- 1 Jones is sometimes labelled as a writer of place. See “Edward P. Jones: The Art of Fiction.”
- 2 Bakhtin uses the term “chronotope” (space-time) to express the combination of space and time in fi (...)
1One of the characteristics of Edward P. Jones’s two collections of short stories—Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006)—is that the characters continuously move between places/spaces.1 Even within the parameters of a single story, characters are on the move and the story occurs in several settings. While Washington D.C. is the central setting in both collections, many stories take us to other places, some real, such as the American South, with a tangible history and traditions, and others fictional, even as they might contain references to real places. Each of these places forms a distinct chronotope in the sense that each has an element of space (geographical location) and an element of time conveyed through the narrative strategies and distinctive recurrent motifs.2 I am particularly interested in the significance of the fictional places in Jones’s work, as well as the moments in which the lines between “real” places become blurred. I argue that while Washington D.C. and the South ground Jones’s work, it is in the imagined spaces and murky borders in which Jones more often employs strategies and themes that are rooted in the supernatural, the hypothetical, and the artistic, and so creates a narrative in which place is personal, dynamic, and in a state of change.
- 3 For more on the disorientation of characters in the city and the use of maps in Jones’s stories to (...)
- 4 For a more detailed and an elaborate examination of Washington D.C. in Jones’s stories, see Henry, (...)
2Jones’s characters are mainly African Americans who have emigrated from the American South to Washington D.C. Jones does not set events in the D.C. that is familiar from postcards but rather in forgotten black neighborhoods. It does not take long before one notices that characters of African American origin are disoriented in the city. When the couple in “A New Man” lose their daughter, they get hold of a giant map of Washington to search for her. The use of the precise description of the city on the map is juxtaposed with the disorientation of the parents.3 We overhear the mother talking about names of places she has never heard of even though she and her family have lived in Washington for many years. For many of these characters, their neighborhood is isolated from the rest of the city, and they are excluded from the national narrative associated with the famous monuments and places in Washington. They are confined and limited to their own world within Washington. Other places on the map are only names that do not mean much for many of the characters in African American neighborhoods. Even African American characters that are well-to-do and who have managed to get out of historically “black neighborhoods” fail to call the city their home. An example of this motif can be found in the story “Lost in the City.” The main character in this story, a young well-to-do woman, takes a taxi ride through the city when she hears about the death of her mother. We learn that the big city suffocates her. She wants to get lost in the city and forget about her mother but cannot; it is overwhelming.4
3Lost in the vast and unfathomable world of Washington D.C., many characters resort to a recurring strategy. Feeling rootless and alienated in Washington, they move back and forth between Washington and the southern states, where they originally came from. Maddie Williams, in “Root Worker,” says about the South: “We leave, we run away and don’t realize how much we’ll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It’s the worst mama in the world and it’s the best mama in the world” (Hagar’s Children 177). These movements, whether literal, conscious, or subconscious (psychic or spiritual), are ones in which memories, stories, photographs, songs, and history connect people and communities and eventually give these characters a sense of meaning and belonging. Lacking a sense of belonging in the capital, these characters need their own narrative of connection, and this they find in the traditions they had abandoned. The connection achieved through these journeys is the key to the survival of black people in Washington (Coleman 59). Through these back-and-forth journeys, many characters are grounded and find a voice and a sense of belonging in the black tradition in the South. The difference, then, between being in the South and Washington D.C. is that of having a narrative, a voice, a tradition through which many African Americans show their resilience and belonging.
4One of the stories in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, “Root Worker,” provides such an example. This story includes all the elements of the journeys between Washington and the South. The journey is literal, and it ends with the main character achieving connection and creating meaning. It is the story of Dr. Glynnis, her father, her ill mother, and her mother’s companion. The mother, who has been ill for some time, thinks she is under a spell and is surrounded by witches who make her ill. After trying the medical treatment at hospitals, the family eventually decides to take the mother back to North Carolina—where they are from—so the mother can be treated by a root worker or voodoo healer.
