Lost in the City
Two short stories from Edward P. Jones’ Lost in the City (New York: HarperCollins, 1992):
“The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” & “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed”
My first experience of reading Edward P. Jones was The Known World, published in 2003. After that, I bought both of his short story collections, Lost in the City and All Aunt Hagar’s Children. The Known World captured my imagination. I loved learning that Jones had been inspired to write such a phenomenally creative novel after being taken with a line he’d read about a certain very small population of Blacks who had owned slaves, and then spending years dedicated to writing such a compelling story. I was also taken by Jones’ age at the time his novel was published (53!), and the fact that his own personal story followed a different trajectory than that of so many other writers I was reading – no MFA, no job teaching creative writing at a small college or university, but rather a day job dealing with finance. It gave me hope that one day I’d really write – no matter the mom or job distractions. (On a personal note, even with different life circumstances these days, I am still not doing any substantial writing of my own and have no excuses and can only blame myself). Jones, no matter his regular 9-5 work life, managed to produce three extraordinary books. Lost in the City, his first collection of short stories, was published in 1992, and was the winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1993, and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction.
I am posting .pdfs of two stories from Lost in the City, and hope that perhaps the form of the short story rather than a novel will encourage some of you to post comments on this page. One of my main reasons for starting Story Remedy after getting a certificate from the International Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy (IFBPT), was to forge a community of like-minded readers and writers, who believed in the power of literature – of words – to promote healing. I believe that healing from a wound – whether emotional or physical – necessitates, or requires, an understanding that the self will not be the same – that there will be a scar and scar tissue, or bruising that fades, but doesn’t ever go entirely away. When pressed upon, the pain can still be felt. But what I do believe is that words possess a great deal of power, and how we use them demands examination. Jones witnesses the world he knows (thus giving double meaning perhaps to the title of his novel, The Known World), and like Morrison, Baldwin, Ellison, Hughes, Larsen, Wright, and so many others, including contemporary writers like Zadie Smith, Jesmyn Ward, Yaa Gyasi, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Jericho Brown, etc., Jones insists that the Black characters he is writing about not only deserve to be seen, but that their lives deserve and demand to be written about. As Toni Morrison so eloquently told an interviewer, she didn’t need to write for white people, and she didn’t need to write about white lives.
“I’m writing for black people,” she says, “in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologise or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white people] – which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books. The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it…”
In November 2020, in a country damaged by four years of increasingly vicious misogynism and racism, it is necessary to return (or to pick up for the first time) the work of Black writers who have long been engaging with racism and the toll it has taken on this country, as well as insisting through story writing that Black lives matter. It is important, of course, that more white people are reading and discussing antiracist texts and participating in antiracist dialogues and teachings at home and in the workplace, but I would encourage – and stress – the need for white readers to go a step further: to dive deeply into the phenomenal canon of Black literature – both from the past, and what is currently being written across every genre – from poetry to novels to short fiction to essays to autofiction, etc. Literature reflects our lives. Serious reading encourages empathy and compassion across the spectrum of human lives. I truly believe reading and writing can be acts of profound resistance – both on the part of the author and the reader. If we read Jones and recognize that he is bearing witness, than we – as citizens – must engage in the act of bearing witness ourselves, which means we must also do something, that we must act, because if we do nothing, than we have succumbed to merely being by-standers to what is going on in the world around us. Such silence, as we have seen in the past, equals death. The solitary experience of dialogue between author and reader can be transformed into activism. Doing so turns a story into a remedy.
Prompts for “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons”
§ Think about who the main characters of this story are, and Jones’ choice to focus on a young Black girl.
§ Is it significant that Betsy Ann is not named in the title – that she is just “the girl”?
§ Describe the relationship between father and daughter.
§ How do you define “family”? What is this story saying about the expansion of the definition of family (consider the importance of Jenny and Walter Creed).
§ Expand on the meaning of “don’t get lost in the city” (9).
§ What is the symbolism of raising pigeons on a city rooftop?
§ I am moved by Jones’ movement through time in this story, from Betsy Ann’s infancy through adolescence, e.g., “She turned ten. She turned eleven” (15). How important is it that part of the story takes place in 1960/61?
§ Flying is a trope in much of Black literature. How does Jones engage with this metaphor?
Prompts for “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed”
§ I think there is an unusual tenderness extended to Jones’ female characters, and a candidness about their sexuality that I find very powerful. In the stories in Lost in the City, Jones writes in both first and third person (and in male and female voices). How often do you inhabit another’s voice in your own writing?
§ Elaborate on Jones’ inclusion of the lyrics to “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” originally sung by the Shirelles in 1960, and later covered in a very different style by Roberta Flack.
§ Why is Anacostia so important to the setting of this story? Think about this line: “She was in a different country and she thought the laws might not be the same for her here” (45). What is Jones saying here? Why is Anacostia referred to in this way? How significant are DC neighborhoods to this story?
§ This notion of being far from home comes up again at the end of the story when Cassandra whispers, “I got to be goin… I got to be goin to home,… saying home as if it were a foreign word” (53). What do you think Jones is trying tell his readers about “home”?
§ I found Jones’ depiction of the intimacy between his women characters very poignant. He describes the friendships between women in a way I have not often encountered. Please share your own thoughts about this.
§ Who is Rhonda to the women in this story, and especially to Cassandra? What does she represent?
§ Consider Jones’ depiction of male violence throughout the story, and compare to his description of Cassandra’s temperament. What is the same and what is significantly different?
Using these stories in Poetry Therapy groups:
§ “Miles Patterson, a bachelor, and some women said, a virgin, was fifty-six years old and for the most part knew no more about the world than what he could experience in newspapers or on the radio and in his own neighborhood, beyond which he rarely ventured. “There’s ain’t nothing out there in the great beyond for me,” Miles would say to people who talked with excitement about visiting such and such a place” (3).
Reflect on this and how so much of the world is reflected through social media and our own self-created bubbles. How does literature expand the world for people?
§ Write about a song that is profoundly important to you. What is it a metaphor for?
§ Write in extensive detail about your corner of the world. Make it come alive. How diverse a world did you end up describing?
action:
Join your local NAACP chapter.
Support a Black Arts initiative. Cave Canem is a great one!