Ballad for Americans:
The stories of Edward P. Jones

Discussed in this essay: All Aunt Hagar’s Children, by Edward P. Jones. Amistad. 416 pages. $25.95. The Known World, by Edward P. Jones. Amistad. 388 pages. $13.95 (paper). Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones. Amistad. 268 pages. $13.95 (paper).

In the single black-and-white photograph that Edward P. Jones has of his mother from her early years in Washington, D.C., Jeanette Satana Majors wears pearl earrings and a white dress and sits upright, legs crossed, the Capitol Building looming over her right shoulder like a sentry keeping watch. A casual glance at the picture, which accompanies Jones’s 1994 essay “A Sunday Portrait,” suggests an official image of an elegant young African-American woman of means, a diplomat’s daughter or, perhaps, a fledgling professor. Inherited when he was twenty-four, the photograph came to Jones a month after his mother died, at fifty-eight. Dating from the late 1930s, “A Sunday Portrait,” which Jones says is “among the treasures I might give my life for,” is the first picture he had been given of his mother in her youth. “Until seeing that picture,” Jones writes, “I had no idea that my mother had ever looked so majestic, and so young and innocent.” Jones, after all, had known a different woman. His mother was known to him, yes, but only

after years of slaving for herself and her children as a dishwasher and floorscrubber, after being forced to place her beloved retarded son, her youngest, in an institution, after years in a relationship with a boyfriend who gave her no sustenance, after three strokes that froze the right side of her body, after lung cancer took final hold of her face and body and twisted her into the same lump of clay God must have seen the moment before he shaped and first breathed life into her.

The Sunday portrait of young Jeanette Satana Majors—“Sunday” because it would have been taken on her only day off from work—was the product of a photo studio in Washington; the Capitol Building in the background was only a cardboard backdrop; the whole mise en scène actually a fiction, one to be sent “back home,” which is to say back to the South, in this case North Carolina and Virginia; “back,” Jones writes, “to relatives who stuck them in the frames of cracked mirrors or put them away in dresser drawers lest the strong light of the South fade the pictures and take away the magic.”

There was nothing magic about the true picture, meaning the real one to come: the eighteen different apartments that Jones and his mother and sister moved through during the first eighteen years of his life, each one “worse than the last,” Jones has said, at least one of which was vacated because the building that housed it had been condemned. There was nothing magic, either, about his mother’s inability to read or write, skills that might have allowed her and them a different kind of life. Nothing magic about their poverty, then, or, for that matter, about the absence of a husband who abandoned the young mother of three to fend for herself in that poverty, a father with whom Jones “exchanged less than two thousand words in his lifetime” and of whom Jones has no pictures, a man whose face, he says, he is unable to describe. “But for what my father did not do,” Jones has written, “I decided not to buy him a tombstone when he died. His grave may still be unmarked, though I have not seen it since the first time in 1975.”

In his essay about this Sunday portrait, Jones tells us that had he “the power to go all the way back,” back to the moment just before the picture of this majestic woman was taken, he knows what he would have wanted to say:

I would have walked up that street and met that woman who was to become my mother. Touched her hand the second before she reached for the knob of the door of that photography shop, taken her hand and asked her to believe what I was about to say. My mother was always a gentle woman, kind beyond anything even God would ask of his creatures, and so I think, after some initial hesitation, she would have stepped away from the door and listened. Save yourself, I would have told her. Save us all. Do not marry him, I would have said of my father, dooming myself, my brother, my sister to some universe of never-to-be-born beings. Save yourself. . . . I am haunted by the photograph of this lovely woman who could have done things, who, in a truly godly world, could have been a thousand different women; and more than all of that, I am haunted because I was not the best of sons and because, in the end, I fear that too much of what she saw of the world was the bottom of a soap-filled dirty pot.

