Maker of Saints by Thulani Davis

First published: 1996

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Mystery; psychological realism

Time of work: Summer, 1989

Locale: New York, New York; Woods Hole and Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts

Principal Characters:

• Cynthia “Bird” Kincaid, a former artist who is now a radio sound engineer
• Alexandra “Alex” Decatur, a provocative Surinamese performance artist and friend of Bird, who falls eight stories to her death
• Frank Burton, Alex’s lover, an acerbic art critic, who Bird suspects is responsible for Alex’s death
• Charles Marshall, a wealthy married investment broker whose affair with Bird is instrumental in her emotional recovery

The Novel

In Thulani Davis’s Maker of Saints, Alex Decatur, a performance artist and sculptor known for works that draw on exotic religious imagery, falls to her death from the window of her Manhattan apartment house. Her neighbor and friend, a former artist named Bird Kincaid, is certain that Alex did not commit suicide as the investigators conclude. Rather, she is convinced that Alex’s controlling lover, an influential art critic named Frank Burton, is responsible for her death. For some time, Alex had heard the sounds of violent arguments coming from their apartment.

Much earlier, Burton had written a disparaging review of Bird’s first solo show, a review so scathing that it caused Bird to stop painting. She works now as a sound engineer for public radio documentaries. Her obsession with proving Burton responsible for the crime energizes her. As Bird begins to catalog Alex’s effects left in her apartment, she comes across boxes of videotapes containing Alex’s experimental performance pieces. Bird is certain that Alex, fearing for her life, used the tapes to leave clues behind in case anything happened to her. Bird becomes intrigued by the tapes, which reveal aspects of her friend that she had never suspected and which shed light on the psychologically twisted relationship Alex maintained with Burton.

When Bird herself is brutally attacked in her apartment house by a man wearing a ski mask, she feels suddenly vulnerable. She seeks the help of Charles Marshall, a successful broker, ten years her junior, who is articulate, artistic, handsome, athletic—and married. Determined to help her recover, he drives her to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, where she begins to feel the first liberating return of emotion—specifically, a hunger to be with him. They make love.

Bird returns to New York determined to compel Burton to confess. She is sure that Burton has been in her apartment in her absence: The tapes she had begun to catalog have been rearranged. Bird believes that Burton is searching for a tape in which Alex speaks indirectly but emphatically about the threat of violence. She decides to create a trap to catch Burton when he returns to the apartment. Inspired into artistic fury, she constructs an elaborate art piece in Alex’s apartment, a stunning multimedia creation that involves carnival masks, clay figurines of demons, dozens of Bird’s self-portraits (many of them nudes), and a full-length mirror. The centerpiece is a grisly altar, actually the television, strewn with mannequin parts. On it runs a tape of Alex, her voice part of the display. The artwork constitutes an allegorical environment intended to intensify Burton’s feelings of guilt.

When Burton arrives, he is disconcerted but refuses to admit his guilt even when confronted by Bird wearing a jaguar mask. A brutal fight ensues, during which Bird realizes that her earlier attacker was in fact Burton. The police, called earlier by Bird, break up the fight, and Burton is charged with stalking and assault. Bird gloriously returns to her art, keeping in her studio a Mexican figurine from Alex’s collection. The figurine, a woman giving birth to another fully grown woman, represents the maker of saints. It symbolizes for Bird Alex’s part in Bird’s rejuvenation.

The Characters

In a novel that plays with images of ghosts and metaphors of detection, Alex Decatur, whose absence in death makes her a ghostly presence, figures as the novel’s central mystery. The complexity of Alex’s identity is represented to readers in recollections, in conversations, and most eerily in the tapes Bird watches. The more Bird learns, the less certain she is. Bird had suspected that Alex’s relationship with Burton was tempestuous, but she discovers that Alex and Burton were locked in a sadomasochistic relationship. Plagued by low self-esteem, Burton—the product of a working-class Brooklyn background and never at ease with his prestige as a critic in the elite world of New York’s art scene—was tormented by insecurities. He was possessive and suspicions that Alex was unfaithful.

As a way to forestall any violence, Alex played on Burton’s insecurities with stories she made up or took from her friend Bird’s promiscuous past. Alex exploited Burton’s masochistic need for humiliation. On one tape, Alex explains her strategy indirectly by refering to Scheherazade, the narrator of Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 1706-1708; also known as The Thousand and One Nights), who forestalled her death each night by telling the cruel sultan enthralling stories. Alex’s mind games apparently succeeded for a time, until Burton came across undated love letters that Bird believes finally pushed him over the edge.

Her discovery of the psychological warfare between Alex and Burton stuns Bird and is integral to her recovery as an artist. Bird, who as a promising artist in the early 1980’s had indulged her passions simply, with an array of stunning men, comes to realize the complicated ambiguity of passion. Bird’s own affair with Charles Marshall, who is very much in love with his wife, confirms this complexity. In a narrative that borrows from Christianity, Bird must experience the “fortunate fall” into awareness (indeed, the narrative plays with imagery of falling drawn from Bird’s haunted dreams of Alex hurtling to her death, forever falling). The demons that Bird must exorcise, then, are not only the profound anger that she harbors for abandoning painting and her regrets over not helping her friend sooner but also her own naïve, unexamined assumptions about love.

Critical Context

Davis’s fictions draw on history (her first novel tells the story of the segregation of a Virginia high school through the eyes of young black student who meets Martin Luther King, Jr.). That context is part of Maker of Saints as well, as it draws on two sensational trials. Most obvious, Davis draws on the 1985 death of Cuban performance artist Ana Mendieta, who fell from her apartment. Her sculptor husband was tried for the crime but was acquitted despite much circumstantial evidence. More subtly, Davis draws on the acquittal of O. J. Simpson after a nearly two-year-long trial in the early 1990’s—although in the novel, the accused killer is white and the victim is a woman of color. In both cases, the legal system, as the expression of Enlightenment science and the faith in absolutes, appears ironic, compelling a troubled culture to accept mystery and the stubborn resistance to revelation as itself a revelation. In her determination to explore rather than clarify the heart, Davis, as an African American woman, sets her complex psychological narrative squarely against the rise during the early 1990’s of so-called soul sister narratives, in which black women characters, often stuck in midlife doldrums, rediscover their identity and retap the energy of being alive through the discovery of an uncomplicated romance.

Bibliography

Blocker, Jane. Where Is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Analyzes the artist Davis used as model for Alex. Investigates the implications of performance art as a way to achieve identity.

Davis, Thulani. “In Our Own Terms.” In Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the Nineties, edited by Elizabeth Nunez and Brenda M. Greene. New York: P. Lang, 1999. Davis’s statement on contemporary African American literature, her own writing, and the place of the latter within the former.

Davis, Thulani, Greg Tate, Portia Maultsby, Clyde Taylor, and Ishmael Reed. “Ain’t We Still Got Soul?” In Soul: Black Power, Politics, and Pleasure, edited by Monique Guillory and Richard C. Green. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Transcript of a roundtable discussion between Davis and four other important African American writers on the state of contemporary African American literature and culture.

Farrington, Lisa E. Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2004. Chronicles the era of performance art and the implications of such engaging pieces as cultural and social metaphors for women of color.

Goldberg, Rosalee. Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001. Standard volume that defines the cultural climate upon which Davis draws—the lively and often shocking world of performance art in the 1980’s. Helpful for understanding Davis’ use of art as a vehicle for an artist’s private redemption.

“Thulani Davis.” In Contemporary Authors. Vol. 182. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Biographical information and bibliography of early reviews.