The following is from Gayl Jones’ The Unicorn Woman. Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, and has taught at Wellesley College and the University of Michigan. Her landmark books include Corregidora, Eva’s Man, The Healing (a National Book Award finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year), Palmares (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction), and The Birdcatcher (National Book Award finalist).
It was at a spring carnival in Central Kentucky, sometime after the Second World War, that I first saw her. Alone, but nevertheless in a holiday-making mood, I was strolling about eating a burger and drinking a coke when suddenly I spotted a large billboard advertising “The Unicorn Woman.”
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Like most of you, I had seen crocodile women, bearded ladies, and assorted other freaks or, I should say oddities, but I’d never seen a unicorn woman, genuine or not. Thus, I was curious, especially since there was no photograph or drawing on the billboard to give a clue, not even the most ambiguous one, nor did the name Unicorn Woman provide an easy giveaway, like say, for instance, the Bearded Lady: stick a beard on any woman you see, and that’s what you have. Usually it was quite obviously fake.
Standing in front of the tent, I finished the burger, drank the Coke, and watched other men enter. Some entered straightaway, others waited nonchalantly at the edges of the crowd, still others glanced about furtively as if it mattered who saw them go in: Their preachers? Their wives? Their sweethearts? Any stranger? One man even looked thoughtful, as if he were meditating—contending only with himself about whether or not to enter. Most of the men wore ordinary workers’ or farmers’ clothes, but there was an occasional fancy young man or dandy. There were even a few obviously wealthy men who entered. After a while, I paid my dime and started to trot inside.
“Your change, buddy. It’s just a nickel.”
“Thanks.”
“You’ll be glad you went in. She’s lovely.”
I put the change in my pants pocket and entered.
Of course, I had expected to find either a woman in a cage or a unicorn in one, even though I’d read somewhere that the unicorn was a mythical beast, which had only existed in the collective imagination. a fabled creature. A creature of fables, of legend. It appeared only in art and literature, some ancient myth that had origins in India or China. and then had inspired the imaginations of people everywhere. The subject matter of historians and philosophers, and there were even said to be even medicinal cures and medicinal magic in the horn. I tried to remember what the unicorn was a symbol of. Of hope? Of peace? Of freedom? Of spirituality? But there were no such things as unicorns. And to hunt them would be foolish.
The Turks and Greeks and Hebrews had unicorns. Then I wondered if Africans had ever accepted the unicorn myth? Or Indians of America?
Hadn’t I read somewhere that the Africans had a name for the unicorn? Okapi? And did not some Indians in America also have the unicorn as a spirit animal in their myths and legends? I tried to remember what I’d read. I tried to remember the origins of the unicorn.
I immediately saw just the back of the woman, who sat on a stool in the middle of a roped-in circle. Viewed from the rear, she looked like any ordinary woman. She was clad in a brown, broad-shouldered, sequined dress, and she was brown herself, which surprised me, as I was used to entering carnival tents only to discover white freaks. Her slender, dimpled arms were the color of my own.
I joined the circle of men and one woman. For some reason, women freaks attracted men more than they did other women. Men freaks, on the other hand, attracted whole families. Even little children. I don’t know if this was always the case, or whether one can make a fast rule of it, but whenever I paid my dime or nickel, it was generally the case. And in those days I was a carnival-goer. I enjoyed carnivals, circuses, and state fairs. I liked the food and I liked the spectacle and the amusements.
When I got to the side of her and was able to observe her in profile, I saw the spiraled horn protruding from her forehead like a bull’s horn or a goat’s: diagonally pointed upward, it was white and shining. Red, black, and white, weren’t those supposed to be the colors of a unicorn’s horn?
Red at the tip, black in the center, and white at the base? But this horn was one color. White. A white horn protruding from her brown forehead.