Jones could not save his mother, but, over the course of the thirty-two years since her death, he has been undertaking a project in her name, the scope and nature of which is only now coming fully into view. The initial installment of this endeavor arrived in 1992, eighteen years after his mother’s death, with the publication of his first book, at age forty-two. Set in the city of Jones’s birth and concerning only its African-American inhabitants, the fourteen stories of Lost in the City move through a Washington where museums and monuments play no daily part, not even as cardboard backdrops. This is a city peopled by the children of former slaves, first-generation immigrants effectively, whose parents left the old world of the South in the early years of the twentieth century and traveled to the new world of the North, to cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, and Boston. And just as Jones’s mother had a portrait taken after her arrival in Washington to document, for family back home, how far she had come, Jones’s book provides portraits of the descendants of such people, pocket histories that document just how far, day to day, they would fall.

Jones has said that a literary model for Lost in the City was James Joyce’s Dubliners, though he allowed that he “didn’t want to do a thing like The Wiz where I took all the stories and just made them all black.” As with Dubliners, the stories of Lost in the City are sequenced developmentally: early stories focus on children, and as the book moves forward, attention turns to young adults, the middle-aged, and, by book’s end, the elderly. As with Dubliners, no protagonist in Lost in the City appears twice and only a few minor characters show up in the background of different stories. Most significant of all, both books share a similar view of history—that of a nightmare from which their characters are unable to awaken.

And yet for all these similarities a fundamental difference animates the books, a difference of perspective. Joyce, after all, had such enmity for Dublin—“the city of failure, of rancour and of unhappiness”—that he exiled himself from it. The stories in Dubliners, then, were really articles of impeachment meant to give the Irish, as Joyce wrote, “one good look at themselves”—“good” in this case meaning something closer to “petrifying.” For Joyce believed that his people had become trapped, and so the tapering forms of his stories herd his characters into corrals of self-awareness, epiphanies in which their cardinal flaws are exposed: here is vanity, they say; here is ignorance; here is cowardice—a run of grim, formally exact little proofs that manifest, beyond all doubting, why one would wish to put Dublin at a distance.

Jones, however, has remained in Washington for all but a handful of his fifty-six years. This is as much a geographical distinction as an aesthetic one. In both his life and his art, he has been more willing to stay with his people than has the Joyce of Dubliners. Jones wants to tell a story larger than just a litany of shortcomings. Consider the first paragraph from a story in Lost in the City called “A New Man”:

One day in late October, Woodrow L. Cunningham came home early with his bad heart and found his daughter with the two boys. He was then fifty-two years old, a conscientious deacon at Rising Star AME Zion, a paid-up lifetime member of the NAACP and the Urban League, a twenty-five-year member of the Elks. For ten years he had been the chief engineer at the Sheraton Park Hotel, where practically every employee knew his name. For longer than he could recall, his friends and lodge members had been telling him that he was capable of being more than just the number-one maintenance man. But he always told them that he was contented in the job, that it was all he needed, and this was true for the most part. He would be in that same position some thirteen years later, when death happened upon him as he bent down over a hotel bathroom sink, about to do a job a younger engineer claimed he could not handle.

Cunningham, Jones tells us in the very first sentence, comes home to find his daughter with “two boys,” or, actually, “the two boys”—an apparently inessential distinction, that additional article, but one that is, from a storytelling point of view, vital: two boys can be innocent; the two boys cannot. As the paragraph proceeds, nudging us away from the tantalizing question seeded in the first sentence (what, exactly, did the boys do?), we are given details of the father’s life much in the manner of Joyce. As Lily in “The Dead” was “literally run off her feet,” Cunningham works where “practically every employee knew his name”—the adverbs smuggled in from the unheard voices of the characters themselves. By the end of the paragraph, however, Jones parts permanently from Joyce: he tells us that Cunningham, thirteen years later, will meet his end “bent down over a hotel bathroom sink.” Such a detail—one taking place fully outside the events that will, in the story, soon unfold—would never appear in Joyce, who wants our attention to remain squarely on moments chosen to demonstrate the extent to which character is fate. In Jones, though, however often his characters run up against their shortcomings, they are always presented against a larger field of problems that lurk beyond the current catastrophe. Whereas Joyce’s narrow focus demands that we, like him, be unforgiving of his people’s limitations, Jones’s wider views demand our compassion: he is always asking us to see, and therefore feel, more.