5In these stories, there is a contrast between the pre-journey situation and the post-journey situation. We are told that Dr. Glynnis, before the journey, is completely immersed in science and ignores other aspects of life, especially what her parents believe is the spiritual side of life. In the South, the root worker tries to remind the mother of her past by asking her questions. When the mother manages to answer these questions and retrieve her past, she rids herself of her illness and becomes healthy again. As a result, Dr. Glynnis, who has denied the root worker up to this point, changes her mind. She decides to access these traditions and learn the tradition of healing from the root worker. Once she acknowledges this, she undergoes a transformation. One of the ways these stories evoke the difference between the world of Washington and that of the South is through the omniscient narrator sometimes choosing to be cryptic, especially when dealing with the spiritual or supernatural (Coleman 59). The materiality and precision of Washington one encounters, such as on the map in “A New Man,” is set in contrast to the mysterious relationship with nature and plants in the garden in “Root Worker.”
6Examining Jones’s Lost in the City, Gerald Kennedy and Robert Beuka argue that the genre of the short story sequence serves to create challenging narratives. They put this discussion in the context of minority, gender, and race (African American in this case). Jones’s Lost in the City, they argue, serves to depict a troubled geography in which there is a conflict between two discourses: on the one hand, there is the national discourse represented by Washington D.C., where the president lives and where famous national monuments are, and then, on the other, there is the actual world of Jones’s characters. The stories of African Americans in Jones’s tales challenge the national discourse and undermine it. By excluding some Americans, the national narrative is not what it claims to be (Kennedy and Beuka 10).
7It should be noted that the South is not easy to define in Jones’s stories, nor is it a simplistic or nostalgic concept. The South has a long history, and the characters in it are not naïve nor have they forgotten its more problematic history. One of these examples is a character from the 20th century who keeps a chair made by a slave in the antebellum as a reminder of this dark history. There is a delicate balance, and Jones’s characters are aware of the South as both home and a site of cultural trauma. Ultimately, black traditions recall the opposition to oppression, and as such they are the path to freedom and the struggle for survival. It is the overcoming of slavery that gives a sense of resilience and meaning to these characters and helps them survive the current exclusion from the national discourse.
- 5 From now on, this article will refer to “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” as “Hagar’s Children” and to “ (...)
- 6 From now on, the unnamed narrator will be referred to as the detective.
8While one finds a tendency towards the artistic and creativity in some stories of the first collection Lost in the City in the form of the narrator being cryptic and mysterious, the exploration of this motif comes to full fruition in All Aunt Hagar’s Children. It is explicitly dealt with in three stories: “Tapestry,” “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” and “A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru,” all of which explore the relationship between creativity and history.5 For example, “Hagar’s Children” focuses on an unnamed detective who investigates the death of Ike Appleton in Washington D.C.6 In the story, there is a scene in which two characters talk about artistic creativity, specifically the art of storytelling. Dvera Jaffe, a relatively minor character, nostalgically remembers how her father used to tell her and her siblings stories, particularly “when the world got too much.” The stories were “comforting, you know. Keeping the world away” (127). In other words, for Dvera, as for other characters in stories that deal with the motif of creativity, stories sustain lives. For a similar reason, Anne Perry of “Tapestry” tells us why she chose to do tapestry art: “I do it cause I can’t help myself” (384). Her sister, by contrast, chose crochet rather than tapestry, like many other women in the South, because it is easier to do and to earn a living with. Anne, by choosing the unprofitable and more difficult tapestry art, is willing to go beyond her daily needs to do what sustains her emotionally. In “A Poor Guatemalan,” the character of Eulogia draws paintings of dead people to preserve their stories for later generations.
9In these three stories, Jones widens the scope of experience to include characters beyond the Washington/South settings that the previous stories have so far been limited to. For example, there are characters from Peru and Guatemala. There is a Jewish woman who speaks Yiddish, and whose story the detective cannot get out of his mind. There is mention of Alaska and an imaginary snow scene by a character who has never seen snow. We encounter characters from diverse cultures and geographies, giving these stories a human feel making these stories representative of a wider range of human experience. As “place” becomes a larger field, Jones’s work becomes more experimental as well. We are presented with the hypothetical possibilities in the life of Anne Perry in “Tapestry”; with the ways that Arlene’s miracles blur the boundaries between dream and reality in “A Poor Guatemalan”; and with the literal power of storytelling in “Hagar’s Children.”
