1In Edward P. Jones’s short story “Lost in the City,” Lydia Walsh calls a cab to take her to the hospital to view the body of her mother who just died. Filled with grief, Lydia tells the cab driver to “‘just keep on driving and get us lost in the city” (153). Yet, rather than getting lost, the drive through Washington D.C. prompts Lydia to catalog many familiar places: 7th and 5th Streets, federal buildings, museums, the mall, a funeral home, a Safeway Grocery Store, her family’s downstairs apartment at 457 Ridge Street, and the wharf. “Lost in the City” is not an anomaly: Jones identifies an abundance of places and routes across his two collections, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006). Reading his work, we discover that Jones is a detailed mapmaking storyteller—his narratives intricately chart the landscape of D.C.

2Jones is something of a demographer. His short stories constitute one of the most extensive fictional renderings of Black characters living in the nation’s capital and arguably any other place. Across two collections, 465 or 89 percent of the total 524 characters are African American. More than just simply populating his stories with Black people, Jones presents a network of interrelated characters. A defining feature of Jones’s short fiction has been his tendency to connect characters across collections. Jones describes this structure of his collections noting, “The first story in Lost in the City has to do with Betsy Ann and the pigeons, and the first story in All Aunt Hagar’s Children is about the infancy of the man who ultimately gives her the pigeons” (“The Art of Fiction”). These sorts of connections persist throughout both collections, demonstrating Jones’s long-term commitment to his major and minor characters, and his desire to create a sense of coherent community.

3As a college student, Jones was disheartened to realize “people only knew about Washington D.C. in terms of government, but they didn’t know about it as a community” (Interview by Catan). After reading James Joyce’s Dubliners—a collection of fifteen stories about life in the Irish capital at the turn of the 19^th century—Jones felt inspired to create similar renderings in D.C. Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children present a diversity of Black characters spanning a range of ages. Elizabeth Poliner observers, “As with Joyce’s Dubliners, Lost in the City begins with stories of younger people, and then, as the stories progress, so too do the ages of the main characters.” Without closer examinations of Jones’s short fiction, which is often overshadowed by his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Known World (2003), we might fail to adequately appreciate his expansive treatments of Black characters and thorough considerations of geography.

4This article expands the scholarship on Jones by highlighting his abundant character and spatial depictions while at the same time situating analyses of his work at the intersection of African American literary studies and digital humanities. Specifically, I examine Jones’s depiction of two characters, Anita Hughes and Caesar Matthews, across his two collections in order to highlight Jones’s remarkable attention to detail—an innovation in Black short fiction. By including such a high number of characters and presenting so many places, Jones expands the density of Black representation and accentuates the nuance of a distinct geographic locale (Washington D.C.) in short fiction. My analysis draws from a dataset I produced on Jones’s short fiction that identifies the hundreds of characters that appear in his works, tracking character interactions and charting their movements across various settings. This comprehensive documentation of people and places makes it possible to consider the details and totality of Jones’s work.

6The first section of this article uses quantitative methods to demonstrate how Jones arguably offers one of the most extensive renderings of Black people in short fiction. A recognition of the variety and large number of characters in the stories reveals the extent to which Jones presents a multiplicity of Black lives in one locale. The second section addresses the importance of Anita Hughes’s mobility across D.C. in three stories by Jones. The active movement of Black female characters in the works of one writer is uncommon in the history of short fiction, especially among the most anthologized literary compositions. The final section considers how Jones charts new ground in short story representation by offering one of the most in-depth treatments of a Black male character, Caesar Matthews, in two linked stories. The intricate, combined tales present scenes from twenty years of an African American man’s life as he moves from criminal to prisoner to rehabilitated ex-con while interacting with more than sixty people in a dozen different settings.

Quantifying Edward P. Jones’s Characters

7In “Edward P. Jones’s Carefully Quantified Literary World,” A.O. Scott describes the experience and dilemma of encountering so many people and places in Jones’s short stories. “After a while, you learn to pay close attention to the names and addresses,” notes Scott, and then later concedes that “the links and knots are too many to enumerate.” My experiences reading Jones were similar. I learned to take note of recurring names and locales. And like Scott, I initially thought that there were too many connections and notes to itemize. But then, I changed my mind. The enjoyment and challenge of enumerating all the characters, interactions, and locations in Jones’s stories prompted me to create my Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children datasets.

