Butter

by Gayl Jones

Genres: African American; Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

A wide-ranging collection, including two novellas and ten stories exploring complex identities, from the acclaimed author of Corregidora, The Healing, and Palmares

“Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable . . . and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched.”
—Imani Perry, author of, Looking for Lorraine and Breathe

Gayl Jones, who was first edited by Toni Morrison, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. This new collection of short fiction is only the second in her rich career, and one that displays her strengths in the genre in many facets. Opening with two novella-length works, “Butter” and “Sophia,” this collection features Jones’s legendary talents in a range of settings and styles, from the hyper-realist to the mystical, in intricate multi-part stories, in more traditional forms, and even in short fragments.

Her narrators are women and men, Black, Brown, Indigenous; her settings are historical and contemporary, in South America, Mexico and the US; her themes center on complex identities, unorthodox longings and aspirations. She writes about spies, photographers, playground designers, cartoonists, and baristas, about workers and revolutionaries, about environmentalism, feminism, poetry, film and love, but above all about our multicultural, multiethnic and multiracial society.

Release date: April 4, 2023

Publisher: Beacon Press

Print pages: 200

Sample

BUTTER A novella

She buys one of those new Japanese-made, filmless cameras in order to photograph Remunda Eadweard. That’s how Remunda spells her last name—Eadweard, not Edward. It’s an ancient spelling of the name, perhaps going back to the time of Beowulf. A lot of modern people are spelling their last names like that again, returning to the original spelling from ancient or medieval times. It’s very much in vogue. But as far as she knows, Remunda’s family has always spelled its name that way.

But why does she spend so much time thinking about the name and about those years? First, it’s important to know that Remunda Eadweard is her mother and that she met her for the first time in a café in London years ago. Or rather a pub, to be more exact. Remunda has thick, black hair and is not thoroughly English but a mixture of English, Welsh, Irish, Danish, and Swedish. Well, you can see her for yourself in the photograph her daughter Odelle has taken.

Once when Odelle was sitting in a Manhattan restaurant, before she met Remunda, she overheard two English women talking. She tried to picture Remunda as the woman they were referring to, though she’d see other people’s pictures of Remunda and knew the description didn’t possibly fit. But every time she hears an English voice, she tries to imagine it’s Remunda’s, or someone who knows her. Anyway, this is what she overheard:

“She looks like an ordinary girl from Liverpool, if y’ask me. But she’s the daughter of famous people, so everyone wants to photograph her. She looks like an ordinary girl to me, and her teeth are crooked.”

She glanced about to see them thumbing through a copy of the French magazine Elle. They were eating marmalade on toast. One of the women was dabbing at crumbs with her forefinger. They were younger than they sounded, perhaps her age in those days. Thirtyish. One was petite with short, raisin-black hair. The other was a blonde. There was the smell of oranges and powdered sugar.

“I see her every day,” said the other. “That same face, y’know. You see it everywhere and nobody’s breaking down doors to get a picture of it.”

“But I bet she enjoys knowing that, knowing that they wouldn’t be at all interested in her for who she is. Don’t y’think she enjoys knowing that?”

“She looks like any milkmaid, if y’ask me.”

“We should go down to Miami and sit in the sun.”

“I sunburn easily.”

“I could live in the sun.”

“It’s just my forehead I’ve got to worry about. It peels.”

“And I love the feel of water. I never swim. I tiptoe into the ocean.”

“I can picture you at Brighton.”

“I never go to Brighton, dear.”

One of the women had a Fujica Auto Focus camera on the table.

She started to take pictures of her friend.

“Oh, no you don’t,” said the other one. “I’m not very photogenic. Everyone tells me how pretty I am, and then when you see me in a photo, I’m just not photogenic. Some gals who look great in pictures, you wouldn’t even notice on the street.”

Odelle took out her pen and jotted on the napkin a list of things she needed to buy: film, a new battery for the camera meter, PX13 and PX625 batteries, lens cleaner, lens cleaning tissues, lens brush, 100% rag paper for mounting prints, Vivitar Bigmouth Developing Tank trays, color print drums, Omega analyzer, exposure computer. One needed all of that paraphernalia then.

In the booth across from her, a man was eating pizza and the woman with him, noodles with bits of seafood. The woman kept loading noodles on her fork and hogging it down. The man nibbled.

