An Interview with Edward P. Jones.

Edward P. Jones is the author of Lost in the City, a collection of fourteen short stories which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992. In the fall of 1997, Jones answered my questions after meeting with a Howard University African American literature class that had recently finished reading his work.

Jackson: I want to ask you a little about your background. You're from Washington, D.C. How long have you lived in the city?

Jones: I was born in Washington, D.C. (I went away for the first time when I went to college.) I spent less than a year at a Catholic school, where I went to kindergarten and partly to first grade. After that my mother couldn't afford Catholic schools, so I went to public schools. I went to college in Massachusetts [Holy Cross] and then came back to Washington in 1972 and worked on and off. My mother was ill, and I stayed with her part of the time. When she died in 1975 I went to Philadelphia for five and a half months, and then from 1976 to 1979 I got a job and lived in Washington. I went to graduate school at the University of Virginia from 1979 to 1981, and I lived down there for a year after that. As a matter of fact I lived in James Alan McPherson's apartment. He was teaching at the University of Iowa, but he would come once a month to see his daughter. I had the place all to myself since he wasn't there. January or February of 1983 I came back up here and the job that I found was in Arlington, Virginia, and since I didn't have a car I thought it best that I be near the job. I've been here off and on since 1983.

Jackson: Did you work with McPherson?

Jones: I took two of his classes. He was on my thesis committee. I'd read his work when I was in college and I liked it. When I was thinking about graduate school in 1979, I found that he was at Virginia, and that was one of the primary reasons that I decided to go down there. I was a little reluctant at first to teach creative writing [Jones has taught at George Washington and Princeton], and he said, "It's all about, you know, just being subjective anyway." So I said, Why not?

Jackson: Which of his works from Hue and Cry or Elbow Room particularly motivated you?

Jones: "Cabbage and Kings," because I read that when I was in college, along with almost all the stories from Hue and Cry. I was reading the passages out loud because many them are very poetic. So going down to Virginia was really exciting for me. I met him before I'd gone down there. He had come up to Washington, I think in 1978, to read at the Library of Congress and at a George Washington University seminar. After the reading a small dinner was held for him by Susan Shreve. I expressed some interest in graduate school and he encouraged me to apply. So I ended up at Virginia.

Jackson: Was being admitted at all difficult? Had you started writing seriously at this point?

Jones: It was probably easier for me to get in because I didn't really care. Once I got down there, I was writing for the classes, but I was doing more writing on the side. That was in 1979. My first story had appeared in the November 1975 issue of Essence, but I hadn't published anything since then because I didn't really have the motivation to do any work. I had a nowhere job and I wasn't around people who were writing and whom I could bounce ideas off, so in a way it was nice that I could go to graduate school. But I still had a job, so graduate school wasn't the be-all-and-end-all. That's how I made up my mind about Virginia--it was close and everything. I was going with this woman--she was up here--and I really didn't want to go someplace that was too far from her. I think I took the graduate record exam after I got out of college, and I probably made lousy scores because I never did well on standardized tests. One of the other people in the creative writing department was John Casey whom I'd met in 1977 or 1978 at George Mason. He also encouraged me to apply to graduate school. So there were really two reasons to go down there.

The people at Virginia liked my writing; they felt that I was talented. I don't think that McPherson had read anything that I had worked on, but Casey had and he thought that I'd be good graduate school material. As far as the writing goes, I think I probably started in college. They never had any fiction writing classes at Holy Cross, but one professor just decided that he would offer one. He liked my writing and was very encouraging. I don't think that I saw it as some sort of career then. I mean you're in the midst of college and a lot of things are going through your head.

I don't think I did very much after 1972 when I got out. Before my mother died in 1975, my sister had this sub-scription to Essence, and every month the magazine would come out and they had these stories. I would read them saying, "Sheesh, I can do better than this." It happened that I was in Philadelphia after my mother died, and I wrote this story and sent the thing off. Lo and behold it was accepted. After that I had a regular job and still wasn't doing stuff as regularly as I should have, but I did three or four short stories with the woman at George Washington. When that ended I was on my own.

