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All Aunt Hagar's Children CD

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Some things are well worth waiting for and Edward P. Jonses's follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning debut novel "The Known World" (2003) is most assuredly one of them. Once again he uses short story formats to illuminate and make memorable his characters, ordinary people, really, but to the reader they are unforgettable. This author's evocation of black life in America is incomparable.

The 14 stories that comprise "All Aunt Hagar's Children" are set in Washington, the city where Jones was raised and now lives. He opens with "In The Blink of God's Eye," the story of Ruth and Aubrey, a young couple in their late teens and recently married. Ruth does not always rest well in "godforsaken Washington" while Aubrey "always slept the sleep of a man not long out of boyhood." One night when Ruth was wakeful she went out in back where she found a baby tied in a bundle hanging from a tree limb. Thus, she thought Washington was "a city where they hung babies in night trees."

As is his wont Jones treats readers to the earlier lives of his characters, rendering them all the more accessible and sympathetic. This is especially true in "Resurrecting Methuselah" in which we meet Anita Channing who sits by the bedside of Bethany, her ill daughter. She sits in a wooden chair built a century and a half ago by a former slave. Anita's husband, Percival, is serving in Okinawa, where he spends much time with a prostitute, Sara Lee. When Percival discovers he has breast cancer he calls Anita and asks her to come to him. She reaches Honolulu, a stopover in her flight, where she has an opportunity to look back on her childhood and wonder what the future holds for herself and her child.

"All Aunt Hagar's Children" concludes with "Tapestry," another story of a young couple, Anne and George, marrying and leaving their rural roots behind. George is a porter on a train, the train that carries them to Washington. As the train slows close to its destination Anne whispers, Mama, Papa, "I'm a long way from home."

For this reader that was the gist of all of these marvelous stories, people seeking a better life a long way from home.

Jones is such an incredibly gifted writer, his prose is succinct, true, impeccably crafted. Reading his work is not only a pleasure but a privilege as well.

- Gail Cooke

In his second book of short stories, Edward P. Jones does a wonderful job of chronicling the African-American experience in All Aunt Hagar' Children. Just as Lost in the City did, Jones brings to life a city that is hardly ever written about, Washington, D.C., and uses fourteen tales to describe circumstances that include life inside of homes full of love, and those without and those that are wealthy and those that are struggling.

Jones' depictions are as real as it gets, thoroughly describing life for Blacks fleeing an angry South to a new beginning in their first experience of living an "urban" American life from the early 1900's all the way to the mid-twentieth century and the loneliness it may sometimes bring. For example, "In the Blink of God's Eye" is about a newlywed couple that moves from Virginia to Washington, D.C. From the way Jones writes, the reader would assume that the couple traveled all the way to Washington State, because that is just how much home was missed for the young bride and how far away it seemed to her. In the title story, "All Aunt Hagar's Children", a hopeless young man aspires to go to Alaska to hunt for gold but in the meantime, spends his days helping a neighbor solve the mystery of how her son was murdered while also dodging an ex-girlfriend that he perceives to be angry.

Overall, this reader really enjoyed Jones' ability to tell a story but at times, wanted it to be longer and did not feel that the short story version could give these stories justice. At other times, the story was just long enough to get to know the characters and get a meaning out of the story that could resonate. Avid readers of Edward P. Jones will definitely want to add this collection to their libraries and will pick their favorites within All Aunt Hagar's Children.

Reviewed by Lena Willis

APOOO BookClub

Reviewed by Joanna Pearson for Small Spiral Notebook

Since the 2003 publication of his novel The Known World, Edward P. Jones has picked up the occasional award--a MacArthur here, a Pulitzer there--but had there been any doubt about his place in the pantheon, his new book of short stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children, secures it. Taken as a whole, Jones's works (including his 2004 short-story collection Lost in the City) do for 20th-century Washington, D.C., what Joyce's Dubliners did for Dublin: create that city within our literary imaginations.

