On Fish Tales: A Forgotten Erotic Novel of Raw Longing and Fierce Freedom

Nettie Pearl Jones, 1984. Photograph by Fern Logan.

Fish Tales, first published in 1983, is a novel told in short, vivid vignettes. A woman named Lewis comes of age hardscrabble in early sixties Detroit. It was a difficult time to be born a girl. Teachers slept with students without consequence; an unexpected pregnancy meant you could be expelled. Secrets and illegal abortions, it seemed, were the best ways for a girl to hold onto her pride.

The novel opens with an illicit scene between twelve-year-old Lewis and the “shit-yellow” older boy who impregnates her. Just pages later, she announces that she has aborted the child, “with a hanger.” It is clearly traumatic for young Lewis, but in the world of the novel, trauma is neither acknowledged nor named. Lewis simply goes on. She barrels headfirst into the arms of Peter Brown, her social studies teacher, beginning an affair that lasts for almost a decade. When he marries a woman closer to his age, Lewis is devastated and enraged. She visits their home and causes a grand, dramatic scene:

“Desecrator, rapist, slimy child molester” spilled out of me into that quiet room.

“Pete told me you were nuts,” [his wife] said from her bed. “He was right. He told me that he’s tried to help you since you were twelve.”

“Help me?” I screamed out. “By fucking me? Huh?”

Brown’s wife tells Lewis that she should “disconnect [her] brain” from her private parts. Lewis takes the suggestion, leaping into another affair, with a friend, this time, named Woody. She marries him because he accommodates her drinking and her ongoing trysts with Mr. Brown.

The couple has no interest in monogamy. The very next Christmas, Lewis finds herself alone in a hotel room, calling “DIAL YOUR DESIRE” for company.

Preparing for her new lover, Lewis daubs her wrists with “a little fragrance of dianthus.” Kenny Burrell’s “Merry Christmas, Baby” fills the room. Kitty appears at her door bearing champagne, and he is “the most beautiful man I’d ever seen at any door of mine.” They go out dancing and bring another woman back to the hotel.

Throughout the novel, Lewis ricochets between affairs and nights of vodka; bouts of mania and depression; stints in jail and in the bohemian haunts of downtown New York City. Quick to abandon lovers and friends, she has no real sense of herself—until she falls in love with tall, disabled Brook. Lewis submits to his care. But a chorus of other women also jostle for the same position. Something about this act of devotion forces confrontation, and crisis. “He feels he has many reasons to live,” one of Brook’s women tells her. “You seem to have forgotten yours. Love yourself, sister.”

***

I first read the book in 2019 with great attention to Nettie’s fierce freedom. She couldn’t care less about respectability, it seemed, and she had no shame about the female body. It was less than a year after the death of Toni Morrison, who had acquired the novel. It was also one of the last books she’d worked on before leaving to write Beloved.

At Random House, Morrison deliberately chose writers involved in social movements agitating for Black people’s freedom. She worked with Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali. She also published writers like Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones, authors then shaping and deepening the tradition of Black women’s fiction. Sometimes their works revealed ambivalence about movements the authors themselves had labored in. They often told unpleasant truths about loneliness and sex and the vicissitudes of romance for a people under siege. Fish Tales both fit and expanded the lineage. It also may have appeared too soon—before literary tastes had evolved to accommodate such complexity in the mouth and mind of a Black woman artist. Nettie was passed around to different editors at the company and does not recall much revision or promotion. The novel fell out of print.

Its rediscovery began when the writer Michael Gonzales wrote a piece about it for Longreads, where I was then an editor. He had read it in the nineties, at the recommendation of his girlfriend. A few years later, it was acquired by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Its reprinting recovers a severed limb on the family tree of literature by and about Black women. While twenty-first century literary novels like The Turner House, Vanishing Half, and Luster present less-than-perfect heroines, the raw longing of Fish Tales feels distant from many novels published in the past twenty or thirty years. “Black female protagonists are now unerringly strong and soulful,” Zadie Smith wrote in an essay about Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. “They take the unreal forms of earth mothers, African queens, divas, and spirits of history … they have little of the complexity, the flaws and uncertainties, depth and beauty of Janie Crawford and the novel she springs from.” Fish Tales luxuriates in its protagonist’s flaws and renders her erotic experiences without restraint. Her pleasure-seeking and her quest for self-annihilation resolve a tension between various modes of fiction writing. One could be high-minded and noble like the crusading authors of slave narratives. Or take a realistic approach, like Hurston in Their Eyes or Ann Petry in The Street. Novels marketed as street lit received little critical attention. But popular urban and erotic fiction caused a splash in the seventies and again in the nineties due to authors like Zane. Nettie pulled from it all, unflinchingly. She’d refused to choose.

***

Nettie Pearl Jones was born in the tiny hamlet of Arlington, Georgia in 1941. She is light-skinned with blue eyes because her grandfather was a white landowner in town. At five, with her immediate family, she left for Detroit. She had a daughter, Lynne, when she was seventeen, then eventually graduated from Wayne State University with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education. For nearly a decade, Nettie taught English and social studies in the public schools of Detroit. After relocating to Montreal with her second husband, she enrolled in Marygrove College for her master’s.

