1Since his tour de force, The Known World (2003), Edward P. Jones has become a major force to reckon with in the production of African American belles lettres. Matters of black-on-black slavery in the antebellum era were obviously emplotted in the above novel, but Jones is engagingly cryptic in his short stories, aligning with the masters of dark humor in the Western literary tradition and beyond to convey the absurd everyday human condition of his characters in the stories, a situation we dub the intolerable. Jones’s three short stories: “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” “Bad Neighbors,” and “A Rich Man” were purposively selected from the collection, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006). These stories were originally published in the New Yorker to wide acclaim, and their reception inspired their author to publish the collection. Though it has achieved less critical success than his first, Lost in the City (1992), it is no less sublime, enigmatic and poetically dense. This essay will analyze instances of the black humor strategy Jones deploys in limning the intolerable.
2Dark humor has been designated differently, depending on the scope of coverage and the perspective or the literary tradition a scholar makes reference to. It is known as “darkly comic” (Herron 418), “mordant, horrifically comic” (Falvey 241), “benign humor” (Perchtold, et al. 1), “gallows humor” (Dynel and Poppi 3) or “black humor” (Schulz 3). At its most effective, black humor can be used to address disturbing topics and events by drawing the reader into the textual situation of the protagonist, even as neither the reader nor the textual personages have any firm mastery over the predicament unveiled in the text. Thus, as Harold Bloom has argued, black humor nudges the audience to interpret their own existence from the sardonic laughter displayed before them as it presents a sad but humorous portrayal of the ills of society (“Introduction” 29).
3A consideration of Jones’s use of humor can be traced back to classical texts. As scholar Louise Cowan argues, black humor involves the possession of double perspectives, “double vision.” She argues that in the case of a writer such as Aristophanes, such vision requires him “to be possessed by a spirit of nonsense, absurdity, and contradiction, so that he may undertake his supremely difficult task of raising earthly existence to a new plane of being,” where the gravity of such existence can be noted (85). As the writer gestures towards the unfamiliar that is by far better than the situation he describes, he allows his pen to depict the decline in morality, while reminding his readers that the task of building a better world should not be abandoned (85). Jones, like Aristophanes, does not lose sight of the issue he satirizes on one hand and, on the other hand, of the ideal he wants his readers to measure up to in the three stories analyzed here.
4Shakespeare offers another model of black humor, most evident, perhaps, in the character of Falstaff, who appears in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 and Henry V. Falstaff uses his word-based humor to sustain his freedom, as he comments on both the laughable and the absurd, the strangely comical and tragically farcical (Bloom, “Introduction” 149, 150). By detesting, or making an “enemy of everything that would interfere with his ease, and therefore of anything serious, and especially of everything respectable and moral,” Falstaff sets himself up as an eminent figure with unrivalled discerning abilities, one who sees the existential and the absurd, and thus the meaningless, where others see the momentary and the meaningful (Bradley 262). He is the configuration of the absurd man built up within the crevices of the carnivalesque, his attitude to life touches on the abrogation of the law, that is, acting in “ignorance” of the law. Falstaff’s features are discernible in Jones’s work—and in his story “A Rich Man” in particular—and his downfall points to the greater good that is temperance.
5Black humor weaves its way through twentieth century texts as well, and there may be no greater antecedent of Jones’s use of black humor than that found in T.S. Eliot’s Modernist masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” At its center, the poem is a recitation of the misery that has put the kibosh on his aspirations, in language that is broken in places. Critical readers agree that the black humor rhizome in the English literary tradition has been found. Prufrock is not a gay Falstaff—rather, his words are a thoughtful rumination of generalizable misfortune humankind has been afflicted with, a summary of the black humor treated in this study. The poem includes disillusionment and passivity, failure of will, fear of old age, fear of sex, intense self-consciousness, the loss of youth, metaphysical distress, the perils of indecision, personal weakness in an ugly world, psychological insecurity, romantic despair, self-division, self-disgust, social isolation, solipsism, the sordidness of daily existence, spiritual emptiness and sterility, turpitude and evil (Blalock 53-93) and self-mockery (Evans, “Almost Ridiculous” 172). Eliot uses black humor to convey the harrowing elements of human existence to which the “victim” has no answer, about which he can change little, and out of which there can be no escape, and which he must relay with a wry smile and a bit of painful fun. Edward P. Jones’s characters are reminiscent of Prufrock, given that the human situation Jones discerns implicates him and his auditor-readers. Prufrock conveys that he, the character in his own tale, is, like Jones’s characters, the whole of humanity putting “his weaknesses on such public display” (177). T.S. Eliot thus presents in many ways, “the archetypal modern man, and conscientious readers will have to confess that in laughing at him, they laugh partly (and perhaps somewhat ruefully) at themselves” (178), a dark humor that weaves its way through Jones’s work too.
