- - - - - - - - - -

T A B L E__T A L K

Is National Public Radio the best source for news these days? Have your say in Table Talk

- - - - - - - - - -

R E C E N T L Y

Lady Macgrunge
By Michelle Goldberg
"Kurt and Courtney" paints a horrific picture of Courtney Love as manipulative, power-mad and possibly murderous
(02/25/98)

How do you spell Yiddish?
By Lee Dembart
A legendary Yiddish newspaper is changing its spelling -- and therein lies a tale of Talmudic proportions
(02/24/98)

Stop the millennium -- I want to get off
By Virginia Heffernan
As the year 2000 approacheth, so doth a Biblical plague of special issues of news weeklies
(02/23/98)

Earth to Mars and Venus
By Mary Beth Williams
Relationship guru John Gray's syrupy new mag
(02/20/98)

Looking for some company
By James Surowiecki
Tripod + Lycos: In search of community
(02/19/98)

- - - - - - - - - -

BROWSE THE
MEDIA CIRCUS
ARCHIVES

As best as one can piece together the story, the seeds of trouble were sown back in 1983. Jones had published her first two novels, "Corregidora" (about a blues singer who was the product of a violent rape) and "Eva's Man" (in which the protagonist is thrown into a hospital for the criminally insane after not only poisoning her lover but castrating him with her teeth), and had been praised by figures like James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, John Updike and Margo Jefferson. She was teaching at Michigan, where her husband-to-be was a student. Bob Jones was born Bob Higgins; he took his wife's name when they married. Higgins had a reputation as a loose cannon: When he got a D in German in 1976, he accused six professors of "conspiratorial malice." One day he showed up at a gay rights rally, shouting about AIDS and "about burning in hell." He left, got a shotgun, returned to the rally and sat in his car. He was arrested. The couple fled to Paris before the trial; Higgins was convicted in absentia of "assault with intent to frighten." Gayl Jones' letter to the university, a copy of which went to President Ronald Reagan, tendered her resignation and said, "I reject your lying, racist shit."

Nobody noticed when the couple returned to America in 1988, moving back to Gayl Jones' birthplace of Lexington to be near her mother, Lucille Jones, who was critically ill with cancer. When Lucille Jones died last February, things began to spiral out of control. Bob Jones was convinced that the hospital where Lucille had died was guilty of a racist conspiracy and that they'd kidnapped and killed his mother-in-law. He began a "villains-rats-s..s[sic]" list whose members included the district attorney and the Lexington Herald-Leader's medical reporter, Jim Warren. Gayl and her husband started a foundation "dedicated to exposing the alleged wrongful death," according to Margaret Kannensohn, the Fayette County district attorney.

Bob Jones' angry letters became nearly apoplectic as the first anniversary of Lucille Jones' death drew near. Kannensohn became worried, as did the staff at the cancer center where Lucille Jones had died. Other people began getting mail threats: Police Maj. Anthony Beatty, Police Chief Larry Walsh and University of Kentucky President Charles Wethington. According to an article in the Sunday Herald-Leader, "At some point, the Lucille Jones Foundation approached former Lexington Mayor Jim Amato about becoming its attorney," perhaps because Jones' father had once worked as a cook in Amato's restaurant. Two days later, Mr. Jones himself called the police.

All this information leads up nicely to an emotional explosion and a suicide, but it doesn't explain how the police knew they were dealing with a man who had been on the lam from assault charges in Michigan for 14 years. They never would have found out -- and might not have swooped in when they did -- if District Attorney Kannensohn's assistant, Lee Turpin, hadn't read the Newsweek article praising "The Healing." Some of the raving letters hammered out by the man calling himself Bob Jones mentioned his wife Gayl, the brilliant novelist. In the Newsweek article, Bob Jones was referred to as Bob Higgins, as he was known back in Ann Arbor. The district attorney ran a police check on Higgins. "When we realized this brilliant woman was living with someone who was angry and confused, we were concerned," Kannensohn said.

Once upon a time, Gayl Jones let it be known that she, like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger, wanted to appear to the world only through her work -- her portable fortress. She is going to walk out of Eastern State Hospital when she's ready, probably not to join the world as most of us know it but to try to rebuild that fortress -- one that made a metaphoric appearance in her most recent work.

In one of the "The Healing's" strange, glowing side trips into Harlan Jane Eagleton's past, her grandmother, a beautician, tells how she once joined a circus side show as a Turtle Woman. She wore an enormous mother-of-pearl shell. Reminiscing about her youth, the grandmother remarks that if she could grow another shell, she'd go back to the traveling show. "But once you's a human being, you hunger for being human."
SALON | Feb. 26, 1998

Sally Eckhoff writes for the Village Voice and other publications.