Understanding Contemporary American Literature

James W. Coleman

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781611176452
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A comprehensive survey of the works of an acclaimed African American writer

In Understanding Edward P. Jones, James W. Coleman analyzes Jones's award-winning works as well as the significant influences that have shaped his craft. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Jones has made that city and its African American community the subject of or background for most of his fiction.

Though Jones's first work was published in 1976, his career developed slowly. While he worked for two decades as a proofreader and abstractor, Jones published short fiction in such periodicals as Essence, the New Yorker, and Paris Review. His first collection, Lost in the City, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, and subsequent books, including The Known World and All Aunt Hagar's Children, received similar accolades, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Following an overview of Jones's life, influences, and career, Coleman provides an introduction to the technique of Jones's fiction, which he likens to a tapestry, woven of intricate, varied, and sometimes disparate elements. He then analyzes the formal structure, themes, and characters of The Known World and devotes a chapter each to the short story collections Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar's Children. His discussion of these volumes focuses on Jones's narrative technique; the themes of family, community, and broader tradition; and the connections through which the stories in each volume collectively create a thematic whole. In his final chapter, Coleman assesses Jones's encompassing outlook that sees African American life in distinct periods but also as a historical whole, simultaneously in the future, the past, and the present.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Edward P. Jones

Several lines of Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son” could be Edward P. Jones’s mother’s words to him describing her life and partly foreshadowing his: “Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. / It’s had tacks in it, / And splinters, / And boards torn up, / And places with no carpet on the floor— / Bare.” The fact that Jones’s family “moved 18 times in 18 years” (Murphy 23) as his mother struggled to keep herself and her three children together sums up much of their “no crystal stair” life. Perhaps because of this reality, Jones is a truly humble, down-to-earth man, but also because of his relationship to his mother and his own too often precarious life, he ironically has risen to greatness as a writer.

Born in Arlington, Virginia, on October 5, 1950, Jones, a bachelor who has always lived alone and does not own a car, still resides in a rented apartment in Arlington, and has lived mostly in this area around Washington, D.C., except for time away earning his BA (1972) at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and his MFA (1981) at the University of Virginia. Jones’s father left when he was a preschooler, and his mother Jeanette, an impoverished, illiterate maid and menial worker, took care of him, his sister, and his brother and influenced him greatly. Jones went to public schools in Washington, D.C. Always having a love for reading, he read comic books early in life; he did not begin to read novels until he was thirteen. When he began reading black writers, the novel that made the greatest impression on him was Richard Wright’s Native Son. He wrote his first fiction as a sophomore at Holy Cross, but did not consider writing as a career while in college. When he graduated in 1972, the highlight was his mother’s attendance after she had had several strokes: “He didn’t expect his mother to be able to make the trip. ‘When I walked into the stadium, I looked up in the stands, and there she was,’ he says. ‘They told me later that when they were driving here, and she got her first glimpse of Holy Cross up on the hill [overlooking Worcester], she started crying. That was the first time she’d ever seen it’” (Murphy 25).

When he returned to Washington after graduation, his mother became ill and died in January 1975. After she died, Jones, working sporadically and barely able to take care of himself, published his first story in Essence in 1976. The four hundred dollars Essence paid him allowed him to stay in Washington instead of moving to New York with his sister as he had planned. Later, he went to graduate school in creative writing at the University of Virginia. After he returned to Washington, he worked as a columnist and proofreader for Tax Notes, a tax-related newsletter in Arlington, from 1983 to 2001. This was a steady job although not a high-paying one, and during this time he published Lost in the City (1992), his first collection of stories and first major work, influenced by James Joyce’s Dubliners and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children. Lost in the City was nominated for the National Book Award (1992) and won the PEN/Hemingway Award (1993). This did not mean the end of Jones’s hardship, though. In 2001 he lost his job; however, ironically this also freed up his time to work on his novel about slavery, The Known World (2003). While writing the novel, he was depressed and on and off medication; his imagination of the misery of the slaves in the novel turned out to be therapy for his own pain. The novel has become the foundation of his fame. Among several prestigious awards, it won the Pulitzer Prize and earned Jones the McArthur “Genius Award” in 2004. (The “Genius Award” is a $625,000 grant awarded annually by the McArthur Foundation, usually to twenty to twenty-five people in different fields who have done exceptional work and show exceptional potential.) His second collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Both of the short story volumes set in Washington and the novel set in Virginia before the Civil War connect emotionally and culturally to Jones life in the area, and to the larger contemporary cultural milieu of black and white America. Jones has said about the emotional and cultural influences on All Aunt Hagar’s Children: “I have spent . . . all my life in D.C. Ninety percent of what I remember and use in this work has to do with my mother and the other ten percent comes from the people I knew when I was growing up who were adults born and raised in the South. They brought all that they knew and what they did and what they learned in the South to Washington” (Graham 432). This could also apply to Lost in the City. Further, Jones has said that in America he still sees definite signs of the institution of slavery that he portrays in The Known World: “It is as if slavery were legal now.” All Americans “absorb and become part [of slavery’s legacy that] is in the culture” (Graham 427, 428).