6Black humor is one of the defining qualities of postmodern literature as well: one thinks immediately of Joseph Heller’s now-canonical novel Catch-22 (1961). James Nagel argues that the work’s black humor feature is revealed in form of its “angry” humor, which fits in with Bloom’s thesis of “affirming conservative norms that its audience can agree on, questions and undermines many values at the heart of American life,” thus draping the text with the status of “a modern-day Juvenalian satire” (Nagel 100; Bloom, “Introduction” 47). As Nagel states, “The humor of Catch-22 is not the gentle entertainment of comedy but the harsh derision and directed social attack of satire” (99). The values being contested include consumerism, crass capitalism, inflexible red-tape, and the malignancy falsely termed civilization (100). We see a form of this humor in Kurt Vonnegut’s work as well, including Cat’s Cradle (1963), which touches copiously on the weakness of our human life, the pointlessness of dreamed utopias, and the irrationalities of science and religion (Hobby 57). The list includes nuclear armament, the Vietnam War, and weak institutions for Vonnegut (58). Like Vonnegut, Jones draws on religion to convey black humor in the short story, “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” and he builds the memory of war—the Korean war (1950-1953) in this case—into the story. And like a significant number of postmodernist writers who rely on black humor in their work, Jones presents a gentle but painfully thought-provoking derision that straddles the microcosm and the macrocosm of the American society—the African American and the American societies, respectively.
7In All Aunt Hagar’s Children, Jones sketches the decay in the upscale city of Washington D.C., the capital city of the free world, and he offers readers the view of absurdity and contradiction of the age and the ills of that city. Like Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller, Jones condemns crass capitalism, institutional failures, warfare. Like Shakespeare in creating Falstaff, Jones presents an uneven figure who considers himself excluded from any entity that interferes with his comfort, and therefore has no respect for morality. Beyond the Western ironic tradition, we find Jones acting in the literary spirit of Nabokov and Gogol as he allows benign humor to guide his narration of the offensive and tabooed. Finally, some of Blalock’s enumerated human predicaments gleaned from Prufrock’s verbiage can serve as subheadings, such notions as urban decay, disenchantment and spiritual hollowness, collapse of the will, romantic despondency, intense self-consciousness, and crass capitalism, and the humorous can be identified through the critical item of the punch line, the surprise element.
8The surprise element differentiates non-humor from humor (Raskin 34), thus radically inaugurating within the text a swing from one level of meaning to another. Despite their varied definitions, Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin argue for the indispensability of the punchline in a joke text, composed of two opposing or contradictory scripts—the first proceeding from normal, conventional communication, the second from a deviation from communicative expectations of the first (308). In Jones’s short stories, the punchline is borne of his sarcasms, witticisms, cynicisms, acerbities, derisions, ironies, and mockeries. Let us take an example of romantic despondency in the short story “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” The narrator avoids taking a particular route because, as he says, he wants “to avoid Sheila Larkin. I had been very successful in avoiding Sheila since I’d broken up with her. I knew how vicious she could be. I did not want to go to Alaska with a face scarred by lye . . . . I once thought I loved Mary. (110, emphasis added). The three italicized expressions are the oppositional elements in that portion of narration that was proceeding as an informative text recounting a past experience. The injection of these sardonic humorous sections jolt the narrational process, yet elevate the remarks to a level where they suggest personalities unable to reconcile themselves to the harsh realities of the modern age. Why would someone congratulate himself on avoiding an ex-lover? Why would one be so heart-broken as to maim a lover willing to leave the relationship? And why would the estranged male lover be unsure as to whom he loved? These expressions thus communicate how distressing the narrator’s love life has been in a wryly jocular fashion that negates the trajectory of seriousness of the narrational process, a strategy that is quintessentially Jonesian.
