THE UNICORN WOMAN

A surprising, welcome gift from one of America’s finest and least predictable writers.

This chronicle of a Black GI’s return to the American South after World War II provides Jones with the occasion to kick back and gently unravel the story of Buddy Ray Guy, an erstwhile Army cook and tractor repairman, who’s on something of a quest to find the book’s eponymous “Unicorn Woman,” whom he first beholds, albeit from odd angles, at a carnival near his hometown of Lexington, Kentucky. Though he can see the “spiraled horn” protruding from the woman’s forehead, Buddy is just as astonished by the “slender, dimpled arms [that] were the color of my own” since he’s more used to finding “white freaks” at carny sideshows. From then on, the enigmatic woman stalks Buddy’s dreams as he makes his way from Kentucky to Memphis, trying to parlay the mechanical skills he picked up in the military into a full-time civilian living in a postwar America still tethered to racial segregation. When Buddy confesses his obsession with the spiral-horned woman to Esta, his sometime girlfriend, she chalks it up to Buddy’s wildly romantic imagination: “You are more of a freedom seeker…than a unicorn seeker, Buddy Ray,” she tells him. “I don’t know whether freedom seekers are ever truly satisfied.” Nevertheless, not even the vicissitudes of Jim Crow America can keep Buddy from following through on his dreams, whether they involve conversing with the elusive unicorn woman or figuring out how to make the best use of his craft. All the while, Jones weaves a captivating tapestry of African American life in the 1940s from Buddy’s dreams and the wide-ranging information he collects on his quest throughout the mid-South from friends and relatives. He keeps his eyes and ears open to all manner of input, whether it comes from fragments of an Amos ‘n’ Andy radio broadcast or from the folk wisdom he gathers at restaurants, homes, and places of worship. Most of all, it’s Buddy’s narrative voice—digressive, reflective, witty, and wise—that sustains one’s attention and affection throughout this warm, savory evocation of the elegiac, the fantastic, and the historic.

Even when she dials down the intensity, Jones is capable of quiet astonishment.