1Edward Paul Jones is the author of two collections of short stories about the African American experience in Washington D.C., Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), and of a novel on Black slave owners in Virginia, The Known World (2003), at the end of which escaped slaves meet in D.C. Together, these works constitute a storyworld for Jones’s readers, to use the term Christopher Gonzalez favors for the world that is evoked by a narrative and by “the cumulative effect of the narrative devices used” (188). The short story “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” first appeared in The New Yorker the same year as The Known World was published; as Jones says, “I started working on [stories] when I was still working on the novel—I thought it would be nice to have a change in the course of writing the novel, come back to the business of the novel with a bit of a fresh mind” (“‘I Never Thought’” 67). “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” may be the only detective story in Jones’s oeuvre so far, but it fits into his storyworld, as will be shown. As for its roots, it is significant that when Edward P. Jones was a teenager, a fictional detective’s investigation to establish the truth of a crime changed his outlook on reading, as he discovered the worlds that words could open: “I think I read the first book that wasn’t a comic book in 1964, and it was a British mystery. . . . And I think what fascinated me was the fact that I could picture these people just based on the words that the writer wrote, which had never been the case before” (“‘I Never Thought’” 69).

2In his foreword to the 2009 edition of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Jones identifies the book as Basil Thomson’s Who Killed Stella Pomeroy? (1936) and remembers being transported by reading (xii). In “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” the only “sort of a detective story” (“Author Interviews”) that Jones has published, that liberation in print finds an echo in detection that means reading stories, seeking the truth, and hoping for freedom in the end. In a 2004 interview, Jones said he had considered writing the story as a novel, but finally felt that he had sufficiently developed the character of investigator (“Author Interviews”). In a 2006 interview, Jones added, “I could have explained why this man is murdered in ‘All Aunt Hagar’s Children,’ but the story would have taken a different course. I was on another course, which is that this man has to come to terms with who he is and learn to grow up” (“Edward P. Jones”).

3The first part of this essay is concerned with the will to escape. Jones’s narrator, an unnamed veteran of the Korean War and a novice to investigation, longs to leave the of Washington D.C. for Alaska. Jones’s storyworld appears both expansive and confining as the narrator wishes for more to discover, meaning to depart once he has found a likely murderer for the case he is working on, and must decipher other stories, which tell of a desire for escape as well. The second part examines freedom within constraints: Jones freely builds upon certain generic elements, and his storyworld is affected as the reader decides whether the outcome of the narrator’s discovery of the perpetrator is a liberation or the final disillusionment of hardboiled fiction. This casts light on what Jones means by growing up.

Escape Stories

4In “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” the unnamed protagonist, 24-year-old African American nine months out of Korea, wants to be free to encounter the unknown. He is on the point of leaving for Alaska, saying “I was a veteran of Washington, D.C., and there was nothing else for me to discover here” (105). He does routine filing work, for which he feels overqualified, in Sam Jaffe’s law office on F Street—“A veteran doing ABCs” (107). Alaska, on the other hand, is presented as a land where discovery is possible—he plans to “hunt for gold with a war buddy” (105) and “learn something new about women and become a different kind of veteran” (105). Its attractions are escapist, “gold and cars and clothes and more women than I could shake a dick at, as my buddy had put it” (105) and all the more desirable as leaving will allow the protagonist to put some space between himself and the girlfriend he has left, Sheila Larkin, who he fears is trying to scar his face with lye; it will also enable him to forget about a certain “dead white woman” (105).

5As the first-person narrator tells his story, the words that haunt him weave through his discourse; they appear in italics on the page: “‘So, you have your way with this woman and now you tellin her to just disappear?’” (103) “‘No, Sheila baby, that ain’t what I’m saying at all’” (104). And the unintelligible final words of the white woman, who died in his arms in the street after getting off a streetcar, run through the text: “A moll is gav vain ah rav und ah rabbit sin. . . . Zetcha kender lock gadank za tira vos ear lair rent doe” (105, 112).

6Yet the narrator’s story is not the only one. As Peter Hühn points out in “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction,” following Tzvetan Todorov and Dennis Porter, there is always another story: the crime, and it is generally the first story (452). The story of the crime is not that of the mysterious white woman, who appears to have died a natural death, but of Ike Appleton—indeed, “murdered Ike’s mother” is shown coming up to the narrator’s office in the opening sentence of the story. He explains that two years before, while was in Korea, “someone had come up behind Ike as he sat over supper and blown his brains out” (105). His mother and aunt and Ike’s mother, Miss Agatha, want him to find the murderer after the police have given up.

