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‘To woman he gave a womb, and to man he gave dominion’, that’s what I teach my boys,” the Rev Sabre Winfrey Jr tells his wife, Priscilla, midway through Addie E Citchens’s formidable Women’s prize-shortlisted debut novel, Dominion. In Citchens’s hands, that dominion is exercised not only through violence, but through charisma, piety and the banality of male entitlement.
Set in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows the Winfreys, a prominent Black church family whose putative grandeur conceals a deep and hereditary decay. Sabre leads the largest congregation in the state from the pulpit of Seven Seals Baptist church, dispensing wisdom through sermons and local radio broadcasts, exuding the oily confidence of a man convinced that God speaks exclusively in his register. The longsuffering Priscilla writes those sermons, raises their five sons and silently maintains the machinery of his authority without ever receiving credit for it.
Their youngest child, Emanuel – known universally as Wonderboy – is beautiful, gifted and terrifying: a prodigious athlete with the voice of an angel. He moves through Dominion with the dangerous ease afforded to beautiful boys who have never encountered meaningful consequences. “When he passed, the teachers got nervous; the girls sighed.” Yet from the beginning there is something warped beneath the sheen. Violence, we come to discover, trails him like heat.
The action unfolds through the alternating perspectives of Priscilla and Diamond, Wonderboy’s teenage girlfriend. Diamond is vulnerable and “smelly poor”, carrying the psychic bruises of childhood abandonment. Loving Wonderboy offers her the illusion of belonging, and access to another world. Both women come to be tragically bound to the same young man: Priscilla has helped create him, excuse him and enable him; Diamond is beginning to experience the sharp edge of the cruelties that flourish under such indulgence.
The novel’s central drama turns on the gradual, then sudden, surfacing of Wonderboy’s true nature. A transgressive sexual encounter with another man leads Wonderboy to a fatal outburst of violence, and the novel quickly takes a darker, more urgent turn.
This drama unfolds suddenly and, at times, one longs for more excavation of Wonderboy’s interior life, particularly the implications of his sexual repression and brutality. His unravelling is both the engine of the narrative and oddly underexplored. Perhaps that absence is itself part of the point: men such as Wonderboy are often produced in plain sight, their damage normalised. His violence is presented as almost inevitable: he is “one special boy”, Priscilla reflects, “but I had long known his cabbage was done, while his cornbread was soft in the middle”. Still, the making of Wonderboy, the “beautiful monster”, would surely ultimately be more compelling than the hurried excesses of his downfall.
Citchens is astute in her interrogation of the ways religious performance can become a theatre for power. Sabre, a philandering patriarch whose “very being was a lie”, embodies the grotesque hypocrisy of public holiness masking private cruelty. He excuses his son’s predation as “boys being boys”, and insists that scripture smooth over disaster. When confronted with mounting evidence of Wonderboy’s violence, he demands of his wife: “Find me a scripture, Cilla! Type me something good up.”
Priscilla is the novel’s emotional centre: witty, exhausted, kept from the brink by an addiction to her “fulfilments” (pills) and liquor, she becomes a case study in the false seductions of female martyrdom, the way women are taught to confuse endurance with love. In one of the most moving moments, she tells Diamond: “Never, ever, ever will you try to lose or find yourself in somebody else because you’ll be lost in the desert if you do.”
Despite its often macabre subject matter, Dominion is gloriously, deliciously funny. Citchens’s prose crackles with southern-black humour and idiom: a poorly dressed woman is described as “looking like the last slave freed”; oppressive heat becomes “boil-a-nigga hot”. When Priscilla decides she has finally had enough of her husband, she laments mordantly that “normally, a Black woman could depend on something like diabetes or colon or prostate cancer to put rest to a problem husband”. The textures and tones of semi-rural Mississippi life are rendered in Technicolor – the food, the gossip, the church politics and the family histories.
By the end, Dominion reveals itself to be a tale about inheritance: the inherited scripts of masculinity, the inherited submission of women, the inherited sadness of towns built atop generations of grief. Citchens has written a bruising, funny and deeply intelligent novel about the ways women’s lives are warped by the whims and cruelty of men, and about what becomes possible when they finally begin to imagine lives larger than those who diminish them.