9Jones presents several different characters of assorted ages in each of his stories, some of which cover various time periods. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” Betsy Ann Morgan, the protagonist, is joined by nineteen supporting characters including her father, Robert Morgan, who is in his early thirties, surrogate grandparents, Jenny and Walter Creed who are senior citizens, and Miles Patterson, a barber, who is fifty-six. A host of neighborhood children such as her cousin Ralph Holley, Darlene Greenley, and brothers Carlos and Carleton Gordon also appear in the story. In “The Store” and “Common Law,” Jones presents children, young adults, middle-aged adults, and senior citizens. Jones underscores his interests in intergenerational, varied Black communities.

10Jones deliberately diversifies the characters in his stories. “Every major character, and even most of the minor characters, would be different, so that each story would be distinct from the others,” he said in one interview. “I didn’t want someone to come along and be able to say that the stories are taken out of the same bag” (Interview with Jackson). Jones views diverse characters as a pathway to original stories. He populates his stories with a wide assortment of characters and in the process avoids derivative compositions.

11Literary scholar Trudier Harris identified several of the characters who comprise Toni Morrison’s fiction, noting that the novelist “has given us worlds of characters, worlds of places, and worlds of language” (“Worlds” 330). Characters dealing with instances of death and violence, slavery and racism, and even evil and otherworldliness, make Morrison’s stories “so vividly and intensely engaging” and “consistently compelling, haunting” (329). Harris explains that Morrison created a constellation of characters that captivated general readers and scholars. Now consider that Jones has given us an even larger array of protagonists, antagonists, and supporting and background characters to consider. He portrays children and senior citizens, men and women, law abiding citizens and criminals. He offers a range of workers in different professions—busboy, bank teller, prison guard, medical doctor, attorney, government worker, high school teacher, grocery store owner, and a root worker. He additionally presents unemployed drug users, skilled burglars, con-artists, and loan sharks. For Jones, diverse Black demographics matter.

12His stories complement canonical short fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. Like those writers, Jones portray Black people contending with a variety of issues while navigating both rural and urban spaces. However, he goes further with respect to the number of characters represented in any given story. Hurston includes nine characters in “Sweat”; Wright presents five characters in “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” and Baldwin introduces nine characters in “Sonny’s Blues.” By contrast, Jones includes eighteen characters, on average, in his stories. In comparison to various other Black short story writers, Jones depicts an unusually high number of characters.

13Along with that density of characters, Jones identifies, in his stories, an unusually large number of settings—260 specific D.C. locations. In “Marie,” the narrator references several locales across D.C.: Claridge Towers at 12th and M, a bus stop at 14th and K, and the social security offices downtown at 21st and M streets, Northwest—similar to the many locations mentioned in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” such as a grocery store at 5th and O Streets, NW, Kann’s Department Store on 8th street, a bar called Mojo’s on North Capital, and Dunbar High School at 1^st and N Streets. As Jones’s characters navigate these venues, they encounter multiple random people on the streets. These random encounters with minor characters rarely occur in canonical stories by Charles Chesnutt, Hurston, Wright, Ralph Ellison, Baldwin, and Alice Walker. In this regard, Jones offers new possibilities for representing characters and locations.

Anita Hughes and Mobile Women

14In the foreword to Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison noted that writing the novel required “what was for me a radical shift in imagination” (xii). Her first two novels had focused on female protagonists, and Song of Solomon would concentrate on a male lead. Doing so meant that she would need “to get out of the house, to de-domesticate the landscape that had so far been the site of my work. To travel. To fly” (xii). A focus on men characters prompted extensive geographic movement in her work. And Morrison was not alone. James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and many other Black writers made the mobility of males an integral part of their narratives.