7As the story of the murder investigation unfolds, the reasons why the narrator feels that Washington D.C. is a confining place which no discoveries can broaden the scope of appear ever more clearly. His freedom seems limited first of all by the high degree of interconnection between the characters. The three older women, Bertha, Penny, and Aggie, have known each other since they were girls in Alabama. Ike, the narrator, and his brother Freddy went to the same junior high and they were at Dunbar high school with Alona, Ike’s widow and Miss Agatha’s daughter-in-law, and with Mary Saunders and Blondelle Steadman, the two young women the narrator meets in Mojo’s bar, who know and “love Miss Aggie” (111). The narrator recalls how “still celebrating” after Korea, he lay drunk on the street at 3 a.m. one day when an old lady he “had never seen . . . before” woke him asking “‘Ain’t you Bertha’s boy? Ain’t you Penny’s nephew? . . . Got a brother name Freddy that married Dolley and Prichard’s girl? You Bertha’s boy what went to Korea? Ain’t yall’s pastor Reverend Dr. Miller over at Shiloh Baptist?’”—and then reported back on his irresponsible behavior to his mother, who has lectured him regularly since (123).

8In his stories, Edward P. Jones has chosen to recreate “the other city,” a D.C. of neighborhoods and neighborly connections, such as he knew in his youth, rather than to depict the monuments and seats of power which he feels are alien to Black lives (Henry 164). Characters, landmarks, and institutions that recur in the story cycle reinforce the idea of connectedness. “[Penny] and Uncle Al owned a grocery store at 5th and O Streets, N.W.” (104); in “The Store,” in Lost in the City, Penny is the sole owner of “Al’s and Penny’s Groceries,” (82). A pair named Mary Keith and Blondelle Harris are the neighbors of the narrator in “The First Day”—“as precious to me as my mother and sisters” (Lost 28). The narrator of “The Store” passes by Mojo’s (Lost 87); Melvin Foster in “Blindsided” goes into it (Hagar 312). Just like Ike, Freddie, the narrator, Mary, Blondelle and Alona, Lydia Walsh in “Lost in the City” and the narrator of “The Store” have gone to Dunbar Senior High School, “the first American high school specifically for attendance by African American students” (Henry 165). And in “The Girl who Raised Pigeons,” a shoplifting Betsy-Ann is identified by a 92-year-old woman who “had never once spoken a word to her” and who tells her father what she has done (Lost 19), just as the old lady tells the narrator’s mother that he was lying drunk in the street in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” According to Gonzalez, the links to other stories makes D.C. a protagonist of the cycle, and opens up the frame of the storyworld (191, 201). Yet Jones implies that the narrator of “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” may want to break away because the town is a place where close family ties engender routine: every Sunday finds the young man and his brother’s family at a meal at their mother’s, the three older women’s have regular get-togethers “over coffee and sweet rolls in one of their living rooms” (103), and Agatha, Alona, and Ike’s child live happily together in Agatha’s flat. It is a place where manners are observed: the Southern signs of respect, such as calling even a married woman “Miss” along with her first name; going calling in full dress (“after I returned from Korea . . . I made the obligatory visits in my uniform to family and friends [104]); being chivalrous (“I got a chair for Miss Agatha” [106]); and observing etiquette (one removes one’s gloves to shake hands—“flesh must meet flesh, my mother had taught her sons” [107]). These manners have been ingrained in the young man and his friends, even Ike who had gone bad as a youth—the narrator’s mother says, “he always yes ma’amed me and no-ma’amed me, I will give him that” (124). How can one feel about to discover the new in a place where tradition rules? Joanne knows she is expecting twins because “a root worker had had Joanne throw ten hairpins up in the air and have them fall on one of Joanne’s headscarves,” then interpreted the pattern; family tradition dictates what is eaten and drunk on Sunday—fried chicken and Kool Aid (115); and the mother’s early teachings on “Blood spilled with violence” are imprinted on the narrator (130).

