Prison Narratives, Narrative Prisons: Incarcerated Women Reading Gayl Jones's 'Eva's Man'

Summary

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Twenty-eight years after its publication, Gayl Jone's Eva's Man thus continues to occupy a rare position in featuring an African American woman who has sustained and committed acts of violence. Jone's novel offers the first-person fictional account of Eva Medina Canada, a woman who is incarcerated in a prison psychiatric hospital for poisoning and castrating Davis Carter, an acquaintance with whom she spent four days in a hotel. Sweeney explores some of the knowledge and insights that emerged in the women'[s readings of Jone's novel.

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Prison Narratives, Narrative Prisons: Incarcerated Women Reading Gayl Jones's 'Eva's Man'

I couldn't, I mean really, I couldn't put a name on Eva.

-Shelly, North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women

Eva bein' Eva, I said, man, we went through some hell, didn't we girl! You know, comin' up and stuff.

-Audrey, North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women

If she still hadn't have killed him, she still didn't stand a chance because she's a female.... She was fried one way or another.

-Tanya, North Carolina Correctional Institution for Women

ALTHOUGH THE PATHOLOGIZED AND CRIMINALIZED FIGURE of the African American woman haunts public debate about welfare reform, single parent families, and the war on drugs, explicit discussions of black women as agents of crime remain relatively scarce in academic and popular narratives. For instance, in a well-known criminology collection called Crime, welfare-dependent African American mothers implicitly represent the source-in James Q. Wilson's words-of "thirty thousand more young muggers, killers, and thieves than we have now," yet the collection offers no analysis of African American women's involvement in crime. The figure of the black female criminal functions as shorthand for "associations that work best when not fully or explicitly articulated." Featuring African American women lawbreakers forces a narrative reckoning with their typical role as cultural decoy, as a means for rendering invisible the routine social violences of the U.S. political-economic system.1 Compounding their hypervisible/invisible status is African American women's relative absence even in progressive scholarship about women and crime.2 With the exception of crucial efforts by critical race feminists, scholars, and activists such as Beth Richie, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Angela Davis, Joy James, and members of Incite! Women of Color against Violence, the prison abolition movement has tended to focus on African American men as victims of the racist criminal justice system, while discussions of sexual violence against women have tended to elide, or e-race, the experiences of women of color.3 When it comes to representations of agents and objects of crime, then, the old adage still rings true: all the women are white, and all the blacks are men.4

Twenty-eight years after its publication, Gayl Jones's Eva's Man thus continues to occupy a rare position in featuring an African American woman who has sustained and committed acts of violence. Jones's novel offers the first-person fictional account of Eva Medina Canada, a woman who is incarcerated in a prison psychiatric hospital for poisoning and castrating Davis Carter, an acquaintance with whom she spent four days in a hotel. In her circular, repetitious, almost affectless narrative, Eva chronicles her sense of continual exposure to sexual harassment from multiple figures-primarily men-including her cousin, her mother's boyfriend, a plant foreman, and a man whom she stabbed in the hand for grabbing her between the legs. Although she emphasizes Davis's attempts to exert sexual and emoti...

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