The Bloodworth Orphans

Forrest County

by Leon Forrest, John G. Cawelti (Introduction)

a novel, foreword by John G. Cawelti

Genres: Fiction, African American, United States, American, Novels

383 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Leon Richard Forrest was an African-American novelist. His novels concerned mythology, history, and Chicago.

His first novel, There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, was published in 1973, and included an introduction from Ralph Ellison. Nobel Prize Laureate Toni Morrison served as publisher's editor for There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, and his next two novels The Bloodworth Orphans, and Two Wings to Veil My Face. These three novels were known as the Forest County Trilogy. He cited Charlie Parker, Dylan Thomas, William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, Ralph Ellison, and his parents' religions as inspiration.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Wandlike, wizened, whispering to herself, unearthly, arthritic yet not crabbed, but rather with a ceremoniously pious gospel-gait, her long brown left hand hovering over the knob of the celebrated cane (which the Jewish Mayor of Israel had given to the Irish Mayor of the City), stabbing, stemming, striking refuse and debris like a garden-keeper; moving through the rubble and babble down the locked-up, abandoned, ravished, sin-sacked and mildewed city; turning the cane about as if it were a symbolic key to the city given a visitor; a holy witness from another country come to save even you, and especially you. "

That is the kind of sentence (from p15 of the novel) that is liable to give me a heart-attack of pure ecstatic, aesthetic delight.

Soundtrack

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child...

https://youtu.be/VI8GkEiK4is

Eric Dolphy came to mind often.

https://youtu.be/bKX3U5Pnf5Q

And Billie, of course

https://youtu.be/Wc4JvGfRLpA

Is there a word for sorrowful-anger?

To describe his prose line as Jazz is a cliche, though (especially when one thinks of players like Dolphy or later Coltrane) entirely accurate.

This is a novel of brokenness and loss, of children orphaned by the legacies of slavery, rape and fear. It is a novel of Mothers and of god-fathers burying a curse in the blood, of Fathers already too ghostly, too spirit-ed, to be killed. It is voices crying in the wilderness of modern America, monologues riffing over, around and within one another. It is a novel of the Church and of the unique developments in Christianity that took place in the African-American community through the 19th and 20th centuries. It is Carnivalesque and full of transformations, in dream and memory and experience. It is irrational and surreal, as the world is irrational and surreal.

It can be read (in part, and without meaning a disservice to its uniqueness nor its specific cultural point of origin) as a response to Absalom Absalom - not least due to the prominence of issues of race, incest and parentage, and other painful legacies of the South. It also has a "plot" that deliberately exploits the tropes of melodrama. It is, I think, more successful than Faulkner in capturing the multiplicity of the Black oral tradition. While Forrest's voice is almost always biblical, or semi-biblical, there is an authenticity to it which Faulkner lacks when he steps out from the mouth and mind of the White Southerner (except perhaps the sermon of Rev. Shegog in The Sound and the Fury - though one suspects this is just indicative of good listening and transcribing skills).

Nathaniel Witherspoon remains central, though we have left the completely enveloping interiority of Eden and his observations are now of those around him, rather than within him (though such a distinction is untrue) - now a "motherless child" himself, he is drawn to the lives of those similarly orphaned. It is the pain and nightmares of his community which obsess him, rather than those of his own psyche. All those torn from "father and mother Africa" are orphans.

The posited solution is to be found in Jazz - in the absorbing and mutating, own-making nature of Jazz, which is unbounded by race or class, by history or parentage - it can incorporate the kitsch and the profound and allow the European and African to co-exist. Most importantly it is always moving forward, is never chained by its past, no matter how painful. It speaks the pain outward and forward into the world and the future, transformed by Art and Soul.

”Now from a tower burial lookout site, on the outskirts to the city, Ironwood became the high priest of the tribe, extemporizing upon his royal golden flute, with a faint jangle of the whispering tambourine, a psalm of memory to Lady Day. Celebrating in tongues her time-freezing, prison-love, muted-hypodermic-jellied, sight-binding, knocking-bones, lean-horned, aching vision, in the frigid, dehydrated valley of bleached dry bones of love, Ironwood’s rage-muted, violin-sounding flute; and behind that, talking, dancing, spirit, meat shaking off their bones, as Big Maybelle, like the huge-hearted felt-flesh life, like Bessie inside the body and blood of Lady’s delicate violin song of sorrows...Singing them all back to the foundling child in the path-road, tiny enough to fit into a mail-box..Sometimes I feel like I’m almost gone.”