9A more somber aspect of this “other city” is racism. Blacks seem to have no more rights to justice in the capital than in the South. The three women, as girls, defended themselves against a white man who wanted to “have his way” with Aggie, and left him unconscious. They knew the law would be against them in the South (“He was not a rich man, but he was white” [106]), so fled to Washington. In D.C., white law officers are not interested in Ike’s case: “‘Near bout two years gone by, and they ain’t done any more than the day it happened.’ ‘One more colored boy outa their hair’” (106). And Kenton Rambsy has pointed out that the narrator’s routes show unofficial segregation at work—his “being ‘a veteran of Washington, D.C.,’ serves as subtle commentary on how race and economics will ultimately shape his future and limit him to traveling, living, and working along the same routes in which he grew up as a young boy” in “the city’s northwest, majority black quadrant” (97). The narrator’s mother doubts that Alaska will be any better: “I didn’t think white people let Negroes into white Alaska” (105).

10Black family tradition and ambient racism combine to strike fear in the heart of the narrator when he gives mouth to mouth resuscitation to the dying white woman on the street. Fear of miscegenation is at the root of his guilt: “My mother had always told my brother and me that if she ever caught us kissing a white woman she would cut off our lips. . . . Would that white streetcar conductor show up and think that I was trying something untoward? Would he try to kill me for doing the right thing?” (117). Helping the white woman means trouble, in this confining context.

11Moreover, the presence of so many women in this D.C. seems to bode frustration for the narrator rather than the liberation and discovery women promised in Alaska. The characters of the story are all female except for him—all the men are away or dead, or mutilated into “nothing”: “Where in the world is that streetcar conductor?” (117); the legless veteran is “Just a nothing spiriting on down the street” (121), and the narrator feels as though Sheila and her sister have turned him into thin air: “It was simply as if they had walked through me, still talking, still arm in arm” (129). He wishes he could “Forget every bitch that ever lived . . . Just go to Alaska, where a man could be a real man without any bullshit” (129).

12Finally, the narrator has a self-limiting view of himself. “I’m no detective,” he protests, not wishing to stay in D.C. to investigate (107). When he views the crime scene for the first time, he thinks, “I had no goddam idea what the hell I was doing” (113). Alaska is an escape to facile self-realization: he imagines discovering gold, “pockets bulging with nuggets, big pockets, big as some boy’s pockets fat with candy—your Mary Janes, your Squirrel Nuts, your Fireballs” (108).

14These several other escape stories risk interfering with what Hühn calls the “first story” which the investigator will have to construe, the story of the murder. The narrator is originally tempted to escape as fast as possible by inventing a solution to the crime likely to appease Miss Agatha. “I figured it wouldn’t hurt anyone if I told Miss Agatha that it had probably been Fish Eyes who killed Ike. One bad man had killed another. That sounded good” (128). But he ultimately discovers the truth by authentic detection, which, according to Hühn, implies rejecting misleading stories and reading the story left behind by the criminal (456).

15He decides to give the apartment a second look: “Two real visits would make it easier to lie” (129). Unlike in his first visit to the flat, he reads the clues like a proper sleuth. Judging by the time references, he solves the murder two weeks after Miss Agatha came to see him, rather efficiently for someone who was “no detective” (107).

Detection and Discovery

16As Todorov puts it in “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” “Detective fiction has its norms; to ‘develop’ them is also to disappoint them: to ‘improve upon’ detective fiction is to write ‘literature,’ not detective fiction” (43). Although Jones’s portrayal of a sleuth investigating a crime is reminiscent of other great detective stories, he takes a degree of freedom with the genre. His statement that his focus was the narrator’s development rather than the motive of the crime, suggests that he meant to “develop” and “improve upon” a frequent characteristic of hardcore detective fiction in which the investigator is changed, disillusioned by his or her discoveries. A tenet of the genre is that the detective finds out the truth. For Miss Agatha, it is simply the identity of the killer: “I just wanna know who hurt my boy” (106). As the narrator seeks to discover who killed Ike, Jones delves into generic tradition to present black spaces, the impact of war, and roundabout thinking. And he develops the oft-used generic device of biblical reference into supernatural agency for the narrator, who ultimately discovers his place in the community that he felt alienated from.