This is not the Washington of bright-faced interns brandishing fresh degrees. Jones's city is a place where African-Americans newly arrived from the rural South grapple with their first experience of urban life in the early 1900's and then continue to make lives for themselves into the mid-twentieth century. Although Jones depicts this time, when certain parts of rural community life still remained intact, with great nostalgia, his characters all struggle within the vast new loneliness of urban life. In the book's the first story, "In the Blink of God's Eye," two newlyweds move to Washington from Virginia:

[Aubrey] smiled when he said Ruth's name, and he smiled when he told people he was going to live in Washington, D.C. Ruth had no feeling for Washington. She had generations of family in Virginia, but she was a married woman and had pledged to cling to her husband. And God had the baby in the tree and the story of the wolves in the roads waiting for her.

Ruth's fear that wolves roam the D.C. streets seems symptomatic of her new loneliness and vulnerability as a result of her sudden distance from the Virginia family that used to surround her. The baby is a foundling Ruth insists on bringing home, even though the baby's presence threatens her husband, who fears this impenetrable closeness between the woman he married and a child who is not his own. As Ruth's love for this orphaned baby grows and her feelings for her husband weaken, it becomes clear that in this new city, family will come to be defined not as the people you're supposed to love but as the people you actually do love--a change that will affect both Aubrey and Ruth's lives permanently.

This story, set as it is in 1901, seems to forecast the new but delicate sort of family life that will evolve as the twentieth century unfolds--the family life of the Washington neighborhood, still steeped in a collective Southernness--that Jones explores in the stories that follow. This is a Washington of old women whom all the neighborhood children call Grandma, and festive Saturdays on H Street; a place where everyone has an aunt in Alabama and Mississippi, and the devil could swim right across the Anacostia River. Even this new urban family, however, will not be completely viable.

In the story "A Rich Man," Horace, the seventy-something charmer and flirt of a senior citizens' residence, takes up with a bunch of twenty-something partiers. Horace thinks that his new life is exactly what he's always wanted, until his new friends end up stealing from under his nose and he finds himself in unexpected trouble. Sometimes, Jones suggests, you don't really want what you've hoped for. Or, as in the story "Root Worker," maybe you yourself have perpetuated the trouble of those you seek to help. In this story a young doctor must accompany her ailing mother when the elderly woman seeks treatment from a traditional healer in rural North Carolina. For Glynnis, the doctor, this collision is uncomfortable, but the trip ultimately gives her insight into both herself and her family, as well as a belief of sorts in the bad voodoo of her own making.

The sectarianism of Washington lurking in the periphery of these stories is writ in black and white. But the divisions extend further than simple race, and Jones doesn't shy away from exploring the classism that emerges with the African-American neighborhoods. These families in Washington have new aspirations for advancing in class and acquiring wealth, and some families have the access to higher education to make good. The story "Bad Neighbors" illustrates this beautifully. Sharon grows up to marry the groomed, Howard-educated good neighbor boy. Meanwhile, Derek and his family, the "bad neighbors" with their run-down cars and ragged-looking children, serve as a reminder of the image that the rest of the community is trying to escape. They are kicked out of their house by their neighbors. Even so, it is Derek who demonstrates the grace, loyalty, and good timing to help Sharon when she needs it years later.

These stories amount to clean, aching storytelling from a master. Many reviewers have referred to Jones's God-like perspective, from which he reveals, often within the same sentence, hints about a character's past, present, and future--he'll often throw chronology aside and hint at how the distant future will relate to a particular character, like the narrative voiceover in a history documentary. Perhaps in lesser hands, this stance would seem overwhelming or even grandiose, but here it only adds to an overall feeling of historical truth and great scope. There is great sadness, loneliness, and love here. Perhaps as good an example as any is the book's dedication:

To my sister

Eunice Ann Mary Jones-Washington

and

to the multitudes who came up out of the South

for something better, something different, and, again,

to the memory of my mother,

Jeanette S. M. Jones,

who came as well and found far less

than even the little she dared hope for

That, if for no other reason, is why we will read Edward P. Jones's work: for that heartbreaking hope, both its presence and absence, and how all that's hoped for ultimately breaks the heart.