But, again, when one has prose like this, what more does one need anyway?:


"La Donna's head dropped in shame; Katie-Mae's droning voice sounded almost like the Mother Superior's voice stumbling out of the harness of dreaming decades, and simultaneously echoing that old negro-folk "other-knowing" coattail-pulling advice, that she had been trained, or admonished, or had trained herself to eternally despise; the undermining advice of a brigade of underground wretches; it was barbaric mud, and more, it was Southern, therefore low-down, that was that - saying one thing and meaning another. She looked at the woman's crow-feet, the cracked-vertebra-looking fingers, the work-soured yet unvanquished, life-harpooning, dark-brown eyes, the large, defiance, sardonic lips, full of mock and pluck, the humbled and humped shoulders, the huge, staunch, challenging African nose, the varicose veins dividing up her once-shapely legs, as the bruised blood upon the links in a leg-chain of a breakaway, as the woman dug her grain-soured hands into her purple apron, declaring:...."

I could quote entire pages, but why ruin the pleasure of first-meetings?

And the end, that extraordinary final 50 or so pages when the great whirl of Greek myth spills out from everything already long pregnant with it (Orpheus, Oedipus, Tiresias)...awe inspiring. Again, this section seems to be suggesting a way forward - that one can use "white" myth to help explain, help deal with, "Black" experience, just as "white" classical music can be used to deepen and develop Jazz. That a community as damaged and victimized as the African-American one should feel free to reach for anything and everything that can assist. That isolation and "purity" is not the answer.

I would not suggest starting with this - it makes sense to begin with There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden.

His bibliography is short:

There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (Random House, 1973)
The Bloodworth Orphans (Random House, 1977)
Two Wings to Veil My Face (Asphodel, 1984)
Relocations of the Spirit: Collected Essays (Asphodel, 1994)
Divine Days (Another Chicago Press, 1992)
Meteor in the Madhouse (Northwestern University, 2001)

My research indicates it is best to read them in this order (though the essays could come anywhere).

He deserves more readers. Go listen.

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 5 out of 5]

The characters have been abandoned, rejected as children by their parents. Abandoned further by race, its identifications and groupings, as they are mostly an alchemic mixture of black, white, some native american, belonging to none. With nowhere to go they clung to the vines of religion, the dependable fixes of drugs, alcohol, the timid hold onto the company of others while remaining alone. In their nightmare they have awoken in the land of Leon Forrest, cupped by the foraging rage and molten sear of his prose.

We are not invited in. We are drawn in well before the feel of pull and tug to live this life with people of color, their scream of travesty while also experiencing the universal heartache of our own abandonment of ourselves. This makes it literature above the literary. His style is not one of gems, coy and feint maneuvers. I would never compare Forrest to the style of other writers, or offer analogies, metaphors or ring out the experience of this book from a distant seat in the opera house of intellect. As a reader, a writer, I am humbled.

I bring up jazz, since it is mentioned numerous times. It exists within the vivid wash of turbulence of the tales unfolding. As jazz moves further out from its center only to return to explode within itself so do the hearts of these piercing characters, as does the jazz ridden style of Forrest. I looked and could not find a minute shred of a conscious attempt of his to write in this way. This, as with, There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden, arrived and he had the raw guts to follow it.

Exhausted, I feel pride in that I have ventured through the hailstrom of Forrest’s world and come through as I hoped I might, a more shaken person, reader. I still move about, his voice in my head, sight through his eyes, his jazz wailing through the house.

What chance does my next book have? It’s author? No matter how well written and engaging? I imagine I will read it in some confluence of how Forrest might read it, how I might, or how I will read as someone who has read Leon Forrest.

I want to thank GR Friend Ali who a while ago made the gift of recommending There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden, which many months later has led me to The Bloodworth Orphans.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

It’s Leon Forrest. So, yes. But not as mellifluous as Tree. Lots of character time ; lots of preaching. But unless you been there done that you ain’t never heard the likes of this preaching. Maybe you grew up with atheist dogma so you don’t have this stuff flowing in you veins.

But I don’t understand, and I’m serious here, why we don’t see Forrest on all those lists of American Fiction that start with names like Faulkner and/or Wright and end with Morrison. He’s of a talent there with our Ms Young and I have no thesis yet but I suspect their BURIAL is symptomatic. Would you read Forrest and help me with the diagnosis?

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a writer, Leon Forrest requires the sustained and intelligent commitment we have learned to give to such modern masters as Joyce, Faulkner, and Ellison, who, as it happens, are Forrest’s own major literary influences. Though two of the Forest County novels have some resemblance to Alex Haley’s Roots in their exploration of the history of Black families in America, Forrest’s relentless experimentalism in narrative, the extraordinary richness of his style, and the complex, Joycean allusiveness of his symbolic structures, make his work much more difficult and obscure at first reading. But for the reader who is willing to persist and come to know more fully the imagined world of Forest County the rewards are great. Forrest’s lavish inventiveness in character and incident, his profound sense of comedy his uniquely complex understanding of certain aspects of Black American culture give his writing a depth that becomes increasingly clear with more reading.