17As mentioned above, Jones provides a revealing portrayal of African American lives, much like Chester Himes who, according to Eve Exandria Dunbar, wrote “domestic novels” showing Blacks in “a space of ‘home,’ a space where inhabitants can be themselves” while underscoring racism (127–28, 130–33). There are elements of social realism in the careful placing of the narrator’s office on F street, “downtown mongst white folks” (105), not far from the Black neighborhoods regrouping Mojo’s bar, Dunbar High, Daddy Grace’s church, and the various apartments in which the narrator’s family have lived, in showing the unfair treatment of Blacks by the police there, and the characters making a home for themselves in such spaces despite it all, creating comfortable living areas such as the young man’s mother’s homes have always been: “The key word in livin room is livin” (123).

18Detectives who are guilt-ridden or haunted by the past are staples of the genre. That Jones made his a veteran like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and introduced the story of the displaced Miriam Sobel suggests a debt to hardboiled detective fiction and what Sarah Trott calls “war noir” (xii), in which war-troubled individuals suffer from a lack of meaning in an indifferent society. The narrator, whose wounding may be seen in his drinking, sees little point in staying in Washington D.C. Jones suggests that such incautiousness is to be found in other vets: “Any day now, I was due to go off to Alaska to hunt for gold with a war buddy” (105). While “Marlowe strives to ameliorate society’s ills against seemingly overwhelming odds because if he does not he feels his sacrifices will have been in vain” (Trott xvii), irresponsibility, immaturity, and amateurism like the narrator’s are less common in the genre. When he expresses surprise that Miss Agatha never told him about Ike’s drug habit, his mother says, “Son, how easy you think it is to tell anybody that your child has fallen far from the height you worked to put him on? How many people would I want to blab to bout your drinking and foolishness? Not that people don’t know already” (124). His vision of a perfect world has a foolish quality—“Gold could buy grape Kool-Aid every day of a man’s life” (116) —as does the stereotypical sexual fantasy with which he wards off real women—sitting in “the best seat of the train” across from a seductive woman in a tight blouse and sheer stockings (126). Jones is realistic in his treatment of the young veteran narrator, for making him so imperfect leaves room for the development that he wants to convey.

19In a typical plot, the investigator must sift through stories (the suspects’) to decide what the real story is (that of the murder), by reading the clues and identifying the murderer. In “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” more extraneous stories run through the narrator’s head (about his family, about Mary and Blondelle or about Sheila, for example) than do alibies or possible solutions. The distractedness that Jones conveys is more realistic than the single-mindedness of classical deductive sleuths. According to Joseph Keller and Kathleen Klein, the first-person narrators of hardboiled detective fiction are “rebels against syllogistic rationality,” helping to “create the action of what Chandler termed ‘organic’ plots” (57). But despite the truthful-seeming range of the organic plot, the narrator does have to narrow down confusing narratives and classical red herrings to find the killer. Fish Eyes, who might have killed Ike over a drug deal, and the alluring neighbor with the mynah bird who calls out sexual encouragement such as she might have given Ike, must both be exculpated. For after looking over the crime scene, Ike and Alona’s second-floor flat below Miss Agatha’s, one more time, he finds decisive clues that point to Alona.

20Jones departs from the norm of the genre by introducing the supernatural in the discovery of the perpetrator’s tracks. As Sandor Klapcsik has pointed out, there is often a suspicion of supernatural intervention in crime fiction, but in his study of liminality and the fantastic in Agatha Christie’s work he makes it clear that the detective usually clarifies each instance back to rational normalcy (Klapcsik ch.1). This is not the case in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.”

I opened the window and saw browned blood out on the edge of the sill. Why here, when the window should have been closed on the January night he was killed? And what power was in that blood for it to hang on for nearly two years?

I went out onto the fire escape and climbed up to Miss Agatha’s place. Even after all the snow and sun and rain and time, there were faint bits of brown midway up the window frame, as if someone with bloody hands, just last night, had held on to it to steady himself before entering the apartment. Blood spilled with violence never goes away . . . (130)

This apparent departure from social realism into fantasy draws attention to the text’s quality as a literary artifact. Does it affect the “willing suspension of disbelief” which Samuel Taylor Coleridge held that a reader brings to a story? In “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien famously argued that even in fantasy, there is no room for disbelief (Lefler 4-6).

