'Lost in the City': Stories from D.C.
Edward P. Jones delves into the lives of Black Americans in the nation's capital.
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In preparation for a trip to Washington, D.C., last month, I headed to Powell’s Books with The Washington Post’s 2021 list of “18 books that capture the spirit and essence of living in D.C.” and perused the aisles until I’d found three of the titles (all used, all in great condition, for a total of $15). One, chosen randomly, went into my under-the-seat bag; the other two, into the suitcase.
Aboard the plane, I swiftly pegged the couple next to me as fellow bookworms. The second the wife was settled in her seat, she pulled out her Kindle — but interrupted herself to check out the book that I’d pulled out. It turned out she and her husband were D.C. residents, and she approved of my choice: Edward P. Jones’ 1992 story collection, “Lost in the City.” Later, returning from the lavatory, I found her thumbing through the book. (I didn’t mind.) She asked if I’d finished the first story, “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons.” I had, but I hadn’t wanted to. It had been such a delight to read.
Jones won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Lannan Literary Award for this 14-story collection, in which Black Washingtonians walk streets mapped with such precision that I was immediately plunged into their world. The New York Times noted in a 2020 piece about Jones that he “spent time working at Science magazine and then at a journal called Tax Notes, and there is a patient, empirical precision in his writing that might be said to fit in with the missions of those publications.”
Take that story my seatmate referenced, about the young pigeon fancier. Betsy Ann becomes enamored of an acquaintance’s birds at a young age; after some resistance, her protective father yields to her pleas for her own flock. Through her pigeons, which she sets loose each morning to fly until nightfall, Betsy Ann imagines life beyond the tight confines of her neighborhood.
Stroking the breast of one, she would be rewarded with a cooing that was as pleasurable as music, and when the bird edged nearer so that it was less than an inch away, she smelled what seemed a mixture of dirt and rainy air and heard a heart that seemed to be hurling itself against the wall of the bird’s breast.
But again and again, reality brings her back down to earth.
In other stories, a petty criminal sets his sights on a woman with an intellectual disability. A young man goes to work for the woman who owns the neighborhood store. A harried working mother has a chance encounter in a Metro station that, for a while, turns her head. A widow bumps into the woman for whom her husband left her. A daughter’s rebellion casts her parents, who have no other children, into years of despair.
They’re quiet stories, about mostly quiet lives. Jones gives his characters the respect of being seen, of being recognized as the possessors of humanity we all want acknowledged. That includes the character appearing in all these stories: the city itself.
At New York Avenue, he turned right, then left on 5th Street. He thought that maybe she had been born elsewhere, that she did not know Washington, would not know the streets beyond what the white people called the federal enclave. But in fact, the farther north he went, the more she knew about where they were going. My name is Lydia … Say it loud …