This collection of stories really has depth and insight. Edward P. Jones writes about the black community in Washington D.C. with great compassion and understanding. There is considerable heartbreak here, but it is presented with such sensitivity and authenticity that it is hard to put down. Jones needs to get some more awards with this one. It is beautifully crafted literary work that deals with the real world.

I have read and agree with the other reviews posted thus far and see no need to outline the individual stories (as was well done below). I have a few comments. AN interesting comparison between this collection and Peter Taylor's "The Widows of Thornton" is worth exploring. The latter work, also by a Pulitzer Prize winner of a previous generation (Taylor was a professor at UVA), also deals with family issues that developed as the new South was being created. The widows were the women, left behind by their men of business who ventured forth into the new economy, who wrestled with preserving the values, traditions and social structure of the post-cival war south in the face of a rapidly changing modern world. Like the current work, Taylor's characters often find refuge in the dying home of Thorton TN. Taylor addresses race and socioeconomic issues, but from a white experience. Taylor's prose is very subtle and challenging, like the present work. Relationships change subtly overtime as lives unfold before us in ways that the characters could not forsee.

Jones, in addition to dealing with the generations spanning the old home (the deep south) and the new home (Washington, DC), addresses the additional issue of displacement, broken families, crime, drugs, adultery and alienation of an entire race made worse by physical displacement during the great migration. Like Taylor's Tennesee families, Jone's families face new challenges and experience great divides between generations. Whereas Taylor's world is white and well to do, Jones' world is mixed and often delves into the beginings and origins of the underworld that grew in the ghettos of this city that offered hope and bitter dissapointment.

Unlike Richard Wright, Jones does not deal mainly in anger. Like Wright, Jones explores alienation in its many forms. The reader is left with little hope for the future as the great strength is rooted in the past and in the south. Many of the stories don't end, per se, but just stop and the characters are left to face an uncertain future. As all good writers, Jones draws the reader in and by identifying with the characters in the stories you experience at a deeper level and beyond words what the author intends to convey.

I found many of the stories very dense in that you best not blink or let your mind wander for you can become lost very easily. This is not a simple work of prose. I read and reread many of the stories and was fatigued at times. However, it was a rich and rewarding experience of having been, in some way, part of Jones' world, feeling the complex emotions and living these lives. I must come back to this book some day.

Read slowly, and enjoy

According to Hebrew legend (see chapters 16 and 21 of Genesis, the first book of the Torah), Sarah was the wife of Abram, and Hagar was the servant of Sarah. It was a Middle Eastern custom in those times that a wife could give her slave to her husband and the child thus conceived would be counted as the child of the wife. The child born to Hagar and Abraham was given the name Ishmael.

In Edward P. Jones's new collection of 14 short stories, "all Aunt Hagar's children" refers to the descendants of slaves, or, in the context of the present work, to African Americans, most of whom live in or near Washington, D.C., who try to "put more and more distance between themselves and the legacy of slavery."

Jones, an African American, has impressive credentials as a writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Known World: A Novel (2003) and his earlier book of short stories, Lost in the City (1992) was short-listed for the National Book Award.

In spite of the foul language ("trash talk") used by many of Jones's characters (anything less would be inauthentic), the author writes with graciousness and a "great-souled" felicity. He describes people struggling to make something of their lives, to make the best of the human condition.

Life isn't easy for descendants of slaves living in "the white man's world." Jones's characters are torn between hope and despair, love and lust, faith and unbelief. They battle the demons of drugs and alcohol. Many of them are obsessed with religion or sex, or both. According to Jones, the mumbo-jumbo of religion revolves madly around sexual questions.

Viewed through Jones's spectacles, the deity doesn't fare well in this world of "Aunt Hagar's Children." In the title story we read: "I sat on my bed in the upstairs back room and drank the last of some whiskey a friend had given me, listening to WOOK all the while. On Sundays WOOK was full of religious [expletive deleted], and it always depressed the [expletive deleted] out of me. But I didn't change the station."