10Daniel Torday suggests that Jones’s characters live in a fated culture, whether in D.C. or the South, arguing that many of them are fated types and that history weighs on them (360). One can almost predict the trajectory of the lives of many of the characters. The motif of creativity, in contrast, liberates characters from this cultural fatalism. The three stories under examination here present examples of characters that, through creativity, go beyond this fatalism and, to a great extent, transcend the limitations of their culture and history. We are offered such an example in “Tapestry” when newlywed Anne Perry and her husband George Carter take a train to move from Mississippi to Washington. This example shows both the fatalism of history that some characters display and the liberation that art and creativity endow upon others. An hour before dawn, Anne wakes up and finds that George’s teeth
began gritting again and he commenced talking almost in whispers in his sleep. ‘I’ll do it,’ he said, ‘I’ll clean every barn before I sleep, master. No need for that thing. No need for that again. I’ll do it. I told yall I’d do it all.’ The sounds of other sleepers now came to her as well, and there were many who were also talking in their sleep. Men and women speaking whole thoughts. A shout or two. A plea. Even the white man was talking as he slept, but not the negro woman who was his wife. She, like all the children in the car, was dreaming in silence while the others talked. (Jones 398)
What surprises Anne while observing what goes on is that George talks about a “master.” He sounds more like a person from the antebellum South than one from the 20th century. The weight of history is evident here. George and the rest of the people on the train seem to be imprisoned by a racial history even though slavery has long been abolished. Then, on the opposite side of this situation, we find Anne Perry. She is the only one awake, and the only one who sees and hears what is going on, and thus is spared from the full burden of history that plagues George. This scene on the train acts like an epiphany, a moment of realization that changes her worldview: “a little more than a half hour before dawn, she reached up and touched the window with all the fingers of one hand, and the entire train seemed to stop its shaking and rattling” (399). She is calmer and connects with people on the train on a deeper level. This is especially true of George whom she accepts in spite the weakness she saw in him and her earlier thoughts about leaving him and going back to her parents. Now “[s]he took his head and laid it on her lap. She even recalls a memory when she herself was scared in the forest relating to what George feels but at the same time transcending it as she is conscious of her situation. This change is further reflected in the modifications she brings to her tapestry.
11The fact that Anne Perry is aware of her situation and that of the people around her sets her apart from the characters in both collections of stories. In fact, one could argue that this awareness is central to Jones’s depiction of creativity, in which characters develop and have their own narratives. In the stories that do not have creativity as a motif, this connection is more collective. In “Root Worker,” for example, Dr. Glynnis develops as a character but does not have her own narrative. Instead, she adopts the communal narrative of her African American traditions. Hence, she becomes heir to the root worker and becomes one herself. By the same token, her mother manages to regain her equilibrium after the root worker helps her reclaim her memories and past life stories.
12In contrast to Dr. Glynnis and her mother, the change in Anne Perry is individual and comes about as a result of her creativity. This is indicated through the changes she brings to her tapestry. Like her, her tapestry evolves. The narrator tells us that some years after she moved to Washington D.C., her father finds her unfinished tapestry piece at home and sends it to her. Anne changes the tapestry scene, indicating that she expresses her voice through the modified tapestry. In the initial tapestry, there is a rabbit which, while heading home, leaves tracks in the snow and in the sky above there is a bird of prey. In the new tapestry scene, Anne removes the rabbit but keeps the bird of prey roaming free in the sky. This change releases both the rabbit and the bird from this prey-predator relationship and diverts their gazes from each other. This change entails hope and the ability to change and bring something new to her life. This change in the tapestry implies that Anne has gained her own voice and is writing her own story, transcending a world in which other characters seem limited and imprisoned.