9If romantic despair was an event in the unmarried relationships between the narrator of “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” and his female companions, in “A Rich Man,” the despair strikes a married couple, Horace and, especially, Loneese Perkins, for it is more pronounced in the wife than the husband. Both “lived most unhappily together for more than twelve years in Apartment 230 at Claridge Towers, a building for senior citizens at 1221 M Street, N.W.” (323). They quarrel at grocery stores and in their apartment to the knowledge of their neighbors. The last time they make love, she euphemistically scribbles, “He touched me” (323, emphasis added). They are characters experiencing tension between desire and fulfilment: the normal communicative process would have warranted that Loneese narrate her love-making experience in clear terms, but Jones chooses to use “touched me” instead of “made love to me”—in this euphemistic expression is embedded the romantic despair Loneese feels. It gives an idea of the lovelessness that surrounds the supposedly loving act. The shift at the prompting of the surprise element is the reason why the reader ends up being wryly amused when reading Jones’s stories. These surprise humorous elements appear in extrapolated segments of the stories and accumulate to give the stories their ironic timbre.
10In “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” as three women walk closer to the narrator’s office, he remarks particularly on the heavy shoes of one of the women: “I . . . learned seconds later that it was murdered Ike’s mother who was wearing those heavy black old-lady shoes, which made the loudest sound as the women clumped their way up to me . . . . The three women were all wearing gloves on that warm day; theirs may have been the last generation of Negro women to go about the world in such a way” (103-04). The narrator’s attention shifts from the narration in form of serious conventional reporting or narrating an information, a technique of fictional narratives, to that of noticing impropriety in dressing, stimulating humor in readers but also sympathy with the possible reason for lack of sense of fashion at the time. The above expression becomes a contradictory joke script within the narrated joke text. The expressions depict a desire in the women to be fashionable at an odd time, when circumstance of life in the city has forced them to be otherwise. The false air of status indicated by the dress of the women contrasts with the pain they belie. Their sense of fashion connotes the grim situation they find themselves in—poverty and death brought on them by the city world. It is actually impossible for anyone to think properly when going through a traumatic event in life. The narrator gives further details of the women in the city of Washington, “my mother, my aunt, and murdered Ike’s mother . . . Miss Agatha’s face had enough lines for all three women—someone had come up behind Ike as he sat over supper and blown his brains out” (103, 105, emphasis added). The humor engendered by this exaggeration reveals the depressing conditions the women experience in the city. American life is causing them pain, they only manage to exist, but not to live, for crime, one of the ills of city life, has affected them.
11A member of the city’s underworld has killed Ike and the narrator’s mother remarks what the white American world thinks: “‘One more colored boy outa their hair. It’s a shame before God, the way they do all Aunt Hagar’s children’” (106). With this remark by Aunt Penny, we learn about the meaning of Aunt Hagar’s children, possibly in a sordid allusion to the Biblical concubine of Abraham who was sent out of the home of comfort with her son, Ishmael. The son thirsted and cried for the most basic things such as water, when his father had enough for his upkeep. The term “aunt” links those suffering in the city and sees them as kin with the biblical Hagar who was forced out into the wild by Abraham, while highlighting how far the city has been corrupted, with Ike being one of the prime cases of this corruption in the city of Washington. Joseph Heller presents this sort of despicable life in his works.
12Ike, Aggie’s only son was “one of only sixty-six people murdered in D.C.” (106, emphasis added), while the narrator was in the Korean war. One death is enough heartbreak, let alone sixty-six: by underemphasizing the number of deaths, the narrator strikes an ironic tone about how horrible things were in Washington that year with respect to homicide cases. He gets so enervated about his experiences in the city that he wants to leave. In his words, “And I wanted to get far away, because I thought it might help me to stop thinking about that dead white woman” (105). He refers to this other death, though not a homicide: Miriam Sobel’s. She has stepped off the streetcar, walked a little and slumped on the pavement in a street in Washington. Washington is like Aristophanes’ Athens: it has its own corruption, homicides, and inequality. The reader can relate to the wry humor of “only” sixty-six murders because the city, the emblem of man’s civilization and transition from fruit-gathering, has now become man’s major nightmare. Instead of being the very life-preserving place it was designed to be, it has now become a hell for its inhabitants. In the above scene, both Jones and the narrator present the awful cases of both the white and the black who were felled by the same fate: city-life. Jones is like Aristophanes in presenting a “double vision”—one, of the rottenness happening; the other, of why this rottenness should never have taken place in a sane environment.
