All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories Review

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All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories Reviewit wasn't until i was almost half way thru jones' short stories that the accumulation of deaths by many means began to make sense to me when a character in the story, the root worker, reflected that people die all kinds of ways. in the story `common law' the randomness and meaningless of death, and much of mr jones' prose style -- i have read chester himes' blind man with a pistol--further hit home when a blind man shoots and kills with a pistol a man at whom he was not aiming.
all of these stories are about black people who have come to washington d. c. from the southern states. the first generation worked what jobs they could find or make, often building black businesses like rooming houses and giving jobs to other blacks. many of the second generation became college educated professionals who did not use profanity or get lost in urban street culture; they had church in their background, a sense of community so cohesive that the main character in the title story, all aunt hagar's children, can get drunk and pass out in the street and be recognized by a woman he'd never seen before by name as well as the names of all of his relatives and have the story get back to his mother in another part of the district. educated in universities, good paying government jobs, none of these men and women is ever far from the south, which can summon them, willingly or unwillingly, for as many reasons as there are kinds of death.
jones writes of tenderhearted girls who faint and remain sheltered from the outside world sometimes for years, grown women troubled by spirits and witches and a series of just plain bad coincidences; of black men in their 60s and 70s, capable of doing a hundred push-ups and bedding women in their 20s.
in the story, a poor guatemalan dreams of a downtown in peru, jones convinced this reader by metaphor how the southern states left by the black migrants to washington d. c. are as strange and as culturally rich and exotic as peru. indeed, rich seams run thru jones' rock solid prose.
by the time mr robinson in the story, adam robinson acquires grandparents and a little sister, notices that the trees in d.c. are dying, i was aware that jones was doing more than describing a community of black neighborhood -- by beginning with the black sons and daughters of slaves who arrived in our nation's capitol on the backs of horses to the black professional, born in d.c., who'd never seen the south, as black neighborhoods developed into an established black community of southern born blacks for whom greater washington d.c. presented possibilities, howard university, catholic schools, hospitals, government jobs, and, sadly, class divisions, a facileness of foul language, and snobbery within the race, jones was describing a community formation of a group of people, historically and culturally, from the ground up.
he has found a good place. he's struck his mother lode. and i get the impression he's just gettin started.
All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories Overview
Three years after the publication of his much-heralded, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Known World, Edward P. Jones returned with an elegiac, luminous masterpiece, All Aunt Hagar's Children. In these fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, Jones resurrects the minor characters in his first award-winning story collection, Lost in the City. The result is vintage Jones: powerful, magisterial tales that showcase his ability to probe the complexities and tenaciousness of the human spirit.

All Aunt Hagar's Children is filled with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is the city's ordinary citizens, not its power brokers, who most concern Jones. Here, everyday people who thought the values of the South would sustain them in the North find "that the cohesion born and nurtured in the south would be but memory in less than two generations."


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