I was working for Science magazine, which is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and I can remember writing stuff that I would stay after work and type up on their IBM. I didn't really have anyone who could look at it and say, "This is right and this isn't quite right" until I went down to Virginia. But even when I was at Virginia I can't really say that I got as much as I always thought I would get out of the courses. I tended to get more out of the literature courses. One in particular was The Bible and Literature, where for the first time I read the entire Bible. I'd never done that before. I enjoyed the writers down there--James Alan McPherson, John Casey, and Peter Taylor--and yet, there was a point here, a point there, but not quite the sort of thoroughness that I expected. When I teach I try to do as thorough a job as I can, point by point, almost line by line if there's time, because I didn't think that I got that when I was in graduate school.

Jackson: Most writers' first novels are heavily autobiographical. Perhaps you'll make something of the distinction between novelists and short story writers, but your stories don't seem to stem from one central character or experience.

Jones: Yeah, a guy named Richard Ford, who is an excellent writer, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Independence Day. But I noticed in his collection of stories, in almost all of them, there was a sixteen-year-old kid living with his divorced mother, and the stories were about her relationship with some boyfriend or other. There were any number of things going through my head when I wrote the stories, but I definitely wanted one thing. When you read one story and went on to another one, you wouldn't come across any character you had seen in the previous story. Every major character, and even most of the minor characters, would be different, so that each story would be distinct from the others I didn't want someone to come along and be able to say that the stories are taken out of the same bag. I suppose that is one of the reasons that it has taken me so long. You're not working the same garden every day. You're working one garden, and the next day you go off to another story, and it's a very different gar den. It takes more time than if you're doing the same people.

Jackson: What kind of time does it take to come up with so many distinct characters?

Jones: It depends. Take for example, "The First Day," which was in Callaloo. Originally it starts off with a mother waking up her little daughter. Then they go through this ritual where the girl gets dressed, and by the time they're outside, the story follows, as it does in the book. When I first published it in Callaloo, I tacked on a little part where years later the mother and the daughter meet up in the hall at the daughter's high school graduation. So that's the way I thought the story should be originally. When I went back to it years later, I figured I could get them outside without losing any of the preciousness of the story, two pages or so originally, of her getting up, eating, and doing everything else. I could just start with them out on the sidewalk ready to go. And then I realized that the high school graduation wasn't important either. I could make my point by talking about the shoes and the sounds and the voices of the children.

A few weeks ago, I got up and went to the bathroom and there was something on television. I was thinking of a story and all of a sudden it occurred to me (and this is a story that's been in my head for years and years) that the character was doing a certain activity at a certain point. I never really knew that until the point in my life where I was getting up during the commercial and going to the john. I could have forced myself and done the story way back when, and it probably would have come out all right, but there was something in that particular moment later that I knew had to be in there--and I couldn't have known it earlier. So, a lot of writers (and it's probably the case with some of the stuff in the book now) can revise until the end of time. I could probably re-examine the stories, like in "Young Lions." I always knew that Carol at the end is taking the money and going back to Anna, but that's not really clear in the story. It was clear to me, but, you know, people thought that she was running ju st to be running. Had I held onto it longer, maybe it would have been clear about Anna. It doesn't make sense that Carol's just running to be running away from Caesar Matthews. That's the biggest thing that stands out now. There are readings that I've given where, for example, I find that the placement of a phrase should come earlier or later in a sentence. These are all things that you really come upon later on.

Jackson: How long did it take to put together the collection?

Jones: I think the writing took about two to three years, but I had been thinking about the stories for many years before that. You know, putting a little note here and a little note there. I remember that when I sat down to do the writing I collected all the little cards that came out of magazines. I had dozens of notes on them.

Jackson: How would you define your style in terms of technique and literary genre? In "The Store," you have a first-person narrator, but most of the stories are told by a tightly controlled third-person narrator. Your work is strongly realistic, particularly its focus on the characters' struggle with the environment.

Jones: I think it's just a sense when you approach it that something has to be in the third person. The only other first-person narrative is "First Day." I can't remember all that went into the decision to tell "The Store" in the first person. I just knew that the way it was working it had to be first-person narration, and that I didn't want to give the guy a name. I did a television script for "The Store," and I was thinking of all the ways you use the camera because he has an apron with his name on it and I was explaining the ways the camera had to look at him without showing the name. The narrator in "The Store" is finding himself and he's making his way in the world, and he can't really see all the things that are coming at him from every direction. I wanted that kind of limited viewpoint with him, and the only way I could do that was in the first person. But there are other stories where I knew I just had to step back and see the whole thing, where I wanted to create the entire world that was Washington, their Washington, and the best way to do that was a third person that the main character may or may not know.

Jackson: Do you feel influenced by first-person writers like John Wideman or Darryl Pinckney?

Jones: No. At my age I've already worked out in my head how I'm going to do things. I was never one who followed. I remember a woman who used to write out in longhand the lengthy passages from the writers that she liked, just to get in the flow of writing. I never saw any sense in doing that; it just seemed like a great waste of time. If you want to write, eventually you get your own legs, without trying to follow the way someone else has been walking. I think I'm just influenced by good emotional writing. I can still remember the poignancy from reading Uncle Tom's Children, Wright's collection of short stories. "Fire and Cloud" has some very poetic lines. I was moved by all the stories. I think that was what I took away from them; you want to be able to recreate the emotion that other people create in you.

Jackson: Would you speak about becoming a writer and educating yourself?

Jones: I educated myself just generally for the pleasure of reading, and somewhere along the way a lot of things stuck. I can't get any clearer than that. I remember when I was 17 or 18 and reading From Here to Eternity. I'm not a very musical guy. I know the piano and the violin, but the horns are just one great hoop of horns to me. There's this character named Pruitt, and Jones is describing him standing on a hill playing a saxophone. And after reading that passage, for some reason I could just see that guy, and hear all the music, and hear all the notes that he was playing, just because Jones had written it that clearly. I took away from Pruitt's description a sense of where this guy was in his life as a soldier. You understand and care about him, and by that point on the hill, because you think you know him so well, it becomes very easy for you to hear him play. In order to do a moment like that in a story you have to prepare the reader.

You also notice a difference once you see your writing on the page. There's a long passage in "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" where I'm talking about her routine in the morning and when she comes home from school and she sits in the chair, and the pigeons flock around her. It's all one paragraph. Then that long paragraph ends, and at first, I had in the same paragraph, "She turns ten and then she turns eleven." Then when I looked at it, to increase the emotional impact and to show that time had passed, I had to put "She turned ten" and then "She turned eleven" on separate lines. When I saw the lines separately I knew what I was trying to get at. I wanted to create a sense that the birds were in her life all of those years, one of the central themes.

Jackson: One of my students felt disturbed by "Young Lions."

Jones: One of them said that the "realism was too real."

Jackson: "Young Lions" and "In His Mother's House" deal in part with Washington and her criminal element. Do you feel that other writers neglect these themes? Were you thinking consciously about being different?

Jones: A lot of the stuff that I read in the daily newspapers doesn't have an impact on me. I think I'm writing about a world that really doesn't exist anymore. In "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons," the school teacher lives across the street, and the doctor lives down the street, along with a variety of people. That kind of world doesn't exist anymore. It's the kind of world where all the adults know all the children even if they've never spoken to that child. It's what happens to Betsy Ann when she goes to the Peoples Drugstore and this woman who has never said a word to her knows her and speaks to her. Many of the influences on my life occurred before I was welve, and that's the world I'm trying to recapture. It would be a little hard for me to mention Go-Go music or to write a story about that because that's not the world that I remember. My world is in "The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed" and the kind of songs that they sing. In the end, of course, there are the emotions that we're dealing with.

It's almost impossible for me to create a colorful world that isn't in the 1960s or 1950s. I can do it when I have to, like with "His Mother's House," which deals with a drug situation that wasn't around in the 1950s or 1960s. I can push myself. But generally it's an earlier kind of world. There's the icecream truck and the guy with the big heels that you can buy. There's penny candy and people work. My memories of the 1960s inspired me to write about the older woman, Miss Etta, in "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons." My family lived in a certain place and then we moved. There was a man who had lived in our old building, and he never said anything. Maybe once I said "Hello" to him, and he said "Hello" to me. Several years later some K Street friends of mine and I used to like to go roaming during the day. This old neighbor was a daytime watchman, and I remember he was sitting at a desk. I looked up at him and we could see this soda behind some bars and a friend of mine took the soda and we ran. I didn't really car e because it had been several years since I had seen this man, and he didn't know me, and if he knew who I was, he couldn't remember. This was a Saturday. That Saturday night, my mother, who worked at a restaurant washing dishes, got home around eleven o'clock, and my sister and I were already in bed. Lo and behold my mother had gone to the old building where this guy lived to see a lady named Miss Cora. She had seen the watchman and he had told her what happened. My mother grabbed me out of the bed and gave me a beating. (Laughter) . It was like "Everybody knows what I'm doing." You get a little paranoid, and that's how it worked. "I'm going to tell your mother" meant something to kids. Adults could give you a beating and then you came home and your parents gave you another beating.

Jackson: Your work includes a wide variety of black folk sayings from down-home. I wonder where some of that comes from.

Jones: I think almost all of it comes from my mother. If she told me to sweep the floor and I went in and did it for ten seconds, she'd say, "You didn't work on that as long as Pat stayed in the Army." When I needed a haircut she'd say, "Your head looks like a sheep's behind," and things like that. I remember black people's poetic language. "One monkey don't stop no show." "Every good-bye ain't gone." "Come day go day." If you were talking about somebody who really didn't care or paid too much attention to the way he or she went through life--every day the same--you would say, "Come day go day." Over years and years you absorb all of this stuff. I had a white friend at UVa whose mother had died. I shared this phrase with her and she eventually wrote a story, but she got the phrase wrong because it wasn't of her life. The phrase is "The wellest day you ever had, you're sick enough to die." You're in perfect health and you walk out into the street and you get hit by a bus and you're sick enough to die. I grew u p with this wonderful way of talking. One of the things I remember about reading Zora Neale Hurston was that in certain novels you hear it too much. If you have lines like that in every paragraph, it's too rich.

Jackson: Did you plan your work to be particularly regional?

Jones: No. One of the things that you realize when you're reading black literature, something that I came across in Black Boy and Native Son, is that people in Mississippi, people in Chicago and elsewhere have similar inflections and ways of doing things. They might have a different phrase or something, but you could tell that they were from the same pot. Somewhere along the way there was a commonness. I grew up calling what people refer to as sneakers, tennis shoes. I never use sneakers at all; it's always tennis shoes. I think I'll always do it, because that's what they are.

Jackson: You talked about the constrictions or limitations once you put something out into the world. What reinforced your determination to keep the focus on Washington?

Jones: I wanted D.C. to be a character. Once that decision was made, I excluded the few other stories that I'd made about country people. It was easier from that point of view. I knew I had these fourteen stories and they were all about people from Washington. The editor wanted me to rearrange the stories, and I really didn't want to do that. Most of the questions I got were from the copy editor. She didn't understand what a "half-smoke" was. At the very end of "The Store" he has a "halfsmoke" for lunch, and I wanted "halfsmoke" in because people in Washington know what a "halfsmoke" is. I could have had him eat a hotdog, but people in Tulsa eat hotdogs, too. "Half-smoke" was something that I knew was a Washington thing. As a concession I had him eat a "half-smoke" with mustard. The copy editor wanted to know if we could be sued because of the part about the cab companies, which didn't make sense to me because the character is expressing her opinion about cabs. [Jones's character calls two local cab companies "unreliable" in reference to a Washington Post expose of livery companies that in practice refused to pick up black men.]

Jackson: I wondered about Lydia and Madeleine. Why do both women who have achieved bourgeoisie success experience particularly challenging problems?

Jones: My mother called certain people educated fools. That more applies to Lydia than to Madeleine. Essentially her problem is the great tragedy in her life: her mother's murder by her father. So I think she's a certain way because of that. Lydia was after the brass ring, and now that she has the brass ring what can she do with it?