13Examples of artistic creativity challenging cultural fatalism abound. In “Hagar’s Children,” another story with a creativity and storytelling motif, the theme is explored further: the detective changes his situation and what looks like a fated life through storytelling. Storytelling challenges his firmly held narratives. Unlike Anne Perry, through whose eyes we watch characters who are resigned to inherited identities, the detective in “Hagar’s Children” is himself imprisoned within his own American narratives. In the opening scene, he tells readers that he returned from the Korean war nine months ago. Then he reveals that he has dumped his girlfriend and all he wants to do now is “go to Alaska to hunt for gold with a war buddy” (105). The detective, unlike Anne, who has the power of observation and transcendence, is at this stage oblivious to the world around him and all he cares about is his own goal of escaping by following the familiar American trope of “going West.”
14However, shortly before he goes away, his mother and two of her friends, Agatha and Penny, ask him to investigate the murder of Ike Appleton, Miss Agatha’s only son, who was killed two years earlier. From this point onward, the story the detective relates is comprised of smaller narratives that are not necessarily connected but which nonetheless affect and shape him. As we listen to these stories through the first-person perspective of the detective, he becomes more of a listener, an act which brings change to him. There are diverse voices that are repeated throughout the story to the extent that this story resembles a long poem with recurring voices as refrains. The main story is that of the murder investigation. However, while relating his investigation, he also reveals his other encounters. One day, for example, as he is getting off the bus, a woman, Miriam Sobel, collapses in front of him but he gets to her before she hits the ground. As he lays her on the ground on the street, she says over and over: “A mol is gav vain ah rev und ah rabbit sin” and “[z]etcha kender lock, gadank za tira vos ear lair rent doe” (Jones 117). He cannot get the voice of Miriam out of his head and keeps repeating her words to himself. This attention to Miriam’s story brings to life other stories from his life. It is as if the investigation is actually that of his own life and existence. For example, he now relates an old story which he knew about but never thought of—the story of his mother and her two girlfriends being attacked on their way home from school in Alabama when they were children. The three girls beat the attacker and leave him there. The perpetrator is a white man who stays unconscious on the ground for three days. Then, scared of revenge, the three girls’ parents smuggle them to Washington at night. The narrator even goes on to reveal the moral of this story. Upon contemplating the events later, the attacker becomes a preacher and lives in a small church. Like the detective, the preacher renounces even words and the language he was used to: “each sentence he spoke for the rest of his life had no relation to the one before it or the one after it” (131).
15What matters in all this is that the detective, like Anne Perry, eventually manages to develop his own distinct voice and narrative. He achieves this by acknowledging others through their stories. The voices and stories he hears challenge his firmly-held preconceived narratives, and he eventually changes in ways that are related to the case and to his own life. First, he gives up the idea of going to Alaska in search of gold and women. He realizes his dream is an illusion because “[he] would never find gold” (Jones 131). He also experiences a drastic change in the way he views people and the things around him: he abandons the abstract narratives with which he started the story and instead now we see him using his senses to describe his world, an indication of his full immersion in life and his grounding in place. He now sees things in D.C. he has never seen before. He starts paying attention to and appreciating the details of everyday life. The final paragraph captures this moment of change for him. Dvera gives him a photograph of younger Miriam Sobel and two identical boys with forelocks.
I took the picture to the window, where the light was better… I raised my eyes from the photograph of Miriam and saw a group of six little colored girls going down 8th street toward E, all of them in bright colors. My eyes settled on a girl in a yellow dress. She was in the middle of the group and she alone twirled as they walked, her arms out, her head held back, so that the sun was full upon her face. Her long plaits swung with her in an almost miraculous way. It was good to watch her, because I had never seen anything like that in Washington in my whole life. I followed her until she disappeared. It would have been nice to know what was on her mind. (Jones 132).
In this final passage, the detective seems orientated in place. His earlier abstract and detached personality disappears, replaced by a presence grounded in his surroundings. His senses are heightened. He sees things and people around him in a new light. He pays attention and appreciates them. Words, such as “bright colors,” “sun,” and “miraculous” assert his immersion in the world around him and show change (Jones 132). Then he explicitly expresses that he has never seen such a thing in the city he has lived in all his life. In short, “Hagar’s Children” presents an example of creativity and storytelling that liberates a character from the fatalism of his narrative. The detective, like the attacker turned preacher, becomes humble by realizing the existence of people around him.