I walked around until I finally stood straight in front of her, face-to-face with her. Like a lot of freaks, and a number of theatrical performers, she looked but didn’t see you individually. There are tales of performers and entertainers who distinguish people, who behave as if you’re the only person in the world when you meet and greet them. But I’ve found that to not always be true. Well, I saw her. And for that moment, it was like she was the only woman in the world. A real beauty. And the funny thing about it, the horn didn’t disturb her beauty; it enhanced it.
I remained in front of her longer than I should have, because the other gents and one lady suddenly shouted, “Get a move on, bud.”
I completed my second circle, then my third; I don’t know how many turns I took around the woman. I felt indefatigable. Each time I paused before her, I was shouted at to let the others get their chance.
“Get a move on, bud.”
“Do you think it’s real?” asked the woman.
“It looks real,” observed a man. “I bet her forehead’s tender, though.”
“A lot looks real that ain’t,” said the woman.
I must admit that the horn did look real. It appeared to be actually growing out of the woman’s forehead. Roped-off, she was nevertheless close enough for you to touch, but you didn’t dare touch her or her horn. It was sort of an invisible or unspoken rule: you looked but didn’t touch, like in a museum with a work of art, even a natural history museum with their exhibits, though there was no sign forbidding it. I wondered whether she’d polished the horn. I imagined her brushing it after she’d brushed her teeth. Some special horn powder or paste. Part of her regular daily make-up routine. And she had the classic style of the age. Well-manicured eyebrows and Vaseline to give a special shine to her red lips. And she was well-groomed.
The horn looked real, like I said, but in those days I did not believe it was.
“I didn’t know what I expected to see,” said the woman. “I thought it was going to be part unicorn and part woman, not all woman and just that horn sticking out of her forehead.”
“Well, I never would’ve believed anything else,” said the man, with a look of appreciation. “I can believe the horn. Plus, the horn’s what lets you know she’s a unicorn. Wouldn’t be a unicorn without a horn.”
“Could be a goat,” said the woman. “Ain’t a unicorn supposed to have a goat’s beard anyway? a goat’s beard and a lion’s tail, not just a horn. I saw a picture of one in an encyclopedia.”
“She kinda reminds me of Billie Holiday. Lady Day.”
“Every good-looking woman reminds you of Billie Holiday.”
Every time I got in front of her, I stayed too long. “Get a move on, bud!” they shouted, yet again.
“That stool should be electrified and she should turn,” said the woman. “We shouldn’t have to turn. she should turn and let us just stand and watch. Look at her. She’s an odd creature. She should give me some makeup tips.”
The next time I saw her she had an electrified stool that turned, and her audience just stood and watched. Mirrors could have done the trick.
But with mirrors you’d possibly never get to observe the real woman. “Stop hogging the front; I don’t want just the reflection.”
“Move it, Joe.”
As I moved, I noticed that whenever there were other displays of cupidity, the people in line waited patiently, talked among themselves till their turn came around; it was only when I hogged the front that the shouts came to get a move on.
*
I was traveling in Memphis when I saw billboards announcing a traveling carnival in town. I had not stopped thinking of that Unicorn Woman. Whenever I saw a notice of anybody’s carnival, especially on days when colored people were free to enter, and allowed to enter, I’d go to see if perhaps the Unicorn Woman was there. Whenever I met a new woman, I couldn’t help measuring her against the unicorn one. I didn’t always do this consciously, but that underlying feeling persisted: “She’s not the unicorn Woman.” I suppose most men have some woman that they idealize and measure all others by. Or perhaps most men haven’t met their unicorn woman yet, not even in their imaginations and fantasies. But I’ve met mine, and all I seem to be able to do whenever I encounter any other woman is to shrug. It’s not always a visible shrug, though; it’s one of those interior shrugs of the spirit. You know the kind.
For instance, one night in Memphis I was out with a woman. Well, a fine thing!, any man would have said of her. Nice, pretty, all of it. It was foggy out, and she wanted to walk in the fog. I don’t know why. Some women just have these things they’ve got to do. Tics, I call them, or fancies, because they’re too minor to be obsessions. Maybe she associated the fog with romance. I held onto her elbow and we walked along. I was uncertain of Memphis at the time. I didn’t really know the territory, and she was escorting me around the colored sections of the city.