Jones has been teaching at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., since 2010. Some recent interview statements indicate that while teaching he is waiting for his next writing project to take shape in his imagination, as happened over the years with The Known World. However, Jones’s literary achievements already place him in the canon of contemporary American literature. Biographies of Jones are readily available, including through online sources, and he gives accounts of his life in many printed and online interviews. (Much of the account of his life here comes from Encyclopedia of World Biography and interviews by Michelle Murphy, Sarah Anne Johnson, Marita Golden, and Mary Emma Graham.)

The Known World thematically and structurally constitutes a symbol of African American experience that stands for everything, a historical whole, a totality. On at least two occasions, in an anonymous interview appended to the Amistad edition of The Known World (4) and in an interview by Sarah Anne Johnson (“The Image You Woke Up With” 89), Jones says that he is the “god” of his work and clearly implies a godlike literary vision. Using his godlike literary vision that is frequently both proleptic (sees the future) and analeptic (sees the past), Jones tries to depict and, through the overall structure of the writing, tries to symbolize everything, a historical whole, a totality of African American experience.

The same thematic and structural approach is central to The Known World. As the novel’s disjointed, incongruous chapter titles suggest (chapter 1, “Liaison. The Warmth of Family. Stormy Weather,” for example), Jones integrates disparate, fragmentary narrative and thematic elements and innumerable characterizations into the loosely connected central story; this integration of structure, theme, characterization, and story symbolizes the totality of experience. This totality is everything, a historical whole that often relies on prolepsis and analepsis to bring it together. It is a “unity of place [that] . . . allows for the re-membering of lost time; it permits artistic resurrection” (Berman 236) of everything. (The narrative vision and the overall approach in the short stories are generally similar to the novel.)

The novel is sometimes difficult to understand, but one thing that makes it easier as well as delightful is humor, often based on irony. Part of the humor comes from the narrative voice revealing the absurdity of oppression that is so much a part of the historical black experience. At times, listening to the narrator is like listening to good jokes and anecdotes that ironically expose the underlying reality of the absurd. The narrator is funny because the reader knows that he is telling the truth. (The short stories are sometimes similarly humorous.)

The story told in The Known World consists of multiple, fragmented, unlimited stories, and at the same time is an all-in-one story of the totality of the black experience: a central story about Henry Townsend’s plantation, many stories about life in the era of slavery, many stories about the future and past in which the narrator reveals proleptic and analeptic vision, and after the last chapter, a concluding story of a godlike view that sees everything. In the central narrative, black, slave-owning Henry dies near the beginning, but his wife, Caldonia, takes over the plantation. In another story that is a fragment to the central story but still related to it, white slave patrollers, although they know he is free, sell Henry’s father Augustus into slavery in Georgia, where his new owner, Hillard Uster, murders him, and Sheriff John Skiffington kills Henry’s free mother, Mildred, when she tries to protect the Townsend plantation’s black slave overseer Moses after he has run away from slavery. There are many other stories about people and situations on the Townsend plantation and elsewhere that are more peripheral to the central story than Augustus and Mildred’s, and almost countless anecdotes and accounts of the future and past. In all of this, pervasive humor directed at the morally corrupted characters and the oppression of slavery generally creates an ironic vision that is highly critical.