15Edward P. Jones, on the other hand, took an alternative route. He demonstrates an awareness and interest in mobile women. Several of his stories feature women who travel to and from work and with kids as they are running errands. They also ride around the city in cars and take public transportation to government offices, department stores, hospitals, and various destinations throughout D.C. Like Morrison and others, Jones shows Black men whose travels are important to the narratives. But his treatment of so many mobile women offers new, uncommon views of Black women characters in fiction.

16While Black women protagonists appear in popular stories by Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gayl Jones, none of those characters are shown traveling to multiple places. They remain relatively stationary. That’s not the case in short fiction by Jones. Like Lydia Walsh from “Lost in the City,” most of Jones’s stories describe several travel routes featuring women characters. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” Jenny Creed demonstrates her facilities navigating the area near Mt. Vernon Square, as she comes out of Hahn’s shoe store, crosses New York Avenue and heads up 7th Street (13). The protagonist of “Marie” understands how to traverse her neighborhood when she has to go downtown to the social security office as she walks from her home at Claridge Towers at 12th and M street to the bus stop at 14th and K (237). Elaine Cunningham, in “A Rich Man,” gets a ride back to where she lives in Capitol Heights and notices the travel routes as her and friends ride down Rhode Island Avenue, and just before they turn onto New Jersey Avenue (331). In “Spanish in the Morning” a family friend, Sadie, picks up the unnamed protagonist from Holy Redeemer Catholic school and travels back to their home neighborhood “up 1st Street, and all the way down Pierce Street to the corner of New Jersey Avenue” (35). Narrators casually referencing the navigation routes of women characters are fixtures of Jones’s fiction.

18Perhaps Jones’s most expansive illustration of a female character navigating D.C.’s environs is found in Anita Hughes, who appears in three stories: “The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed” and “Gospel” from Lost in the City and in “Resurrecting Methuselah” in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. In each story, Anita travels by car across different parts of town. Anita is a teenager when she first appears in “The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed” and “Gospel,” and in “Resurrecting Methuselah,” she is an adult with a child. Tracing her mobility in the stories means moving with her across spaces and time.

19In “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” the protagonist, Cassandra, agrees to take Gladys Harper to her father’s house in Anacostia while Anita and Cassandra’s cousin-in-law, Melanie, ride along. The teenaged girls, students at Cardozo High School, make their way to Anacostia while also making stops along the way evidencing their familiarity, or at the very least confidence, with navigating D.C. neighborhoods outside of their home environment. In “Gospel,” Anita travels to two different churches in D.C. to perform at various churches as the newest and youngest member of The Gospelteers. Over the course of the story, along with three other women, Anita travels by car to ten different locations. They go to Claridge on M Street, the House of Holy Savior Baptist Church, S. Street between 10th and 11th, and Holy Tabernacle AME Zion, among other destinations. Readers rarely witness this much mobility from a Black woman character in short fiction and perhaps from any African American character or woman character in short stories.

20In “Resurrecting Methuselah,” Anita, the protagonist of the story, travels around D.C. in her car with her daughter Bethany. Anita leaves the National Arboretum and rides along New York Avenue, passing North Capitol Street. She thinks of Sixteenth Street where her parents lived. By the end of the story, she visits Walter Reed Army Hospital. In all, she travels through three different quadrants in D.C. and several neighborhoods. Her movements become critical touchpoints for memories and knowledge of the city. She drives by the National Arboretum on New York Avenue, Cardozo High School on Clifton Street NW, her job on Minnesota Avenue in Northeast, her daughter’s school, The New Day Arising Christian School, a few blocks over, Walter Reed Army Hospital on 16^th street, and other landmarks, which spark remembrances, leading the narrator to introduce flashbacks that provide insight into experiences that shaped Anita’s temperament.

21Admittedly, Jones thought when he published Lost in the City, “that was supposed to be the end of it,” but “you mature, life does things to people, and it does things to writers as well” (Interview with Graham 426). Anita is one of the characters whom Jones pulls forward. In All Aunt Hagar’s Children, readers learn that Anita met her current husband while in high school, and later became pregnant with her daughter, before finishing medical school, even though she would become an accomplished manager later in life at her government job in Northeast. These important life events in Anita’s life are revealed more than a decade after she first appeared in “The Night Rhona Ferguson was Killed” and “Gospel.” Jones imagined or at least shared her background in retrospect in “Resurrecting Methuselah.” The flashbacks in the story transport readers from All Aunt Hagar’s Children to the previously published Lost in the City.

