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Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale
Orpheus played his lyre so beautifully that even the rivers and rocks were moved to do his bidding. In Mojo Hand, it is the blues singer Blacksnake Brown who casts a spell over Eunice Prideaux, a light-skinned black woman from San Francisco. Eunice's fascination with the blues doesn't always mean being the helpless victim of whatever created them. The life she has to lead is her own and no one else's. The haunting language of Mojo Hand has no equivalent in twentieth-century fiction - it is matched only by the music that is its subject.
180 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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492 people want to read
About the author
J.J. Phillips
4 books5 followersA poet and writer, she lives on the west coast of the USA. During the Civil Rights Movement she was arrested in North Carolina in 1962. Her novel Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale, about a young woman's involvement with a blues musician, was first published in 1966, and was reissued in 1987.
(from Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby)
(from Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby)
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 3, 2024
This novel is quite remarkable for capturing a moment so vividly, and for the vulnerability of the protagonist, and for the stark brutality of the world it portrays. It's so vivid, this prose. Sadly the word that comes to my mind next to describe this book is "brave" which is unfortunately on a fairly long list of words that have been forever ruined by over-blurbing. But yeah, it is very brave.
I couldn't find a copy of Mojo Hand for sale at a price I was willing to pay. I needed to read it on the internet archive. Thankfully there is a NYRB reprint coming in 2025. I recommend you check it out when you can. Wow.
I couldn't find a copy of Mojo Hand for sale at a price I was willing to pay. I needed to read it on the internet archive. Thankfully there is a NYRB reprint coming in 2025. I recommend you check it out when you can. Wow.
June 19, 2025
(This will, without doubt, be in the running for my favorite novel read in 2025, and an addition to my all-timer canon.)
There is a huge difference between being drunk and ON a drunk. If you know, you know. If you don’t—or at least not experientially—I am truly happy for you. I spent almost twenty years on a drunk. That shit hurts; not just physically (although, my God, it does so terribly), but the psychic toll it effects is a specific kind of hell found only in its little niche in addiction’s abattoir. While I retired with full pension from the Bottle Leagues many seasons ago, I can never forget exactly what it feels like. Instantly. It can haunt or serve you, and I choose the latter. Conversely, I can never see someone on one and not have sympathy. But as a mimetic experience, nothing I have ever read comes close to Mojo Hand in mirroring what it is to be—irrevocably and irretrievably—on a drunk. The damnedest thing? It’s not even a book about drinking.
What it IS about is fugue, fog, magick, and hoodoo soaked in Delta Blues (literally). Blacksnake Brown, that bastard bluesman with a whole curse of Robert Johnson in him despite being birthed by Marie Laveau, may be a devil or just an old, half-pimp conjurer using his string box to channel NOLA’s undead to boogie and its living ladies into bed. But really, he’s on the periphery—Johnson writes a fucking heroine for the ages in this, the only novel she ever penned. Eunice Prideaux, our precocious wanderer, is so wonderfully fucking unapologetic in her indefinability that I am taxed to think of an analogue other than something found in the bottom of a bottle. No, I don’t mean the worm. Maybe enlightenment, maybe delusion; probably both and neither. Because that is what Mojo Hand evokes—a three-month bender with no way out in sight; that careening light of daybreak horrifying your eyes as you jettison bile onto ceramic to immediately replace with vodka (brown booze burns after time, kids) before the delirium and shakes get too bad; and the conviction that this jag will see you dead so double the fuck down. ‘“Been down so long that” I am not even going to fucking pretend like heaven hasn’t fallen up to me; ‘fuck you’ as karmic mantra; where are my goddamn cigarettes?; shit! I fell asleep and am almost sober!’ It’s THAT. Being on a good drunk, like Mojo Hand, both is and is not for the weak. Life as paradox? I don’t know, or care, at this far remove—I owe my younger self fuckall. Eunice is just starting down that piece of road, and I bless her head in a benediction of hope and solidarity. Oh: knowing your Eurydice from your Orpheus may add some dimensionality to your reading, but I would dare say that an open mind, an open bottle, or both will do just fine.
