 by Ralph Ellison. Used by permission of Penguin Classics, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

“I’ll Go to Nineveh and Preach,” “In God We Trust,” “Ode to Guidance,” “God Didn’t Say to the Black Man He Made,” “Love’s Such a Wonderful Thing,” “God’s Ones,” “My Blood Is for Thee,” “The Toast God Made to Man,” and excerpts from “Appeal for Progress,” by Lucille Jones, are printed here by permission. © 2022 Lucille Jones. All rights reserved.

Text design and composition by Kim Arney

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Virago

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

For my father, Franklin Jones,
a World War II veteran (Army)

And my brother, Franklin Taylor Jones,
a Vietnam veteran (Army and Navy)

But for God’s sake, learn to look beneath the surface.

—RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man

By going from spot to spot, talking to this person and that one, I had gotten this reality as it seeped into me from the personalities of others.

—RICHARD WRIGHT, Black Power

Are you sure this legend is the real one?

—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE, “Windows”

Come, Sancho, and behold what you have to see but not to believe; make haste, my son, and learn what wizards and enchanters are able to accomplish … there are many kinds of enchantment and perhaps they change with the times from one kind to another.

—MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote

I figure the unicorn must be good for something.

—ANONYMOUS UNICORN HUNTER

Je suis né avec la dernière disposition à la tendresse, et, comme tous mes efforts n’ont pu vaincre les penchants que j’avais à l’amour, j’ai cherché à me rendre heureux, c’est-à-dire autant qu’on peut l’être avec un coeur sensible. …

Vous me direz sans doute qu’il faut être poète pour aimer de cette manière: mais, pour moi, je crois qu’il n’y a qu’une sorte d’amour, et que les gens qui n’ont point senti de semblables délicatesses n’ont jamais véritablement aimé.

—LES INTRIGUES DE MOLIÈRE

Why not a black unicorn?

—DUDLEY RANDALL

Everything begins with an idea …

—DON STEELE, Symbolism and Modernity

BOOK I

A Young Man’s Fancy