22Jones exemplifies his attentiveness to details of his characters with Anita. In “The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed,” “Gospel,” and “Resurrecting Methuselah,” Anita has moved from minor character to protagonist, and she has transitioned from a child to an adult. Across two collections, Anita evolves, providing an idea of the development of a short story character across multiple works. Some fourteen years after her first appearance in Lost in the City, Jones provides more background on Anita in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, adding more dimensions to her as a character. In “Resurrecting Methuselah,” readers learn Anita was a sickly child, and as a result, she failed two grades making her, “two years older than most of the students in the senior class at Cardozo High School” (60). So, in “The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed,” she was actually older than her peers. Anita is a mature in comparison to her classmates, and the knowledge that she was slightly older explains why. Jones’s attentiveness to key details concerning Anita’s life represents his commitment as a storyteller to thoroughly developing the backstory of the character and showing her relevance to his ongoing creative processes.

23Anita serves as a caretaker of sorts in each of the stories, providing reassurance for the people she travels with around D.C. When Cassandra and Melanie have a conflict, Anita mediates and facilitates reconciliation between the two girls. Her demeanor eases the transition as the girls drive back to Southwest. Similarly, in “Gospel,” Anita cares for the oldest member of the group, Maude Townsend. The night before each of the group’s performances, Anita spends the night with the blind seventy-eight-year-old, assisting with her preparations. These key scenes offer insight into Anita’s personality and illustrate her caring and compassionate nature. In “Resurrecting Methuselah,” Jones draws on and develops these character qualities when showing interactions with her daughter Bethany. A look at Anita across multiple stories reveals Jones’s interest in transforming a minor character into a major character, all the while continuing the distinct traits of the figure.

24In the first collection, Jones emphasizes Anita’s abilities as a talented singer as she travels around D.C. In “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” as they are driving back to Northwest, they ask Anita to sing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” The girls enjoy her singing so much that Gladys says, “‘I’d pay a quarter for that,’” and Cassandra says “‘I’d pay a hundred bucks,’” as she honked the horn (57). Once they return to their neighborhood and learn the news about Rhonda, Cassandra is taken in by Anita’s family for the night. Anita sings as Cassandra falls asleep.

25Jones builds upon her talent later in “Gospel,” where the narrator says, “It was said that Anita had a voice beautiful enough to lure the angels down from heaven” (200). Anita is such a talented singer that a rival gospel group, Jesse Mae Carson and her Heavenly Choir, attempt to recruit her to join them. However, the narrator notes, “Anita had never once wavered in her desire to stay with the Gospelteers” (200). Anita’s calm demeanor and deep sense of loyalty reverberate in both stories in Lost in the City. Just as important, by highlighting gospel and a character’s singing talents, Jones produces a composition that aligns with other short fiction representing Black music and musicians such as James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” Henry Dumas’s “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” Amiri Baraka’s “The Screamers,” and Rudolph Fisher’s “Miss Cynthie.”

27While Jones denies that his mother, Jeanette Jones, is an artistic influence, he nonetheless features her prominently by acknowledging her on the dedication page of each of his three critically acclaimed books. In interviews, he credits her with “whatever it is I am now. So it’s a small thing to put her name on the dedication page every time” (Interview with Franklin). On the dedication page to The Known World, Jones writes that his mother “could have done much more in a better world.” In the fiction he produces, Jones presents women doing quite a bit. Beyond presenting twenty-one female protagonists in his twenty-eight short stories, Jones includes more than two-hundred thirty Black girls and women in those compositions. Representing so many different Black female characters is extraordinary.

