2Claire Stocks has explained that theories about the “psychological effects of exposure to extreme experiences” can be traced back to Freud’s study of “shell-shocked” World War I veterans, but “it is [only] since the fall of Saigon which ended the Vietnam War in 1975 that trauma has become the subject of a fairly substantial body of theoretical and literary works” (71). In the foreword to Peter Levine’s Trauma and Memory, Bessel A. van der Kolk confirms that contemporary trauma theory is grounded in Freud’s idea that “trauma is imprinted in the body” (xiii), frequently “replayed and reenacted as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), body movements, or visual images (nightmares and flashbacks)” (xi). He notes that Freud “proposed that the reason people keep repeating their traumas is due to their inability to fully remember what has happened. Because the memory is repressed, the patient ‘is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience, instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past’” (xiii). The body’s way of recalling a traumatic event is to produce, in Levine’s words, “fragmented splinters of inchoate and indigestible sensations, emotions, images, smells, tastes, thoughts, and so on” (7). As Freud has insisted, “What the mind has forgotten, the body has not” (25).

3In “Spanish in the Morning” and “Common Law,” Jones focuses on two young children whose symptoms, although directly provoked by an encounter with violence, tap into the transgenerational history of American racial oppression. Never consciously aware of the roots of their psychic disturbances, the children remain inarticulate and implicitly mystified by their experiences. In “Spanish in the Morning,” Jones reveals the narrator’s past exposure to episodes of racial violence and stigmatization through the personal histories of family members and friends, especially Black men. Yet in invoking images of slavery and lynching, he also suggests that the child’s witnessing of an episode of violence triggers deeply buried ancestral memories of racial trauma. In “Common Law,” Jones links Amy’s symptoms of trauma to an inner-city culture of violence in which children are forced frequently to become helpless bystanders to acts of deadly physical aggression. Viewing Jones’s stories through the lens of trauma theory—specifically the concepts of transgenerational trauma and vicarious trauma—helps illuminate the writer’s keen historical consciousness and unique vision.

Second-Generation “Postmemory”

4In “Spanish in the Morning,” the unnamed child narrator’s unacknowledged (indeed, unperceived) burden of transgenerational trauma provokes a “great flood” of emotion—“as if my heart, on the path that was my life, had come to a puddle in the road and had faltered, hesitated, trying to decide whether to walk over the puddle or around it, or even to go back” (48)—that culminates in her loss of consciousness and a facial injury from falling at her desk. Jones’s decision to deploy the first-person point of view—a rarity in his stories—indicates his intention to leave the narrator’s responses ambiguous and unresolved. In an interview with Lawrence P. Jackson, Jones has confirmed that he uses the first-person only when he wants “a kind of limited viewpoint,” with a narrator who “can’t really see” clearly (98). Recognizing that the doctor who attends her after her fall expects her, “now that [she] was awake,” to “tell him the why of it all,” the narrator of “Spanish in the Morning” remains silent, since she “wasn’t yet able to do words” (48, 49). A child who has led a “happy” life (33) within a secure, loving family, the narrator implicitly cannot explain or understand the “why” of her sudden blackout.

5Yet the child provides clues about her experience when she states, early in the story, that despite her mother’s descent from “a long line of Washingtonians who saw education as a right God had given their tribe” (33), the “men in her life” have cherished no such expectations: “But this is about my father’s father. And me. And all of them” (33). What the narrator has learned about the “men in her life” is that “all of them” have known hardship or humiliation, either directly or indirectly because of racial discrimination. Her disabled, illiterate paternal grandfather, who “got as far as the second grade,” makes “a life shining shoes” (46). Her uncle Cyphax “couldn’t seem to stay out of jail” (32). Although the narrator’s “Philadelphia uncle” is a chemist, his desire to buy his niece “some quality” dresses at Garfinkel’s department store requires that he play a servant, wearing “a made-up chauffeur’s cap setting ever so straight on his chemist’s head,” since the store managers “had Negroes arrested if they tried to shop there” (31). Most disturbing is the fate of her mother’s best friend’s husband, “whose left eye had been shot out across the D.C.-Maryland line by a Prince George’s County policeman as Mr. Jack innocently changed a flat tire when I was six months old. Late that night he was shot, several of his friends gathered in my father’s kitchen, cursing white people. My father had me resting on his shoulder, and he kept telling me that it would be nice if I went to sleep like a good little baby was supposed to” (36).

