History, memory, narrative, and culture: Figuring ancestry in Leon Forrest's Bloodworth trilogy ('There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden', 'The Bloodworth Orphans', and 'Two Wings to Veil My Face')

Leon Forrest is one of four novelists---among these Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, and Henry Dumas---published by Toni Morrison, senior editor at Random House from 1965 to 1985. Though each of these novelists seems to share a common narratological practice, the four novels of the late Leon Forrest, who died in January 1998, has received the least critical attention. This exploration of his fiction identifies a narrative motif and its function---not unlike that which critics have observed in the fiction of his contemporaries but uniquely constructed in Forrest's trilogy There Is A Tree More Ancient than Eden, The Bloodworth Orphans, and Two Wings to Veil My Face. Succinctly stated, this examination seeks to show how Forrest uses history and culture to invoke the voice of an ancestral community and to offer his questing protagonist a viable path into the angularity of contemporary experience. More specifically, history and memory, black music, and the folk sermon each provide a way station for Nathan, the trilogy's protagonist, and for the African American relocating spirit in each of the three novels.