The second of the three parts of the title of chapter 5, “A Cow Borrows a Life from a Cat,” is an example of narrative fragmentation and critical humor. It refers to an episode that centers on a dispute between two of the white slave patrollers, Harvey Travis and Clarence Wilford, whom Manchester County pays eight dollars per month (155). The dispute occurs because Travis sells Wilford a dry cow that he claims gives plentiful milk, “though in fact more milk fell from the sky than came from the cow.” The cow was “something Joseph might have dreamed up and warned Pharaoh about” (158). Travis’s attempted scam notwithstanding, the cow miraculously starts giving milk after Wilford buys her. Wilford’s wife, Beth Ann, “took one teat and aimed it at a cat standing to her side. The cat closed its eyes and opened its mouth and drank. Its tail had been in the air, but as it drank, the tail lowered and lowered until it was at last resting on the ground” (156). “The cow swung its tail and chewed its cud. It farted.” Sheriff Skiffington resolves the dispute by convincing Travis, who agrees reluctantly, to stop trying to get his fifteen dollars for the cow back in exchange for Wilford letting him get milk twice a week, but only if he stops harassing Wilford. In the context of the episode’s title, somehow, someway, for some strange reason, the cow “borrows” life from the cat, apparently as indicated in the movement of their tails, even after the cow has miraculously found a new milk-producing life, even when the cow seems to nourish the cat. On one hand, this is a fragmented story disconnected from the other stories, one which stands on its own through its fortuitous ironic humor that resides in the nonsensical, surprising, and unexpected. On the other, it is ironic and humorous that Wilford cannot see that his deception and depravity coincide with his life as a slave patroller who hunted down, brutalized, and sometimes killed human beings, and it is ironic and laughable that the highly Christian sheriff only seeks justice in a dispute between white men and does not see the injustice of slavery. This emphasizes the immorality and lack of vision of white people living with moral certainty and supporting the institution of slavery, which was so obviously wrong. The southern slave culture did not see this, but the novel’s vision encompassing the totality of African American experience sees this and much more.

The concluding pages after the last chapter call the vision godlike, implying a thematic critique and the creation of the totality of black experience in The Known World. In the conclusion, there are two artworks created by the character-artist Alice. One is literally a structural replica of life: “There are no people . . . just all the houses and barns and roads and cemeteries and wells in our Manchester [County, Virginia]. It is what God sees when he looks down on Manchester” (384). The other art piece is a structural replica, too, but it includes the people. Calvin Newman says: “It is your [his sister Caldonia’s] plantation, and again, it is what God sees when He looks down. There is nothing missing, not a cabin, not a barn, not a chicken, not a horse. Not a single person is missing. I suspect that if I were to count the blades of grass, the number would be correct as it was once when the creator of this work knew that world” (385). Although it may not be discernible from the normal, usual human perspective, everything is where it should be structurally and working out for the good from this perspective. The perspective is godlike, but it is also the creation of the ex-slave artist Alice, who now has a larger view, which is like the view of The Known World. Alice’s words regarding her life seem to carry a moral critique of slavery that affirms the positive: “I have been good as God keeps me” (386).

Besides describing the godlike view, Calvin points out the well-being of the escaped slaves now living in Washington that suggests a future much greater and bigger than slavery. It is significant that Calvin dates his letter April 12, 1861, the date of the start of the Civil War that led to this future and that is part of the ongoing totality of African American experience. In this hypothetical time, God keeps Alice as she and the other characters flourish: “All that is here is owned by Alice, Priscilla [an ex-slave] and all the people who work here, many of them, to be sure, runaways. . . . Jamie [Priscilla’s son] comes and goes as a student in a school for colored children. He is as fine a young man as any father or mother could want.” Even back in the “real” time of slavery, the novel presents a sense of continuity, transcendence, and survival that is emblematic of an ongoing totality larger than any oppressive present. The Known World ends: “Her meals to Moses [who had his Achilles tendon cut by slave catcher Oden Peoples for trying to escape] would be until the end. [The slave] Celeste was never to close down her days, even after Moses died, without thinking aloud at least once to everyone and yet to no one in particular, ‘I wonder if Moses done ate yet’” (388).

There are broad and general structural and thematic connections between the novel and short story collections and among all three works. Structurally in the novel, narrative and thematic elements and characterizations coalesce with the central story through the figures of the pieces of art at the conclusion. If not before, then at least at the end the reader can understand the idea of a totality of African American experience that Jones wants to capture symbolically.