Now someone vamp in A, goddamnit; I’m feeling the spirit(s) coming on…
There is a huge difference between being drunk and ON a drunk. If you know, you know. If you don’t—or at least not experientially—I am truly happy for you. I spent almost twenty years on a drunk. That shit hurts; not just physically (although, my God, it does so terribly), but the psychic toll it effects is a specific kind of hell found only in its little niche in addiction’s abattoir. While I retired with full pension from the Bottle Leagues many seasons ago, I can never forget exactly what it feels like. Instantly. It can haunt or serve you, and I choose the latter. Conversely, I can never see someone on one and not have sympathy. But as a mimetic experience, nothing I have ever read comes close to Mojo Hand in mirroring what it is to be—irrevocably and irretrievably—on a drunk. The damnedest thing? It’s not even a book about drinking.
What it IS about is fugue, fog, magick, and hoodoo soaked in Delta Blues (literally). Blacksnake Brown, that bastard bluesman with a whole curse of Robert Johnson in him despite being birthed by Marie Laveau, may be a devil or just an old, half-pimp conjurer using his string box to channel NOLA’s undead to boogie and its living ladies into bed. But really, he’s on the periphery—Johnson writes a fucking heroine for the ages in this, the only novel she ever penned. Eunice Prideaux, our precocious wanderer, is so wonderfully fucking unapologetic in her indefinability that I am taxed to think of an analogue other than something found in the bottom of a bottle. No, I don’t mean the worm. Maybe enlightenment, maybe delusion; probably both and neither. Because that is what Mojo Hand evokes—a three-month bender with no way out in sight; that careening light of daybreak horrifying your eyes as you jettison bile onto ceramic to immediately replace with vodka (brown booze burns after time, kids) before the delirium and shakes get too bad; and the conviction that this jag will see you dead so double the fuck down. ‘“Been down so long that” I am not even going to fucking pretend like heaven hasn’t fallen up to me; ‘fuck you’ as karmic mantra; where are my goddamn cigarettes?; shit! I fell asleep and am almost sober!’ It’s THAT. Being on a good drunk, like Mojo Hand, both is and is not for the weak. Life as paradox? I don’t know, or care, at this far remove—I owe my younger self fuckall. Eunice is just starting down that piece of road, and I bless her head in a benediction of hope and solidarity. Oh: knowing your Eurydice from your Orpheus may add some dimensionality to your reading, but I would dare say that an open mind, an open bottle, or both will do just fine.
Now someone vamp in A, goddamnit; I’m feeling the spirit(s) coming on…
Read
September 19, 2017It's a glorious tumbledown, and I wish it were the go-to sixties cult book instead of Kerouac.
January 18, 2015
Mojo Hand was republished in the mid-80s and is highly recommended for author JJ Phillips' gorgeous prose. This is not a book about the semi-autobiographical plot so much as how the story is told. A young woman from an upper middle class family in San Francisco gets seduced by the blues and heads off to find bluesman Blacksnake Brown. Eventually they meet, he does her wrong in so many of the ways described in blues standards, and she tries (and fails) to leave him. Much of the power of the book lies in the almost dreamlike way the tough circumstances in the story are told. This is a novel well worth hunting up.
February 28, 2024
This book relates to another time though-interestingly much of the story takes place in my current city of Raleigh, NC. It was recommend by a NYT book newsletter and I’m glad I read it. Some beautiful prose but a dark read.
February 21, 2024
Love, pain, and the blues. And gorgeous prose.
September 9, 2025
75th book read in 2025
I learned of this novel from a feature of the New York Times Book Review called “Read Like the Wind.” My 1966 reading list has been an adventure in experimental writing and Mojo Hand falls into that category.
Jane J Phillips was an African-American poet, novelist and Civil Rights activist. Her story is one of obsessive love between a mixed-race woman and a Black blues musician, possibly loosely based on Lightnin’ Hopkins. The writing is poetical and infused with the blues. It draws from the myth of Orpheus.
Quite a hot mix! My final comment in my reading notes: Not any life I know, except in my secret heart.
