In response to my “Puzzle the
Prof” contest, Keith Hood writes that he would like to hear what I have to say
about Edward P. Jones, noting that I cited Jones’s Aunt Hagar’s Children
as one of my favorite collections of the twenty-first century so far and his
story “Marie” as one of the 200 stories from Boccaccio to the twenty-first
century that I most admire. Keith
quotes from Garth Risk Hallberg’s review of All Aunt Hagar’s Children about
Jones’s “omniscient voice, detached yet curiously intimate, plainspoken,
quiet,” adding that the voice “wraps itself around characters, good guys, bad
guys, men, women, and children, and loves those characters, and makes them
live."
Indeed,
I have admired Jones’ stories since the publication in 1992 of his first
collection Lost in the City. Let me comment briefly on that first collection before taking a
look at “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the opening story of All Aunt Hagar’s
Children.
Convinced that most readers had only a narrow idea of what
Washington D.C. was like, because they were familiar with it only through
novels that dealt with downtown power, and politics, Edward Jones has said that
in his first book he wanted to create a collection of stories that, like James
Joyce’s Dubliners focuses on ordinary people in various African American
D.C. neighborhoods. Lost In The City,
published in 1992, was short listed for the National Book Award and won the
PEN/Hemingway Award.
Jones has said that he spent the next 10 years thinking
about a story of black ex-slaves, who became slaveholders themselves. The result was The Known World, his
first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and the Lannan Literary
Award. The following year, Jones won the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called
“genius award.” All Aunt Hagar's Children, a second collection of short
stories, several of which featured characters introduced in Lost in the City,
was published in 2006, and was short listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award.
Widely praised by reviewers and critics, Jones represents a
new wave of African American writers who write about individuals rather than
about race and about the personal rather than the political.
The fourteen stories in Lost in the City, patterned
loosely after Joyce’s Dubliners, are about people of various ages who face
challenges of growing up, surviving, and succeeding in African American
neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. Some of the stories are brief lyrical pieces
in which characters face loneliness and loss.
For example, “Lost in the City” is about Lydia Walsh who, while at a
hotel with a man, receives a call that her mother has died in the
hospital. She does a line of coke and
calls a cab, telling the driver to get her lost in the city so she can postpone
accepting her mother’s death.
Strength of character in the face of disappointment and
disillusionment is the motivating force of Jones’s stories. Typical of his
proud and capable characters is the young mother in “The First Day,” a brief
lyrical piece about a woman taking her daughter to her first day of school. The story is told in first person by the
child, who is learning things about her mother, for example that the higher up
on the scale of respectability someone is, the less her mother will let them
push her around.
The strongest character in Jones’s collection is eighty-six
year-old Marie Delaveaux, living alone on social security. When she is
condescended to and ignored by a young employee at the social security office,
she slaps the girl. Two weeks late, a
young university student comes to interview her for an oral history
project. When he sends her copies of
the tapes, she plays them and then puts them away, saying she will never listen
to them again, even though they recount a history of hardship and courage.
The central themes of Jones’s stories are dependant on the
trials, challenges, and triumphs of his characters. When Lost in the City was first published, many critics
noticed immediately that although all the characters were African American, the
stories did not focus directly on racial prejudice or adversity resulting
directly from white oppression. In
fact, there are very few references to color in any of the stories. Instead of being about characters suffering
as a result of their race, the stories were about characters who just happened
to be black, facing the problems of living with very little money in small
neighborhoods in a large American city.
This does not mean that the situations the characters
confront have nothing to do with their color.
It does mean, however, that Jones writes stories that are not narrowly
limited to issues of race. If there is
a central theme, it comes from a warning that an old man tells his
five-year-old grandson: “Don’t get lost
in the city.” This is repeated in a
variation in another story when a father warns, “Never get lost in white folks’
neighborhood,” and echoed when the young woman in the title story tells a cab
driver to get her “lost in the city.”
Finding one’s way in the city by identifying with one’s neighborhood is
the driving force of many of Jones’s stories.
“All Aunt Hagar’s children” is a phrase Jones says that his
mother often used to refer to black people.
He originally planned to use the phrase as the title of his novel, which
he finally decided to call The Known World. Hagar was the female servant of Sarah in the Old Testament, a
kind of iconic mother figure for African-Americans. W. C. Handy once wrote a
song called “Aunt Hager’s Blues.” You can hear Louis Armstrong play and sing it
on YouTube.
“In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the opening story in All
Aunt Hagar’s Children, may be a fairly representative example of the
“voice” that Keith Fort refers to. It’s
also an example of how Jones echoes characters in his first collection by
referring to them in the second collection.
A minor character, Miles Patterson, in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” in Lost
in the City shows up in “In the Blink of God’s Eye” as the baby that Ruth
Patterson finds hanging from a tree in Washington, D. C. “So this was
Washington,” the voice says, “where they hung babies in night trees.”
