Plain Truth

All Aunt Hagar’s Children stories by Edward P. Jones.  Harper Perennial.  399 pp.  *****

Edward P. Jones, it would seem, can write about anything, and anybody.  He published his first book of stories, Lost in the City, in 1992 (otherwise known as half-a-lifetime ago).  It was a bit of a late arrival on the literary scene; he was 41.  In 2003 he published The Known World, his only novel, which was selected in the New York Times as the fourth best novel of the century, the highest finish by an American.  He published Aunt Hagar’s Children in 2006; it too made the top 100 list.

I read somewhere that the characters in Aunt Hagar were all minor characters in Lost in the City, but the actual task Jones set for himself is more remarkable than that.  Each volume contains fourteen stories.  The first included an order that Jones insisted on against his publisher’s wishes: they move chronologically, from the youngest character (a girl who raised carrier pigeons) to the oldest (an old woman tussling with the Social Security Administration).  All Aunt Hagar’s Children doesn’t seem to be chronological in the same way, but the first story is somehow related to the first story from the other volume, the second to the second, and so on.  The whole thing seems arbitrary, almost whimsical.  But All Aunt Hagar’s Children is a remarkable volume, much deeper and richer than Lost in the City (which I also enjoyed a great deal).

It is like the maturing that I noticed in Alice Munro’s career.  The later stories are longer, more detailed, somewhat richer.  Some seem to contain material for an entire novel.  I read Jones’ stories slowly, one or two per evening, stunned by the richness of the writing.  I can’t recommend these stories too highly.

I could literally write about any of these stories, but a couple stick in my mind.  The first is “Bad Neighbors,” about a black D.C. neighborhood where most of the residents own their houses, but in the midst of them is a rental house, into which moves a family much different from the others.  The things the Benningtons own, for instance, are battered and worn, including a table with three legs and a refrigerator with a major dent (the neighbors peer from behind their shades as the family moves in).  There seem to be fifteen or so people living in the house, and it isn’t clear what relationship they have with one another.  One boy in the house, quiet and shy, seems to have a crush on a girl from one of the proper families, and she likes him too.  But her father isn’t happy with that, nor is anyone else in the neighborhood.

One member of the Bennington’s won’t take crap from the neighbors; his name is Derek, and he seems to be in his early twenties.  He’s noticeably bright and verbal.  He gets into an altercation one day with a neighbor named Terence Stagg about a parking place.  (How much blood has been shed in this world over parking places?)  Stagg feels morally superior because his family is better off; his father drives a Cadillac, while Derek’s is a beat-up Ford.  When Derek refuses to move, Stagg spits on the car, referring to Derek and his sister as “you people.”  He refuses to wipe the spit off, saying, “Tell your funky mother to wipe it off.”  And Derek says, “Even you, even poor you, should know the law against sayin something like that.”

Then the incident occurs which rocks the whole neighborhood and keeps them talking for weeks.

A lesser writer would have made this a racial conflict, but Jones is interested in the human emotions, which are just as raw in this situation (The Known World, next on my reading list, is about a black slaveholder.)  I won’t spoil the story by telling more, the way the neighbors gang up on the Benningtons, or the startling event that happens years later.  It isn’t that Derek is good and the Stagg family evil.  It’s that you can’t judge people by what appears on the surface.  You might not like the way somebody lives, but you don’t what that life conceals.

The story that charmed me most takes place in my home state, North Carolina.  (All twenty-eight stories have their roots in Washington D.C., where Jones grew up, but some wander a little.)  Dr. Glynnis Holloway is a general practitioner and prosperous woman who lives with her parents in a $650,000 renovated house in DC; her father has worked as a chauffeur, and her mother has been ill for many years, visited nightly by witches, who torment her and leave her exhausted.[1]  Glynnis and her father have tried every remedy they can think of, but none seems to work.  Into their lives comes a woman named Maddie Williams, whom they’ve hired as a day companion for the mother after her last hospitalization.  Maddie knows of a root worker in Person County, North Carolina, who might be able to help.  This is the kind of family, especially Glynnis, who might think they’re beyond such things.  But these spells have been going on for twenty years.  They’re at their wits end.

Dr. Glynnis doesn’t plan to come—she has a vacation planned in Massachusetts—but the root worker asks that the whole family be there.  So they hire a small bus and travel to an isolated house about a mile outside of Roxboro, NC.  The root worker in question, Imogene Satterfield, is holding “a walking stick far older and taller” than she is.  “Snakes, each swallowing the tale of the one before it, were wrapped around the stick, and at the top there was a final snake with two heads, one looking up and the other looking down.”  Imogene is “cross-eyed, with thick eyeglasses.”  When they go into the small house where she lives, she sets “the walking stick down into a velvet-lined container inside the door.”

The family stays in North Carolina for seven weeks, far longer than they’d expected (Glynnis has to cancel all kinds of appointments).  And though Imogene insists that all of her healing comes about because of the plants, which she grows in her front and back yards and doesn’t even know the names of (she’d been taught the names by her mentor but has forgotten them), she exhibits a kind of love that I have rarely seen in a story.  She isn’t our image of a loving, compassionate person.  She can be quite bossy, and always gets her way.  What she does above all is pay attention to people, and allows them to be as they are.  (She’s the same way with her plants.)  She isn’t surprised or worried about the thought of witches.  She seems to consider them a natural phenomenon.  She doesn’t charge money, though she seems to have enough.  She’s just a healer.  And she has years of experience behind her.

There are any number of startling moments.  A somewhat mysterious guy with long dreadlocks who keeps hanging around turns out to be Imogene’s grandson, who grew up with her after his parents died in a car accident.  At one point he notices that Glynnis has been calling the root woman Miss Imogene.  He lets her know that everyone around there calls her Dr. Imogene.  The healer herself doesn’t care one way or another.  But he says that “if people start hearing you call her like that, they will think less of you, Dr. Holloway.  They will think you have no home training.”

The young man has just gotten his grandmother her first television ever (she calls it a television box), and she doesn’t know how to use it, is not sure she wants it (she has been watching a show for a while, and believes that when she turns the tube back on it will take up where it left off).

When a man comes to Imogene who insists that “there is nothin I love more than the ladies,” and who has a problem of “the utmost urgency,” Jessie, the grandson takes Glynnis aside.  “When you hear a man going on and on about his love for women, he is talking pussy. . . .  It’s a sad truth, but a truth nevertheless.”  He admits he knows that from his own experience, and tells her that, for such a man, “when the pussy is done, such a man would want the woman to turn into a pool table with one good opponent waiting at the other end.  Or a lake full of the biggest fish around.”

I find myself unable to stop quoting from this startling and delightful story, so I’ll close the book.  But I will mention that the ending is the most startling part of all, and that the person who undergoes a change is Glynnis.

Edward P. Jones obviously isn’t writing to explain his race to white people, though we learn a lot.  It seems obvious to a white reader that he believes black people have an intelligence and understanding that white people don’t begin to have, though the truth is right in front of them.  It is to learn such truth that I read black writers, and Edward P. Jones is at the top of the list.  If he had written more, we’d be talking about him along with Toni Morrison (he won the Pulitzer; we know what prize she won).  That’s the question I would ask him, if I could just ask one.  Why haven’t you written more?  (And by the way, what are you writing right now?)

[1] If that content seems odd for a contemporary story, I should mention that there is another where a woman encounters Satan—and has a long talk with him—in a Safeway supermarket.