I learned of this novel from a feature of the New York Times Book Review called “Read Like the Wind.” My 1966 reading list has been an adventure in experimental writing and Mojo Hand falls into that category.
Jane J Phillips was an African-American poet, novelist and Civil Rights activist. Her story is one of obsessive love between a mixed-race woman and a Black blues musician, possibly loosely based on Lightnin’ Hopkins. The writing is poetical and infused with the blues. It draws from the myth of Orpheus.
Quite a hot mix! My final comment in my reading notes: Not any life I know, except in my secret heart.
February 9, 2013
There isn't much plot to this lesser known blues novel, but what it lacks in momentum it makes up for with J.J. Phillips' glorious prose and her subtle handling of various issues.
The story couldn't be simpler - Eunice, bored of her upper-class lifestyle, develops an ear for the blues, and after hearing a record by Blacksnake Brown, leaves to find him in Raleigh, falls in love with him, and sticks by him even as he abuses and neglects her, until his philandering finally gets him killed, with Eunice pregnant with his child. Most of this, however, comes down to a tiring cycle in which Eunice attempts to leave, but doesn't have it in her, a tragic scenario that would be more touching if it weren't so predictable.
What saves the novel, though, is Phillips' language, with descriptions that paint this world in a dreamy haze. When Phillips describes a hot day, you can feel practically feel the heat on the page dragging you down. She also has a talent for understatement, presenting significant details with a light touch, avoiding melodrama while still drawing on race and identity crises, gender power struggles, and class conflicts.
At times, Mojo Hand is simple to read, but it's never easy, and Phillips pulls no punches in treating her characters. For all the good times set to blues lyrics, there's an other foot waiting to drop.
The story couldn't be simpler - Eunice, bored of her upper-class lifestyle, develops an ear for the blues, and after hearing a record by Blacksnake Brown, leaves to find him in Raleigh, falls in love with him, and sticks by him even as he abuses and neglects her, until his philandering finally gets him killed, with Eunice pregnant with his child. Most of this, however, comes down to a tiring cycle in which Eunice attempts to leave, but doesn't have it in her, a tragic scenario that would be more touching if it weren't so predictable.
What saves the novel, though, is Phillips' language, with descriptions that paint this world in a dreamy haze. When Phillips describes a hot day, you can feel practically feel the heat on the page dragging you down. She also has a talent for understatement, presenting significant details with a light touch, avoiding melodrama while still drawing on race and identity crises, gender power struggles, and class conflicts.
At times, Mojo Hand is simple to read, but it's never easy, and Phillips pulls no punches in treating her characters. For all the good times set to blues lyrics, there's an other foot waiting to drop.
September 4, 2008
For those who have felt the pull of lust and love beyond all reason....
January 8, 2009
A great and forgotten gem about a young black woman from San Francisco who immerses herself in black Southern culture, voodoo and the blues.
June 27, 2022
An outlier blues novel where the pursuit of pleasure disappears into the pursuit of pain. I love its pre-Toni Morrison antisocial morbidity, though after reading it you’ll understand why it isn’t more famous.
Check out the author’s poem “Brautigan’s Brains,” inspired by an experience in the Berkeley Library when she discovered brain tissue and other viscera on the original manuscript pages onto which Brautigan actually “blew out his brains.”
Check out the author’s poem “Brautigan’s Brains,” inspired by an experience in the Berkeley Library when she discovered brain tissue and other viscera on the original manuscript pages onto which Brautigan actually “blew out his brains.”
November 4, 2021
A true lost masterpiece that deserves wider recognition. Phillips is a hypnotic storyteller with an uncanny ear for realistic dialogue and lyrical description. This one will not be leaving my mind any time soon.
July 18, 2023
The writing was incredibly good, but the story just wasn't for me.
June 26, 2025
What in the world did I just read
July 25, 2024
A very odd impressionistic love story in which a young woman gives up her life to follow an old Black bluesman into depravity. Depressing and disconnected, but worth reading for the haunted rhythms and smoky poetry. Not unlike the blues.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews