Lost in the City by Edward P. Jones

First published: 1992

Type of work: Short stories

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: 1950’s-1980’s

Locale: African American communities in Washington, D.C.

Principal Characters:

• Betsy Ann Morgan, a young girl who keeps pigeons
• Cassandra G. Lewis, a high school student
• Woodrow L. Cunningham, a man whose daughter disappears from home
• Caesar Matthews, a young hoodlum
• Penelope Jenkins, a grocery store owner who accidentally kills a young girl
• Marvella Watkins, a single mother who is attracted to a young man with dreadlocks
• Marie Delaveaux, an elderly woman frustrated with the Social Security bureaucracy
• Lydia Walsh, a young woman whose mother has just died
• Joyce Moses, a woman who must cope with her son’s drug dealing
• Madeleine Williams, a woman whose father killed her mother when she was four
• Vivian L. Slater, a woman whose husband is dying of cancer

The Stories

The fourteen stories in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City are patterned loosely after James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914). They concern people of various ages who face the challenges of growing up, surviving, and succeeding in African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. The collection begins with two young girls dealing with death. In the first story, a girl whose mother died in childbirth wants to raise pigeons on the roof. Although her father tries to protect her from knowledge of death by checking on the pigeons each morning before she gets up to see if any have died, one morning he finds many of them have been killed by rats, and he must wring the necks of the wounded ones. The second story, “The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,” focuses on Cassandra Lewis, a high school girl whom boys call “the tank” because she is so large. The title character, a friend of Cassandra, is supposed to sign a contract with a record company on the day the story takes place, but she is shot by the father of her baby.

Some of Jones’s stories are brief, lyrical pieces in which characters face loneliness and loss. For example, in “Lost in the City,” Lydia Walsh, while at a hotel with a man, receives a call that her mother has died in the hospital. She snorts a line of cocaine and calls a cab, telling the driver to get her lost in the city so she can postpone accepting her mother’s death. In “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,” a young, single mother with three children meets a man with dreadlocks on the train who is kind to her. In her loneliness, she is attracted to him, but after a time she no longer sees him. “A Butterfly on F Street” deals with a chance encounter in which Mildred Harper runs into the woman for whom her husband left her after twenty-seven years of marriage. The result is a shared sense of loss. In “Gospel,” a woman whose husband is dying of cancer is disillusioned when she sees her best friend kissing another man.

Parents facing conflicts with their children are the focus of two stories. In “His Mother’s House,” Santiago Moses, a drug dealer, buys his mother, Joyce Moses, a house. When one of Santiago’s childhood friends owes him money, Santiago kills him. After Joyce slaps Santiago, he points a gun at her head, but later that night, she unlocks all the windows in her house so Santiago can get in. In “A New Man,” Woodrow L. Cunningham comes home one day and finds his fifteen-year-old daughter with two boys. After he chases the boys off and threatens to punish his daughter, she runs away and gets “lost in the city.” He spends the rest of the story unsuccessfully searching for her.

Characters

Strength of character in the face of disappointment and disillusionment is the motivating force of Jones’s stories. Typical of Jones’s proud and capable characters is the young mother in “The First Day,” a brief, lyrical piece about a woman taking her daughter to her first day of school. The story is told in the first person by the child, who is learning things about her mother. For example, she finds that the higher up on the scale of respectability someone is, the less her mother will let them push her around.

Contrast in character is the focus of two stories: In “Young Lions,” the thug Caesar Matthews seems to have no redeeming qualities. In “The Store,” the twenty-year-old nameless narrator becomes an independent man by befriending his boss and taking over for her when she has a tragic accident.

The strongest character in Jones’s collection is the eighty-six-year-old Marie Delaveaux, living alone on Social Security. When she is condescended to and ignored by a young employee at the Social Security office, she slaps the girl. Two weeks later, a young university student interviews Marie for an oral history project. When he sends her copies of the tapes, she plays them once then puts them away, saying she will never listen to them again, even though they recount a history of hardship and courage.

Critical Context

Convinced that most readers had only a narrow idea of what Washington, D.C., was like, because they were familiar with it only through novels that dealt with downtown power and politics, Jones wanted to create a collection of stories that focused on ordinary people in various African American D.C. neighborhoods, as James Joyce’s Dubliners had focused on denizens of the Irish capital. Lost in the City, published in 1992, was short-listed for the National Book Award and won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Jones has said that after publishing Lost in the City, he spent the next ten years thinking about a story of black ex-slaves who became slaveholders themselves. The result was The Known World, his first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2004 and the Lannan Literary Award. The following year, Jones was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius award.” All Aunt Hagar’s Children, a second collection of short stories, several of which featured characters introduced in Lost in the City, was published in 2006 and was short-listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Widely praised by reviewers and critics, Jones represents a new wave of African American writers who write about individuals rather than about race and about the personal rather than the political.

Bibliography

Jones, Edward P. “An Interview with Edward P. Jones.” Interview by Lawrence P. Jackson. African American Review 34, no. 1 (Spring, 2000): 95-104. Jones talks about the writers who influenced and taught him, the development of the stories in Lost in the City, and his creation of the cultural world of African American neighborhoods in Washington, D.C.

Kennedy, J. Gerald, and Robert Beuka. “Imperiled Communities in Edward P. Jones’s Lost in the City and Dagoberto Gilb’s The Magic of Blood.” The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 10-23. Argues that Lost in the City constructs from disparate stories a unified narrative about the loneliness and isolation of the African American community.

Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Dignity Survives amid Grimness of an Inner City.” Review of Lost in the City, by Edward P. Jones. The New York Times, June 11, 1992, section C, p. 18. In this influential appreciative review, Lehmann-Haupt says that Jones consistently dignifies his characters, presenting as proud and without self-pity people who are down and out, but who lead rich and varied lives.

Mason, Myatt. “Ballad for Americans.” Harper’s Magazine 313, no. 1876 (September, 2006): 87-92. Compares Jones’s stories to those of James Joyce because of their meticulous style, but argues that whereas Joyce is unforgiving of his characters’ limitations, Jones demands readers’ compassion.

Yardley, Jonathan. “On the Streets Where We Live.” The Washington Post, June 21, 1992, p. X3. Argues that although Jones writes about African Americans, it is more accurate to say that he writes about people who merely happen to be African American.