Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007
Black Wisdom
By Darryl Pinckney
All Aunt Hagar's Children
by Edward P. Jones
Amistad, 399 pp., $25.95
Washington, D.C., the black city, is the setting of the stories in Edward P. Jones's extraordinary first collection, Lost in the City (1992), and Washington is the haven escaped or freed slaves have found their way to at the end of his highly original, Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Known World (2004). The stories in his new book, All Aunt Hagar's Children, return to the nation's capital on the banks of the Potomac that the black surveyor Benjamin Banneker first mapped out. Washington isn't described in Jones's stories. It just is; a gathering of nostalgia-producing addresses, locations. An ex-convict realizes that
Review, 3050 words
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