She had introduced me to Parkway Village and Orange Mound. She had introduced me to Lamar Avenue and Getwell Road. she showed me the schools she had gone to: Dunbar Elementary and Melrose High School. She showed me the churches and black-owned businesses in the area.
“Don’t you just love the fog?” she asked, as we walked along one of the avenues.
“I’ve never really thought about it. As something to love, I mean.”
Fog had always seemed to me just something to try to avoid getting lost in.
“It’s just nice. I don’t know what it does to me.”
“If you don’t know, I certainly don’t.”
She snuggled up to me. The fog must have made her feel like Marlene Dietrich or Garbo or one of those. In fact, I remember seeing a movie with Garbo on a ship in the fog and she was explaining how the fog did something to her, too, but I’ve forgotten exactly what it was she said it did, though I believe she said it made her feel holy.
“It makes me feel new,” she said. “I don’t know, it just makes me feel new, or something.”
I wondered whether “new” had anything to do with romance, or holiness. Maybe either one of them could be her “something.” We stood for a moment and peeked in a shoe-store window, then we continued walking.
“This your first time in Memphis?”
“No, I came once with my father when I was a boy. I think we visited Orange Mound, but I’m not sure. He was explaining to me the history of the place, about its being built by and for blacks. I was a little boy, though.”
“That’s nice. I mean it’s always nice to come back to a place where you’ve been when you were little. Even if you don’t exactly remember. That just does something to me.”
“Does everything do something to you?”
“No, not everything. But I always just love to go to Miami because the first time I was in Miami I was a little girl. It just does something to me every time I’m there. We had to travel through some places to get there though. We were in some places where people treated us like we weren’t even visible. You’d say something to them and they wouldn’t even acknowledge you. And other places where we were too visible. . . . I remember this one little town that had a sign that read ‘N_____ read and run, and if you can’t read, run anyhow.’ They didn’t allow colored people in that little town, and we didn’t stop where we weren’t welcome. My father kept driving. . . . But I adored Miami. And we met this group of Seminole Indians from South Florida who had stayed in Florida, and we met some people from Havana. I didn’t know who I was meeting until years later because I was just a small child. All the beaches were white people’s–only beaches, then someone directed us to this private beach and then we returned to Miami after the war for the opening of this colored people’s beach. All colored people parading up and down the beach. . . . That was lovely. . . . They said some colored people had had a wade-in at one of the white beaches and got themselves arrested. Then they established their own beach. . . . I adore Miami.”
“Miami in the fog must be nice,” I suggested.
“Oh, but it is! Though I don’t exactly remember Miami having fog while I’ve been there, but it must. Every place has fog. Though every time I’ve been there, the air’s just been as clear as anything. You were a soldier, weren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“I can always tell a former soldier.” She pronounced it like “farmer soldier.” “The way you walk or something. The way you conduct yourself. I guess it’s the military training. Maybe it’s that or maybe it’s the way a soldier looks at a woman. Perhaps not all soldiers . . .”
I looked at her; she giggled.
“A lot of men don’t know how to look at a woman, you know. They really don’t.” She shrugged. “A lot don’t even look at you. It’s a certain type of acknowledgment, I suppose. And you’re always tipping your hat to me. It’s a certain type of acknowledgment.”
I looked at the fog, at the languid shimmer of the buildings seen through fog. They looked like cardboard buildings, like we were living in some future century where they built only throwaway buildings. Two ghosts came walking toward us: the man ghost tipped his hat, the woman smiled. Then we were able to distinguish them as real. They entered one of the buildings.
Music could be heard from within. A songstress singing a song of love.
“I bet he’s a farmer soldier,” she said.
The woman had looked like one of those adoring types, I thought, but didn’t say.
