For today’s blog post, I’m talking about my favorite Beverly Jenkins novel: Tempest. Here’s a plot description and cover from the author’s website. 

Cover image, description, and buy links from the author’s website.

What draws me in to how Regan and Colt are written is that they are both very direct speakers, yet right below the surface of their words are complex negotiations for conversational – and relationship – power. The directness of their speech betokens emotional honesty rather than narrative simplicity, and allows the couple to maintain the importance of truthfulness while working through their misunderstandings.  I want to take a look at exactly how that dynamic works in an early passage from the novel. Colt and Regan are at the beginning of their relationship, and so far things have started off badly. She’s accidentally shot him, and he has yet to accept her apology. In the process he also intimated that she may have had a sexual relationship with the man who taught her to shoot guns, an assumption that Regan does not appreciate (and which she references in the passage below): 

She sat and he followed. Colt wasn’t sure where or how to begin the conversation, so he simply plunged ahead. “Your letters made me believe we’d be compatible.” 
“And now?” she asked frankly. 
He wondered how long it would take him to get accustomed to her blunt way of speaking. “Now, I’m trying to reconcile the woman I thought you to be from your letters with the woman seated here.”
“They’re one and the same. I answered your letters truthfully. You never asked if I knew how to shoot.” 
She had him there, he admitted.
She continued, “I was raised in Arizona Territory, a sometimes dangerous place. My sister and I were taught to carry a firearm for protection.” 
“By this neighbor?”
“Yes. His name was Mr. Blanchard and by my Uncle Rhine, who insisted we learn. Mr. Blanchard was a dear and honorable man. He died recently. I didn’t appreciate you casting aspersions on what I may or may not have learned from him.” 
Her displeasure was plain. 
“My apologies for being disrespectful. Being shot tends to make a man short-tempered.”
She held his gaze unflinchingly as if to remind him she’d already offered her apology, more than once. Colt found himself drawn to the determination she radiated. “What else did I fail to ask?”

Beverly Jenkins, Tempest, 2018.

The passage is written from Colt’s point of view, but as we’ll see, Regan subtly dominates the conversation. The first two lines show Colt following her lead (“She sat and he followed”) and expressing uncertainty over how to direct the conversation. Already this setup reverses important elements of Colt and Regan’s relationship dynamic. As a mail-order bride, Regan is the one who has had to come to Colt, to meet him in the position he’s already taken as a resident of the town of Paradise. In these first two lines, we see Colt meeting Regan where she’s at, and plunging ahead without a road map.

One of the most significant disadvantages Regan faces is how much she doesn’t know about Colt’s life. So it’s significant that when Regan maneuvers the conversation, she does so not by force, but by subtly controlling gaps in information, asking for more when she needs it, and leaving out information in a way that forces Colt to seek more knowledge of her.

The conversation starts out simply, with the two characters feeling each other out. Colt makes a statement (“Your letters made me believe we’d be compatible”), Regan asks a leading question for more information (“And now?”), and Colt follows up with an answering statement (“Now, I’m trying to reconcile the woman I thought you to be from your letters with the woman seated here.”) 

While Colt hasn’t asked any questions yet, he indirectly solicits Regan’s help in reconciling the gaps he’s perceiving between her letters and her reality. Regan, however, has little time for his indirectness. She first corrects him (“They’re one and the same”), defends herself (“I answered your letters truthfully”) and then, critically, points out his fundamental conversational flaw: he assumes rather than asks (“You never asked if I knew how to shoot”).

This begins Regan’s process of redressing the information gap between herself and Colt. She takes the next turn in the conversation, and it’s also a conversational turning point. Regan is a direct speaker who doesn’t often use the passive voice, which makes her use of it in the next exchange stand out, particularly the sentence “My sister and I were taught to carry a firearm for protection.” By leaving out the active subject – about whom she knows Colt is curious –  she makes Colt ask for the information he wants, rather than continue in his assumptions. And the subtly-placed but powerful passive construction has the desired effect. Colt is now the one asking questions (“By this neighbor?”). 

Colt does, however, make one last attempt to out-maneuver Regan in their conversational battle of wits. His statement (“Being shot tends to make a man short-tempered”) seems an attempt to ask for an apology- again, without actually asking. Here Regan uses silence – another form of missing information – to remind Colt that he’s already received the apology, and can do with it what he will. 

