Lost in the City — Edward P. Jones (1992)
All Aunt Hagar’s Children — Edward P. Jones (2006)
Edward P. Jones has, perhaps guardedly, allowed me a view into a community and way of life I don’t know well, even though I lived near that community during some of the later periods covered in his stories. The community he describes in these short stories is a particular neighborhood in Washington, DC NW, while my community was a dozen miles away in Arlington and Alexandria, Virginia.
His two books of short stories, Lost in the City published in 1992 and All Aunt Hagar’s Children in 2006, report on the lives of African Americans living in Washington, DC. In between these collections, Jones published his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Known World in 2003.
The difference between the short stories and the novel is that the novel covered extended families of slaves and free blacks in a particular county in rural Virginia before the Civil War, while the short stories are each self-contained separate stories of mostly unrelated people living in Washington in various eras from the 1900’s to the 1990’s. (See my review of The Known World here.)
The novel included extensive coverage of the white people in that pre-war Virginia county, probably because it would have been impossible to cover generations of slaves and free blacks without continuously colliding with white slave-owners or racist poor whites. In contrast, the enlightening difference, for me, in the short stories was the fact that white people were not relevant, or more precisely, not included, at all. While the discriminatory societal structures created by white people shaped the residential, economic and power structures of the city, white people were ignored to the extent possible by the black lives in these stories. On the rare occasions the characters in these stories even mention white people it was only to knowingly confirm to each other that no good can come out of any interaction.
These stories provide a view for all into the day-to-day lives of black families and individuals living in very real neighborhoods of Washington, DC. Jones provides the actual addresses, the street intersections, and the names of churches and schools in each story, and these exact locations serve to validate the reality described in the fiction of the stories. Most of the stories cover various tight knit neighborhoods, often limited to only two or three blocks in Northwest DC between North Capital Street and 8th Street NW and from E Street NW up to S Street NW, plus a few stories in very real locations in Anacostia and Northeast DC. Several of the Northwest neighborhoods described in the stories were later torn up and separated when the 395 Freeway leading to New York Avenue was developed in the 1960s. In fact, since the stories were published, most of the neighborhoods have gentrified and the commercial areas are now the upscale theater and restaurant areas of Penn Quarter in NW and H Street NE.
As a white suburbanite in neighboring Virginia, I felt fortunate to have Jones show me the ordinary day-to-day lives of the people in these neighborhoods. I am conscious of my irrelevance to their lives, but I am nevertheless thankful that Jones was willing to allow me to see.
What did I see? These are lives of generational inter-dependence and unselfishness, lived in the context of the slow deterioration of neighborhoods. For nearly every family whose lives are disrupted by drugs or crime or divorce, there are neighbors and grandparents and aunts and uncles who step up to catch the falling pieces. The neighborhoods are nearly organic in the way they evolve and inter-relate. Everyone seems to know each other in these micro-neighborhoods, and more importantly, most everyone takes responsibility for each other. If a woman meets an old friend or a cousin on the street, then that person is invited, sincerely and insistently, for dinner that very evening. If a mother has to go see the “city government people,” she knows she can ask her neighbor to watch her child while she is gone. However, as discussed below, Jones believes that the fabric of support is tearing, and the old ways of community brought to the city from the migrations from the South are disappearing.
Each of the stories has the building blocks that could have been used for high emotion and action scenes. There is marriage and betrayal, generational conflict, drugs, and violence. Yet, as discussed in my review of Jones’ novel The Known World, Jones as a writer does not create scenes that crescendo. The narration is detached. An act of deceit in marriage is described with the same neutral description as a daily commute on a city bus. Most stories end without warning and without conclusion. Jones’ style is to present each character fairly and without judgment. While our understanding of the characters is powerful, the neutrality of presentation means the stories do not propel a reader along. It could be difficult for some readers — one must be more interested in who the characters are than what happens to them.
The theme of relationships plays out with the characters across the stories of both collections, but in a very subtle way. As pointed out by O.E.Scott in his wonderful essay in the NY Times Book Review on Edward P. Jones on August 11, 2020, one character in each of the 14 short stories of Lost in the City also appears in the corresponding 14 stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. The connection is almost coincidental and there is usually no action in one story that carries forward in the corresponding story. For example, in “Marie,” the 14th story of the first collection, an older woman, Marie Delaveaux Wilson, who carries a knife to protect herself on the streets, is repeatedly humiliated by the federal government people. She is summoned to the Social Security office at 21st and M Street Northwest, land of white people, for an interview where, after sitting for six hours in the waiting room she is told, with cruel satisfaction by the African American receptionist, that the person she is to see is not in that day. After several such humiliating trips, Marie slaps the woman hard across the face and then waits in fear for weeks to be summoned for punishment.
Marie lives in the Claridge Towers apartment building at 12th and M Street NW. One day a thin young man knocks on her door and introduces himself as George Carter, and asks whether he could interview her as part of his project for a folklore course at Howard University. He speaks in a “voice that old people in her young days would have called womanish,” and he has long dark-brown fingers that remind her of delicate twigs. They talk through the chain on the door for about 15 minutes and she finally allows him in even though she would not have been surprised “had he turned out to be death with a gun or a knife or fingers to crush her neck.” He introduces himself as “born right here in D.C. Born, bred, and buttered, my mother used to say.” They have a nice talk and she eventually fixes him dinner.
Two generations earlier in “Tapestry,” the 14th story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the cousin of a country girl in Picayune, Louisiana, introduces her to a sleeping car porter based out of Washington, DC named George Carter. Carter falls instantly for Anne and visits as often as his life as a porter of the trains will allow. The story covers life in the rural south and the fish-out-of-water oddity of a city boy wooing a country girl. They are eventually married and she leaves the farm to live with him in Washington, DC. The story ends with their arrival in Washington, but we are told that she would live there for 68 years, “a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great-grandmother to twins.” We, as readers, can allow ourselves the presumption that George Carter, the student with the womanish voice at Howard University, is one of those descendants. As thin as the filaments may be, there is a community in Washington, DC in which the fates of each other are somehow bound.
These two stories also illustrate the apparent view of Jones that the ways of the rural south – inter-generational support, unselfishness and personal responsibility – cannot survive for the African Americans who migrated to the cities in the Great Migration. As Annie and her porter husband are on their train of destination in 1932 to Washington, DC, the narrator says of the passengers that “none of them could know that the cohesion born and nurtured in the South would be but memory in less than two generations…. All the people in that car would have said two generations was a long time. It was, and yet it was not.” In his dedication to All Aunt Hagar’s Childer, Jones writes:
to the multitudes who came up out of the South
for something better, something different, and again,
to the memory of my mother,
Jeanette S.M. Jones,
who came as well and found far less
than even the little she dared hope for
In the story “Root Worker” in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a sophisticated and successful doctor cares for her father and her mentally ill mother. Her mother believes that witches pin her body down in bed every night, and she is in and out of St. Elizabeths for years. Her father learns of a “root worker” in his hometown in rural North Carolina who cures in the old-fashioned way. The doctor reluctantly accompanies her parents to the care of what the doctor considers to be voodoo. The doctor comes to learn that the plants used by the root worker are nearly forgotten medicinal plants that eventually cure her mother. Indeed, the ways of the South are about to be forgotten. The doctor takes it upon herself to learn the ways of the plants, and she brings the knowledge back to her medical practice in Washington, DC.
Edward P. Jones’ writing is dispassionate, but it is empathetic, and Jones permits each character their dignity no matter what their choices. The author’s judgment does not get in the way. It permits the readers an opportunity to meet people they might not otherwise get to know and to better understand their lives.
Bob Fall 