6Significantly, the narrator relays this incident not as a story her father has told her but as a memory she herself retains, despite the fact that she was an infant at the time of the shooting. After she passes out at school, she dreams that all the “men in her life,” including One-Eye Jack and “a hundred others,” gather around her “the way I remembered when I was just an infant” (48). Marianne Hirsch, in another context, has described this form of recollection as a “postmemory,” transmitted intergenerationally when a strong identification exists between the teller and the listener:

When . . . experiences are communicated through stories and images that can be narrativized, integrated—however uneasily—into a historically different present, they open up the possibility of a form of second-generation remembrance that is based on a more consciously and necessarily mediated form of identification. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through repetition or reenactment but through previous representations that themselves become the objects of projection and re-creation. Postmemory is defined through an identification with the witness or victim of trauma. Postmemory thus would be retrospective witnessing by adoption. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories of others as experiences one might oneself have had, and thus of inscribing them into one’s own life story. (76)

Hirsch further explains, “Postmemory is not identical to memory: it is ‘post’; but at the same time . . . it approximates memory in its affective force and its psychic effects” (76). The narrator’s adoption of her father’s memory as her own reflects the tenacious hold this episode of racial violence exerts upon her, marking her—as she sees it—almost from birth, since she envisions herself as a wakeful infant absorbing a tale of white terrorism that frightens and enrages the “men in her life.” The fact that she dreams of One-Eye Jack and “a hundred others” the night after her blackout at school clearly indicates that the white Mother Superior’s punishment of two Black children triggers her deeply embedded consciousness of collective racial trauma.

7The narrator’s limited knowledge of racial trauma within her own family does not preclude her psychic awareness of racial division and injustice. As Gabriele Schwab has stated, “Memories are passed on from generation to generation, most immediately through stories told or written, but more subliminally through a parent’s moods or modes of being that create a particular economy and aesthetics of care . . . . Traces of psychic life can be transmitted from person to person and from generation to generation” (51). In “Spanish in the Morning,” the narrator’s male relatives impart a fear and distrust of white institutions as the narrator reaches school age and must “go out beyond their gate that kept the world at bay” (35). When the narrator’s mother decides that she “wanted her children to be educated by nuns and priests all dressed in black, the way it had been done down through the generations with her people,” the men in her family silently register their apprehensions: “In the days before I first started kindergarten, the men in my life came from here and there to bring me things and more things, as if, my mother was to say, I was going away and never coming back” (31). Her grandfather repeatedly urges her to reassure him about her well-being at school: “‘They treat you okay up there?’ he asked. Anyplace he ever mentioned was always ‘up there’” (37). The narrator’s father directly questions the motives of her teachers when they move her up to first grade shortly after she begins kindergarten, yet, tellingly, he makes sure his daughter cannot hear him: “My mother was happy, but my father saw something he didn’t like in my skipping a grade only three weeks after I started school. ‘Watch out when white folks wanna do somethin for you, cause it ain’t gonna be pretty,’ he said as they talked in bed after my sisters and I were asleep” (43). Jones compels his reader to question whether the narrator was awake and eavesdropping, or if (as in her infant recollection of the shooting of One-Eye Jack) she has adopted her father’s memory as her own, perhaps even intuiting or imagining what he never spoke aloud to her. In conveying the narrator’s inability to distinguish between individual recollection and secondhand memory, Jones captures the fluid boundaries and indeterminacy that inhere in the intergenerational transmission of psychic trauma.

