by Matt Weiland
In recent years, the novelist Edward P. Jones has emerged as one of the most powerful chroniclers of life there. Born in D.C. General Hospital in 1950, and a resident of the city for much of his life, Jones describes a city hidden to most of the politicians and lobbyists and journalists and civil servants who make D.C. their home, and one seldom seen by the fifteen million tourists who visit each year.
—CRESSIDA LEYSHON
The introduction to the WPA Guide to Washington, D.C., which was published in 1937, states: “In the ream of broad (and somewhat trite) generalities, the most fundamental fact about Washington is that it was created for a definite purpose and has been developed according to a definite plan. Therein lies its unique distinction among American cities, and among all existing capitals in the western world.” How aware were you that you were growing up in the capital city?
I lived in neighborhoods that didn’t have much to do with the fact of living in the capital of the United States. Neighborhood kids usually stayed in their own neighborhoods; we didn’t really venture out. I think once, when I was eleven or twelve, there was an astronaut—I don’t recall his name—who came back, and they had a parade. I can remember seeing Lyndon Johnson—it must have been when he was vice president—so there was a big parade and all these schoolkids watching the parade, and there was this astronaut, and there was Johnson. But that was unusual. Usually we went to school and we came back home. We played. We had meals. We had friends in the neighborhood. We never really went to the monuments, to the museums.
How far back does your family’s connection to Washington, D.C., go?
My mother was born in 1916, in Virginia. I think she came to Washington sometime in the late 1930s. She worked most all of my childhood at Chez François, a French restaurant on Connecticut Avenue less than a block from Lafayette Square, which is across the street from the White House. The restaurant served a lot of people who were in important positions in the government—because, of course, the White House was there, the Old Executive Office was there, and then there were other government offices around there. My mother worked there as a dishwasher, a cleaner. She got that job sometime in the late fifties and she was there until she was too ill to do anything more, in the early seventies.
She didn’t talk about her work much, though. When she got home she was exhausted. I do remember once she said she was cleaning up, because one of her jobs was to vacuum the dining room area, and she found a diamond ring and gave it to her boss. The woman the ring belonged to came in the next day and gave my mother some sort of reward. I don’t think it was very much.
Washington was situated on the shores of the Potomac by an agreement between the Northern and Southern states. The WPA Guide says of Washington in the 1930s, “Everywhere in the Capital one hears the indolent cadence of southern speech, and encounters that admirable though often irritating southern characteristic—the innate aversion to hurry and worry.” Did you feel as though you were living in a Southern city when you were a boy in the 1950s?
Just about all the adults I knew, starting with my own mother, had been born and raised in the South. I was among the first generation to be born in the North—in Washington, anyway. I guess I was essentially being raised by Southerners; what they knew about life they had learned from the South. So in that sense, it was, for me, a Southern city.
The WPA Guide has a chapter titled “The Negro in Washington.” It declares that “the Negro in Washington [has], from the start, exerted a profound influence upon the city’s destiny. Aside from the fact that at the present day the Negro population constitutes more than one-fourth of the city’s total, the Negro’s subtler influences are by far greater than might be apparent on the surface.” Growing up, how aware were you of the history of the African-American presence in the city?
I was not aware of it at all. All I knew was that the adults I knew came from Virginia, North Carolina, perhaps South Carolina, that’s about it. I had no sense of how a lot of those people came to be in Washington, or when things started. It was only when I got to high school that I had any sort of sense of the role that black people played in history. I can remember I did a report on blacks in World War I for one history teacher, but that was quite unusual, and that particular history teacher was unusual in herself.
Did you study the history of slavery?
I can’t remember ever hearing about or learning about anything like that. It was a double standard sort of thing, and it’s sort of a whitewash of American history. I can remember one of the things they pressed upon you, which was how the American Revolution started. “No taxation without representation,” which is rather ironic now, because people in Washington, D.C., could not vote for the president until 1961 and they still have no representation in Congress, really. There’s a so-called Congresswoman. She can vote in the committees but she can’t vote on the House floor, and there are no senators. So you talk about the capital of the United States, and all of that, but the people of Washington, D.C., essentially have no rights.
What do you think should be done about that?
Well, those of us who were born and raised in Washington are committed to having full rights. And then there are people who come every two years, every four years, who come to work with politicians who have been elected to Congress. And they don’t really care. They were born and raised in Nebraska or wherever, and their plan is to go, if not back to Nebraska, then maybe to New York or something. So they don’t care that the people of D.C. have no rights. They don’t care about the fact that the country was founded on a certain principle and that every day that principle is set aside.
Over the years there has been a demonstration here, a demonstration there. I can remember when Jesse Jackson first came to Washington to live. He was arrested several times along with Walter Fauntroy, who was Washington’s first so-called Congressperson. Every now and then people will rise up and say something, but for the most part we just go on with our lives, because nothing can be done. I don’t think anything will be done.