But for a long time, Odelle had stopped photographing people and took up photographing things. It became an obsession, a compulsion. She photographed everything: the corners of rooms, a pink radiator, a carpet stain, Scotch tape, butter. She was really banalyzing the art. Still, they put some of the photos in a museum, and she labeled the show Private Subjectivism and she actually had buyers. So she continued taking photographs of such inconsequentialities; that people actually bought them made her shrug and wonder. The gallery director praised them; she talked about how such photographs looked easier to take than they actually were. It’s harder than it looks to take a really good photograph, she said. And what did Odelle think? Which ones were her favorites? Odelle answered that her favorite pictures were the ones she hadn’t intended, those she didn’t realize she’d taken until after she’d developed the photo. The gallery director said that wasn’t exactly what she meant.

It was Dante who suggested that she go and visit Remunda. Or rather who was the catalyst for what she always wanted to do anyway. But needed the push or nerve. She remembered it like she remembers everything, as a continuing present, even those old days: she is photographing Dante, her boyfriend, the musician and composer, who is sitting at his piano. She photographs him first and then the sheets of composer’s paper piled on top of the piano. Music manuscript paper, he calls it. It’s a thin paper he orders especially from a company in Youngstown, Ohio, because it has multiple staves. He always orders the twelve-stave, deluxe pad. But she can’t remember why it’s better than any other music manuscript paper. And he has a blueprint machine. What does a musician need with a blueprint machine? And he keeps a list of other places where the multiple-stave paper can be gotten; it can be gotten at Educator’s Music in Cleveland, Harris Teller’s in Chicago, Volkwein’s Music in Pittsburg. And the first time he asked her, “Have you seen my master?” she didn’t know what in the hell he meant. “Master,” he repeated. “You know.” No, she didn’t know. He went about and found it himself. Made her feel stupid that she didn’t know. When anyone said “master,” the only thing she could think of was slavery, not music. Then he played the piece. She’d gone out onto the terrace, but it traveled to her, changing as it came. It sneaked up on her and nudged her shoulder and said, “I’m what you like.” She tried to stay indifferent to it, but it made her dance. Standing against the music, she rested her chin on its shoulder. She interlaced her fingers with its fingers. The music got closer and whispered something.

She couldn’t quite hear it. But then there was Dante standing there at the glass doors, watching her. He came out onto the terrace, and she held her head up simply, and they kissed.

“Need something to distract me,” she says.

“What?”

She says it again.

“I don’t mean to bore you with my problem,” she says.

“Sure you mean to.”

She tries to remember the guy who advised his son never to entertain other people with his personal problems and private affairs. “Though they’re interesting to you,” he said. “They’re tedious and impertinent to everyone else.”

She’s had a string of boyfriends, real ones and dream ones: an electrician, a plumber, a high school football coach, a motorcycle repairman, a welder in an automobile plant, a diver, a coast guardsman, a gardener, an organizer of socialist cooperatives, mostly rough-and-ready types. She didn’t know how the organizer sneaked in there. Was he the sort who’d please Remunda? Dante was born in Nassau in the Bahamas and composes contemporary music that has its base in the music of Junkanoo.

She photographs the piano keys. She photographs Dante reaching up and scratching notes on composer’s paper. She photographs a “master.” She photographs some sheet music. She lights up one of the Chesterfields they keep for houseguests.

“Leave me some peace, just for a minute,” he mumbles.

She goes into the kitchen and photographs condiments. Salt, pepper, garlic powder, onion powder, cinnamon. She returns to the living room, grabs a handful of Chesterfields, then goes into the darkroom. She leans against the darkroom wall and smokes one cigarette, one after another.

After a while, Dante comes to the darkroom door and knocks. “You okay in there?” he asks.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Come on, let’s go to dinner.”

She exits with a handful of cigarette butts.

“You smoke all o’ that crap?” he asks. “That’s the worst crap in the wul for ya.”

“Then how come we keep ’em for the guests?” she asks.

“Their choice,” he says.

In the kitchen she dumps the butts into the trash compactor.

She thinks of her last showing of photographs—the one of inconsequentialities.

What do you feel taking pictures? An interviewer had asked her once.

What do you mean what do I feel? she’d asked.

I mean does it make you feel well, I don’t know. Safe or in danger?

I just feel.

Well, what do you mean by feel?

She didn’t answer.

But do you think that the photographs are truly worthy of our attention, I mean, that photograph of butter, for example? And aren’t you Remunda Eadweard’s daughter?