13The decay in the city in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” leads to a heightened consciousness that moves people to despair and emotional turbulence. Jones highlights the experiences of both white and black city dwellers as they go through similar negative circumstances of (city) life. White people also go through their own share of pain and haunting experiences. Sam Jaffe’s wife reveals the identity of the white lady that slumped and died after the narrator repeats her last words to her. She begins to cry, grieving for the deceased. She says: “‘I’m sorry . . . . It’s been a long time since I heard those words. . . . They were my father’s words, his way of beginning stories to me. All his stories started that way. He used to tell me stories when the world got too much. Comforting, you know. Keeping the world away”’ (127). The expression “keeping the world away” is a reference to someone who wants to keep his head afloat amidst the inundating circumstances of life. Though one never actually succeeds in keeping the world off one’s space to stop it from causing pain, Dvera’s father, like the white woman that just slumped, repeats the same words, and when Dvera hears them, not from her father, but her husband’s African American co-worker, she says the words are soothing. Ms. Sobel is the preeminent depressed modern subject, disconnected from her Russian origins, which she dies trying to link up with. Her quest informs readers of the absurd condition of all humankind. Cut off from what orders life and gives it meaning, man has become a straying entity. Dvera Jaffe mentions the dead lady’s name: “‘Miriam Sobel . . . . 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. She would disappear at times, trying to get back to Russia, back home”’ (127). Miriam Sobel and Dvera’s father are entangled in the fruitless cycle of a quest that remains elusive, echoing the representations of the Theatre of the Absurd, which points to the ideal of community and meaning beyond self-conscious isolation and hollowness.
14Another term for Sobel’s disposition is disenchantment or loss of enthusiasm about life. In her case, death comes to her aid. In the case of the narrator’s great grandmother, “my grandfather’s mother” (108), who lived some fifty years before his time with the same intense disillusionment, she wanted it, but it refused to come. The narrator says of her: “‘She was not fifty years out of slavery. She was five years from death. She had seen death following her for more than three years. ‘Do it or leave me be’” (109). The above expressions are grotesque, setting readers to think through the dimensions of the pain people feel and the extent of their resignation to fate. If slavery ended in 1865, then the narrator’s great grandmother must have formulated those expressions in the early 1920s. This woman had her own absurd existence, an agonizing life that is shown to continue in the description of the narrator as he compares her past slavery to her present “freedom,” her past experiences with death, and how she waited for death. To her, slavery, death and miserable living are all entwined. Yet, for one who ought to have developed some familiarity with death, she seems to be clearly averse to contemplating homicide:
“Not none of my son goin out and killin somebody in cold blood.” . . .
My grandfather smiled. “In hot blood, then, Mama. I’ll kill him in hot blood.”
“Do nothin, Morris,” my grandfather’s mother said. “You can’t kill in Aggie’s name. What would become of her? Ask yoself that, son. What would become of Aggie? What would become of your own chirren if you had your way with him? What would come of Penny and Bertha if you killed that man?” (109)
This is the harrowing humor echoing the contradictions of the age Jones’s narration relates to readers. It is a melancholic irony that tells the tale of what goes on within an individual trying to act for the best after experiencing trauma. Jones inserts the narrator’s great grandmother into his narrative above to establish the foundation of the modern American city, the so-called good life, possibly to offer a viewpoint on how the suffering of the past has yielded only very few results, and macabre ones for that matter, for contemporary Americans in the city.
15Amidst this disillusionment, there is another item indicating the unbearable: spiritual hollowness. Possibly because of her age, since she could not go to church, a preacher is sent for to talk to the narrator’s great grandmother. However, the man encumbered with this onerous task is bibulous: “He was a drinking man and Sunday was the only day he could be counted on. Miss Agatha had been attacked on a Wednesday” (109). There is something cynical here, at the heart of which is black humor. How can one counted upon to be a pious man display behavior bordering on impiety? By virtue of his vocation, he is expected to lead the life of piety always. Here, spirituality is sham, and it appears to have been transferred from the grandmother’s era to the grand-child’s age, the narrator’s: the narrator is no different from the preacher. He goes to Aunt Agatha’s seeking clues about Ike’s murder, and he is told by her: “‘Maybe you shouldna been workin today, on the Lord’s day. God might not appreciate it”’ (115). This embarrassing humor reveals the hypocrisy evident in the life of the narrator or the preacher stimulated not so much by mere absence of love for piety and moral principles as by outright desire to align with an acquisitive age that has greatly downplayed these core values. Thus, through the narrator and the preacher-character, the reader glimpses at the disconnection between a desire for the ideal life and the practical realization of the same, echoing the irrationality of religion, the sort Kurt Vonnegut depicts in his Cat’s Cradle.