In your fiction, the characters are always keenly aware of geography—they often specify precisely where they are, what street they’re crossing, how far out of their neighborhoods they’re venturing. In “The Store,” for example, a story set in the early sixties that appears in your 1992 collection, Lost in the City, the narrator describes a bus trip “all the way down P Street, crossing 16th Street into the land of white people.” How segregated was the city when you were growing up?
When I was growing up, the only white people I ever saw were those who had stores. I didn’t know any white teachers until I got to high school. When I was eleven or twelve, this kid next door, Jobe, had seen in the newspaper that there was a sale going on at a Peoples Drug store. The closest one to us, amazingly, was in Dupont Circle. To get to Dupont Circle, we had to go fifteen or so blocks, and it was evident as we left 10th Street and went down R and got beyond 15th Street, that things were different. It was around 16th Street that we began to see that the world was changing: There were white people.
For some reason, Jobe had wanted us to skate there, but we only had one pair of skates between us, and they were his, so he had one skate and I had one skate and it was hell going down the street. It took a lot of effort, and so you’re taxed in that way, and then there was the very real sense that you may not want to be there. It’s not a residential area that we’re talking about. It had large office buildings and apartment buildings—it still does—and it’s very busy during the day. But I wasn’t used to being there. I was used only to the area I lived in.
In April, 1968, there were three days of riots in Washington, D.C., following Martin Luther King’s death. Had you already left for college or were you still in the city?
I was there for the riots and everything. I didn’t really take part in any destruction. I was living at that time at 1217 N Street. That’s essentially downtown, and lots of things were happening around there. Two blocks away there was a Safeway on 11th Street, where a
lot was happening. In a lot of places, to prevent people from breaking windows and from looting, the owners would put up a sign that read soul BROTHER. There was a Chinese laundry on 14th Street, down from U, where they put soul BROTHER in the window.
By that time, I didn’t have any friends outside of school. I lived most of my life in Northwest, primarily the downtown area, but by the time I was eighteen I had lived in about eighteen different places. Where I was living, I had my books, I had television, and I didn’t really have anything else. I would just go to school and come back. So I was rather alone, I wasn’t inclined to be out and doing anything—but I went out of curiosity. At 7th and New York Avenue, there was a Hahn shoe store, right across the street from another Peoples Drug store, which I used in the first story in Lost in the City. Some people had already broken into the place, and I came along afterward and got a pair of shoes.
What did your mother say when you came home with the shoes?
I never spoke to her about them. My mother would get home around eight or so from Chez François, so she wasn’t home yet. In all the riots the only thing my mother ever got was two or three packets of Kool-Aid, and those were lying outside the Safeway there on 11th Street. She was walking up and she saw them there and she picked them up. Before my mother even married, before she had kids, she had a friend and they went into a five and dime store. And this woman goaded my mother into stealing some crochet thread. I think it was one or two packets, maybe five or ten cents each. And my mother always talked about the fact that she felt such guilt for weeks and weeks after that, for something that was less than a dollar. So she would have never ever have gone into any place. I had the shoes and I just never mentioned them.
I went off to college with them, though. They were just a tad larger than would have been comfortable. But in that Hahn shoe store, it was dark and there was a bit of a stench of tear gas, and I was nervous and afraid and I wasn’t with anyone. There were other people in there, but I didn’t know any of them and they didn’t know me, so my whole thing was to get in there and get something and get out.
Were people you met at college interested in the fact you were from Washington?
No, I would tell them, and they had no idea that Washington was a place of neighborhoods, which was one of the reasons that led me, when I got around to it, to writing Lost in the City. I wanted to correct the record, as it were, and talk about people who were not part of the federal government. It’s as if you say, “I’m from New York,” and someone says, “What was the last play you saw?” Chances are you might never have seen a play. That’s why I wrote Lost in the City.
Have the neighborhoods you grew up in changed much since your childhood?
When All Aunt Hagar’s Children came out not too long ago in Germany, a film crew came over from German television and filmed me in various neighborhoods where I had grown up, and where some of the stories take place. At one point we found ourselves on the 400 block of M Street, where I had lived before I started school. The sense I got was that there were just white people on the block now. One of the crew, the cameraman or the soundman, I think, said that he knew a lesbian couple who lived in one house. And I could see the house—it was painted a weird color. He said that the neighbors had gotten together to get it changed, because it didn’t fit with the new décor of the neighborhood. One of the women who lived in that house did some research and she found that the color fitted the scheme that the block had had in the early twentieth century, so she was allowed to keep the color. The thought that went through my head was that these are the kind of people who want the neighborhood to look a certain way and to have a certain kind of person living there. And if they had anything that my mother could have afforded when I was a kid, I’m sure they wouldn’t have wanted my mother and her kids living there. That’s the sense that I get of that whole neighborhood now.
