by Gayl Jones
When I arrive, he stands. They told me he would be Nicholas. Surely, they hadn’t asked him his name. They’d heard about the man who was my witness, heard his name was Nicholas, and simply assumed this was him. Surely, they’d said Nicholas because everyone knew Nicholas was the one I’d always traveled with. A man named Nicholas. But the man standing here is the last man in the world I expected to find. Or maybe the first man I’d hoped for.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of Corregidora and Eva’s Man, Gayl Jones is one of the most highly regarded African-American writers in the country. In the early 1980s, she spent several years in Europe, leaving a promising publishing career and a tenured professorship at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. While living in France, she published a novel in Germany. She returned to the United States, completed three more novels, and is currently finishing other new works of fiction and poetry. Beacon Press will publish her next novel, Mosquito Woman, in 1999.
Her awards include a Mademoiselle Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Schubert Foundation Grant for Play writing. She has a reading knowledge of six languages and has been learning Japanese and Indonesian.
Beacon Press
Boston, Massachusetts
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 1998 by Gayl Jones
First digital-print edition 2005
All rights reserved
Text design by Anne Chalmers
Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Gayl.
The healing / Gayl Jones.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-8070-6316-3
ISBN 0-8070-6314-2 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8070-6325-8 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3560.0483H34 1998
813′. 54—dc21 97-33325