undefinedEdward P. Jones, ca. 2004. Photograph courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

In the past two decades, Edward P. Jones has produced three works of fiction—the short-story collections Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), and his epic novel about black slave owners and the effects of slavery, The Known World, which received the Pulitzer Prize in 2004. His many other honors include a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004 and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story in 2010.

Like his great precursors James Joyce and Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jones is a writer of place—mainly the segregated Washington, D.C., where he grew up in the fifties and sixties. For the most part, he writes in the third person—his tone is cool but engaged, knowing. Although he is familiar with the ways in which white power has impinged on black life, his real interest lies in experience at an intimate scale; his Washington is an oversized small town where chance encounters, changes in the weather, a little local fame can lead to momentous events, and where the Deep South remains a living memory, as for example in his early story “A Dark Night”:

About four that afternoon the thunder and lightning began again. The four women seated about Carmena Boone’s efficiency apartment grew still and spoke in whispers, when they spoke at all. They were each of them no longer young, and they had all been raised to believe that such weather was—aside from answered prayers—the closest thing to the voice of God. And so each in her way listened.

Our interview took place over two days in the Hay-Adams Hotel, in Washington, in late spring. The cherry blossoms were gone, but the air was fragrant with the green of Lafayette Square. “If you didn’t have those trees,” Jones pointed out, “you could see the White House.” A private person with a shy demeanor, Jones laughs readily when telling a tale about his upbringing, or his journey as an artist. But his openness is not greater than his desire to remain relatively anonymous as a writer (he refused to have his picture taken for this interview, for instance), thereby underlining his belief that his work—his stories—should do the talking.

Hilton Als

 

INTERVIEWER

Were you always a reader?

JONES

Oh, yes. I started with comic books. In Washington they called them “funny books.” Then in 1964, when I was thirteen, we spent the summer in South Boston, Virginia, with my aunt and her children. Her son-in-law, one of the things he did was scavenge junk from the junkyard. One day he brought home some books, including something called Who Killed Stella Pomeroy? That was my first real book, without pictures in it or anything. I was so surprised that you could read and create the world in your own head without the benefit of pictures. I really didn’t go back to comic books after that.

INTERVIEWER

What kind of books did you read?

JONES

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors—black and white—because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell. The summer of 1965 I think I read about four or five of his novels. And Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi. Then I started branching out. I remember reading From Here to Eternity. I didn’t know anything at all about music, but there’s a section very early on where this guy Prewitt is on some little hill and he’s playing his trumpet, and I could hear every single note.

Ten or so years ago, someone asked me to come to her class and answer questions about Lost in the City. This one white woman said she had trouble feeling or caring about any people who weren’t like her. You hear that and it’s like somebody slapped you in the face. It made me think about From Here to Eternity. Hawaii, all the way out there, and this guy playing his music on a hill.

INTERVIEWER

Your mother was from the South?

JONES

She was born in Virginia and raised in Virginia and North Carolina. She came north and settled in Washington a little before the war. She did what they called “days work,” taking care of a white child and cooking and cleaning. Then somehow she met my father and I was born in 1950 and my brother in ’52 and my sister in ’53. He was a drinker, so things started going bad pretty early on. Within a few years she was on her own, working full-time, with three kids.

INTERVIEWER

What part of town did you live in?

JONES

We lived in eighteen different places by the time I was eighteen, but New York Avenue is the earliest place I can remember. It’s quite fancy now. Then we moved across the street, into a rooming house. My mother couldn’t read, and I remember she got a letter from the court, and she had to find a guy to read it, and it said that they were going to commit my brother. The phrasing at that time was “feebleminded,” not “retarded.” I can remember her crying. She had hard trouble with three kids, but just the idea of losing one . . .

INTERVIEWER

How was she taking care of him? How old was he?

JONES

He was under five. At one point, before he was committed, we were living in a two-story house on Fifth Street. Everybody else had their own room, but they’d come and look at our TV while my mother was working. She was paying for our television on time so she had someone there to take care of her kids, and my brother being severely retarded, “no” didn’t mean anything to him and “yes” didn’t mean anything to him. So one day this woman put my brother in a chair and tied him down, and my mother came back and had a fight with the woman. Later we moved up the street, into a basement, and it must have been the wintertime, because I remember—this is the image I have quite clearly—they had this stove right in the middle of the room and my mother was trying to get it started. And because there was no warmth in the room, she took us and put the three of us on the mattress and doubled the mattress over us.

INTERVIEWER

You all shared a bed?

JONES

Yes, when my sister was an infant. I remember one time, when we were liv- ing on Fourth Street, my mother heard what she thought was a cat in the middle of the night. My brother had climbed out of the bed and got out of the window, and he fell two stories. Luckily, he survived and there wasn’t any major damage.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you when your brother was taken away?

JONES

Six or seven.