8The child narrator is almost certainly unaware, at a conscious level, of the racial subtext behind the Mother Superior’s punishment of her two classmates, but this, too, is knowledge she subliminally assimilates. The boy and girl in her class playact a childhood crush on each other, with their demonstrations of affection never extending beyond the boy’s “waving vigorously and desperately to Regina” (44) from across the playground, or “turn[ing] and mak[ing] a face at her” (47) during class. Yet their classmates’ idea that they are “boyfriend and girlfriend” and that “‘they gon’ get married in a big church’” (45) is enough to precipitate the children’s physical punishment:

That second Monday in October the hands on the clock had just settled into being eleven o’ clock when Mother Superior, the principal, opened the door and looked at Sister Mary Frances. Sister pointed at Regina Bristol and then to the boy the whole class knew as her boyfriend. The boy rose first, then Regina rose, slowly. . . . The four of them, the nuns and the children, left, with Sister closing the door behind them and looking sternly at us before she did. . . . After a long, long bit of time we heard a slap, then silence. There was another slap, and there quickly followed a wail from Regina. They all returned shortly, the boy quiet and Regina crying, and Sister took up where we were before Mother Superior had opened the door. (46-47)

Although the narrator does not mention the incident to her parents, “a fear took hold of [her] throughout all the school days” (47), and moments before her blackout she “studied the back of Regina’s head,” noticing that “it was such a vulnerable neck,” a recognition that makes her “head [begin] to swirl” (47). Like One-Eye Jack, “innocently changing a flat tire,” but seen as “threatening the policeman’s life” (36-37), the six-year-old boy and girl in the narrator’s class are implicitly the victims of racist constructions of blackness, the young boy perceived as a sexual predator and the little girl as sexually precocious. Yet the narrator does not need to know the history of racial stereotyping to understand the endangerment of the vulnerable black body under the condemnatory white gaze. As Jessica Maucione has observed about Jones’s Lost in the City, whiteness in the author’s short fiction is persistently associated with danger: “Early in . . . Lost in the City, a five-year-old boy repeats his grandfather’s constant admonition: ‘Don’t get lost in the city’—the first in a series of advisements regarding adherence to the ‘known world’ of the black neighborhood and avoidance of the hostile ‘white world’ beyond it. . . . For Jones’s characters, the black neighborhood is a dangerous place to wander out of—even by way of institutions that promise class mobility” (76).

Ancestral Hauntings

9However, the narrator’s dreams during the nights after she overhears her classmates’ punishment suggest that her awareness of racial trauma and the dangers of the white world are linked not only to messages she has picked up from her family and community but also to subconscious ancestral memories. She repeatedly dreams that she cannot enter the school: “At home in my bed I dreamed of school. I went there in my dreams, but the door was always locked” (47). The night after her fall at school, she dreams that she explains her plight to a neighbor, but he cannot help her: “I kept telling Mr. Lewis that I had to knock on the school door again. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Just wait’” (49). Invoking the historical denial of literacy to enslaved African Americans, the narrator’s dream emerges as what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok have famously named a “phantom” or “phantasmic haunting.” Gabriele Schwab has usefully elaborated on this theory:

In The Shell and the Kernel, Abraham and Torok develop their concept of the crypt, that is, a psychic space fashioned to wall in unbearable experiences, memories, or secrets. . . . Assuming that individuals can inherit the secret psychic substance of their ancestors’ lives, Abraham argues that a person can manifest symptoms that do not directly spring from her own life experiences but from a parent’s or ancestor’s psychic conflicts, traumas, or secrets. Speaking of a phantom, a haunting, or a phantasmic haunting, Abraham uses a rhetoric of ghosts to suggest a foreign presence in the self. . . . [His] concept of the phantom is particularly relevant for an analysis of the transmission of historical trauma through the cultural unconscious. . . . [The] concept of the phantom and transgenerational haunting not only moves psychoanalysis beyond individual life experiences and their intrapsychic processing but also deals with the cultural legacies or the unfinished business of one or more generations of a people and their transmission to the descendants. (78-79)

10The images that haunt the narrator, both in dreams and in daily life—locked school doors, Regina’s fragile neck, her own infant confrontation with racial terror—reveal the fragmentary nature of traumatic memory. Kali Tai, among other trauma theorists, has noted that survivors frequently “reinscribe” the traumatic experience as metaphor, suggesting not only their need to approach the recollection of the event obliquely rather than directly, but also their development of a vocabulary of images to communicate what they cannot construct as a cohesive narrative. The trauma victim, as Dominick LaCapra explains, often describes the “incomprehensible or unrepresentable” event in “figurative or allegorical terms” (107). Dori Laub affirms that survivors attempting to convey their experience to others consistently rely upon metaphor and symbol—forms that the trauma victim creates, in Laub’s words, to “compensate for the failure of language faced with the exorbitance of the literal” (12). The child narrator of “Spanish in the Morning,” who “wasn’t yet able to do words,” nevertheless implicitly connects recurring dream-images to create an internal story of virulent racial oppression.