16One drunken episode is significant as regards the narrator, when he falls asleep in the street: “I dropped more in the street than on the sidewalk. In those days, most of D.C. was asleep at that time of the night, so there wasn’t any traffic to run over me. The street was warm, and all that warmth told me to take a nap. Man, just nap” (122, emphasis in original). Still, a woman passing by gives him a knowing look and inquires: “‘Ain’t you Bertha’s baby boy? Ain’t you Penny’s nephew? . . . Got a brother name Freddy that married Dolley and Pritchard’s girl? You Bertha’s boy what went to Korea? Ain’t yall’s pastor Reverend Dr. Miller over at Shiloh Baptist?’” (123). The woman’s multiple questions, making it is evident she knows him well, though he does not recognize her, are the oppositional elements in the text. It is amusing that she should comment on the spiritual contradictions of the era the narrator is brought up in, wondering how a child born to a good family and raised attending the sermons of a reverend minister could turn out so badly. In the midst of the tirade of questions, his mind tells him to keep napping on the street because he is so drunk. The narrator’s drunkenness is caused by his spiritual bankruptcy. Closely related to spiritual bankruptcy is weakness of will. The narrator places himself in Prufrock’s situation and the humor becomes tinged with aspects of tragedy, as the theme of the captive human will emerges.
17While Loneese suffers romantic despair, Horace, on the other hand, goes through what could be analyzed as failure of the will, the same incident yielding different painful psychological states and responses. At sixty, in Claridge Towers old people’s home, Horace’s desire for women is unwieldy: “As far as he could see, he was cock of the walk: many of the men in Claridge suffered from diseases that Horace had so far escaped, or they were not as good-looking or as thin, or they were encumbered by wives they loved. In Claridge he was a rich man” (326). The narrator’s last reference to him as “a rich man” is an ironic comment that borders on wry humor. True, he has the gold medals on his uniform upon retirement from the American defense ministry. He is healthy and not sick like other Claridge tenants. He is good-looking and thin. All these elements amount to his “wealth.” Still, Horace’s existential failing is his irrepressible desire, for which he cannot love his wife. His riches have not profited his immediate family. The narrator arrives at the phrase “a rich man” from the context of Claridge Towers sexual politics, amid the gathering of less fortunate persons. Jones seems to declare that one’s fortune is only measurable by some local standards and not by a universal one. However, there is an underside to this insight, and it is that the best things in life also have their very inimical flipsides, especially when not used with moderation. Horace has no respect for morality. And this is where Jones, like Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger (1916), satirizes the tragic fate of humanity, because man can never be better than what he is. Such a man is referenced by Twain in his letter to William Dean Howells as “a shabby poor ridiculous thing” who is “mistaken” “in his estimate of his character and powers and qualities and his place among the animals” (256). Mandia argues along this line when she declares that Twain’s fusion of “horror with humor” “indicates that man has no free will,” “since man does not possess the power to change” (120). Horace’s captive will makes him an epic figure fitting Mandia’s description.
18What in Horace’s eyes makes him rich turn out to be liabilities with dire consequences, and he will later be ashamed of his sexual manliness. The women he loves deal drugs, indicating the failing of society. When the police come for them, Elaine and Catrina escape through the window with Elaine’s newborn in arms. And with an officer watching and another sleeping in the van that has come for Horace, both women escape the law and the indictment of the American law enforcement system. Jones represents the absurd consequences of city life on the human will through Horace, Elaine, and Catrina. Jones, like Joseph Heller, “questions and undermines many values at the heart of American life” (Bloom 47) by exposing the root of all human actions, the human will, which in his stories has become weakened by encroaching societal values. The value of morality is crushed as Horace leaves his decent wife and lives with Elaine, who already has a baby with Darnell. His wife passes on without his knowledge or care. His release from jail leads him to understand the futility, emptiness and poverty of his later life. His health and looks, his wealth, have now led to his downfall and his poverty. When he steps into his apartment, we read: “On top of the clothes and the mementos of his life, strewn across the table and the couch and the floor were hundreds and hundreds of broken records. He took three steps into the room and began to cry. . . . But there was little hope . . . . There was not much beyond that for him to cling to” (342-43, emphasis added). The phrase “and began to cry” is the oppositional element. In these tears is embedded the painful irony of man’s life: his composure disintegrates on viewing the stark consequences of his intractable will. The source of comfort and enjoyment, due to his ungovernable will, now lies on the floor of his apartment in shreds. As Mark Twain would say, man will always err in his evaluation of his gifts and turn of mind (256). Horace’s tears signal the mistakes he made in his earlier decisions.