The baby hanging in the tree may be an allusion to the
famous 1930s song, “Strange Fruit,” written as a poem by a Jewish high school
teacher after seeing a photo of two lynched African Americans, and then made
famous as a song by Billie Holiday.
Darryl Pinckney, in his March 29, 2007 review of All Aunt
Hagar’s Children in The New York Review of Books, says that Jones’
attitude toward his characters has much to do with what he calls “the gentle
caressing tone” of the stories in his second collection. Pinckney says that Jones is the “shepherd of
his invented world; protective toward his flock, his people.” He calls Jones is
an “historical lyricist,” using language to shield and elevate his characters.
Whether you call it “voice, style, or tone,” the magic of a
writer’s language to create a certain musical rhythm is difficult to describe,
even more difficult to account for how language can “elevate” characters. The two central characters in “In the Blink
of God’s Eye,” the young newlyweds, Ruth and Aubrey Patterson, are indeed
described in something other than a realistic or naturalistic way, and the
result of the lyrical, folklorish word choice and rhythm of the language does
indeed make them seem characters in a traditional folklore tale rather than
characters in a realistic story.
The story takes place in 1901, just after Ruth and Aubrey
have gotten married and moved from Virginia to Washington, D.C. It opens with Ruth “hearing” the old song of
the night the way she did in Virginia and “ever mindful of the wolves, would
take their knife and pistol and kiss Aubrey’s still-hairless white face and
descend to the porch.” The verb “descend,” and the reference to wolves and the
song of the night prepare the reader for Ruth’s seeing in the glow of a
gaslight a “bundle suspended from the tree in the yard, hanging from the apple
tree that hadn’t borne fruit in more than ten years.” The appearance of the bundle is strange enough to make her fear
something “terrible and canine” to burst from it and to create a supernatural
aura around the experience:
An invisible hand locked about her mouth and halted the cry she wanted to give the world. A wind came up and played with her coat, her nightgown, tapped her ankles and hands, then went over and nudged the bundle so that it moved an inch or so to the left, an inch or so to the right.
The simple device of
repeating the phrase an inch of so to the left, an inch or so to the right adds
to the sense of an otherworldly moment.
The ballad-like nature of the story is echoed throughout. For example, when Ruth learns that Aubrey
has decided to move to Washington, she does not want to leave her generations
of family in Virginia, but knows she is a married woman pledged to her
husband. “And God had the baby in the
tree and the story of the wolves in the roads waiting for her.” In one of the few references to race in the
story, the Voice situates the couple in the folklorish world of their heritage:
They were the children of once-upon-a-time slaves, born into a kind of freedom, but they had traveled down through the wombs with what all their kind had been born with—the knowledge that God had promised next week to everyone but themselves.
However, as the book title reference to the Old Testament
slave Hagar suggests, Jones locates their heritage even more primally in the
Judeo-Christian folklore of the origins of human life itself. The sermon the preacher gives after coming
back from burying his mother emphasizes the storytelling rhythm at the heart of
“”In the Blink of God’s Eye”: “I’m next
in that long death line that started with our Daddy Adam. And with Mama Eve. O Mama Eve, we forgive you for pickin that fruit and biting into
it with not a care for all of us what was to come after you and face death.”
Because the plot of the story centers on the conflict
between Ruth’s desire to keep the baby found in the tree and Aubrey’s desire to
father a child of his own, the story must, in ballad fashion, end with a
resolution to this conflict; Jones presents the resolution in the tone and
rhythm of an otherworldly tale.
Aubrey has gone to Virginia to bring Ruth back, but when he
sees her chopping wood in the snow, he also sees the “grey smoke rising from
the chimney with great energy, and it was, at last, the smoke, the fury and
promise of it, the hope and exuberance of it, that took him back down to the
horse.” Aubrey’s decision to turn back
and give up hope of reclaiming Ruth because of the smoke rising from the
chimney is a device typical of fairytale rather than realistic narrative. The metaphor “In his mind, Ruth’s husband
shrugged” is based on something inchoate and intangible. In the terms of the folktale, he is no
longer Aubrey, but rather “Ruth’s husband.”
His trip back to Washington on a horse through the snow ends the story
in fairytale fashion. “The dank smell
of the horse rose up and held fast like a stalled cloud before his face. Ruth’s husband smiled and told the horse he
forgave her.”
When Aubrey reaches the bridge across the Potomac, the story
ends this way:
The horse stepped onto the bridge to Washington, her white breath shooting forward to become one with the white of the snow. Ruth’s husband patted her neck. The top button on his coat came loose again and he rebuttoned it, thankful that he hand had not yet stiffened up. His heart was pained, and it was pain enough to overwhelm a city of men.”
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