11Although the narrator cannot explain the “why” of her blackout, her silence does not prevent her family from rallying around her. Her grandfather reassures her, “‘Now your mama and your daddy say you don’t never have to go back to that school. . . . Go just cross that street [to Walker-Jones Elementary] and be safe and happy as you would be in that front yard’” (50). The narrator consistently views both her family members and the wider Black community as an impregnable bastion of support. When, early in the story, her mother is late picking her up from school, the narrator declares that “because of the world my parents had made for me, I was not afraid” (38), and she envisions all her extended family and neighbors, the “dozens and dozens of people in [her] life . . . on their way to [her]” (39). As Jones has remarked in an interview with Maryemma Graham, “That first generation coming up from the South lived in a different world. When Hillary Clinton writes a book entitled It Takes a Village, she has just come to this very late. Black people were already doing this for their kids. All the adults in the neighborhood felt a responsibility for all the children” (432). J. Gerald Kennedy and Robert Beuka have pointed out the notes of hope about the Black community even in Jones’s darker stories: “Against the legacy of slavery and racism . . . Jones nevertheless juxtaposes certain scenes of communal affirmation and identity” (15).

12While the support of the Black community provides balm for the narrator’s psychic wounds, it cannot eradicate the scars of racial trauma. As Durrant states, “For the racially marked, coming to terms with one’s personal history involves reconciling oneself to the fact that one can never come to terms with one’s collective history” (84). Although “Spanish in the Morning” ends with the narrator back at Holy Redeemer, sitting beside her “best friend for life,” with the “wound [she] suffered when [she] fell at [her] desk . . . healing as best it could” (31), the child’s resilience does not defuse the darker implications of the story. Three times in the final paragraph, the narrator mentions “the curious alphabet of our lives” (51), ostensibly referring to the alphabetical seating chart for her classroom, yet alluding obliquely to the new vocabulary and new relation to society she has had to learn by “going out beyond [her home] that kept the world at bay” (35). In her encounter with the white world, she “had come to a puddle in the road and had faltered, hesitated, trying to decide whether to walk over the puddle or around it, or even to go back” (48). The narrator understands that such encounters have been hardest on “the men in her life,” the ones who try to discourage her from attending Holy Redeemer. Observing the exodus of Black boys from her classroom, she states, “My seat had once belonged to a boy who was gone now” (43), that another boy, “the boyfriend, was gone when I returned, and I never saw him again” (51), and that “by late October . . . our class was down to nine boys” (51). This flight from white authority figures suggests that the haunting memories transmitted to her by the men in her family and her neighborhood are pervasive in the Black community. If, as Meera Atkinson has observed about traumatic memory, “[p]ersonal history becomes a portal for the illumination of cultural conditions” (21), the narrator’s bodily response to her classmates’ punishment points to the devastating psychological impact of racial oppression across the historical and contemporary American landscape.

Vicarious Trauma

13While the narrator of “Spanish in the Morning” acts out a collective legacy of historical racial oppression, the child Amy in “Common Law,” responding with symptoms of trauma to an act of brutality, embodies the collective history of American urban violence. Similarly focusing on a young girl’s empathic physical reaction when she witnesses an assault on her friend, “Common Law” demonstrates even more strongly than in “Spanish in the Morning” the essential role of the community in confronting the perpetrator and helping the child to heal. When Amy Witherspoon sees Kenyon Morrison knock Miss Georgia down a flight of stairs, her bodily reaction is almost immediate:

[Georgia] bumped her way down to the entrance, screaming and crying on every step. At the bottom she lay silent for a minute or so, her eyes closed, and each boy and each girl thought she was dead. “Miss Georgia?” Amy said. . . . Georgia used what strength she had left to lift her arm from her chest, which was heaving, and raise her hand to the little girl. “Just leave her be,” Kenyon said from the top of the stairs. . . . Georgia’s hand was still reaching out to Amy. . . . Kenyon closed the door with his foot.