Late in her twenties, Nettie moved to New York and began taking courses in copywriting and advertising. In the city, she’d run into James Baldwin at various downtown haunts. She had many lovers. (“You know, orgies,” is how she put it.) She held adjunct appointments at Michigan Tech and NYU’s Gallatin School, where she taught her students the works of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines. “What I would do up there in Michigan Tech, you know, was to free them. I told them ‘you can cuss, you can tell your most [private] secrets if you want to.’”

Writing with so much freedom did not come naturally to Nettie, whom I visited recently at her Brooklyn apartment. Now eighty-four, rouge adorns her cheekbones; faint lines curve around her eyes. “I wrote something and I think I was referring to female genitals,” she says. “I wrote it as politely as I could, because that’s what we’ve been taught. We didn’t even use the word pregnant. I wrote ‘Nancy’ or ‘your cute girl’ or something like that. Whatever we were told to say. And [Gayl] kept pointing at the word and was like, what’s the real word?  And I said ‘pussy’ and she told me to put that.” She was referring to her mentor, Kentucky-born novelist Gayl Jones, author of Corregidora and Eva’s Man. It was Gayl who’d given Nettie the contact information for Morrison, who’d also edited Gayl’s debut. Gayl and Nettie met when Gayl worked at the University of Michigan.

Through the years, most critics have labelled Fish Tales as semi-autobiographical. Nettie describes her writing as an embodied kind of knowing. “I’m like the piano player that sits down and finds that he or she can play without any training other than the [most] basic [instruction].” The story, heightened for fiction but sketched from real life, arrived into her mind fully formed, and she says, while writing, she felt the characters pulsing through her body. She was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder in her twenties. She believes that her mental illness helps her see and hear and channel the sensibilities of her characters with crisp lucidity.

Nettie says that her motivation for writing novels was money, or rather, “insufficient funds.” She hated the first edition’s cover, which showed a collage-like illustration of a brown-skinned woman lounging topless on a multi-hued quilt. Beside the woman was a pair of heels, above her head was a green-scaled fish. In the novel, fish does not refer to a seafaring creature, but to the quality, the essence of being fish, which is Black gay slang for real-live woman. In the disco- and drug-fueled seventies and early eighties, some transgender sex workers smeared themselves with fish oil, insisting that they’d smell more authentic—more like the fleshy parts of people born biologically female. Nettie also took inspiration from Jean Toomer, using an excerpt from one of his poems for the novel’s epigraph: “The human fish is intricate and hidden; the appearance of his fins are deceptive.”

She didn’t like that the cover figure was Black. “I’m Black, but I’m not a Black writer,” she says. “They put you on the Black table and then you get less sales.” She also told me she found some Black literature stuffy and staid.

Nettie published a second novel, Mischief Makers, in 1989, and many articles in anthologies and the Detroit Free Press. And she has worked off and on on a third novel she calls Puma. Mostly, the intervening years were full of struggle. She battled housing instability and addictions to alcohol and drugs, but now she is sober. “I thought I would end up like Zora,” she says, referring to Hurston, who died with much of her work out of print, cut off from most forms of literary community.

Republishing Fish Tales has recovered and assured her legacy. But I was heartened to find Nettie already living a full life. “We call it the Daisy Society,” she said. “It started when I was in the shelter.” Three women, all mothers, all struggling with an assortment of difficulties, created a close-knit sorority of sorts to look after one another. Glynda and Maria became first-year residents of the new facility alongside Nettie, and because they are two decades younger, help to make sure she runs her errands, stays on top of her medications, and eats enough nourishing meals. They go out to plays and restaurants in New York City together.

“We help each other. We make sure she’s okay,” Glynda said from Nettie’s doorway. She was born and raised in Brooklyn to parents who’d come from North Carolina and Florida. She and her mother were never close (“her mother didn’t [even] comb her hair,” Nettie says), and when her father died, Glynda became an addict.  Glynda claims the three women get along because they have experienced similar hardships. “We came up the same, you know, the hard-knock life. We had to struggle to be parents. And no one was really there for us. I see her as an older woman that’s teaching me the ropes still because both of my parents [are] deceased.”

It surprised Glynda to learn about Nettie’s career, but only so much. The elder woman had informally tutored her in reading when they still lived in the shelter. She’d helped Glynda battle the fear she’d developed as a schoolgirl because of trauma, shyness, and dyslexia. It was apparent Nettie had a background in education, but it would take time before the elder woman let her charges in on a secret: close to forty years before, she’d published a novel that had been edited by Toni Morrison.

“It was a wandering life,” Nettie writes, in the afterword published in Fish Tales’s newest edition. The slim novel has no filler, none of the laborious context-setting that many editors demand. It simply moves from moment to moment, from obstacle to pleasure and back again. The way human beings, Black, female, and everything else, actually live.

Danielle Amir Jackson is a writer and editor whose essays on literature, music, and film have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Bookforum, and The American Scholar. Her first book, about women in the blues, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.