Even the least of Jones’s people, those most flatly villainous and cruel, do not escape his imperative to view them roundly, to give them their due. In the story “Young Lions,” Caesar Matthews, a young hoodlum, enjoys synesthetic moments quite different from those produced by Proust’s madeleine:

He put the Beretta in one of the jacket’s pockets. The moment he touched it the memory of the times he had used it came back to him. He liked remembering. The last time had been eight months ago when they crossed into Maryland and he shot the 7-Eleven clerk in the face. A few miles from the store, back in D.C., Caesar was still laughing about how the man’s face had drained of blood as the gun came towards his face.

As much as Caesar enjoys the sensual pleasures of recalling the pain he causes, he is equally attuned to finding his next mark. Here he comes upon a group of mentally challenged people at a bus stop:

They were all adults, all at least thirty years old, but they talked as if they were new to the world and excited about being in it. The two men talked very loudly, as if they were not afraid to share whatever they were saying. Caesar figured from the beginning that the larger of the two women was the weakest, would be the easiest to pick off.

The narration is in the third person, but the point of view and perceptions here belong to Caesar: he cannot hear “whatever” it is the men are saying, whereas Jones certainly could. Thus we are given a chance to see the world through Caesar’s cold eyes—and how surprisingly fine his thoughts are, noticing creatures “new to the world and excited about being in it.” This is rather more congenial than we might expect of a cruel thug, which begins to free us to imagine him as something more than merely nasty, though he is not yet someone for whom we can feel much compassion. As the story progresses, as Caesar puts in motion his plan to con “the larger of the two,” Jones does not send out social workers to do his storytelling. His narrative ambition is not to see Caesar remanded to decency; rather, his narrative compassion manifests in small moments during which clear venality is blurred by the killer’s trembling hand. Here is Caesar, returning home to rob his father, a man who kicked his “goddam no-account” son to the curb:

Caesar touched nearly everything along the way—a lace piece made by his grandmother that was on the back of the easy chair in the living room; a drawing of the house signed and dated by his sister taped to the refrigerator; the kitchen curtains he had helped his mother put up. In a corner of the kitchen counter he found wrapped in a rubber band the letters he had been sending to his father; only the first one had been opened. . . . He turned away and went to his sister’s room, where he touched the heads of the three stuffed animals sitting on the pillows of her bed. In the room he had shared with his brother, he took as many of his clothes as he could carry, his hands shaking each time he picked up an item.

Such a capacity for imagining the human in the inhuman was well suited to the subject Jones chose for the book he would publish next, eleven years later, a novel set in the slaveholding pre-Civil War South. Jones planned on calling it All Aunt Hagar’s Children—“a phrase,” he told an interviewer, “that my mother often used for black people.” The antebellum novel he had in mind was to have been limited in scope, centered around a single slave. “But in the course of time,” Jones says, “I took an interest in the other characters who were not black. So I had to come up with a larger title.”

Published in 2003 as The Known World, this novel—which has collected nearly every literary prize one might name—is set in an imaginary southern county that Jones calls Manchester, Virginia. The Known World tells the story not of a single slave but of a community of people, black and white, whose lives all intersect in some way with that of a black man named Henry Townsend. Townsend, though born in slavery, becomes free in his late teens, acquires land, builds a plantation, and turns slaveholder himself, overlord to thirty-three human beings at his time of death—the event that provides the novel’s springboard. This précis, however, wrongly conveys that the terrain of The Known World is that of the “historical novel”—a dutiful fictional filling in of our understanding of the factual record. What research on the subject Jones undertook was, in fact, quickly derailed after he happened upon an account of a white slave owner who spent her days abusing one of her black slaves, a little girl, by beating her head against a wall. “If I had wanted to tell the whole story of slavery, Americans couldn’t have taken that,” Jones told an interviewer. “People want to think that there was slavery, and then we got beyond it. People don’t want to hear that a woman would take a child and bang her head against the wall day after day. It’s nice that I didn’t read all those books. What I would have had to put down is far, far harsher and bleaker.”

