1Hope and disappointment are juxtaposed in Edward P. Jones’s picture of everyday life for urban African Americans. In both of his short story collections, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), Jones explores the changing structure of the Black family as it responds to poverty in Washington’s Black neighborhoods. The stories “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” the first story in Lost in the City, and “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the first story of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, are both models and mirrors of this focus, offering portraits of newly arrived Washingtonians and of community life within the history of African American workers. As such, the stories provide the reader with a stereoscopic vision of Black urban life and so prove useful in highlighting the central point of Jones’s storytelling—the need for a strong community bond among Black Washingtonians. Yet they also convey a sense of loss, which is assuaged through an enlargement of translated experience.

2Jones conceptualizes the community bond that keeps together recently urbanized Black men, women and children, while taking into account the influence of society on each individual, by using a sociological distance that refers both to the dialectical unity of members of an urban community and to individual reactions. For instance, Betsy Ann responds with disinterest when her father tells her not to care for the birds near their apartment in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons.” More dramatically, in “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” Ruth Patterson stops caring for her husband to focus exclusively on an orphaned baby the former had objected to her taking in. This distance is even more clearly established when Ruth overrides her husband’s opposition to her naming the orphaned baby boy “Miles,” as this name was originally meant to be given to their first-born boy.

3Despite these tensions, both “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” and “In the Blink of God’s Eye” also introduce the reader to a community of people who help each other. For instance, from the very first pages of “The Girl who Raised Pigeons,” the reader faces alternative perspectives, or frames of vision. This is transmitted by the people surrounding Robert Morgan, the main protagonist. There is a choric function to the characters of the short story, inherent in the way they communicate. Thus, Miss Jenny and Walter Creed help the newlywed couple, Robert and Clara, find an apartment. One also notes the reactions of the children playing on the sidewalks, as they make way for “the man whose wife had passed away” (8) and even call to their parents to let them know that “Robert was passing with Clara’s baby” (8). Sympathy, spontaneously expressed by people in the street, is brought to the fore with the emphasis laid on the number of people that rush to the street in order to comfort the young widower with his baby girl. There is an extension of consciousness to the African American urban community and a collective “God’s Eye” offers a similar extension of consciousness. This can be observed in the evolution of Ruth’s attitude once the newlywed teenager stops behaving like a woman in love to act like a substitute mother: “she slept with the orphan in the bed she had slept in before her marriage. The baby slept holding tightly to her nightgown” (15). Elsewhere, the reader comes across Janet Gordon advising Robert to be careful not to stifle his baby girl under a blanket, and she offers concrete help as she shows the young father how to part and plait a girl’s hair by “practicing on string and a discarded blond-haired doll” (9). Even sentimental passages become vehicles that reflect the author’s view of the Black public sphere with its socio-economic difficulties combined with a sense of social help and a community spirit. In “The Blink of God’s Eye,” we see that while “the mother, Essie and Aubrey…lived mostly from hand to mouth, but they did not go without. [They] were surrounded by country people just as generous who had known the family when they had had a brighter sun” (3).

4While Jones is interested in the creation of community—even in light of personal tensions--one may argue that the African American community in Washington D.C. is specifically haunted by the ghosts of the South and its attendant past in his work. The idea is underscored by any number of ghostly presences that signify the connection between past and present, and South and North. For instance, in “The Girl who Raised Pigeons,” when Carlos and Carleton, the two boys walking on either side of Robert and up Myrtle Street with him, unexpectedly turn back, the reader realizes that the boys are somehow intimidated because they have reached the limits of their community district, the area where they feel safe. Their backward movement becomes fully significant of the pressure of legends when the narrator quotes the words the younger boy’s grandfather used to tell him: “‘Don’t get lost in the city’” (9). By mentioning not only the fear of the city perceived as the source of all dangers, but also the transmission of this fear from generation to generation, the narrator maintains the tradition of the legends of the American South, transplanting them to the community of Washington D.C. In parallel, coming from the past, too, and spreading all over the city, a similar type of rumor about the city as a source of all dangers, is introduced in the very first lines of “In the Blink of God’s Eye”: “That 1901 winter when the wife and her husband were still new to Washington, there came to the wife like a scent carried on the wind some word that wolves roamed the streets and roads of the city after sundown” (1). The atmosphere of the past comes back to mind when Ruth brings together the legend of the city as the source of all dangers, and the reality of a peasant’s or an explorer’s life: “Ruth Patterson knew what wolves could do: she had an uncle who . . . was devoured by wolves not long after he slept under his first Alaskan moon” (1).