When the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce [Coleridge’s] sort of belief, says Tolkien, what really happens is that the story-maker . . . makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (qtd. in Lefler 6)

21Jones’s Secondary World has left room for supernatural intervention. Superstition has prevented the landlord from renting Ike’s apartment in the two years since the murder: “[C]olored people believed dead people should stay dead, but they also knew that dead people tended to follow their own minds” (112). When the narrator scrapes off some of the paint around the kitchen window and sees “that someone had merely painted over the blood and everything else that had come out of Ike’s head,” he seems to confirm that the place is haunted: “No wonder Miss Agatha couldn’t sleep at night—her son was still up and about just below her head” (130).

22The world Jones creates for the story is imbued with religious belief. Caroline Blyth and Alison Jack, in their introduction to The Bible in Crime Fiction and Drama, have pointed out the prevalence of allusions to the Christian and Jewish Bibles in the genre; sometimes, “the Bible is less a plot device than a presence in the crime narrative, which allows the author and their readers to reflect on wider culturally relevant issues pertaining to good and evil, innocence and sin, crime and punishment, justice and injustice—themes that reverberate throughout the biblical traditions themselves” (2). The women still seem to embody the rectitude of their deeply religious families in the South, where “everyone . . . feared God and wanted one day to sit in the aura of his majesty” (108); “‘I’m guiltless,’” is the explanation the narrator’s mother, a believer in the power of a clear conscience, gives for her smooth skin (104). Moreover, expressing her disappointment that nothing has been done to solve the murder, Penny gives the African American population a religious origin as descendants of Hagar, the Biblical slave whose son, Ishmael, is supposed to be the founder of Africa itself, and stresses the injustice of the white police by invoking the deity: “It’s a shame before God, the way they do all Aunt Hagar’s children” (106).

23The narrator, a veteran who had “got used to dead men everywhere” in Korea, does not seem to share the ambient religious belief. He would not consider going into a church: “I went up 6th Street. There was a big crowd around Daddy Grace’s church, but I didn’t see anyone I knew. I turned onto M” (119). This point highlights his alienation from the community which he wants to escape: “On Sundays WOOK was full of religious shit, and it always depressed the hell out of me” (116).

24Yet when he sees the blood on the fire escape, he credits tradition and his mother’s dictum, returning to the community who believes in a supernal power: “Blood spilled with violence never goes away, I remembered my mother teaching Freddy and me, and you can see it if you have a mind to” (130). The singular lack of italics or quotation marks to denote speech make it ambiguous whom the final statement is to be attributed to—the narrator, espousing his mother’s belief?

25Furthermore, after the required degree of suspense as the narrator follows the tracks to Miss Agatha’s, he makes another symbolic return to community. When he raises the window, looks inside, and sees more blood stains on the inside of the frame, Alona is watching him defiantly: “Her arms were folded across her breasts, her legs slightly apart” (130). She seems “impervious for all eternity”; “mountains did not stand the way Alona stood” (130). The investigator seeks the comfort of religion to try and come to terms with the woman’s act and lack of remorse—and realizes that she had been amply wronged by the murdered man: “Dear God, I thought, dear God. Of all Ike’s crimes against her, what had been the final one?” (130). As in many detective stories, the discovery of the criminal poses an element of danger: “I became aware that in only a few steps Alona could be at the window and one powerful push could sent me toppling over the fire escape. I became afraid.” But instead of being cut down in his turn by the killer, he is aided back to safety by the child that has hitherto been nameless, that he has found difficult to “put up with” and only “waved to” (114): “‘Hi hi.’ The kid kept holding her hand up to me, so I took her hand and I let her help me into the room. The child was named for Miss Agatha. ‘Hi hi,’ she said. ‘Hi,’ I said” (130). As Slavoj Zizek might put it, the child, “the public which witnesses the duel of the actant and his opponent” though ignorant of the stakes, returns the young man to the necessary benevolent, innocent other (150). She marks the restoration of his belief in community. The veteran who wanted to leave the place in which he felt alienated is reintegrated; by stepping in the murderer’s footsteps, he has begun to communicate with others and to wonder what makes others tick—what constitutes the truth for Alona, for example.

26Jones departs from the genre in the manner of telling the story of the “genesis of the crime,” which Peter Hühn sums up as implying “with particular clarity the essential components of any narrative as a highly organized as well as organizing structure: origin, agent, causal connection, temporal sequence, aim—or in the (incomplete) handy formula often cited in detective novels: the motive, the means, and the opportunity” (454).