The arrangement of stories in Lost in the City is part of a general symbolism in Jones’s work, which the last story highlights. The volume starts with the youngest character, five-year-old Betsy Ann Morgan in “The Girl Who raised Pigeons,” and progresses to the oldest, eighty-six-year-old Marie Delaveaux Wilson, in the fourteenth and last story, “Marie.” The progression from the experiences of the youngest to the oldest symbolizes the totality of black life, which Marie at the end “hears” when she listens to tapes of her own history.

Both the female and male main characters in the fourteen stories are “lost in the city,” imperiled in their Washington, D.C., environment in one way or another, but they are not always, and perhaps never, imperiled and “lost” beyond hope. This is mainly true because of the thematic context created by all of the stories. The progression of stories creates an overall context, in which there are intimations of connections to the South and its black tradition of strength and survival, and there is psychological and literal movement back and forth between the South and the North that puts the characters in touch with the tradition that allows them to survive or makes survival a possibility. The character who may be the most “lost” is Lydia Walsh in “Lost in the City,” the eighth story. Lydia seems to have absolutely no sense of a positive direction to move in and no sense of anything that can save her. Her characterization is ironic because she has a law degree from Yale and is making a lot of money. However, Lydia is not necessarily more “lost” than the high-school-aged girls in “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” the third story; Caesar Matthews in “Young Lions,” the fourth story; Joyce Moses in “His Mother’s House,” the seventh story; or Vivian L. Slater in “Gospel,” the eleventh story. The chances for psychological or physical survival for the other characters seem better, Woodrow L. Cunningham in “A New Man,” the twelfth story, being an example, and Marie in the last story being the best example. However, in the overall context, there is for the characters in each story, including Lydia, at least the intimation of the saving connection, the potential pathway back and forth between the South and North, which makes survival a possibility.

The idea of a totality of black experience comes together in “Marie.” Listening to her account of her life on tapes, Marie hears a story with black historical relevance which she was unaware of telling, a story about her parents’ naive but still sustaining faith and hope while living in the South, and about her own naive youthful striving that nevertheless led her safely to Washington. This history shows that the oppression black people underwent forged in them and their descendants the positive vision of hope and faith that allowed them to transcend this same oppression. This history on the tapes is the totality of experience that connects black people, now “lost in the city”; the history is the potential saving pathway, back and forth, between the South and the North.

The short-story collections are connected volumes that also coalesce to represent a totality of black experience. There is no clear central story in the two volumes as there is in the novel. However, in “Tapestry,” at the end of All Aunt Hagar’s Children, tapestries can encompass “one hundred, two hundred, three hundred,” “maybe even a thousand” years (377), again representing the totality of black experience.

Although All Aunt Hagar’s Children is similar in many ways to Lost in the City, the arrangement of stories is different, and the general thematic emphasis and direction of the stories are somewhat different. In All Aunt Hagar’s Children, usually through a minor character, there is a connection to the correspondingly numbered story in Lost in the City. The settings of All Aunt Hagar’s Children’s stories are sometimes earlier, sometimes later; this means there is not the same progression from the youngest character in the first story to the oldest in the last. However, the collective experience of all the characters, particularly with the stories’ connections to the stories in Lost in the City, still represents a totality of black experience, and individual stories portray the same totality. Throughout the volume almost all the characters live imperiled lives in Washington, initially at least, and the psychological pathway between the South and the North that can sustain and save black people is just as important as in the first volume. The characters in All Aunt Hagar’s Children, though, are generally more successful in finding the pathway that connects and sustains. This is true for eighteen-year-old Anne Perry in “Tapestry,” the last story, but it is also true for most of the other characters. The fates of characters at the end of a few stories are perhaps more ambiguous and more troubling, for example Laverne Shepherd in “The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia,” the tenth story, and Horace Perkins in “A Rich Man,” the twelfth story, but in no s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter 1 Understanding Edward P. Jones
• Chapter 2 Meaning, Structure, and Story in The Known World
• Chapter 3 The Known World’s Characters
• Chapter 4 The Stories of Lost in the City
• Chapter 5 The Stories of All Aunt Hagar’s Children
• Chapter 6 Jones’s Vision and Its Development
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index