Some readers find short stories just too inaccessible to be worth the investment of time. And many writers avoid short stories because achieving the focus needed to make a short story work is tough. Longer fiction allows, even encourages, some meandering.
But when short stories work, they pack the unmatched punch of life distilled to moments of revelatory essence. So it is with “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” a collection of stories by Edward P. Jones. These pieces are built around the life that Jones grew up in, the poor and working-class black families of Washington, D.C.
The collection’s title is rooted in Genesis; Hagar is the slave who bore Abraham’s son Ishmael and who is eventually cast out by Abraham’s wife, Sarah. And just as Hagar and her son wandered in the desert searching for a home, so have the descendents of America’s slaves come to Washington, searching the streets for the promises of the American dream.
“All Aunt Hagar’s Children” comprises 14 stories grounded in a hard reality that embraces elements of the fantastic. Jones has a gimlet eye that bores beyond the societal to find the deeper truths in the relationships between friends, family and community. The results are lyrical, breathtaking and transcendent.
And the stories are strikingly different from each other; there is no predictable tie between one story and the next.
“In the Blink of God’s Eye” is set in the early days of the 20th century, when newlyweds come from Virginia seeking the fortune the city promises. The wife takes in an abandoned infant, an instinctual decision that will destroy her marriage. Perhaps their shortcomings are inevitable. Jones writes as the couple leaves the familiar world of Virginia behind, “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.”
The collection’s title story is a detective tale, one that uses the conventions of pulp fiction as a starting point for a story that takes off on eagle’s wings. Its narrator is a recently returned Korean War veteran, working for a lawyer but drifting, life’s purpose yet ndiscovered. He is confronted, with all the moral authority carried by strong black women, by his mother, his aunt and “murdered Ike’s mother.” The narrator, “put down the box I was holding and brushed myself off; a man like me does not greet the woman who brought him into the world while holding a box of dusty belongings from an undistinguished life.”
And though he’s planning, any day now, to head for Alaska to search for gold, he is unable to resist the implied order his mother gives as she removes her gloves, one finger at a time. He is to find out who, two years ago, murdered Ike. And in the search he, quite by accident, begins to find himself.
Perhaps the most fantastic story, told with a healthy dose of whimsy, is “The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River.” Laverne Shepherd has the bad fortune to be born into a line of women pursued by the Devil. “It was said that all the women in her family had the answer to a riddle that would make the Devil the King of Heaven. All he had to do was pose the riddle in the right way to the right woman, alive or dead, and the answer would send God tumbling from his throne and down to the narrow perch the Devil had been consigned to for all history. And so the Devil had sought out all the women in her family, sought out millennia of women who had known the big and small of life before Laverne but who had failed to tell the Devil the answer of the ages.”
The Devil has left Laverne alone, until a day when she comes face to face with him in the aisles of the Safeway on Good Hope Road, S.E. “She neared a face-high display of canned pinto beans and glanced at a short shopping list after she took it from her sweater pocket, and when she looked up from the list of four or so items, the Devil was before her. She stopped, not out of fear, but because to go any farther would have meant running into him with the cart. “Himself been studying you,” the Devil said.”
In an essay titled “We Tell Stories,” posted on Powells.com, Jones writes that the kernel for his National Book Award finalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Known World,” was not the historical fact of black slave owners. Rather, he writes, “Something happened during the 1980s – perhaps the political climate of that time – that caused me to ask how a people would become part of a system that oppresses their own people.”
The question is still alive and well, quietly resonant in each of these stories. Jones writes with great kindness, and at times a bemused affection, for those who’ve gone astray as well as of those who’ve gotten it right. Adversity is never far from the surface, but the way in which it is faced – sometimes conquered, sometimes not – is illuminating and beautiful.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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All Aunt Hagar’s Children
By Edward P. Jones
Amistad, 320 pages, 25.95