27The narrator does not expose the murderer’s motive. But in his investigation, some clues are provided to the reader regarding “all Ike’s crimes against [Alona]” (130). The marriage seems to have been unhappy. In the snapshop of the couple which he examines in their apartment, “Alona was smiling, but Ike, wherever they were, looked somber. Alona had a determined look. Perhaps she had been trying to get Ike to smile” (113). There is blood at the head of the bed: “I knew that Ike wouldn’t have moved from that kitchen table once he was hit, so it was blood from another event” (113)—perhaps Ike, a drug abuser, had been a wife beater too. This likelihood is borne out by the contents of the medicine cabinet, “a rather large bottle of Mercurochrome and three bottles of iodine,” and the “pasteboard box with bandages” under the sink, from which clumps of (Alona’s?) hair appear (113). Alona, “five months pregnant” at the time he died (112), may have decided that she had spent long enough being brought down to earth by her husband. As for the means and the opportunity, we know that Ike was shot, but we do not find out how Alona might have got a gun, fired it without anyone hearing, or escaped Miss Agatha’s suspicion.

28In the classical detective story, the investigator restricts the perpetrator’s desire to escape with the truth:

The criminal attempts to realize himself and to gratify his desires by freeing himself from the restraints of society and its defining norms. By means of his story the criminal creates for himself a free place, a place of his own outside society’s order. And as long as he is in exclusive possession of his story, he is, literally, free. The detective, on the other hand, acts as society’s agent in order to restrict this freedom and bind the criminal again to the constraining rules of society through arrest and punishment (imprisonment or execution). The detective’s means of achieving this is getting hold of his story, thus gaining power over him and depriving him of his free self-determination. (Hühn 460)

29Alona’s story is that she is the perfect daughter-in-law, mother, and apparently was the perfect wife—in Mojo’s, Mary Saunders had told the narrator, “The problem you have is everybody in the world hated Ike . . . Except his mother and his wife. They had to like him, had to love him” (110). According to Ernst Bloch in “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel,” it is a sign of the “chaotic insecurity of life (compared with the relative security of the nineteenth century” that “the ultimate clue in the detective novel can and usually will consist in the unmasking of the most unexpected, least suspected person as the perpetrator” (41). But perhaps the reader will have suspected all along what the narrator discovers at Miss Agatha’s, given Freud’s legacy—“the conviction that, the more neatly the mask conceals, the less salutary that which goes on behind it” (Bloch 42).

30In “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” there is no confrontation with the suspects and perpetrator in which the investigator reveals the missing components of the crime or elicits confession as in the classical detective story, nor is the killer swiftly punished. When Hühn’s detective reveals the truth, he restores order, “coherence and meaning” (454) to the community; in this detective story, the reader must piece together many clues to establish coherence and meaning. In Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction, David Riddle Watson posits that we are especially aware of the relativity of truth today, and that we have become accustomed to searching for it like detectives (viii). That Jones’s narrator has doubt about what constitutes the truth of Alona’s story is suggested immediately after he finds out she is the criminal, in an analepsis to “the white man who tried to drag Miss Agatha off into the woods when she was a child” (130). Although that white man’s speech never made any sense once he regained consciousness after the girls beat him, he took to preaching, and his gibberish was interpreted as divine revelation. Ultimately, Jones’s narrator does not know what to do with his discovery, even though Miss Agatha has made it clear that knowing the truth would set her free: “I just wanna know who hurt my boy so I can put my mind to rest. I’ll leave the punishin up to God. But I must know” (106).

31In a typical hardboiled mystery, the detective does not always reveal the truth that he has uncovered at the end. Some of the reasons are that society is so corrupt that he cannot expose the criminal, or that he is a part of the problem and is incapacitated by guilt; or that his feelings are involved in case; or that he cannot reveal the criminal’s identity because his clues would not add up in court. Again, the reader must determine for himself why Jones has the narrator in a quandary about what to tell Miss Agatha. In this modern take on the hardboiled genre, he may have been touched by the closeness between Miss Aggie and Alona and not wish to destroy that happiness. It would shatter Ike’s mother’s belief in Alona to learn the truth from the narrator. He may also realize that the ghostly blood traces would not be as convincing to others. Moreover, he may understand her motives in killing Ike, and feel guilt as a hitherto dominant male. He neither turns in Alona nor tells Miss Aggie in the course of the short story.