Remunda . . . How’d you know about Remunda?

She sits back in one of the straight-back chairs along the wall while the interviewer rattles off her biography: A war baby, born in London. Her father, an Afro-American—do you prefer Black or Afro-American?—soldier stationed in London. They met in a bomb shelter during the Blitz. Very romantic, etc. Her father brought her back to America when she was still a baby. How come? But that’s not the usual war-baby story, is it? I mean, don’t most GIs just leave the kid? Korea, Vietnam, and all? . . .

She says nothing. Remunda’s a photographic journalist and art photographer who takes real photographs—the Biafran War, Guinea Bissau; or real landscapes—Futa Jallon highlands or those of Southern Algeria; or real people—brick makers in Guyana or Sotho potters; or exotic animals—the oribi. No common zebras for Remunda. In fact, she has a signed book of photographs—signed from Remunda, with love. What does a camera feel? Next to Remunda’s photographs, hers seem the most inconsequential in the world.

“Lock up your camera, take a holiday, why don’t you?” Dante had asked back then. “Maybe you should go visit Remunda, why don’t you?”

Lock up your cameras? Imagine that? Imagine telling him to lock up his piano? Or his keyboard? Or his music?

And in fact, when he said that, she looked at him in wonder, not because of the prate about locking up her cameras, but that he even knew who Remunda was. She’d forgotten ever having told him about Remunda. Well, at least naming her. He persisted with the bit about locking the cameras up, and then he said, “Go to London. Maybe you’ll come back and take better pictures.”

“My pictures ain’t half bad,” she mumbled.

“Recharge,” he said.

As they walk down the street toward the restaurant, she looks at their reflections superimposed over objects in the glass windows: wine glasses, a VCR, candelabra, sweatshirts. “Palimpsest” pops into her head. Palimpsest, though, has to do with words, doesn’t it, not images. It always surprises her that her reflection is so fair and Dante’s, so dark. She doesn’t feel her color. She feels darker. She read somewhere that Robert Redford had said he didn’t feel blond; he felt like a brunet; he felt dark. She feels like a darker woman. Up North sometimes, too, they mistake her for a white woman. Only in the South do they seem to know she’s Black. Or Afro-American.

Someone behind them with a radio passes. She hears snippets of Joe Cocker’s “I’m a Civilized Man.” “You’re lucky I’m a civilized man,” he sings to a woman who’d done ’im wrong. You’re lucky I’m a civilized woman, she thinks, though Dante hasn’t actually done ’er wrong. What could she say of him? Sometimes it seems like he’s on one planet and she’s on another. Sometimes she travels to his to meet him; other times she invites him to hers. He surveys her planet, explores it, discovers things, but always goes back to his own.

Shouldn’t lovers journey to a new world, neither one’s nor the other’s? Once, looking out at the ocean, Dante said, “That ocean’s a perfect blue.” But it wasn’t blue at all to her; it was green. He swam and bathed in the sun, and she roamed about taking pictures of lovers, triple exposed. As she photographed, she kept trying to remember what it was Flaubert had said about passion. She’d written a paper on it for a Comparative Literature class in college, a whole paper, and she couldn’t remember now what it was at all. They had read La Rochefoucauld and Rousseau, but nobody Black, nobody African, in those days, and one Asian woman whose name she couldn’t remember, Lady something. She’d wanted to write her paper on Achebe or Tutuola, but she’d chickened out and done someone safe: Flaubert. Nothing magnifies passion like art? Was that it? The lovers whose pictures she took seemed like such small souls, embracing, but when she blew their pictures up . . . Well, nothing magnifies passion like art. But did she dare call it art? Quincunx she called that series of five lovers, triple exposed.

“Hungry?” he asks.

“Some,” she replies.

“Let’s grab a bite t’eat in here,” he says.

She thinks he means Horn and Hardart’s, but he’s glanced toward the right.

“Okay,” she says. “Was that lyricist really named Glasscock, the one who sent you those lyrics?”

It’s redundant, but she feels redundant sometimes. Lyricists are always sending him lyrics.

“Naw, the song was called ‘Glasscock Island.’ Maybe change it to ‘Glass Island.’ Now that would be a title.”

“You darn right.”

Pushing in glass doors, they touch their own reflections. Inside, stranger, latent images. Dante directs her away from the crowd toward a corner table. In the background, a woman’s tender, idle comment. Odelle orders a salad. ...