Again, from "Tapestry," one of the best stories in the collection: "God, people said, did more mysterious things in Mississippi than he did anywhere else on Earth. . . . Lucas's grandfather, who had been lynched, [was] just the opening act of the entertainment for an Independence Day celebration, just before the white people's picnic and five hours before the fireworks. . . . Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And God would lick the tip of His forefinger and turn the page."

All is not gloom and doom. Although some of "the good people" turn out to be less moral than they appear, some of "the bad people" (see the short story, "Bad Neighbors") turn out to have more compassion than we first believe.

Throughout these 14 stories, one is impressed with what might be called a ripple effect: how the words and actions of one character can profoundly affect the lives of others--for weal or woe.

The stories are tantalizing, leaving us, like short stories are often wont to do, wanting more--wondering what happens next. But more would be less; to "tell all" would compromise the emotional impact of the tales. All Aunt Hagar's Children will add to Jones's reputation as a consummate artist.

Mr. Jones has taught fiction writing as a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.

There is no one else like Edward Jones writing today. Imagine someone writing with the elegiac tone and richness of language of Doctorow mixed with deep emotion and you get Mr. Jones. In these stories, the lives of ordinary citizens of Washington DC come to life in a way that gives testimony to the creative spirit. In a literary world crowded with the talented and clever but short of heart, Mr. Jones is the real deal, someone who writes with intelligence for readers who love to read serious fiction and care about the human condition. If you are passionate about serious writing, you'll read these stories again and again. They are that good.

The best writers--or at least the most memorable--are the ones who can break the rules of writing and somehow still tell a great story or convince us of something. Jones often changes points of view, shifts time, and fills his stories with a variety of characters. He seems to lack the ability to write a one-dimensional, uninteresting character. Even the one or two stories in the collection that I didn't particularly like left me wanting to read more. And I felt as I read the stories that each was so well wrought and imagined that Jones could easily turn them each into novels.

Some readers thought that there were too many characters in Jones' novel _The Known World_, which made it a difficult read. But I found little difficulty reading it. In the short story, however, with its limited space, I think that the large number of characters placed in one story give them little breathing room and make the reading a bit challenging. Sometimes Jones falters, but when he gets the story off the ground right, he soars so high that he can be placed among the best short fiction writers today in the English language.

One story, "The Devil Swims Across Anacostia River", despite its provocative title and some amazing passages, I found a little odd and below the quality of the other stories.

Stories such as "Old Boys, Old Girls", "A Rich Man", and "Adam Robinson" are truly short masterpieces. I originally read them in the New Yorker. But however many times I read the stories, they continue to amaze me with their elegance.

Some characters in this book first appeared in _Lost in the City_, Jones' first collection of short stories. Though some stories in _All Aunt Hagar's Children_ approach perfection, _Lost in the City_ was a far more even work, perhaps because of its consistency of style and genre. _All Aunt Hagar's Children_ contains several stories, such as "The Root Worker" and "A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru" (a very Gabriel Garcia Marquez-esque title), that have magical realist elements.

After reading all fourteen stories in this book, I felt a pang of grief, as if I had a finished a good conversation with a friend I knew I would never see again.

Read this book. It's simply amazing.

In All Aunt Hagar's Children, Edward Jones once again showers us with prose that is both concise and metaphoric. He is truly one of the great writers of our new century. His stories capture the intricacies of living in our complex and strife-torn world with true humanity and humility. For me, his strongest metaphor comes from the last story - the metaphor of a tapestry. It takes many years to create and is full of innumerable details, yet it produces a work that last for many years and enlightens many other lives. What a wonderful image and a challenge for us to live into. In All Aunt Hagar's Children, Jones has surely presented us with a tapestry that will live for years and enlighten lives.

I usually do not read short stories, I just love novels, however, because it was by the author of "The Known World" I had to read this. Edward P. Jones has written a thoughtful, well crafted, haunting collection of short stories. "The Root Worker" makes you wonder about the choices that you make in your life, and how they can haunt you. Riveting.