Instead of clinging to the cruelties of historical fact, Jones manages in The Known World a curious kind of summoning, finding in his scores of characters not one too small to warrant, however briefly, his full attention. This aesthetic choice has a metaphysical consequence: all beings, we see underscored, warrant that kind of attention. Late in the book, for example, Sheriff Skiffington, having discovered that one of the free black men in his county has been sold back into slavery by one of Skiffington’s unscrupulous deputies, is unsure if this act, which he knows to be unjust, is actually illegal. He writes to Harry Sanderson, a liaison in Richmond, who writes back to confirm that “a crime had indeed been committed.” Although that response would have been enough to move the sheriff forward and to allow the novel to proceed along its course, Jones waylays us with this glimpse into an incidental character’s pained existence:

[The sheriff] heard from Richmond again four days later. In handwriting he did not recognize, a Graciela Sanderson let him know that her husband, Harry, was dead and that she was now charged with keeping up his correspondence. He read the eight-page letter twice but he found nothing in it about what Virginia was doing about the crime of selling free Negroes. The widow told him about her husband, how she had met him when he vacationed in Italy, how he had wooed her, brought her to America after their wedding, and made her a happy woman in Richmond, “where the Governor is in residence.” She closed the letter with two paragraphs about the recent “discouraging” weather in Richmond, and then she asked Skiffington if she should return to her home in Italy, “where the sun is not as spiteful,” or remain in the Capitol where her children and grandchildren were prospering. “I am despondent and I await some answer from you about what I should do.”

He would get more letters from her over the next few days but there would not be time to write her back.

One sorrow—the free Negro’s theft—is compounded by two more: the death of the man whose expertise the sheriff seeks, and the grief of the man’s widow, who, graphomaniacally, is now sending out bulletins to strangers too busy to reply. This Graciela Sanderson neither appears in the novel before this moment nor does she come into it again. Yet Jones manages to conjure her both suddenly and lastingly for us, as if we ourselves were the surprised stranger with her letter fully in our hands.

That Jones finds a place in the structure of his large book for such small and telling things is a technical marvel, a deliberate stratagem to which Jones provides, quite literally, a map. At the novel’s very end, one of the slaves who manages to escape the plantation, a woman named Alice—hitherto believed by the entire county to be mad because of her nightly rambles through the brush while warbling to herself—appears in Philadelphia, transformed. In a great hall, she is displaying artworks that she herself has created. Another of the former residents of Manchester happens into the hall and, in a letter to his sister, describes Alice’s work:

a grand piece of art that is part tapestry, part painting, and part clay structure—all in one exquisite Creation, hanging silent and yet songful on the Eastern wall. It is . . . a kind of map of the life of the County of Manchester, Virginia. But a “map” is such a poor word for such a wondrous thing. It is a map of life made with every kind of art man has ever thought to represent himself. . . . There is nothing missing, not a cabin, not a barn, not a chicken, not a horse. Not a single person is missing. I suspect that if you were to count the blades of grass, the number would be correct as it was once when the creator of this work knew that world.

The Known World itself was Jones’s attempt at such a “kind of map,” one from which nothing would be missing. Of course, maps are constantly lapsing out of date, are endlessly in need of being redrawn, as Jones’s latest book reminds us. The title he abandoned for his novel, All Aunt Hagar’s Children, has found its place with this new collection of short stories. His mother’s phrase refers to the Hagar of Genesis, female servant of Sarah, who was seen as a sort of patron saint by former slaves, and it suggests the book’s terrain. The fourteen stories of All Aunt Hagar’s Children revisit not merely the city of Washington but the fourteen stories of Lost in the City. Each new story—and many of them, in their completeness, feel like fully realized little novels—is connected in the same sequence, as if umbilically, to the corresponding story in the first book. Literature is, of course, littered with sequels—its Rabbits and Bechs; its Zuckermans and Kepeshes—but this is not, in the main, Jones’s idea of a reprise. Each revisitation provides a different kind of interplay between the two collections. A minor character from the first story of Lost in the City, “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” shows up in “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the first story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children. “In the Blink of God’s Eye” tells us about a woman, newly arrived in Washington from Virginia, who awakes one night in 1901 to a sound. Brandishing both a pistol and a knife, she walks out of the house in the dark, where she sees a “bundle suspended from the tree in the yard, hanging from the apple tree that hadn’t born fruit in more than ten years.” She pokes the bundle with the knife, “and in response, like some reward, the bundle offered a short whine, a whine it took her a moment or two to recognize”:

So this was Washington, she thought as she reached up on her tip toes and cut the two pieces of rope that held the bundle to the tree’s branch and unwrapped first one blanket and then another. So this was the Washington her [husband] had brought her across the Potomac River to—a city where they hung babies in night trees.

The baby is Miles Patterson, aged zero, who, fifty-six years later in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” will himself provide a bundle of birds for the young female protagonist of that story to raise. That earlier story is effectively being retold in a new way: this woman in the night, Ruth Patterson, takes in the bundle, names it Miles, and raises him as her son—a choice not without its consequences. After all, the tree from which this strange night-blooming fruit is cut is an apple tree. In these very first pages of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones would have us bear in mind that Washington is very much a world of the Fall.

The ways that Jones connects the new stories to the old never lack for variety or invention. He is constantly paralleling his themes and mirroring his images, which creates, for a reader who knows the first collection, a suite of “third things” that extend beyond the two stories themselves: places in the mind where these fourteen distant marriages are made. One of the great pleasures in this book are those moments of recognition when we discover how old and new align—a pleasure never marred by expectation. For there is so much at stake in these stories that one forgets, from each to each, what is going on beneath them . . . and then one remembers . . . and forgets again. In large measure, this is a function of Jones’s capacious idea of storytelling: as it did with the Italian widow in The Known World, Jones’s imagination fills these long stories with people and incident and moments of great tenderness, not to say humor amidst the melancholy. As such, for readers unfortified by a knowledge of Jones’s prior collection, he has paid them the courtesy of making sure that these fourteen stories stand on their own.

One need not have read “Young Lions,” from Lost in the City, to enjoy the new story, “Old Boys, Old Girls,” with which it corresponds. As it happens, the connection they share is the most conventional of the fourteen: both feature the same protagonist, Caesar Matthews. The young thug of the first story, however, has blossomed, thirteen years later, into a full-fledged felon. As “Old Boys, Old Girls” unfolds, we cannot fail to notice that the story is of a type that has been told uncountable times: a man commits a crime, goes to prison, is released, and, no longer young or hale, must find some kind of home in the world. Caesar’s journey seems as though it can only be a further bottoming out: we see him living in squalor, once again near temptations that could set him against his own humanity. But Jones’s manipulation of the familiar is never less than a reinvention. Caesar happens upon a woman in his tenement named Yvonne, a woman from his past, a woman who disappeared from his life long ago. “Together, they had rented a little house in Northeast and had been planning to have a child once they had been there two years. . . . Two months later, she was gone.” During their time together, Caesar had put aside thieving and pushing, going back to them when she left him, “not because he was heartbroken, though he was, but because it was such an easy thing to do.”

Yvonne, Caesar learns, fell: she is in worse straits than he; she is beyond salvation. Eventually, he discovers her dead in her apartment. He cleans up what little is left of her life: her room, her body. No one but the reader will ever see this gentleness of which Caesar is capable:

Caesar changed the bed clothing and undressed Yvonne. He got one of her large pots and filled it with warm water from the bathroom and poured into the water cologne of his own that he never used and bath-oil beads he found in a battered container in a corner beside her dresser. The beads refused to dissolve, and he had to crush them in his hands. He bathed her, cleaned out her mouth. He got a green dress from the closet, and underwear and stockings from the dresser, put them on her, and pinned a rusty cameo on the dress over her heart. He combed and brushed her hair, put barrettes in it after he sweetened it with the rest of the cologne, and laid her head in the center of the pillow now covered with one of his clean cases. He gave her no shoes and he did not cover her up, just left her on top of the made-up bed. The room with the dead woman was as clean and as beautiful as Caesar could manage at that time in his life.