32In a genre in which questions have solutions, Jones both prompts surmise and meets the reader’s expectations elsewhere, as the narrator’s personal story comes to a close and he lays his ghosts to rest. The narrator finds out who the “dead white woman” was. His boss Sam Jaffe’s wife, Dvera, identifies her as Miriam Sobel, who would sometimes disappear, trying to return to her native Russia. “She was in my brother’s congregation. For a week they didn’t know what had happened to her. Young as she was, her mind had been going for a long time” (127). She translates the apparent nonsense that the narrator remembers as her last words into proper Yiddish and English: “‘They were my father’s . . . way of beginning stories to me’” (127)—“Once upon a time there was a rabbi and his wife. ... Listen, children, remember, precious ones, what you’re learning here” (131, italics in the original). She gives him a photo of a young Miriam Sobel with “[t]wo identical boys with forelocks” holding her hands (132), which ties in with an earlier dream of the narrator’s about “the dead white woman . . . alive again . . . a child on either side of her” (112). The reader guesses that she may have left her family behind in Russia and lost her mind as a result.

33The narrator’s return to community is confirmed as he gets to know Dvera better—like the dying Miriam earlier, she first seems to be only a white woman who could get him in trouble, crying when she hears him speak Yiddish—“This was all I needed before Alaska: a white woman crying and no witnesses to my innocence.” But when she tells him about her father’s stories, he says: “This was more than she had ever said to me in all the time I had been working there. Sometimes one moment sweeps aside everything you ever thought about a person” (127). At the close of the story, when he goes into her back office, beyond the samovar, the calendar with the time of sunset every Friday, he perceives the similarities between Dvera’s world and the world he knows (“The doilies on the couch reminded me of my mother’s living room” [132]), and notes that Sam makes her giggle and blush on the phone.

34In the end, the narrator decides to stay in Washington rather than go to Alaska: “It came to me over the next few days that I would never find gold in Alaska, not even if my life depended on it” (131). Is this to be interpreted as a sign that he has rejected his former plans as pipe dreams because of the disillusionment that hard-boiled detectives so often come away with, and that he is resigned to his lot in a confining D.C.? Or, more positively, that he feels that the community is not as stifling because he has been caught up in something as great as his former daydreams?

35The final lines point to such a liberation. From his office window, he sees a little girl dancing, “It was good to watch her, because I had never seen anything like that in Washington in my whole life” (132). The new has been discovered in the investigation and in the viewing of the child. “It would have been nice to know what was on her mind” (132). In Washington’s people, not Alaska, is gold to be found—in appreciating their beauty and seeking to understand their experience. With the child, horizons are symbolically open—the narrator seems to have matured and absorbed the reality principle, yet the child’s innocence is not something bound to be lost, a story bound to be cut short. The narrator’s view of life is more balanced, indicating, perhaps a chance of escape for Alona—a new story possible for her, too, in D.C. The open ending about Alona, twinned with the vision of the girl dancing, are an invitation to imagine a different part of Jones’s storyworld. As Daylanne English has noted about the ending of Walter Mosley’s novel Cinnamon Kiss, in which there is a sense of optimism for the detective Rawlins “not on political or social grounds but on personal grounds,” the open future that is heralded suggests hope for the Black community as a whole (147). Jones’s vision of growing up, a constant process of remaining open to discovery in oneself and others, offers hope for all.

“May you derive strength from these letters”

36The phrases repeated by Miriam Sobel—“Listen, children, remember, precious ones, what you’re learning here”—are from the song Oyfn Pripetshik, about learning to read the Torah, the sacred text that is to sustain the children when they “will bear the Exile,/ And will be exhausted” (Warshawsky). The slave woman Hagar was in exile in the desert, and the Black community can perceive itself as being in a form of exile from justice. As English argues about Mosley’s choice of a past genre and setting in his novels, “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” shows the 1950s as being much like the contemporary world in many respects, “enacting a complex process of literary anachronism that describes and inscribes both past and present-day injustice and discontent” (English 134). Although Jones denies consciously producing social commentary of any sort, his own feelings about what is right cannot but surface—“it’s just a part of your makeup, your DNA” (“‘I Never Thought’” 73).