16The theme of the miraculous expressed towards the end of “Hagar’s Children” connects this story with the next one in the collection, “A Poor Guatemalan,” which centers around miracles. This more experimental story challenges Washington as a place with its temporal and spatial dimensions. The artistic and the miraculous are set against the rigidity and materiality of life in Washington. This story, therefore, creates a narrative of place that is playful. “A Poor Guatemalan” is one of the most difficult stories in either collection, challenging the reader to distinguish the real from the unreal without close reading. From the age of eight, Arlene Baxter experiences miracles. On many occasions, people close to her, such as her family and relatives, die while she survives. Arlene then becomes aware of another girl, Avis, and later a woman, Eulogia Rios from Guatemala, who have the same miraculous experiences as she does. The story takes a different turn when Arlene attends an event at which Eulogia presents her paintings. Eulogia tells the audience that when she was eight years old, soldiers attacked her village in Guatemala and killed everyone, 159 people, except her: “The village was all killed, even down to the littlest chicken” (157). Eulogia, now eighteen, paints the victims because she believes that those present have to “blow life into them [killed] and create them” (159). She has so far painted nineteen victims and intends to paint them all. What is surreal at this point is that stories of people from different times and places intermingle and connect people with each other. Arlene realizes one of the paintings Eulogia has done portrays her pregnant aunt who had drowned in a creek in Tennessee when Arlene was a child. Avis also recognizes three of the people in the paintings. Through Eulogia’s paintings, the lives of the dead are somehow preserved. This connection between people from different places and times through artistic means goes further. At some point at the gallery Eulogia tells the audience the story of her teacher, who was shot by soldiers in the middle of telling a story about her honeymoon in Peru. Like Eulogia, Arlene becomes interested in the story of the teacher and her husband, and, called by the power of the narrative, decides that she and her husband Scott will go on their honeymoon to the same place in Peru. Standing on the same road where the teacher and her husband had been, we now see the road and with it, by implication, the rest of the teacher’s story:
She seemed to recognize what she was seeing now…The bright road eventually came back again and went on a bit until it dipped swiftly and disappeared once more… She could see the eternal road emerge almost miraculously from the valley, still crooked, still shimmering, still full of humanity, and she turned to her new husband to tell him what the path ahead would look like. (Jones 161)
- 7 In a chapter entitled “Thirdspace: Expanding the Scope of the Geographical Imagination,” Soja pres (...)
Arlene, like Eulogia, makes sure that the story of the teacher is not only told but also seen through her own eyes. The undulating road ahead on which the teacher and her husband had stood, and on which Arlene and her husband now stand, confirms the continuation of the teacher’s story and gives it a mythic characteristic. Like the detective in the previous story, Arlene now realizes how miraculous things around her are. She knows what the “path ahead would look like.” The road she is on is “shimmering” and “full of humanity.” In this way, Arlene moves beyond the limitations of Washington and connects with people across time and place. This experimental story, like the other before it, then questions the city of Washington as a place. Jones’s conception of place in these stories of imagination and creativity could be elucidated and summarized by using Edward W. Soja’s notion of “thirdspace.”7 According to Soja, the “thirdspace” is space as it is actually lived and experienced by people and not imposed on them. As such it is a space of resistance and possibilities. The stories of creativity and imagination present a space of hope, change and possibilities.
17In conclusion, this article studies the topic of place/space and creativity in Jones’s two collections of stories. While making reference to the two “real” places of Washington D.C. and the American South in these collections, this article is particularly interested in the imagined places and the moments when borders between places are murky. The article highlights the strategies and narrative devices used by Jones to create these imagined spaces. Some of the narrative strategies and themes Jones employs in these experimental stories include exploring the hypothetical possibilities of a character's life (through the art of tapestry), miracles blurring the lines between dream and reality (through painting), and showing the power of storytelling on another character. Through creativity, Jones creates a site where some characters are able to transcend cultural fatalism and the burden of history. These characters use their creativity to inspire hope and create possibilities. The result is a place that is personal, dynamic and constantly evolving.
