Dominion, a fictional town in the Mississippi Delta, is shot through with Black church culture and an outsize reverence for high-school football. At the turn of the millennium, it is a community in which sexuality flourishes despite, or perhaps because of, efforts to suppress it. Addie E. Citchens’s debut novel, which takes its setting as its title, follows two women yoked together by their love for a teenager named Emanuel, who more commonly goes by “Wonderboy” or “Wonder”: Diamond, his girlfriend, and Priscilla, his mother and the “first lady” of the local church. Both women, over the course of the novel, desperately try to dislodge themselves from their difficult pasts while confronting a swelling sense of wickedness in Wonder.
Diamond has to grow up quickly when, at 8 years old, she is abandoned, along with three siblings, by her mother. As she enters her senior year with Wonder’s baby on the way, she struggles to figure out her identity outside of her relationship with this mysterious boy, who makes increasingly reckless decisions. Priscilla, meanwhile, manages five sons, a philandering know-it-all husband, and a bad hip with the help of brown liquor and what she calls her “fulfillments” (read: pills).
The characters in Dominion are bombarded with religious scripts about what a proper erotic life should look like. But if we know anything about intimacy and desire, we know that they often hold dominion over us rather than the other way around. Many official and informal directives come from Reverend Sabre Winfrey Jr., Priscilla’s husband and Wonder’s father. The longtime leader of Seven Seals Missionary Baptist Church, he insists on seeing a malignant sexual deviance everywhere. In one of his sermons, he posits that the Bible’s “first seducer” altered “the course of human history,” urging his followers to consider what Jesus can tell them about how to “best resist temptation.” Wonder, who sings and plays music at Seven Seals, masters the trumpet rather than his preferred instrument, the saxophone, because, as his father puts it, “a man never oughta put nothing in his mouth but food.” Wonder also confesses that he murdered the family’s dachshund because it “kept making my daddy mad.” As Priscilla recalls, the reverend “wasn’t too keen on his boys playing with an animal shaped like a ding-a-ling.”
These counterproductive attempts to control sexuality affect the women of Dominion as well. In an early scene, Priscilla walks in on Diamond and her son in an intimate moment. Contemplating where the boy could have learned such impropriety, she recalls the reverend telling her “that because Eve ate the apple, I would have to ‘eat the snake.’” Later, as Diamond registers her embarrassment, she recalls meeting Priscilla years earlier at an event for Finer Womanhood Week that taught young girls “about pads and cramps, how to sit with our ankles crossed, what to wear to keep our bodies from moving under our clothes.”
The book primarily unfolds through first-person observations, toggling between Priscilla and Diamond, both of whom live in awe of Wonder. Diamond sees her relationship with him as “creating something all our own, something I inherently belonged to”—a rare feeling after her family was ripped apart. Priscilla, meanwhile, is disturbed by her son and the “energy that radiated off of him,” which “felt nuclear, dangerous, like someone I didn’t and couldn’t ever know.” The book also includes church bulletins, church histories, obituaries, and records of Wonder’s other dalliances marked by case numbers. These brief accounts of his escapades provide unvarnished views of his often hazy motivations—his search for the “plumpest, most unruly breasts he’d ever come across”; his delight at discovering that another girl’s “panties were scratchy and fancy. Harlot red.”
Wonder might have continued to live a more or less nondescript life of church, football, and teenage sex if not for a sudden queer encounter with a man he meets at his school’s football stadium. When the stranger catches him off guard with a kiss, Wonder reacts with anger and revulsion. He then violently assaults a homeless man who happened to witness the whole thing. Citchens frames this moment, perhaps the novel’s most pivotal, as a high-resolution wide shot from up in the nosebleeds. She tightly choreographs the chance meeting: Wonder “saw and felt lips on his, accepted the tongue crashing about in his mouth. Dude had one hand cradling Emanuel’s head; his palm resting on the stranger’s strong rippled belly, struggled to decide whether to touch or shove.” Citchens barely describes this other man, giving no sense of who he is or where he’s come from. He’s simply dark and muscular.
Many readers will want more details on the identity of this shadowy figure who changes the lives of Wonder and the women who love him. But these facts are irrelevant; the man is portrayed as a manifestation of the aberrant sexuality that Dominion’s Christian culture seeks to suppress. The kiss causes Wonder to spiral; he reflects on every moment of innocuous intimacy he has shared with a man, “the locker rooms and fanny slaps and chest bumps he’d participated in most of his life.” His vicious outburst warns that when erotic desire is oppressively regulated, it can erupt into something destructive.
Not long afterward, Wonder and Diamond run away from home, drive six hours to the Mississippi coast, and hole up in a motel room. This interlude is cut short when Diamond finds Wonder sprawled on the ground after having ingested too many pills. She spends the next few days sitting by his hospital bed, vowing to love the incapacitated young man beside her forever.
What Diamond doesn’t know at that moment is that the choice won’t be hers to make. After his suicide attempt, Wonder starts to pull away from her. Panicking, she wonders how she might emulate what she calls “dangerous women”—those who “had the power to make men risk it all; they brought men to their knees.” When she asks Mrs. Kathareen, a “brown and juicy” woman who is having an affair with the reverend, how to channel the kind of power that will keep a man, the woman ripostes, “Nooooo, baby girl, my only power is that I won’t give my power away.”
Diamond isn’t immediately sure what Mrs. Kathareen means. But the dam that’s been holding back the passions of Dominion has already broken beyond repair, and she’ll soon find out. Priscilla tastes liberation first when her husband steps down from the pulpit in a public admission of his extramarital affairs, freeing her to leave him and face her own desires. She urges Diamond, too, to leave her son. “He is no good for anyone, I promise you,” she tells her. “No good for you or a baby.”
Soon after Wonder wakes up from his overdose, Diamond observes: “People rarely just snap and do crazy shit. What looked like a snap to other people was actually an erosion of the surfaces that we built up for protection, and unfortunately people would rather dwell on the snap than the wearing.” Because Dominion takes place over the course of just a few months, the reader witnesses the snaps, but yearns for more of the wearing. Priscilla laments difficult moments in her marriage, but we scarcely see her husband divulge more than phallic anxieties and churchy platitudes. Her drastic decision to leave her old life behind certainly feels warranted, but I would have delighted in a more elaborate depiction of the circumstances that led to her choice.
This quibble arises because I simply wanted more of this book. To paraphrase one of Priscilla’s more vivid characterizations of her son, the novel’s cabbage feels done, while its cornbread is soft in the middle. Although Dominion is certainly not a romp, it reads perhaps too briskly: The novel’s message is clear, but its characters, at times, could use more fleshing out. Then again, this is what makes it a parable—albeit a complicated one, rooted not in dogma but in messy reality.
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