Jackson: Madeleine sees another woman [Arnisa, in "The Sunday Following Mother's Day"] and begins to think she has the woman figured out.

Jones: That's because she's of a lower class. Madeleine's education allows her to think that way about that woman, and it connects easily to the way she sees her father. He reeks of smoke, and he has a coat and pair of pants that from a distance would appear like a suit, but as you get close you can see that the coat and pants don't match. She's gone to Columbia and everything, but she relies on her reading of social status. I remember reading in the New York Times about a black woman talk-show host named Gail, a friend of Oprah Winfrey's. She was talking about the people she wouldn't have on the show. She said, "We won't have any of those people from the trailer parks." She comes from a certain world of status and privilege, and where I don't generally think of black people in the trailer-parks, I could easily think of someone saying, "We won't have any of those ghetto types," or "We won't have any of those inner-city types," or "We won't have people from the projects." So that's why I'm not sure that Madele ine would have that sort of attitude toward people. Lydia is different. She's drawn off into her own world, and she never really thinks about anybody else. But I have been aware of these attitudes throughout my life. People say and do certain things to show just how far they've gotten in life, but ultimately they become educated fools.

Jackson: There is a tension about race in the stories that is understated. I read one of the reviews that championed the stories for transcending race. I think of the stories as being extremely race-conscious, with a palpable kind of tension.

Jones: I think it's like people born into that Reagan thing, "It's morning in America." It's wonderful, the dew is on the grass, and we don't have to worry about anything. You get that a lot of course with the black conservatives and from the people who aren't even conservative, largely because of the lives that they've lead. They refuse to believe that racism happens anymore. I think he was conscious of it before it happened, but the son of Earl Graves, the publisher of Black Enterprise, was on a New York subway and was stopped and frisked and everything. He was walking to work in a suit. It's just a sense that he had chosen a certain path for his life, and he had money, and a home of high caliber, and an expensive car, and all those things really didn't bother him until something did happen. I see no reason in not saying "I'm a black man," because I'll never be just a plain old "man" in America. That may happen 200 years from now, but it's not going to happen in my lifetime.

Jackson: What do you think the relationship of working-class black folks is to white America?

Jones: I don't think white Americans think about working-class black folks very much. In the Times yesterday they were responding to an Op-Ed piece that Orlando Patterson had written in the spirit of "race doesn't matter anymore" and "it's morning in America." I tend to discard stuff like that and go on. But the letters to the editor were commenting on Patterson's use of public opinion polls, and a guy mentioned that 80 percent of the white people who had been polled said that they had a close personal black friend. That's 80 percent. And the letter writer said that if that was the case then every black person in the country, including the ones in the very remote areas that never see white people, had a white friend, which obviously is not the case.

Jackson: They all must have had the same black friend.

Jones: They're lying through their teeth because that's what people want to hear. My whole attitude about the race thing just is not very positive. We're dealing with the sons and daughters of hippies who were supposed to believe that we were all a part of mankind and should treat each other nicely. Now their sons and daughters are some of the most racist people in the land. You wonder where they got that racism from. Probably from the mother and father who didn't really believe that blacks were equal; they were just saying this when they were high off marijuana. In the New York Times a company had written in about how the high school students they were hiring didn't have a very good grasp of reading, and a few months later the same paper ran an article about the suffering of the students at the same school because they were grossly underfunded. No one really put the two things together: The inner-city kids weren't getting the education they needed because people didn't care. They weren't getting the money fr om the school system. I think we are just going terribly wrong. So I tend to be very negative about the situation. I don't think it'll ever be "morning in America."

Jackson: Some readers are bound to see the stories as tragic. It seems to me though that there is a balance between growth and the pain that comes with it, a balance between independence and the loneliness that follows. Is that your particular theme for American life?