5In less literal ways, too, Jones introduces the specter of rural life of the South within the dominant group of recently urbanized Blacks. Through the discredited shadow of life in the city and the presence of the South in Ruth Patterson’s mind—“when she was a girl across the Potomac River in Virginia where all was safe and all was family” (“In the Blink of God’s Eye” 1). Both Ruth and Aubrey have realized the importance of paying homage to the South, yet, while Aubrey Patterson seems not to doubt the determination of urbanized Blacks to develop a community spirit, Ruth stands for rural Blacks’ rootedness in the South’s ancestral past. Jones’s stories thus invite the reader to analyze the influence of the social on the textual.

6The subjective rendering of social reality sometimes relates to the private area, sometimes to the collective, public sphere. Opting for symbolic realism, Jones refashions the idea of self-help within a community of lower-class urban Blacks, who are financially destitute but ready to demonstrate neighborhood spirit, cooperate, help one another, and above all, be united. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” evidence is given of the close relationships that help develop neighborhood spirit within Washington’s African American urban community.

7Despite Jones’s accent on community, the psychic and emotional trauma of being a victim of abandonment and misunderstanding and of experiencing the feeling of loss it entails is explored in each of the two stories. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” the exposure of a protagonist who confesses his fears and weaknesses, establishes an intimate bond with the reader. Not only does the teenaged widower acknowledge his inability to take care of a newborn child, but he admits his desire to escape his responsibility as a father, and run away: “‘If my daddy had just said the word, I’da been on that train with him’” (6). His young motherless daughter’s need for tenderness drives her to raise pigeons, enjoy stroking their wings and watching them fly. “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” too, the reader faces the emotional response of a teenaged husband whose young wife is confronted with her own feeling of vulnerability after the move to Washington and the discovery of a bundle with a newborn baby inside, hanging from a tree. Their behavioral choices allow them the subjective impression of being able to maintain some control over the course of events. For example, no doubt Miles Patterson, the elderly barber in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” and foundling of “In the Blink of God’s Eye”, is a fascinating character to Betsy Ann because he is so fond of speaking to the pigeons and making kissing sounds when saying “‘Daddy’s here’” while her actual father is struggling with his paternal authority (2). As this situation suggests, the responsive context is that of parenthood, as Betsy Ann experiences the somewhat maternal need to breed pigeons in turn. It is clear that “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” and “In the Blink of God’s Eye” do not appear in isolation, but in relation to one another with a responsive context of difficult transmission and heritage in both stories.

8Jones’s writing remains open to aesthetic emotion. The author exhibits a poetic coloring in his work, while concerned with the social arena. For instance, the description made by Jones of the flights of the pigeons around Miles, the barber, and eight-year-old Betsy Ann, takes the form of a scenic show in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons.” When, at Miles’s call, a flight of pigeons unfolds around him, the reader attends the composition of a ballet staged like an artistic painting, the narrator playing with colors and shapes: “In an instant, Miles’s head was surrounded by a colorful flutter of pigeon life” (2). Because of the extension of the text to the visual, the role of the other senses, such as hearing, feeling, and smelling, are intensified, now by Miles’s kisses (2), now by Betsy Ann’s stroking the pigeons’ feathers or enjoying both their cooing and their smell: “Stroking the breast of one, she would be rewarded with a cooing that was as pleasurable as music . . . she smelled what seemed a mixture of dirt and rainy air” (15). The same sensitive approach to a character’s feelings can be observed in “In the Blink of God’s Eye” when the author focuses on the link between tactile sensations and emotions. Of particular note is Ruth’s determination to create her own happiness by holding the baby she has adopted close to her heart, or carrying him on her back during the various household chores she has to perform so as never to be separated from him or deprived of the pleasure she takes in caressing him.

9Jones develops a new form of sensory aesthetics as visual art shifts familiar experience into new forms, giving Washington’s inhabitants’ everyday life a sudden luminosity, even in sadness and pain. The reader can empathize with the characters, giving the stories added meaning. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” as Betsy Ann watches the last pigeon fly “into the colors and sounds of the city’s morning” (25), she realizes she will never see it again nor feel the softness of its feathers on her skin anymore. The mirror image of the story “In the Blink of God’s Eye” is Aubrey riding to Virginia, hoping to bring his wife back. Yet, as he looks at Ruth chopping wood, carrying the orphaned baby on her back, he eventually understands with infinite pain that Ruth has taken refuge in the world of her childhood. Thus, art becomes a translator of experience in Jones’s short stories. The perceiving subject is not a distant spectator, but an active contributor engaged in a continuous aesthetic field. The rich insight he provides into the lives of these fictional others who are representatives of a real community offers an immediate means of participating in the full life of a society.