Two Wings to Veil My Face

Forrest County

by Leon Forrest

Leon Forrest, author of the powerfully praised novels There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden and The Bloodworth Orphans, now gives us perhaps his finest achievement: a work of fiction about a strong black woman, Sweetie Reed, domineering and hellbent on survival, and about the perils of her hubris, pride she needs to overcome painful memories with dignit.

In Two Wings to Veil My Face -- a tale of horror, wonder, woe -- grudge-holding ninety-one-year-old Sweetie Reed recounts her passage from slavery to freedom to her vain twenty-one-year-old grandson, Nathaniel Witherspoon. Throughout her life she has had to cope with psychological devastation caused by two relationships: one with her philandering husband, Jericho Witherspoon, a noted judge who had "purchased" her from her grandfather; and the other one with her father, who had spurned her as a child

Forced to confront herself in the darkness of her final years, and increasingly dependent on her grandson, Sweetie Reed faces the choice of abandoning her self-righteousness or else perishing both spiritually and intellectually.

Genres: Fiction, United States, African American

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

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]

“Because, my beloved Sweetie Witherspoon, I want you to show the blood in the water and the grieving water in the blood, the affliction and the bruised-blood contour, the meaning of the condition service cup, the service pan; the floundering and especially the forgetting amid the forging (preserved in your remembering heart, as an echo-throbbing tributary) and now unlocking it all and letting it flow, as the flood-time of the River prepares itself.”

Roused, spilled-out words ringing in congregational harm/ony, clawing themselves open, bloodied, worth more for their fury and their pain; rooted, yes, planted, yes, but fast-moving, developing musically toward a rhetorical climax that is felt rather than understood.

The past is bone-broken, irregularly syncopated, stuttering, fractured, perpetually present.

It is in the moments outside of control, the convulsions, the sudden-standing, the forced-thigh, the pew-pressing, the praising and the calling-out, that each tale receives its thrice-earned blessing.

"A Love Supreme".
"Volunteered Slavery". (in case you don't know - https://youtu.be/-6ryVryFnEY)
"The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady".
"Body and Soul".

Here is a strange and bitter crop. Yes.

Riff-wracked, poly-tonal, side-slipping. Jazz and Sermon, Sermon and Jazz. Mothers and Fathers, wives and husbands, children, family.

The whole white-owned world blown b(l)ack through horn and pen.

The text as sound re-triggered by the eye, a living voice recorded, rendered immortal.

And what a voice!

Over-written, orotund, aureate, bombastic, declamatory, flowery, grandiloquent, histrionic, euphuistic, overblown, magniloquent.

Synonyms are not identical in meaning, nor in sound. How we chose to voice a chord determines us (do we add 9ths, 11ths, 13ths? Upper voicings? stacking fourths? displace the octave? leave root notes to be mere suggestions?).

Compound words, hyphenated, harmonic.

Cult;you;oral Her(e);it;age

Re-invention

The self-spun spinner of self.

A language performed from necessity, from need.

The Preacher preaches, bridges the gap between audience and God, teaches rhetoric, rhythm, rhyme and rap. Provides a semblance of unity, a semblance of song. A resistance. A rebirthing. Baptized into The Word.

"Cities play upon our souls like broken drums
Redrum the essence of creation from city slums
But city slums mute our drums and our drums become humdrum

'Cuz city slums have never been where our drums are from
Just the place where our daughters and sons become
Offbeat heartbeats, slaves to city streets
And hearts get broken and heartbeats stop
Broken heartbeats become breakbeats
For niggas to rhyme on top of"


https://youtu.be/FgFpYKhP-nA

And, as an addendum, and more for fun than anything else:


"Sing it
Bring it, back to your laboratory
While he's in his oratory
Glory, It's like a horror story.
The mask is like Jason
They told the place not to let the basket-type case in"

https://youtu.be/SAUR5_wPM3o

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Masterful.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the boy’s imagination all of this was tied up with the beginning time on both sides of his family, like two wings of a strange angel struggling to rise . . .