19Jones universalizes the trait of the failure of the will. Besides Horace Perkins, the black individual in “A Rich Man,” it is also found in a crude form in a white man in Choctaw, Alabama, in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children.” The white man tries to drag Miss Agatha, murdered Ike’s mother, when she was in her early adolescence, to the woods to rape her. This exhibition of an ungovernable will provokes an adverse reaction from the girls: “My mother and my aunt picked up rocks and beat the man down to the ground until he was no more than an unconscious lump. In the woods, when it was done, the girls held each other and cried, half out of their minds, afraid of what the world was going to do to them” (106). The surprise elements are how three girls could beat a full-grown lust-filled man to a coma. Both the activity of beating and falling unconscious also convey the dire consequences of an anarchic will on an individual, white or black, confirming Kurt Vonnegut’s depiction of the failing human will in Cat’s Cradle. Rape is a violent act, but there is a startling humor in little girls beating a full-grown man to a coma; their taking off from town for fear of the law that recognizes the rape of citizens of color as non-rape, a much more depressing and tragic event.
20In another instance, we are told: “So when the law discovered him, dead or alive, it would do everything to find out what had happened to him . . . . it was a nice world the law and its people thought they had in Choctaw, Alabama, and coloreds in that place didn’t do bad things to white people, whom the law was built to protect” (106, 108). Yet again, Jones returns to his disquieting humor of how ‘nice’ the law is and whom it protects, and it is surprising to the reader that the law should be described as nice, even when its working is partial. In the above, Jones follows in Mark Twain’s footsteps in presenting how animalistic man can be to his neighbor by lacing horror with humor and how this transmutes to an intolerable experience for people of color in the southern states of America at the time. The privilege of being white could mean having one’s immoral and criminal actions pre-justified before one’s crime was committed. Crime was color-filtered, the enforcement of the law color-acquainted: these skewed notions, these failures of institutions, make the children cry instead of celebrating the crushing of a child abuser who was taught his will could be given free course because the law backed and assisted its cravings. The white man at Choctaw thus becomes the symbol of the moral decay of American society and of modern man, whose will remains largely ungovernable, and there seems to be no help in sight.
21Like the evidence of unrestrained will, inconsiderate capitalism flourishes among inter-racial and intra-racial groups. Jones’s special focus in “Bad Neighbors” is the intra-racial group, the African Americans of Washington D.C. Derek, the eldest of the Bennington children is rudely asked by Terence Stagg, the eldest promising son of Lane Stagg, to remove his Land Rover from his father’s parking space. The exchange of words leads to Derek issuing a punch that sends Terence to the ground; he remains unconscious for a day. Derek finds it unendurable to be insulted by Terence, a fellow person of color. Terence “had seen the fist coming, but because he had not been in very many fights in his life, it took him far too long to realize the fist was coming for him” (361). The basis of Terence’s audacious initial attacks on Derek is upbringing, family status, and education, a combination that, apparently, can empower one to humiliate one’s neighbor. Lane Stagg sees in the blow given to his child the need to return a similar blow to the entire family, an economic one, instead of a physical one. He calls four other neighbors and tells them “how the neighborhood” is “changing for the worse” (363) and about the need to buy off the house to evict them. This will make room for good neighbors. He argues that the Benningtons’s building has not housed the “proper sort of folk in years” (263), a remark smacking of the spiral discrimination they are engendering amongst their own kind, something akin to the major theme of Jones’s earlier successful book, The Known World. These four “good” neighbors are reminiscent of the Black slave owners in that work (Koger 94), who “were no different from white slave masters” and not like “Benevolent Negroes” (81); the black slave master William Ellison owned “more slaves than any other free person of color in the South. . . . more than all but the richest white planters,” even though “he remained bound to them by his race” (Johnson xii). The Benningtons may not be enslaved, but they bear two of the many features of the dehumanized and dispossessed group reeling under the power pressures of another human being: “the destruction of their dignity, and the fat profits others make from their sweat” (Bales xii). As it was for Terence, so it is for the Benningtons: “it t[akes]” them “far too long to realize that the fist,” the blow of evicting them, “[is] coming for” them. Here, Jones makes a powerful statement, using black humor, to describe the condition of the blacks in America. Nicholas Riccocelli, the Bennington’s landlord at Potomac, Arlington, summarily evicts them, having sold the property.
