There's a moment in Edward P. Jones's new story collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children—coming out in September from Amistad—when a community of well-to-do blacks watches from behind "discreetlyparted" curtains as the Benningtons move in. "They had a collection of junk that included a stained queen-sized mattress, a dining room table with three legs, a mirror with a large missing piece in one corner, and a refrigerator dented on two sides...," Jones writes, and it's not long before a decision circulates among the old residents: the Benningtons must go. The story, "Bad Neighbors," isn't the first time Jones has explored the conflicting interests of rich and poor blacks. His last novel, The Known World (Amistad, 2003), dramatized a little-known fact: before the Civil War, an elite class of wealthy, free blacks owned slaves in the American South.
Though Jones now resides in a posh building at the top of Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., his childhood was spent in poverty. His mother, Jeanette, was an illiterate dishwasher and cleaner at the restaurant Chez François on Connecticut Avenue. His Jamaican father skipped out when Jones was three. Jones's younger brother, who is mentally retarded, was institutionalized about the same time. The remaining family—Jones, his mother and his younger sister, Eunice—moved 18 times in the next 18 years.
"Each place was worse than the place before," Jones says. "On 10th Street, I remember, whenever there was a hard rain—we lived in the basement—it would flood."
At 55, Jones is earnest and dignified and his solemnity might be intimidating if he weren't so polite. We meet at his building and he escorts me to a conference room with French doors and a sparkling chandelier. I imagine that his apartment is at least as well appointed. But half way through our interview, Jones tells me that his home contains almost no furniture, though he's been living in it for two years.
"Tonight when I go to bed," he says, "I'll lay down on a pallet on the carpet."
Over the past 14 years, Jones has received more than $500,000 in book prizes: the PEN/Hemingway Award for his 1992 story collection, Lost in the City; the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World; and a MacArthur "genius" grant for overall talent. He could afford to buy a bed. But aside from letting him move out of a noisy apartment in Arlington, Va., the cash doesn't mean much to Jones.
"I don't want to travel around the world," he says. "There's no fancy car that I want, and I'm not really a clothes-oriented person." In the mornings, he writes two or three pages of fiction. In the evenings, he watches DVDs or Court TV. He doesn't like parties. And as far as he's concerned "you could have a splendid apartment with all this gorgeous furniture and wonderful things on the wall, and if you don't have those two or three pages [a day] behind you, it's a terrible existence."
It's tempting to portray Jones as a kind of literary monk or to suggest that his early poverty bred some scorn for material goods—but Jones owns several hundred books and he collects both American stamps and miniature Japanese carvings. Whatever influence morals and upbringing have had on his spare décor, there's also an element of inertia. When he first moved in, Jones says, some friends took him to furniture stores. But after the third weekend of couch-hunting, he gave up. It was too much bother.
Writing is a solitary act, and for most novelists, it's hard to pinpoint which comes first: a reluctance to be with other people or the need to curl up with a book. For Jones, however, reluctance was clearly the impetus. When he was 12 or 13, he says, after another of his family's many moves, he stopped going outside to play with other children. "I would just come home from school and watch TV and read books," he says. "I really had no sense of what was going on in the outside world."
Comics were his first love, but eventually he found Black Boy and Native Sonat an aunt's house. And from Richard Wright he made his way to James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Truman Capote. "I was quite struck by the Southern authors, both white and black," he says—perhaps because the worlds they evoked seemed so familiar. Almost all the adults Jones knew had moved to D.C. from the South. His mother made the journey in the 1940s, near the beginning of the great migration that saw some five million African-Americans relocate to the North.
Jeanette encouraged Jones's bookish streak—illiteracy made her extra sensitive to the importance of education—but Jones probably wouldn't have gone to college if he hadn't met Joseph Owens, a young Catholic missionary. Owens helped Jones navigate the college applications process and suggested Jones apply to Holy Cross College in Massachusetts. When he was accepted with a scholarship, Jones became the first person in his family to attend college—a fact that made his mother so proud that she cried the first time she saw the campus.
Graduating with a degree in English, Jones moved back to D.C. and worked odd jobs while he cared for his mother, who had had several strokes while he was away. Jeanette may have been the most important person in Jones's life—he's dedicated all his books to her memory—and after she died of lung cancer in 1975, he went through a terrible year. He couldn't find a job, and for a while he was homeless. Eventually he wrote to Eunice in Brooklyn, asking her to send $15 so he could take a bus to New York, where he hoped his prospects might improve.
"That same week that I got the money from her, I found a job with Science magazine [in D.C.]," he says. A few days later, he received a mailgram from Essence offering $400 for a story he'd submitted almost a year earlier.
Jones's career was steadier after those reversals. He worked at Science for a few years—calling scientists to have them review submissions—then enrolled in the M.F.A. program at the University of Virginia, where he studied with John Casey, James Alan McPherson and Peter Taylor. When he graduated in 1981, he went back to a desk job, taking a position with Tax Analysts in Arlington, where he worked for 18 years, first as a proofreader, then as writer summarizing tax stories from the news.
All the while, he wrote fiction. After Lost in the City came out in 1992 (Jones sent the manuscript to an editor at Morrow whose name he got from a friend in the MFA program. The editor put Jones in touch with Eric Simonoff, who is still his agent), Jones spent 10 years brooding on The Known World, writing the entire novel in his head. When he finally sat down to transcribe the story to paper, he produced a 432-page novel in three months. The work was indirectly facilitated by bad news: on January 11, 2002, a week into Jones's three-week vacation, Tax Analysts called to say he was laid off.
Since then Jones has been a full-time writer who spends his time, and his money, much the way he did when he was 13.
"Joseph Owens said I would be happy because I want simple things, like a bathroom," Jones says. "I'm sitting there sometimes watching TV—and the reception is bad because I don't get cable—and I'm thinking, you have a color television. You have a color television." He gives a rare laugh. "It just strikes you, the amazing things that a lot of other people take for granted."