Have you seen that happen in many parts of the city?
You can drive through, and the neighborhoods that I knew as a kid, the people who lived in those places when I was growing up aren’t there anymore and I don’t know where they’re living now. The last two mayors, Anthony Williams and Adrian Fenty, their whole thing has been to try to make the place nice for people who are well off, and poor people don’t fit into that sort of scheme.
I read a recent guide called Frommer’s Irreverent Guide to Washington, D.C. It has a section telling visitors where they shouldn’t go, explaining how to “redline out the scary parts of Washington.” Is it odd to see whole parts of the city treated this way?
That’s for all of those tourists. And that’s for all of those people who come to work in government. Over there are all those niggers, you know, make sure you don’t go into those areas. When I was growing up there were a good number of middle class, working class black people. You won’t find them these days.
Do you feel proud about living in one of the great majority black cities in the United States?
I think that no matter what the color of the people I’d feel better if I thought everyone, especially the people who don’t have enough, were taken care of; if I felt that the government, the city government, the federal government were doing all that they could to help them.
When I go to readings around the country, people have been asking me about the baseball team. “Aren’t you excited about the Washington Nationals?” they say. Well, no, I’m not. I have a friend who’s been teaching elementary school for the last five or so years. I tell them that every year, she has to buy 500 dollars of school supplies for her kids, because she doesn’t have enough. She and I spoke last week, and she said actually it’s 2,000 dollars’ worth. I had been using the 500-dollar figure, because she and I had once gone into an Office Depot and that’s how much she spent. My problem is that you can be excited about the Redskins, excited about the Nationals, but the school system is going to pot.
But I do miss Washington when I’m away. When I was at graduate school, in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early eighties, I remember I was at a friend’s house, and he had cable. We were watching a news report about Washington, and there was just a shot of a street and I was overwhelmed with homesickness. … Despite the fact that I didn’t grow up in one particular neighborhood, there is a sense that it’s home.
Do you ever wish that you belonged to a state?
No, I think I’ve just wished that we had the same rights that everyone else has. I think that feeds into my pessimism. How can you march around the world and talk about how wonderful democracy is, when the people in the very capital of the so-called free world don’t have representation? I think it may have been ten years ago when this started, but D.C. license plates now have the phrase, “Taxation without representation.” I don’t have a car, but I think one of these days I’m going to find out a way to get one of those license plates just for myself.
THE 50 STATES IN NUMBERS
TABLE 1.
POPULATION
1. California 36,132,147
2. Texas 22,859,968
3. New York 19,254,630
4. Florida 17,789,864
5. Illinois 12,763,371
6. Pennsylvania 12,429,616
7. Ohio 11,464,042
8. Michigan 10,120,860
9. Georgia 9,072,576
10. New Jersey 8,717,925
11. North Carolina 8,683,242
12. Virginia 7,567,465
13. Massachusetts 6,398,743
14. Washington 6,287,759
15. Indiana 6,271,973
16. Tennessee 5,962,959
17. Arizona 5,939,292
18. Missouri 5,800,310
19. Maryland 5,600,388
20. Wisconsin 5,536,201
21. Minnesota 5,132,799
22. Colorado 4,665,177
23. Alabama 4,557,808
24. Louisiana 4,523,628
25. South Carolina 4,255,083
26. Kentucky 4,173,405
27. Oregon 3,641,056
28. Oklahoma 3,547,88
4
29. Connecticut 3,510,297
30. Iowa 2,966,334
31. Mississippi 2,921,088
32. Arkansas 2,779,154
33. Kansas 2,744,687
34. Utah 2,469,585
35. Nevada 2,414,807
36. New Mexico 1,928,384
37. West Virginia 1,816,856
38. Nebraska 1,758,787
39. Idaho 1,429,096
40. Maine 1,321,505
41. New Hampshire 1,309,940
42. Hawaii 1,275,194
43. Rhode Island 1,076,189
44. Montana 935,670
45. Delaware 843,524
46. South Dakota 775,933
47. Alaska 663,661
48. North Dakota 636,677
49. Vermont 623,050
50. Wyoming 509,294
SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, 2005
TABLE 2.
POPULATION INCREASE 1950–2000
1. Nevada 1,148.3%
2. Arizona 584.5%
3. Florida 476.7%
4. Alaska 387.3%
5. Colorado 224.6%
6. Utah 224.2%
7. California 220.0%
8. Texas 170.4%
9. New Mexico 167.0%
10. Washington 147.8%
11. Delaware 146.3%
12. Hawaii 142.4%
13. Georgia 137.7%
14. New Hampshire 131.7%
15. Maryland 126.1%