22Like Joseph Heller, Jones interrogates America’s insensitive capitalist tendencies, where humanity is sacrificed on the altar of acquisitive tendencies. The Benningtons experience the grating effect of the inordinate questing for lucre. Their sole offence was that Derek, the Bennington’s first son, punched Terence, Lane Stagg’s son. Lane Stagg then uses his network and economic power to inflict pain on the entire household. The landlord decides to sell the house to the good neighbors for a mouth-watering amount, even though he is aware the tenants are going to be hurt. More profit is more important to him. It is a decision that is traumatic to the Benningtons, the ‘bad’ neighbors, but gratifying to the gang of four—the “good” neighbors; the former move their things at the expiration of the notice. Though the expression, “it took him far too long to realize the fist was coming for him” is humorous, when the Benningtons substitute for Terence it touches on the notion that the plague of mankind is man. The Benningtons become the symbol of humans in various sorts of subjugation by systems of (economic) power.
23Many years later, Derek, who has achieved relative success, saves Sharon, one of the four “good” neighbors’ daughter, from the hands of a gang of youths at F Street, Georgetown, Washington D.C. She is now a nurse married to Lane Stagg’s son, Terence. What the white man alone does in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” to Aunt Agatha, for which he is beaten to a pulp and the three girls made to run out of town the same day, is what an African American youth leading two young white men does to her—they sexually harass her. Jones has thus complicated the racial model for evil, showing propensity for cruelty of the two major races of the Americas of the 1950s, using irony, a major technique of black humor. Both youths represent the violence on second generation African American subjects, thus presenting the general human trait or propensity for violence or for man inflicting pain on his neighbor. Sharon Stagg is now at the mercy of Derek, whose poor family was evicted with just two months’ notice by her father-in-law, Lane Stagg, because he mustered more economic power than the Benningtons. The surprisingly forgiving Derek rescues her and drives her to her home in “upper Northwest Washington where the Benningtons could only serve and never live” (268). Jones uses Derek to obfuscate the categorization of the poor in society, a masterstroke of black humor. The ironic twist reveals how fluid an individual’s life may be and that the awkward fates of most people, good or bad, especially as regards black Americans, are the creations of a vile economic climate. The existential conditions of life, rather than being ameliorated for the “good neighbors’ victims” are used to push them deeper into the morass society has created for them, as it inhumanely quests for riches. Out of this, Derek, the fighting, cursing, and swearing youth, who had suggested that Sharon was his junior brother, Neil’s, girlfriend, overcomes two depressing life storms. Derek’s rise to slightly higher status (he has stopped living with his parents, owns a car, can fend for himself and is wary of running afoul of the law) and refinement (he has become familiar with the inner workings of the American society and the logic African Americans are up against) is a stinging rebuke to America’s obtuse capitalism. It is Derek, one of the “bad” neighbors thought to be crude and unlettered, who rescues Shalom, one of the “good” neighbors who see themselves as the refined segment of the African American subsociety, from the vicious gang members. Jones caps off his artistic strategy of black humor through this ironic turn.
24In his short stories, Edward P. Jones demonstrates a most authoritative strategy in order to espouse his condemnation of societal ills using black humor. As protean as the idea of black humor may be, in “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” “Bad Neighbors,” and “A Rich Man,” he depicts the tragic quotidian human condition readers will identify with as they identify with the textual victims of pain. A notable strategy in Jones’s deployment of black humor is the idea of racial concourse in his elaboration of the detestable in American society. In his short stories, Jones manages to convey that extreme capitalism, thwarted free will, broken-down bureaucracies, urban decay and other ills are responsible for modern man’s predicament, and he does this by bringing both white and black races in America into the fray. In doing so, Jones establishes himself as an African American master of black humor and one of the most insightful ironic writers in the West today, his trademark being a skillful factoring of racial aggregation in a quest to universalize humanity’s “worst traits” (Vars 105) and the most agonizing of human woes.