29The presentation of mobile women undoubtedly constitutes a recurring feature of Jones’s storytelling. While Anita’s mobility is noteworthy, her movements correspond to several other women characters in Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. In “Blindsided” from All Aunt Hagar’s Children, the story’s protagonist Roxanne Stapleton goes blind while coming home from work. The narrator describes the route she takes on her way home to 1708 10th St, NW and reveals just how acquainted she is with the various bus routes as she is traveling from work: “Roxanne, without much waiting, was able to catch the D.C. Transit bus heading down 14th Street, N.W.” (293). According to the narrator, “the bus going down 11th Street would have put [Roxanne] closer to her room on 10th,” but “going down 14th had always been good luck” (293). Roxanne’s movements and even her potential movements are up for consideration in a story by a writer mindful about women navigating urban spaces.

30Similarly, in “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” Marvella Watkins takes the Metrorail system with her three children, and we witness her directional awareness: “It did not matter if they took the orange line, which ended at Ballston, or the blue line, which ended at National Airport, because both lines, traveling over the same tracks, went past their McPherson Square stop” (116). Viewing Marvella’s thoughts while she travels gives us glimpses of D.C. Metro routes as well as a woman’s knowledge about her movements in an urban environment. By showing Anita, Roxanne, Marvella, and several more women and girls navigating D.C., Jones advances the representational possibilities of black women characters.

The Extended Treatment of Caesar Matthews

31There is a long, rich history of representing Black male characters in short fiction, yet based on the nature of the genre, those representations are relatively brief. We view momentary scenes and experiences in the lives of Black males in stories by Charles Chesnutt, Hurston, Wright, Ralph Ellison, Charles R. Johnson, and Ernest Gaines. Jones contributes to this history of storytelling about Black boys and men and goes even further. His representation of Caesar Matthews in “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls,” however, is perhaps the most extensive and sustained treatment of a Black male character in short fiction.

32Among canonical short stories, there is no story or groups of stories that offer an expansive view of a Black male character detailing his experiences interacting with more than sixty people, in several different settings, and across approximately 20 years. That’s exactly what Jones does. “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls” follow Caesar, a native of D.C., as he falls into a life of crime and eventually prison. Jones reveals the long arc of Caesar’s life following him from his descent into criminal life and then his search for redemption. Caesar is twenty-four years old in “Young Lions,” and he is in his mid-30s ten years later at the start of “Old Boys, Old Girls.” He is between forty-two and forty-five years old by the end of the second story.

33In a 2006 NPR interview, Jones described his fascination exploring the lives of Black characters. He explained that no person was ever born bad, and it’s up to the writer to “find the moment or moments when that person turned off the good road and went on the bad road.” As he noted, “When you can find those moments and tell them as detailed as possible, then maybe, maybe you can avoid the stereotype” (Interview with Elliot). Jones’s extended treatment of Caesar gives him the freedom to develop a complex portrait of a single character.

35Caesar contends with familial conflicts, a life of crime, failed romances, prison, and even redemption. Jones includes several flashbacks that demonstrate how Caesar never fully recovers emotionally from the conflict with his father and estrangement from his family. When he was sixteen, his father declared, “‘I gave you more chances than you deserved,’” before kicking him out of the house (“Young Lions” 74). This conflict haunts Caesar throughout “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls”—a timespan of nearly twenty years. His banishment from his father’s house sets off a chain reaction leading Caesar to interact with unsavory, older male characters. The conflict between Caesar and his father becomes a catalyst for later troubles. The sustained treatment of Caesar’s experiences over an extended period of time shows multiple scenes along his life journey, providing in-depth views of a Black man making poor and disturbing decisions and then eventually changing course and improving himself.

36Place based explorations are crucial to Caesar’s development. The character appears in more than thirty settings in the two stories. In “Young Lions,” the narrator mentions a bar where Caesar works located at Georgia Avenue and Ingraham Street, a friend’s apartment on 16^th Street, a few blocks up from Malcolm X Park, his childhood home on French Street, and several other locales. In “Old Boys, Old Girls,” once Caesar is released from prison, the narrator mentions a restaurant on F Street where he works, a boarding house where he stays at the 900 block of N Street, Northwest, and Franklin Park, at 14^th and K where he spends his free time. Ironically, despite the many settings in the story, the protagonist previously experiences limited mobility. In “Young Lions,” the narrator mentions that Caesar “had never come down to the world below Constitution Avenue, except for those times when relatives came from out of town” (72). Caesar mostly remains within a single quadrant of the city, but the author-narrator of the stories shows countless settings within that space. The presentation of so many different places reveals how integral cultural geo-tagging is to Jones’s storytelling.