Amy fainted as soon as the lock on the door clicked into place. She would have hit her head on the concrete, but she fell toward Carlos and her head hit his chest, and, once again, the boy thought he was looking at a dead person. “Amy,” he said, “please don’t be dead.” (216-17)

Amy’s symptoms of trauma, including nightmares, withdrawal, and inertia, persist alarmingly after the incident: “When not plagued with the dreams about Georgia, the child suffered a lethargy that caused her to sleep most of the time . . . . [E]veryone prayed that she would get better, but in their beds at night, after the lights had been turned out, adults feared that the girl was not long for this world” (221). As in “Spanish in the Morning,” Amy’s family and neighbors rally around the stricken child, significantly bypassing an ineffectual legal system and exercising the “common law” of the community to protect both Amy and Georgia. The story concludes with the members of the community, led by their children, ousting Kenyon from the neighborhood, and implicitly enabling Amy to begin the process of recovery.

14In depicting the serious psychological effects on a child witness to violence, Jones addresses what E. Ann Kaplan, in another context, has described as a major gap in trauma studies. Kaplan maintains, “Empathic overarousal not only produces nightmares, flashbacks, and ‘psychic numbing,’ but also physical symptoms such as dizziness . . . and fatigue,” symptoms certainly consistent with Amy’s response to Georgia’s traumatic experience. Yet Kaplan argues that secondary trauma, despite its frequency and severity, remains a subject that has been inadequately treated in the literature of trauma: “While clinicians have described and theorized vicarious trauma, why has the distinction between traumatic situations per se and vicarious ones not been written about much in literary and cultural studies? Why has the fact that most of us encounter vicarious, rather than direct, trauma not received more attention?” (41). Jones illuminates the importance of this disturbing subject, suggesting in “Common Law” that the experience of secondary trauma bears potentially life-threatening consequences, especially for a sensitive and empathic child.

16Amy’s recurrent nightmares illustrate her compulsion to keep replaying the incident of violence over and over in her mind until her images of the event ultimately dominate her waking hours as well. As Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw have stated, “Trauma, one could say, never happens only once” (9). In discussing the lingering symptoms that afflict witnesses of trauma, Perry has explained, “The thing that people tend not to appreciate is that when there’s a single, intense, overwhelming event . . . that’s not really one event. What happens is your brain revisits that thousands of times, and so it becomes thousands of little events, all of which are able to activate your stress response” (148-49). Shelly L. Rambo further elucidates, “Temporal categories of past, present, and future shatter in experiences of trauma. The past does not remain in the past; a future is not imaginable. The past is relived in an invasive and uncontrollable way in the present, leaving persons . . . unable to move forward” (108). For Amy, all her dreams repeat the refrain of the nightmare she had on the morning after the incident, “her first dream that Georgia was coming to get her, and not her daddy or mama or Grandma Judy with her walking stick or anyone else could protect her. Her mother had to shake the screaming girl awake . . . ‘Is she here?’ Amy kept saying after she woke. ‘Is Miss Georgia here to get me?” (219). Amy’s subconscious replacement of Kenyon with Georgia as the object of fear perhaps indicates her sense of guilt for her inability to help Georgia when she stretched out her hand to the child, so she envisions Georgia seeking vengeance. Imagining Georgia as the attacker who stalks her might also represent her mind’s self-protective suppression of the too-fearsome image of Kenyon. Despite her mental revision of the incident, Amy’s failure to let go of her haunting memories of violence reflects Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s contention that, in child trauma, “the traumatic experience is apt to become fully incorporated into the child’s inner world; the basic building blocks of this world are still in the development stage, and the victimization is likely to define the world and self-assumptions of the child” (86). As Amy’s friend Carlos recognizes, “the girl of early summer was not there” (222).