Significantly, I think, for the continued success of their relationship, Colt not only seems to enjoy this verbal chess match, he also learns from it. The final question of the passage – “What else did I fail to ask?” – is pivotal. He realizes the problems in his conversational approach, and remedies them by doing exactly what Regan needs him to do: he asks her a question that recognizes his previous conversational gaps. In fact, Colt remains in interrogative mode nearly exclusively for the rest of the passage, asking Regan about her education and her family. (I had to excerpt a bit for length, but in the remainder of their exchange he does all the asking.)

Getting Colt to ask her questions is pivotal for Regan in a couple of ways. As previously discussed, doing so begins to redress the information imbalance between the two. However it also, very tentatively, starts Colt on another important path : openly recognizing his desire for Regan. Colt is still mourning his deceased wife, and has been painfully denying himself the opportunity to desire anyone else. In guiding Colt to seek information from her, Regan is also subtly drawing him in to accept one more form of desire: the desire to know her. 

I want to look at one last bit of this exchange, where Regan finally decides to give Colt a bit more information about herself than he has explicitly asked for. Here, her negotiations for place in the landscape of Colt’s desires, past and present, become even clearer : 

My sister, Portia, and I are both considered unconventional by the men back home. She enjoys working with numbers and handles my uncle’s ledgers for the hotel. I enjoy seeing what’s over the next hill, which is one of the reasons I responded to your advertisement. But as I said in my letters, I can also cook, set a proper table, and have impeccable manners. I speak English and Spanish. I hunt, fish, swim, and ride. I’d hoped to find a husband who’d view these qualities as assets, but if you’re seeking what society considers to be a proper wife who’ll defer to you in all things, and spend her days in a rocker with an embroidery hoop in her hand, you should say so and I’ll return to Arizona. 

This short monologue represents Regan’s attempt to define who she is, but also to more generally redefine parameters of femininity. Throughout the few days of their acquaintance, it has become clear that Colt holds his late wife up as a paragon of female docility. Upon Regan’s arrival, he seems unable to see his new bride as anything other than a stark contrast. Part of Colt’s journey is coming to see all of the women around him – not just Regan and his late wife but also his daughter and his sister – in their full complexity, and not just as polar opposites of rebellion or docility. What’s more, an overarching theme of the novel itself is finding female solidarity despite differences. 

All of this is seeded in the way Regan thinks about herself and describes herself to Colt in this passage. While putatively answering questions about herself, Regan sets up a lineage of female solidarity with her sister. She also reframes difference between women as more of a plurality than an opposition: she and Portia are both unusual, but in different ways. 

Regan also presents her talents cannily, starting with the domestic skills that Colt surely sought in a mail order bride, continuing with the intellectual skills that he likely sees with ambiguity as both proof of a good education and (possibly) a bit of a threat, and ending with the skills he almost certainly sees as unbecoming. Regan presents herself as multiple without being contradictory, and proud of what makes her different. She also, in holding forth for this long in their conversational back-and-forth, shows her capacity for knowledge of herself and control of the unfamiliar, a worthy partner and a match for Colt. 

Partner and match are words that keep coming up as I read this passage. Regan’s use of conversational control is still about partnership: she knows that a successful partnership with Colt will involve her being an equal match for him- a dynamic he clearly enjoys as well. And while the memorable opening gambit of “mail order bride shoots her fiancé” sets Regan up as a match for any man she meets, it’s conversations like these that really do the work. They show that her power can be both as overt as a gunshot and as subtle as quietly confident self-knowledge, and more broadly that a single woman can contain such contradictions, rather than being either/or. Throughout the rest of the book, Regan and Colt slowly negotiate their way from imbalanced power to a more equitable union, and from one-dimensional impressions of each other to a nuanced love in all its complexity. The book also mirrors this commitment to understanding the broad complexity of women’s experiences (specifically Black women living in the Wyoming Territory in the 1800s) with a cast of supporting female characters of great depth and nuance, particularly Colt’s sister Spring and his daughter Anna. Just like there’s a lot more going on beneath the surface of Regan’s simple conversational style, there’s a lot more happening past the eye-catching opening moment of this book.