  Phew.  The opening chapters of this book are up there with the best passages from the first two books of the trilogy.  They are based on two moments in Nathaniel Witherspoon’s young life – when he was seven and his grandfather has passed away and his grandmother, Sweetie Reed, refuses to go the funeral - at this time she tells Nathaniel she’ll explain it to him when he came of age – the other moment is 14 years later, Nathaniel is now “of age”, and with trepidation he is visiting Sweetie to hear her story.  Both moments intertwine during these opening chapters, and I could really just quote every sentence from them, because they’re all so damn good. Forrest has moved away from some of the more experimental of his prose techniques in this book - more on that in a moment - but his language remains poetic, focused, and lovely at all times. If anything, he's improved as a writer in this third volume.

Grandfather Witherspoon’s six-foot, six-and-a-half-inch form had carried 250 pounds before the boy’s knowledge of the grand old gentleman’s weighty presence in the world, before words existed for the boy; but this was passed down through retelling. Awesome words spoke of the many dimensions of the outer man, as the conversation drifted into the stature of the inner man; but in the last months, his head bowed and back stooped, in the autumn, and then taken to the University Hospital in October, his speech slurred and the weight scalded down to less than one hundred pounds - ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven . . . the way a snow melts away, the boy wept.
He threw away the magazine advertisement that boasted of making a man of you, if you weighed only ninety-seven pounds. That was for the foolish older guys, he thought. I don’t need to become Mr. Atlas; he was my Atlas; when I sat upon his shoulders, I was upon an axis . . . Besides, hadn’t he heard from his own father’s lips the words of the Bard: “Golden lads and girls all must as chimney sweepers, come to dust.” The brain itself, he had heard, weighed less than the body of most infants no more than three pounds. But there were brains and then there were brains. Most people don’t use 75 percent of the light of the body, which is the brain and the golden radiance of the soul, his father said. This made the boy think: the brains of most people are dusty, long before their death; and that’s what being dimwitted must mean. But did you go on living after the wheels in your brain stopped clicking? Or when your heart stopped beating? Grandfather Witherspoon’s brain had gone to sleep, like so many furious bees, and brilliant butterflies, suddenly gassed in a net; yet his heart went on beating for a long time, after that sleeping away of the brain.

Now, even where Forrest's writing had improved, I found the initial sections directly narrated by Sweetie to be stylistically/poetically weaker than all the other sections. This is mostly due to their fairly straightforward nature: by anchoring the narrative to Sweetie the poetry of the prose is restrained. That said, the sections themselves are still incredible, in large part due to the complexity and nuance of the sociological ideas behind the narrative exploring the transition form slavery to freedom, and the deft manner in which Forrest navigates the labyrinthine social structure of the south in the waning years of slavery and its aftermath. It is affecting, arresting, and illuminating.

Those sections really only take up a third of the book or so (there is one more section later in the book but it finds Forrest in full poetic form) - the majority of the rest of the book is either taken up with JW's funeral (and long eulogies giving way to visions and dreams and dreams within dreams) or the "present" i.e.: when Nathaniel is 21. These present day sections continue to center around Nathaniel's trepidation and desire around the uncovering of his family history, to unveil that which is veiled; fearful and anxious for the masks of the past to be removed.

--Great-Momma Sweetie, I know that June 5 is not your juneteenth, but since you’ve spelled out everything to me in order that I might get some order over my disorder.--
--In order, son, that I might get some peace of mind, and that’s very different from peace of soul, church folks haven’t understood that part of the good news yet. They still can’t deal with Nicodemus, who was about as close to us as anything in the New Testament I can think of in our modern-day finery . . . Yet they allow for his presence at the tomb.--
--I feel that I’m somewhere between Nicodemus and Hamlet, Fred Douglass and Lincoln, a rock and a hard-place and Joe Williams singing “Every Day I Have the Blues,” all the time, Great-Momma Sweetie.--
--That day, June 5, Nathaniel, is a burden still fierce for me to center down upon.--
--Great-Momma Sweetie, it’s not for the story alone that I need to fill out that date and what it meant to get the story right. But to get right what is missing from you and me. Between us, too. For myself and my own troubled mind within. I came upon those dates in your Bible long ago. And now I want to know what is hidden from me and what you have hidden maybe from yourself, as unspeakable in the long ago . . . especially when you confessed everything else.--

I will say little else but this: Those last 45 pages! . . . No, more than that, those closing few pages! . . . You, dear reader, are in for a treat; Forrest is masterful, and in those closing pages he is in full command of that mastery.
 