Keepers of the Community

17Jones’s primary focus in “Common Law” is on the efforts of community members to help both Georgia and Amy, and to stop a cycle of domestic abuse that does not end with the violence Amy witnesses. Cameron MacKenzie has pointed out that in Jones’s first collection of short fiction, Lost in the City, “[t]he sanctity of th[e] community, which is key to understanding the movement of Jones’s story cycle as a whole, rests with its women. The women . . . are representative of the nurturing neighborhood, carved as it is from the mass of the City by their very empathy” (102). In “Common Law,” the women in Amy’s neighborhood similarly serve as instigators of action against Kenyon and as protectors of his victims. When one boy’s father asks his wife, who urges him to confront Kenyon, “‘Why you want me to get mixed up in another man’s business?’” she responds, “‘What happens if he kills her, Moses? What happens if he kills that poor woman just above your own children’s head?’” (224). Amy’s mother rebukes her husband about “being friends with a man who had no more respect for their daughter than to beat up a woman in front of her” (227), and, in response to his claim that Kenyon didn’t know Amy’s identity, retorts, “‘He probably knew and didn’t give a damn. . . . The fact is, he did it in front of children period’” (228). Most productively, Amy’s neighbor Judy—whom all the children call “Grandma Judy”—cares daily for the ailing child while Amy’s mother works, pleads with Georgia to sever ties with Kenyon, and “knock[s] [Kenyon] once in the head with her walking stick” (231) when she sees him slap Georgia on the street. Jones has eulogized “this kind of world [of his childhood] . . . where all the adults know all the children even if they’ve never spoken to that child” (Interview by Jackson 99). Jones recreates this nurturing environment with Ridge Street in “Common Law,” yet, as MacKenzie has observed about the vigilant neighborhood women in Lost in the City, “as these women age and die, their neighborhoods die with them” (104).

18Significantly, however, it is the neighborhood children, not the women, who spearhead the initiative to oust Kenyon from the community, suggesting that the women’s tradition of care and protection may be perpetuated by the next generation. The spontaneous communal decision to bypass the legal system in driving Kenyon away is acted upon only after “the law” proves negligent: “An hour [after Kenyon had knocked Georgia down the stairs] the police came, the white one staying outside in the squad car reading the newspaper . . . . The [second] policeman listened to the children, then went down the street to talk with Kenyon while the white man drove the car down the few doors. . . . Kenyon was innocent of hitting the child, the Negro policeman concluded and left the home and got into the passenger seat and they drove away” (218-19). When Carlos sees Kenyon walking toward Georgia’s apartment after the man’s brief absence from the neighborhood, he climbs on top of a car, “put his hands to his mouth, megaphone style,” and shouts, “Boo boo boo!” a cry that “the other children took up” until “more children were shouting” (234). Soon a crowd of adults—including Judy, who had exercised her own “common law” many years before in killing her abusive husband—“began to fill the streets and Kenyon found himself having to maneuver through a growing crowd” (234) which “became too thick for [him] to move” (235). The crowd stands back only when Kenyon leaves the street, but the children and adults “continued to shout ‘Boo’s and each one rained down upon him” (235). Kenyon’s dramatic but non-violent expulsion from the neighborhood demonstrates the power of the unified community to protect its most vulnerable members simply through collective verbal intimidation of a chronic abuser.

19In affirming the support of the family and community, “Common Law,” like “Spanish in the Morning,” provides hope that the young victim of trauma can heal. However, eschewing his familiar device of prolepsis in which he foretells the future lives of his characters, Jones leaves the destinies of the children in both “Spanish in the Morning” and “Common Law” unresolved. Trauma theorists have concurred that resolving traumatic memory frequently proves an insurmountable task, since, as Atkinson has stated, the traumatic encounter “generates an affective charge destined to later, and again, resonate” (9). Yet the children’s ability to communicate their pain enables their loved ones to intervene in beneficial ways. If, as Atkinson further explains, “affect is the way in which the unconscious speaks itself in the body via the ego” (133), the child in each story, unable to articulate her experience verbally, reaches those around her through the “curious alphabet” of her bodily responses to trauma. For Jones, our humanity depends upon our attentiveness to such messages, since, as he suggests in another context, the anguish of even a single child cannot be borne: “[A] little girl is still suffering out there somewhere in the universe . . . the pain is still there” (Interview by Graham 427).