Jiggs and Other Stories Vondell Jones
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University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 7-12-2014 Jiggs and Other Stories Vondell Jones Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Recommended Citation Jones, Vondell. "Jiggs and Other Stories." (2014). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/79 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Vondell C. Jones Candidate English Department This dissertation is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication: Approved by the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sharon Oard Warner , Chairperson Dr. Julie Shigekuni Dr. Jerome Shea Dr. Kadeshia Matthews i JIGGS AND OTHER STORIES by VONDELL C. JONES B.A., Communications, Westminster College, 2005 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May 2014 ii © 2014 Vondell Jones All rights reserved iii Acknowledgements It goes without saying that anyone who accomplishes anything of merit owes a debt of thanks to those who’ve helped shape the vision and who’ve provided inspiration and support when the goal seemed uncertain. I don’t know if it is enough to merely thank the UNM professors whose patience and knowledge has served as a bedrock of encouragement but I am compelled to acknowledge my newfound heroes and heroines. My sincere thanks go to University of New Mexico’s (UNM) entire English Department faculty, with special thanks to professors Jerome Shea, Julie Shigekuni, Dan Mueller, Marissa Greenberg, and Sharon O. Warner. These educators have had a noticeable and lasting impact on my writing as well as my desire to write. The guidance I’ve received at UNM has elevated my writing. I’ve benefited from courses such as professor Shea’s Writing with Tropes and Stylistics Analysis classes in which I was introduced to rhetorical techniques designed to improve style and clarity of thought. Creative writing workshops and one-on-one sessions with professors Shigekuni and Mueller have given me a wider perspective of my own work as well as for the work of other writers. Professor Warner’s instructive novella class taught me how to apply effective principles regarding character development and plot structure. Under this guidance, I now better understand the craft and forensics of writing. My UNM experience has given me confidence and increased my desire to write and enhanced my ability. Part of my motivation to write will be to justify the gifts given to me by so many UNM professionals. iv JIGGS AND OTHER STORIES By Vondell Jones B.A., Communications, Westminster College, 2005 Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing, University of New Mexico, 2014 Abstract Jiggs and Other Stories represent a diverse sampling of my work as a University of New Mexico graduate student and a writer of fiction. The works presented here are a pastiche of genres that include magical realism, tragedy, absurdist fiction, and fantasy and adventure. Beyond those significant categories, however, these stories are the product of my imagination. The power of fiction itself—I’d like to believe—depends upon the capacities of the mind. When knowledge, experience, restless imagination and bold creativity are combined—good fiction supersedes the boundaries of literary categorization. My intention, in part, is to have these stories serve as an homage to many of my preferred authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, Carson McCullers, John O’Hara and other American writers as well as a panoply of African, British, Irish, French, German and Russian novelists, short story writers and playwrights. v The collection is prefaced by an introduction intended to give a full sense of what kind of enrichment these stories hope to achieve. Each story is summarized and examined to present an overview of the theory and the craft that defines it. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................................................................... IV ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................................................................ V PREFACE .................................................................................................................................................................... 1 JIGGS ........................................................................................................................................................................ 17 THE WHITE LIE .................................................................................................................................................... 84 THE TOWN OF INSANITY ................................................................................................................................ 112 THE CLAY-BORN ................................................................................................................................................ 131 WORKS CITED .................................................................................................................................................... 159 vii Preface Jiggs The title story, Jiggs, is a novella that was composed prior to my enrollment at UNM in 2010. However, Jiggs has benefited from a very special graduate creative writing workshop taught by Professor Julie Shigekuni, where ideas such as ethos, pathos and dénouement were thoroughly discussed. Jiggs’ storyline speaks to American racism from the historical perspective of the modern civil rights movement. The novella blends some of the methods used by writers such as Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and Toni Morrison (Beloved), two celebrated writers known for using magical realism as a dominant literary mode in their novels. My novella replicates the form and content of magical realism. Magical realism is what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe. Such are the elements found in my novella. “Jiggs” is set in 1955. A seventeen-year-old African American girl is murdered in the normally sleepy, rural Village of Stone’s Throw, NY, a community settled by African Americans fleeing Southern oppression, hatred and bigotry. The novella’s protagonist, “Cockeyed Bill” is the village sheriff who is both gentle and strong; he is down-to-earth yet worldly, easy-going but nonetheless complex. Cockeyed Bill must solve the crime amid powerful resistance from institutionalized and colloquial racial intolerance. When the black sheriff puts several white derelicts into custody, events heighten to a harrowing pitch, threatening his family and testing his legal authority. Stone’s Throw villagers and surrounding communities of white farmers are riled over the murder and the arrests; state troopers and young African American ruffians exacerbate the conflict. All the while, our narrator, the sheriff’s son, 11-year-old Billy Brewer is struggling to comprehend and cope with hard realities such as death (including his mother’s death some years before) and racism. The story ends transcendently when the white men thought to have committed the murder actually are the ones who solve the crime by exhibiting unearthly power that connotes an otherworldly intervention, thereby invoking my 1 use of magical realism as a storytelling mechanism. Jiggs is more than just a Twilight Zone-type murder mystery. Its ethos is meant to capture a moment in time by pointing a finger toward one of the most heinous crimes in American history: The murder of Emmett Till, an African American teenager who was slain horrifically in Mississippi in 1955. The story is not about that specific crime but draws from the tumultuous national pre-civil rights zeitgeist that arose from it. Jiggs presents a morality tale that pierces the heart of verisimilitude and its pathos is applied using the techniques found in magical realism. In his article on “Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction,” writer and literary critic Angel Flores chronicles 1935 as marking the literary birth of magical realism, a term originally conceived to describe visual art. Flores credits the works of Argentine, Cuban, and Mexican writers as having advanced magical realism as an efficacious literary approach that is being more commonly used by American writers. A significant symbol of magic realism is apparent when a character in the story continues to be alive beyond the normal length of life. On the surface, however, the story has no clear magical attributes. To convey an aura of realism, the author may give precise details of the real world such as the date of birth of a reference character or the army recruitment age, but such facts belie the notions of abnormal occurrences like someone living for two hundred years. Throughout my story, the men who are suspected of committing the murder in Stone’s Throw are actually ghosts who appear as wandering transients addicted to rot-gut wine. They appear in real time as seemingly lost souls, downtrodden, throwaway human beings. In actuality, they represent powerful forces from