“Did you see a lot of action? I guess that’s a silly question, isn’t it? All soldiers I’ve ever met tell me they saw a lot of action. I guess you couldn’t be over there overseas during a war and not see a lot of action?”
“With a frying pan.”
“What?”
“I was a cook in the army.”
“Were you one of those Consciousness Objectors?”
“No.”
“So you got to shoot a few too?”
“Yeah, when I was shot at, I got to shoot a few. We were allowed to defend ourselves.”
She looked at me, musing, like she was trying to figure out the relative merits of the gun, even in a defensive posture, versus the frying pan, and waiting for me to give my opinion on the subject.
“So you did see some action,” she said finally, scratching her eyebrows.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah,” she said, jollily. “I didn’t believe you could go over there to a whole war and not see some action, not unless you were a Consciousness Objector—I’ve met some of those—or one of those colored flyers.”
At first I thought she said “colored flours”; then it registered. she was talking about flyers, like the Tuskegee Airmen. But I wondered what was the difference between a whole war and a half war. Maybe we were in the latter all the time. What they called “fighting on two fronts.” What they called “double victory.” I’d met some men during the war who talked like that.
“I met one of our colored flyers and he said that they just kept training them and retraining them because they didn’t know what to do with them for ever so long, at the beginning of the war. I forget what field he was stationed in, but I believe it was somewhere out west. I know about the Tuskegee airmen, but he was talking about the West. And then he said they finally sent them overseas. They still hadn’t figured out what to do with them, but they shipped them overseas anyway. He said he didn’t get to see as much action as they could have seen if they’d known what to do with them in the beginning of the war, but he knows airplanes inside and out. I asked him whether there were any colored women who flew planes during the war, but he looked at me like that was a foolish question.”
We strolled along, breathing fog. I tried to remember that incantatory passage by Charles Dickens about the fog. Fog everywhere . . . Chance people. I’d learned that passage once for a school recitation, but I couldn’t remember it now. something too about a Megalosaurus. Fog moving down the hill like one? Maybe we could meet a Megalosaurus made of fog. Something. Fog in the nostrils? Someone told me once about how foggy Milan is. Because of its geography. I don’t know what started the conversation. an Italian American was working in the mess hall along with the blacks. He was a dark-skinned Italian American. Like the Japanese Americans, they’d been considered the enemy. A threat to homeland security. He told me about how they were treated. But he’d joined the army anyway. He was teaching me a few of his favorite Italian recipes and then he started talking about Milan, where his ancestors originated before they came to America. Because of her adoration of the fog, Milan would’ve been her dream city.
“It would’ve been nice to have been somebody’s deer,” she was saying. Deer? That’s what I heard.
“What do you mean?” I asked. I squeezed her shoulder a bit and pulled her a bit closer.
“Somebody’s deer,” she repeated. “You know. ‘Dear So-and-So, I have just landed on foreign soil . . .’ and all that. Like when soldiers write their gals letters, you know. Some of the gals collect those letters. I met all my soldiers after the war. None of the fellows I knew before the war were old enough to be soldiers.”
“Then you weren’t old enough to be somebody’s dear.”
“That’s right. I was a youngling during the war. But I still wonder what it was like to be a grown woman during the war. A grown woman and in love, and receiving Dear-So-and-So letters from a soldier. I used to see some of those gals getting their letters from soldiers and writing to them. Some of them weren’t that much older than me, but they were still grown women. I used to call them ma’am and some of them would laugh at me. Did you have a dear?”
“No.”
“You couldn’t have been too old when the war started.”
“No, I was eighteen.”
“And I’ll bet you were a fine young man. To go through a whole war too. That’s just awful, not to have had a dear to write letters to. And to have received letters from. I’ll bet you have a dear now, though, don’t you?” she asked, but answered for me. “Of course you do. All the good ones already have their dears. . . . All the fine ones . . . Are you still a cook?”
“No, I repair tractors.”