Jones: I can't go much beyond what I do. Once or twice I went in over my head. The Howard University radio station WHUR had me on to talk about the community, and they really should have gotten a sociologist, because I didn't have anything to contribute. I can't comment about larger things. I have to confine myself to the stories. I think that's why I write in naturalistic fashion. I tell the truth as I see it and don't try to shade it. This is not the truth as every one else knows it. That's what it's all about. The writer next door could probably take the same characters--this man and his daughter and the pigeons [from "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons"]--and do something very different with them. That's his vision of how the world should go. But I have a very different vision, and that means that at the end these rats come in and they destroy the pigeons. They kill a lot of the pigeons. That's just the way I see it. The girl is devastated for a while, but I think it's a learning lesson. She doesn't take to her bed and have to be checked into St. Elizabeth's because of what happened to her pets. It's a jumping off point in her life, and it happens to a lot of people in the stories. I think that when it was all said and done and I had to come up with some title for the entire book, the only thing that would fit was the story titled "Lost in the City." Some people are lost and they eventually find their way a bit, and other people are lost and they can't ever return.

Jackson: The book's title seems like a pun on the grandfather's advice in Invisible Man "Don't get lost in the city" is the advice from the little boy whose grandfather is losing his mind.

Jones: I thought about people coming in and out of all the stories so that they were interrelated in a way. That happens with Joyce Moses and Pearl Guthrie in "The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed" and "His Mother's House." "Young Lions" mentions the old woman who is the center of "Marie." Certainly I could do that, but I ran out of steam as far as doing it with a lot of other people. That's my sense of the way community was when I was growing up. You knew not to go into certain neighborhoods because you could get your butt kicked, but once you were in the neighborhood, and you knew everybody, it was like home. I was very conscious when I had the grandfather say, "Don't get lost in the city." I knew that it would be the initial story, and I wanted the reader to be able to take that and remember it. It doesn't matter if the kid says that the grandfather was insane, because sometimes insane people say the greatest truths.

Jackson: Is "Gospel" a story about envy?

Jones: It is. I had read Joyce, and I didn't want to do a thing like The Wiz where I took all the stories and just made them all black. But I was very moved by the last story in Dubliners called "The Dead." He calls the snow simply "general." The snow is generally throughout Ireland. I read somewhere that that's not possible; when it snows it can't snow every place in Ireland. But I was very struck by this story. It's a very long story, the longest story in there, and I think they're having a birthday party for the main character's aunt, and it doesn't seem as if the first ninety percent of the story has anything to do with the last ten percent.

I just wanted to use this structure where you can't tell what's going to happen in the end. So, you have the main character Vivian who is living the kind of life that a lot of people think is very nice. When she gets to the church everyone is talking about how handsome her husband is, and no one knows he's dying of cancer or that sometimes, when she comes back from the church on Sunday, he has peed in the chair.

She began her life in the South with certain expectations. There were unspoken promises of courtship and the guy would come up and have lemonade with the family and always take off his hat. Vivian closes a very long day and her friend Diane McCollough gets in a car, and for that moment when the light is on a man takes off his hat. It reminds her of everything that she was promised, none of which has come true. She was left with taking these people to their houses and then going home to a man that was dying. It didn't matter that the boyfriend in the car taking off the hat could have been a bastard. She only knew that single moment which somehow commented on all that she had received in her life.

I think she's rather vain, which prevents her from telling anyone about her husband. She feels that she has attained a certain something in life which really isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I forget how I described her job, but it's not as if she's in an upper tier. She's somewhere in the middle. If you looked really hard at other things m her life you could see a facade. The reader can see that it crumbles when she sees the man in the car; then she becomes hostile.

I wasn't really going for gospel, because I don't like it, but for truth. For a moment in their lives, no matter what's going on, the singing alleviates some of the pain. Anita carries the burden of her father not speaking to her because she's unmarried and living with a man. And so for a little bit on Sunday she relieves the pain of her father not speaking to her. I could have done the same thing for the blind woman, but I would have upset the balance of the story. But the religious singing does something for them. The piano player has a drinking good time all Saturday night, but he's there playing the piano on Sunday morning. It Fulfills a need in their lives.

Lawrence P. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he teaches courses in African American literature and culture. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in June of 1997 and is completing a biography of Ralph Ellison. He was a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard in 1999, and his work has been published in Stanford Review, Massachusetts Review, and Baltimore Magazine.