It is an overwhelming moment for any reader, and certainly for one who recalls Caesar’s trembling hand in “Young Lions.”

Another story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, “A Rich Man,” features perhaps the most moving of Jones’s reprises. At the story’s center is Horace Perkins. A former army sergeant who moved to a department of records desk at the Pentagon, Horace has become a widower of Loneese Perkins: the two of them “lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Sunset House, a building for senior citizens.” The story begins in 1989, shortly after Loneese’s death. Horace, long a philanderer in their marriage and in their retirement center, is now free to exercise every libidinal whim, which he does with a new urgency and vigor: “God is a strange one, he thought, sipping Chivas Regal one night before he went out: he takes a man’s wife and gives him a new penis in her place.” Whereas before he had contented himself with “attractive widows, many of them eager for a kind word from a retired army sergeant,” his new vitality has made him seek out “young stuff.” While he is at the apartment of one of his older companions, sixty-one-year-old Sandy, her younger daughter arrives with a friend: “One day in February, nine months after Loneese’s death, one of Sandy’s daughters, Jill, came to visit, along with one of Jill’s friends, Elaine Cunningham.” Elaine Cunningham, daughter of Woodrow L. Cunningham, the girl who was missing at the end of Lost in the City’s “A New Man.” I don’t want to say too much more here on that account, for Jones has been careful to supply just enough information to make her reappearance in every sense a revelation. But this is a story that is really about Horace, who will be left asking, “How does a man start over with nothing?”

“Nothing” is precisely what the people in Jones’s Washington are asked to confront, again and again. The final story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, “Tapestry,” suggests a use for these blank spaces. Anne Perry, daughter of Mississippi weavers and a weaver herself, meets a man and moves north with him, to Washington. She leaves many things behind, family and friends and a whole other possible life, along with an unfinished tapestry of a snow scene. Years later, her father sends it to her to complete. “She would have by then grown into something else in Washington and had barely enough left of Mississippi in her to finish [it]. It took three more years, but it looked nothing like the world she had first imagined in Picayune.” The artwork, then, charts the distance between two versions of herself.

This distance from self, what one might call perspective, is something Jones also showcased at the end of The Known World, with Alice’s “grand piece of art that is part tapestry, part painting . . . a kind of map of the life of the County.” And going back further still, the closing story of Lost in the City, “Marie,” contained the first instance of such a final reckoning. A young man called George Carter, the grandson of the weaver in “Tapestry,” records eighty-six-year-old Marie’s stories of the South for a folklore course. “He’s takin down my whole life,” she tells a friend, and though she enjoys telling of her past, “she knew that however long she lived, she would not ever again listen to them, for in the end, despite all that was on the tapes, she could not stand the sound of her own voice.”

Some truths are too difficult to hear; some merely bind us to cruel facts, as Jones discovered when researching The Known World, to a child’s head that is beaten endlessly against a wall. Others, though, can provide perspective on the unforgivable, a liberating distance through which insight may be gained. This kind of freedom may seem small, particularly in light of the losses that have been suffered by Jones’s people—of basic liberty when they were slaves, of opportunity when free, of dignity throughout. There is no reparation for such thefts. But Jones’s stories tell us, through their hoardings of human cargo, their salvages of the small and the pure from the larger ruin, that he has found a place for these unmoorings. As the ends of his three books attest, one must chart the territory; find a way to document, depict, create; make good on what cannot, in life, be mended. This is how majesty, locked in a photograph, is freed into the world. This is how people are saved.

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Ballad for Americans: The stories of Edward P. Jones

Ballad for Americans:
The stories of Edward P. Jones