-John G. Cawelti (from the introduction)

Don’t sleep on Cawelti’s introduction y’all; as of this moment it’s the most well organized, cogent response to Forrest and his prose that I’ve came across. Of course, I’ve got a book on Forrest coming in the mail so hopefully that will change.

Then, don’t sleep on this book. Of course, it goes without saying that by that point you’ve already not slept on his first book (There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden) or – most importantly, that you’ve not slept on Leon Forrest. Because he’s the honest-to-deity real deal.

Enough of that.

This book is in many ways a continuation of There is a Tree… - that goes without saying a bit since this is the second volume in the Forrest County Trilogy of which that was the first, so it continues with the storylines of the Witherspoons and the Breedloves, most specifically that of Nathaniel Witherspoon. But it also continues many of the same themes – mythology, martyrdom, the fall, the seeking of redemption, apocalyptic Christianity, the Oedipus myth - and, while it was likely a part of the first book, this volume also majorly focuses on, unsurprisingly based on the title of the book, the theme of orphanhood. This is not only explicitly a theme – many of the characters of the book are either orphans or become orphans through the course of the book – but it’s also an implicit genealogical theme where these descendents of slaves are orphaned from the father/mother country of Africa. And the unmoored disconnect and seeking on the part of the characters flows from both facets throughout the narrative.

The main strength of the book – outside of Forrest’s prose, which is by far the biggest strength – is the continued mixture of myth, religious doctrine, and the language and cadence of deep-south fire-and-brimstone preaching; the language of the book frequently pulls these motifs into the day-to-day narratives of its characters.

Nathaniel believed that Regal’s presence provided them with a lost-found “rain ticket” back into the coaches of temptation, where everybody still operated. He speculated that Regal’s absence and sudden appearance allowed them to recanonize his mythhood, for a constant presence of the living flesh would have surely reduced the saint. That climactic moment of arising from the living presence of hell was like an ascent into heaven and connected him even more with the Christ and salvation than a thousand Christ-martyred figures. When Nathaniel told him this about the sisters, Regal merely scoff‘ed, saying: “You’re always making the sisters into nuns. I didn’t know you were working for the Pope with such precision.”

But overall, and most importantly, Forrest’s proses continues to shine – it is erudite, complex, and mellifluous; he has an knack for alliteration, assonance and intonation that gives his prose a musical quality – but it’s musically moored in jazz rhythms and blues pathos; it is wild and frantic, while yet lost and seeking.

And Nathaniel thought, Well now, Brer Fox Black-Ball, Sounds like you were a chitterling chained upon Mount Caucasus . . . Caught up in the oldest of grinds, that old nasty fifth-flanking column; why, perhaps that tart Pharisee was really a fellow traveler . . . In the lair of the lily-harpy: ass in lion’s skin. Or was it a taped parody on a drunken Bacchus, or metamorphosis, in which the God went up in the mountain and deep into a cave, cleaned up one of their number, sired a “passable” Redeemer by her, and yet their God was born out of such vainglorious loins, but they were pledged never to touch that white whale meat . . . but what about Saltport’s abandoned one by the half-mad Diedre, upon what city rung in hell was he abandoned? Or was it all just a replay of Beauty and the Beast, in which they had accepted certain Aryan imperatives and taboos; and then of course there was the danger of flying too close to the sun . . . Ah, but Aunt Hattie Breedlove used to say, “The Devil’s busy.”

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abraham Dolphin, Arlington Bloodworth III, Industrious Bowman, Bella-Lenore Boltwood, Bee-More (Money-Czar) Flowers, Hattie Breedlove Wordlaw, Rev. Shelton Packwood, Ironwood Landlord Rumble, Maxwell Saltport, Amos-Otis Thigpen, La Donna Scales, Regal Pettibone, Jamestown Fishbond, Noah Ridgerook Grandberry

[Simon Robs · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Race is depressing, being a people is not,” Coates said. “I want what made me become a race to go away, but I love being a people.” Quote from article: ‘Chicago is the Capital of Black America’ WTTW-Chicago.

"TBO" like its predecessor (trilogy) "There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden" is a verbal hurricane that swamps a reader's ability to float meaning regardless of race, yet it's the black experience through and through; it bleeds myth/truth and redemption on every page. I am curious what Ta Nehisi Coates (who must surely have read this?) in review would say - can a book so abstruse and jazzily dense secure meaning the way his own books seem to resonate across racial lines? Fire and brimstone pulpit verbosity, that bone-quaking rhythm unto the soul leaps any brain's categorical pace to keep order. You see the "light" like "Jake Blues" and gots to shimmy-sham & shake!

This is another book that begs for reading ALOUD maybe in group to let the sonorous thunder roll across those synapses whilst burning the tongue in blasphemy whose not worthy to tread these lines. 'Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.'