“You do? You know, one farmer soldier was telling me that they had tanks that could be converted into tractors when the war was over. You know, like interchangeable parts or something. They could either be tanks or tractors depending on if there was a war or not. In peacetimes, they were tractors. In wartimes, they were tanks. I bet you could have repaired a tank. . . .”
“Sure. I can repair just about anything.”
“I’ll bet. you look like that sort of guy. But I bet they didn’t know what to do with you either.”
“Probably not.”
“That’s the same with most of our men. And many of them were eager to do whatever was needed for the war effort. And it’s been like that with every war, my papa told me. I wasn’t too young to remember that. And the ration books on the home front. And the women going off to work in the factories and the defense plants. I remember all that.”
I said nothing.
“Do you want to go in here?” I nodded.
“Yeah, this is a really nice place; you’ll like it. They’ve got a jukebox and sometimes they have live music. They’ve got a woman who sings songs she wrote herself. Anyway, you look like you’ve had enough fog. You don’t look like you appreciate it as much as I do. I have to remember that everybody doesn’t like fog, that fog annoys some people. And especially if you were a flyer. You can’t like the fog, for sure. It just does something to me, though. . . . Yeah, I bet you could’ve repaired a tank or two. Well, as many as you’d wanted, I’d imagine. And I bet you could’ve converted tanks into tractors, or even tractors into tanks. But I’m sure you could have repaired a tank or two. Well, as many as you’d wanted, I’d imagine. I wonder how many tanks got converted into tractors after the war? Who knows, but you could be repairing a tractor that used to be a tank, like the men repairing tanks that used to be tractors, but of course you’d have to know that though, wouldn’t you, I mean with your knowledge and information. I mean, what good are interchangeable parts if they can’t be recognized and especially by mechanically inclined and knowledgeable men like yourself?”
I held the door for her as she was talking and we went inside. The door was too solid to be made out of cardboard or any other throwaway thing. Inside, we listened to a woman singing:
Love’s such a wonderful thing O yes, O yes, Oh yes.
Love’s such a wonderful thing O yes, O yes, Oh yes.
Makes you walk when you walk,
And you’re walking so light,
Makes you talk, and you talk
And your talking’s just right.
Makes you feel good from morning
Till night.
Yes, love’s such a wonderful thing. Oh yes.
Love’s such a wonderful thing O yes, O yes, Oh yes.
Love’s such a wonderful thing O yes, O yes, Oh yes.
Makes you sing with joy,
And you feel so bright,
Makes you love everybody
That comes in sight
Makes you so happy
And everything’s all right,
Yes, love’s such a wonderful thing.
Makes you sing with joy,
And you feel so bright.
Makes you love everybody
That comes in sight.
Makes you so happy
And everything’s all right,
Yes, love’s such a wonderful thing.
Then a Mexican man joined her and sang:
Awnn Taliano, you are the only
One I’m dreaming of, Awnn Taliano,
You are my only love,
Awnn Taliano, until my days
All cease to be,
My Dearest Senorita, come to my
Hacienda with me.
You are my love, my only love,
You’re in the stars above,
There in the night,
You’re like a flitting dove,
Against the light,
Please, be my own, my dear
You’ll always be.
Awnn Taliaino, you are the only One for me,
You are my fair one, Senorita,
And you will always be,
Forget your past love affair
And come with me.
And they sang together the following song:
Down that bull, here he comes a-charging,
Down that bull, here he comes a-charging,
Down that bull, here he comes a-charging,
Please oh! matador.
Down that bull, put him in his grave now,
Down that bull, put him in his grave now,
Down that bull, put him in his grave now,
Please oh! matador.
If he kills you I will die.
I could not stand to live.
Down him now, before I cry. Your life I cannot bear to give.
So now you down that bull,
Here he comes a-charging,
Down that bull, here he comes a-charging,
Down that bull, here he comes a-charging.
Please oh! matador.
__________________________________
From The Unicorn Woman by Gayl Jones. Used with permission of the publisher, Beacon Press. Copyright © 2024 by Gayle Jones.