 
 
*Ephemera*
A couple of quick ending notes about the title of the book that I came across and liked.  The book is based on an old gospel song (quoted in the book):
 
Hurry, Angel, hurry! Hurry down to the pool.
I want you to trouble the waters this morning.
To bathe my weary soul.
Angel got two wings to hide me away
Two wings to fly me away.
I would not be a hypocrite
I tell you the reason why
’Cause death might overtake me
And I wouldn’t be ready to die.
Angel got two wings to veil my face.
Angel got two wings to fly me away.
 
(here’s a performance of the song - it’s slightly different than the one Forrest is quoting, but you get the idea, and I can’t find a performance of his source text: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xgGW-9P...)
 
Which is, itself, based on a scripture (Isiah 6:2) Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying.
 
Here’s an excerpt of a conversation with Leon Forrest about the titles of his books:

Two Wings to Veil My Face, I forget now what was the original title.  I think one was To Trouble the Waters This Morning.  [Toni] Morrison didn’t care for it that much and I didn’t either.  She said, you keep using this song in there, ‘Angels got two wings to hide my face.  Angels got two wings to fly me away.’”  She suggested Two Wings to Hide My Face, one of the refrains from this song.  I changed it and took the other one, Two Wings to Veil My Face, because the veil seemed to be much more poetic, much more elusive, much more suggestive of mask wearing and so on

*End Ephemera*

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s this thing that Forrest does here with the interplay between oral history agglutinating into written history, as literature that deserves another, more investigative read, instead, I was just carried away with the flow of language and all the rest.

Forrest is a master.

[Clement · Rating 5 out of 5]

As furious as a fiery black preacher exorcising the intergenerational trauma of slavery and the demons of America's dark past with the poetic lyricism of Joyce, Faulkner, Shakespeare, Ellison, and jazz but Leon Forrest's voice is uniquely his own. Two Wings to Veil My Face is not an easy read both in form and content, but it is beautiful and, in its own way, cathartic and redemptive, especially in its last three chapters.

[Gail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hard to read but worth the effort

[Vel Veeter]

This is another book, or here author, that I learned about from reading the collected letters of Ralph Ellison. He comes into those letters when Ellison is asked to give notes on a book about to be published by an imprint that Toni Morrison is running in the early 1970s and Ellison is so enthusiastic in his reaction to the book that they ask to use it for the book’s introduction. That’s high praise as Ellison is a thorough and skilled reader and many of the letters give those notes on works he’s been asked to read.

This is not that book, though I bought it as well, but a later novel. This book is incredibly challenging in structure and style, and in that way both frustrating and rewarding. In a way, it feels like a reaction to many books that have come out in the 20th century (I am specifically thinking about Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree in terms of the mythic, collectively-sourced Southern origin novel as well as books like Ernest Gaines’s The Biography of Miss Jane Pittman and maybe even Roots in terms of slavery narrative turned novel). The book begins with a young Black man attending his grandfather’s funeral and beginning to take down the personal history of his grandmother, born into slavery and then in a way “sold off” to her husband. This history is sometimes told to the grandson in sweeping, conversational and impressionistic dialect, and sometimes reflected upon by the grandson, and sometimes in the form of documents. The language of the various narrative voices here more or less are easy to distinguish but are still incredibly complex in language, thought, and in narration choices.

The other elements of this book that I think really elevates it is the ways in which the book emphasizes the physical toll of telling history like this through the fading body of the grandmother, and also the physical toll of recording as the grandson sometimes needs to stop to buy more ink or that his hand hurts too much to continue. An incredibly complex and amazing novel in so many ways.

[Tommy · Rating 1 out of 5]

My personal opinion but this book was sub-par. The best part is the introduction by Toni Morrison.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm the only person to ever review this. Whatcha know about that? I'm still reading it but stopped midway through. It's very dense. Those of you who know me well, know that I WILL finish it.