History’s back roads

THE year is 1901. Ruth and Aubrey Patterson are newlyweds, new to Washington, D.C. Their lives are wide open and full of promise. But in the opening story of Edward P. Jones’ profound and resonant new collection, “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” life in Washington is foreboding: “[T]here 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. The wife, Ruth Patterson, knew what wolves could do: she had an uncle who went to Alaska in 1895 to hunt for gold, an uncle who was devoured by wolves not long after he slept under his first Alaskan moon.”

And a bundle that Ruth finds hanging in a tree -- a baby boy, wrapped in two blankets, had been abandoned by his mother -- is the ultimate proof that the Pattersons are in an altogether new world, far from home, in “Godforsaken Washington.” “So,” Ruth thinks, “this was the Washington her Aubrey had brought her across the Potomac River to -- a city where they hung babies in night trees.”

“All Aunt Hagar’s Children” is a hefty collection -- 14 stories and 400 pages -- full of texture and layers readers must take their time to absorb, but that seems to be Jones’ point. Lifetimes may happen “in the blink of God’s eye,” as the opening story is titled, but we can’t rush through these lives. To do so would be to obscure them, and Jones is writing with the detail and urgency of a witness -- he means to make sure we won’t forget.

These stories, however, aren’t retreads of the familiar post-slavery, African American assimilation and migration narratives one may already have read, although they do cover some of the same ground as Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Known World” and the National Book Award finalist “Lost in the City: Stories.” Jones, in fact, brings in minor characters from “Lost in the City” and makes them major players here. When the reader comes across the phrase “the known world” in the collection’s final story, “Tapestry,” it’s a pleasure to recognize Jones’ allusion to his novel: to participate in his ongoing conversation about the nuances and breadth of the African American experience.

As travelers make their way from South to North in “Tapestry,” Jones writes, “[t]hey shared food, they shared stories about home, about Southern places that would be the foundation of their lives in the North. None of them could know that the cohesion born and nurtured in the South would be but memory in less than two generations.... All the people in that car would have said two generations was a long time. It was, and yet it was not.”

Jones’ evocation of the distant past and the uncomfortable present is remarkable because of the humanity that illuminates each story and binds the reader to his characters. Though most of the stories in the collection return to themes of community, education and the legacy of the everyday hero (and how all have been integral through their absence or presence in shaping African American identity), Jones gives us people before he gives us ideas.

Even the encapsulated lives of minor characters are illuminated in ways that make them much more than minor, as in the sweeping, almost epic “A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru.” Here, we meet in one brief paragraph, and never see again, a Holy Cross professor, “[a]n aging Jesuit ... who had discovered too late in his life that while God walked with him, he did not enjoy walking with God.” When he reads the college application of the main character, Arlene, he is taken with her phrase “live peacefully unto myself.” He volunteers to read the applications “as one small way to ease his growing despair

“All Aunt Hagar’s Children” is not a breezy story collection, but why should it be? Insight into the familiar requires more than a quick glance. Each of the stories reads like a novel, jumping around in time, introducing us to myriad characters with unyielding histories. If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, Jones, in every story, takes us down the back roads before we get to where we’re going. He makes the reader take the long way home. This is evident in “Root Worker,” in which a successful D.C. physician who is “uppity, but still teachable” must return to her parents’ home state of North Carolina to learn from a root worker, a practitioner of voodoo, before she can help her mentally ill mother.

In “Common Law,” a story in which individuals as members of communities enforce the law of the land, even dogs know about traveling distances. After an abused woman kills her husband and tries to get her dogs to leave for Washington, D.C., with her, one of them is wary: “The brown dog stayed home ... the brown creature knew what the white dog was to learn beyond Arkansas -- that leaving that place could break your heart, even while traveling with a loved one.”

In “Bad Neighbors,” the successful blacks on the 1400 block of 8th Street N.W. have come so far that they’re lost: They’ve forgotten where they came from, treating their less fortunate neighbors as nuisances. Jones reminds us of their collective denial when he describes the neighborhood princess destined to marry the privileged Howard University student across the street: “And Sharon, coming rather late to an awareness of her womanhood, had begun to take some delight in seeing boys wither as they stood close enough to smell the mystery that had nothing to do with perfume and look into her twinkling brown eyes she had inherited from a grandmother who had seen only the morning, afternoon, and evening of a cotton field.”

The people of Sharon’s Washington have come a long way from when their kin were new to the city, when wolves were rumored to roam the streets. But in their necessary struggle for progress, they don’t consider the presumed bad neighbors across the street, let alone the grandmother in the cotton fields who delivered Sharon to her comfortable life. “All Aunt Hagar’s Children” is testimony to this hard journey, to people who didn’t have shortcuts as they made the passage and continued on. Jones denies us the shortcut too. History takes a while, he tells us. Walking with Jones, we clearly see how far we’ve come and how far we’ve strayed. Come this way with me, he says. This is the best way to go. It may take a while, but I’ll show you something.