37Caesar regularly inhabits spaces with older men as he is seemingly looking for direction on how to live his life once banished from his home. These male figures shape Caesar’s outlook on life. In “Young Lions,” a cousin, Angelo Billings, brought stolen flowers to Caesar’s mother’s funeral, and though Caesar understood that stealing was wrong, he viewed the theft as proof that Angelo “loved Caesar’s mother as much as he loved anyone” (73). A friend, Sherman Wheeler, burglarizes homes and eventually enlists Caesar to join him in the crimes. When they first begin working together, Sherman does not like Caesar carrying a gun, and “in their first months together he pulled rank and told him to leave the guns at home when they weren’t needed” (65). Caesar occasionally works as a bartender for a widely known criminal, Manny Soto, who runs a fencing business out of his bar. Manny seems to unnerve Caesar and make him uncomfortable. Interacting with various felonious men accelerates Caesar’s involvement in a life of crime.

38Male influences continue to play a pronounced role in “Old Boys, Old Girls,” which primarily takes place in D.C.’s now-closed Lorton Reformatory, a prison located in nearby Lorton, Virginia. Caesar interacts with various figures while incarcerated. His first cellmate, Pancho, is a recovering drug addict, and his second roommate, Watson Rainey, is a three-time rapist of elderly women. A former armed robber becomes an amateur tattoo artist in the prison. Caesar reconnects with former associates, Multrey Wilson and Tony Cathedral, who are serving life sentences for first degree murder. He observes (but does not speak to) Multrey’s prison wife who is unnamed, and the Righteous Desulter, a former deacon who killed a man for insulting his wife. A dead man in the form of a ghost, or so Cathedral thinks, also makes appearances, to haunt the one who had murdered him.

39The diversity of characters in the prison elevates the intricacy of “Old Boys, Old Girls” as a work of literary art. Caesar’s cast of fellow inmates are mysterious, dangerous, compulsive, and calculated. Some are strange; others are familiar. The ghost prompts a reckoning with the supernatural. The presence overall of these eclectic characters enriches the narrative and reflects a writer imagining multiple representation possibilities.

40At the end of “Young Lions,” Caesar appears headed for a life of crime. In the beginning of “Old Boys, Old Girls,” Caesar is on trial for murder apparently having become that anticipated criminal. By the end of the story though, he moves toward redemption. Near the close of the story, he encounters a former ex-girlfriend, Yvonne, at his boarding house. She is so ravaged from drugs, she doesn’t remember him. One day, Caesar returns to the house to find her dead from an apparent drug overdose. As a final act of kindness, Caesar meticulously cleans her room, brushes her hair, and makes her presentable for whoever might find her body. After completing his solemn tasks, Caesar realizes that he “was not a young man anymore” and begins to contemplate his next moves (99). Caesar’s efforts of ensuring that Yvonne’s body and home are viewed with dignity represent a remarkably touching moment.

41The story of Caesar Matthews in “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls” is the story of Jones weaving an elaborate two-part narrative featuring multiple, diverse supporting characters and settings encountered by an ex-con Black man. Jones is a geographer, plotting dozens of locales and settings in D.C. He is a demographer, identifying a wide range of citizens across the city. Above all he is a literary artist painting an extended portrait of a single character inhabiting and traversing multiple locales and engaging dozens of different people.

 

42Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children reveal that Jones makes a multiplicity of Black characters and locales integral to his storytelling. The unprecedentedly large number of characters that Jones introduces demonstrates the promise of increasing and diversifying Black representation. The women characters in Jones’s works traverse dozens of locales across the cityscape and in the process break through typical limits of female mobility. The interconnected “Young Lions” and “Old Boys, Old Girls” offers the rare possibility in short fiction of tracing an extended narrative of a troubling and redemptive Black man character. Ultimately, through his numerous Black character portrayals and geo-spatial explorations, Jones makes distinct contributions to the long history of American and African American short stories.