There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden by Leon Forrest

First published: 1973

Type of plot: Stream of consciousness

Time of work: Primarily the 1920’s through the 1960’s

Locale: Indeterminate; New Orleans, Memphis, but primarily the minds of the characters

Principal Characters:

• Nathaniel (Turner) Witherspoon, the boy whose mother’s funeral is a major theme in the book
• Jamestown Fishbond, an artist, criminal, and friend of Nathaniel
• Madge Ann Fishbond, Jamestown’s older sister
• Hilda Mae Fishbond, their mother
• Jericho Witherspoon, Nathaniel’s grandfather, once a slave, the son of a white father
• Taylor (Warm-Gravy) James,
• Maxwell (Black-Ball) Saltport, and
• Goodwin (Stale-Bread) Winters, friends of Nathaniel
• Aunt Hattie Breedlove Wordlaw, Nathaniel’s aunt

The Novel

There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden is a novel which explores the consciousness of a number of characters. From the record of those explorations, one comes to understand not only the characters but also some of the events which shaped them. There is no traditional plot line which proceeds in an orderly fashion throughout the novel. There are, however, a number of incidents which were important enough to influence the characters.

One of those incidents, referred to in the initial description of Nathaniel Witherspoon and repeated in the final chapter of the book, is the funeral procession of Nathaniel’s mother. Another has to do with Nathaniel’s grandfather, Jericho Witherspoon. Born into slavery, his father a white man, Jericho once attempted to escape, and the pursuit by bloodhounds has become a part of the family memory. So that he would “know his place,” the white man branded his black son, and that memory, too, has come down through the generations. Jericho hated his white father; Jericho’s son hates his white grandfather.

The lives of the Fishbond family also become important in the novel. Hilda Mae Fishbond becomes the head of the family when her husband walks out, leaving seven children and a pregnant wife. For a time she manages, working for rich people for almost nothing. Finally, one cold night, without heat, almost without food, she snaps, tears up her apartment and sets it on fire, leading her brood down the fire escape.

In his progress through jails and mental institutions, Jamestown Fishbond is taunted and abused. At one time he is beaten and fears damage to his genitals; at another he is plunged into water in a straitjacket and fears that he is being drowned. Yet his most humiliating experience occurs when he is a small boy: At a party of Nathaniel’s color-proud mulatto kin, Jamestown has the door slammed in his face.

Finally, the funeral train of Abraham Lincoln, winding through the countryside and through the novel, fusing with the funeral procession of Nathaniel’s mother, is an important plot element and a major motif in what is a thematically constructed work.

The Characters

Forrest’s list of characters in the first section of the book, “The Lives,” includes purely fictional characters along with real ones—Louis Armstrong, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Abraham Lincoln. Among Nathaniel Witherspoon’s childhood friends, Goodwin “Stale-Bread” Winters is disposed of in two phrases—he was the class valedictorian, he overdosed and died. The lives of Taylor “Warm-Gravy” James and Maxwell (“Black-Ball”) Saltport are related fairly objectively, though Forrest does become more poetic when he speaks of Saltport’s religious change. For M. C. (or Master-of-Ceremonies) Browne, who was killed by his father, Forrest changes technique, simply recording his dying words. Madge Ann Fishbond is characterized through the dramatic monologue, addressed to Nathan (Nathaniel Witherspoon). Hattie Breedlove Wordlaw, whose religious views are expressed frequently throughout the novel, is described in “The Lives” merely by the use of one word, “honor,” which is both the key to her character and the mode in which Nathaniel must treat her.

The two most important characters in “The Lives,” and the major characters in the novel as a whole, Nathaniel Witherspoon and Jamestown Fishbond, are treated in extremely complex ways. The book begins with Nathaniel’s description of himself and his increasingly poetic evocation of the images of his life, as he moves backward and forward through the years, ending with his friendship with Jamestown. Several pages later, when Forrest comes to Jamestown, he begins in the third person with limited omniscience, later moves to a journalistic listing of jobs, dates, and talents, in the manner of notes for a biographical entry, and finally returns to the third-person mode, broken by a first-person fragmentary birthday entry in diary form. Most of the later sections of the book record Nathaniel’s thoughts or dreams, but Jamestown’s own horrors have penetrated the mind of his friend Nathaniel.

It is obvious that the characters differ in the extent to which their minds are penetrated by the author. The historical characters, Jericho Witherspoon, and all of Nathaniel’s friends except Jamestown are dealt with externally. Madge Ann Fishbond tells her own story in one section of the first chapter. Only Nathaniel and Jamestown reveal their inner experience to the reader—their fears and dreams and nightmares.

Critical Context

In technique and in material, Leon Forrest is clearly in the tradition of Faulkner. Even the emphasis on history, whether national, familial, or personal, reminds one of Faulkner. Also like Faulkner, Forrest is preoccupied with the problem of identity in a society which begot sons and then rejected them because their mothers were of a subject race.

The background of Forrest’s work is complex. He calls upon gospel rhythms and jazz beats, upon Christian and classical symbolism, and upon historical events. In his visionary passages, the grim facts of black history are seen as part of a people’s memory: the slave boats, the bloodhounds, the lynchings, the castrations. In the juxtaposition of allusions from so many sources, there is a great richness of texture and of suggestion; in the variety of styles, from matter-of-fact to poetic, from elegiac to gospel, there is almost a symphonic effect.

Forrest’s complexity has drawn varied reactions from critics. Some have found him incomprehensible or undisciplined, indulging in private symbolism. Others—among them, Saul Bellow—admire the integrity and originality of his vision and argue that his difficulty results from the scope of his allusions and from the fineness of his thought. It is significant that Ralph Ellison, himself a difficult but a rewarding writer, praised Forrest in the introduction to the novel, suggesting that only a complex style such as that of Forrest (and such as that of Ellison himself) can do justice to a complex world.

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Discusses Forrest in the section on fabulation, romance, and fantasy. Considers Forrest as part of a tradition of black fabulators who use dream visions and other linguistic forms to present personal and spiritual journeys.

Byerman, Keith E. “Orphans and Circuses: The Literary Experiments of Leon Forrest and Clarence Major.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Praises Forrest’s use of stream-of-consciousness techniques and believes that within the stylized and surreal episodes lies a cultural wealth of material carried by black Americans.

Forrest, Leon. Conversations with Leon Forrest. Edited by Dana A. Williams. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. This compilation of interviews with Forrest provides insight into his creative process and his thoughts on literature; includes one interview devoted entirely to There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden.

Jones, Gayl. Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African-American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991. Jones stresses the blues, jazz, spiritual, and sermonic rhythms of the text as it attempts to redefine the oral tradition of black Americans.

Lee, A. Robert. “Making New: Styles of Innovation in the Contemporary Black American Novel.” In Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1980. Comments on Forrest’s strengths in making symbolic connections between generations while expressing mythic racial truths of American history.

Mootry, Maria K. “If He Changed My Name: An Interview with Leon Forrest.” The Massachusetts Review 18 (Winter, 1977): 631-642. The author comments on his own goals, interpretations of his novels, and his writing style.