An Interview with Edward P. Jones - Interview

African American Review, Spring, 2000 by Lawrence P. Jackson

Jones: A lot of the stuff that I read in the daily newspapers doesn't have an impact on me. I think I'm writing about a world that really doesn't exist anymore. In "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons," the school teacher lives across the street, and the doctor lives down the street, along with a variety of people. That kind of world doesn't exist anymore. It's the kind of world where all the adults know all the children even if they've never spoken to that child. It's what happens to Betsy Ann when she goes to the Peoples Drugstore and this woman who has never said a word to her knows her and speaks to her. Many of the influences on my life occurred before I was welve, and that's the world I'm trying to recapture. It would be a little hard for me to mention Go-Go music or to write a story about that because that's not the world that I remember. My world is in "The Night Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed" and the kind of songs that they sing. In the end, of course, there are the emotions that we're dealing with.

It's almost impossible for me to create a colorful world that isn't in the 1960s or 1950s. I can do it when I have to, like with "His Mother's House," which deals with a drug situation that wasn't around in the 1950s or 1960s. I can push myself. But generally it's an earlier kind of world. There's the icecream truck and the guy with the big heels that you can buy. There's penny candy and people work. My memories of the 1960s inspired me to write about the older woman, Miss Etta, in "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons." My family lived in a certain place and then we moved. There was a man who had lived in our old building, and he never said anything. Maybe once I said "Hello" to him, and he said "Hello" to me. Several years later some K Street friends of mine and I used to like to go roaming during the day. This old neighbor was a daytime watchman, and I remember he was sitting at a desk. I looked up at him and we could see this soda behind some bars and a friend of mine took the soda and we ran. I didn't really car e because it had been several years since I had seen this man, and he didn't know me, and if he knew who I was, he couldn't remember. This was a Saturday. That Saturday night, my mother, who worked at a restaurant washing dishes, got home around eleven o'clock, and my sister and I were already in bed. Lo and behold my mother had gone to the old building where this guy lived to see a lady named Miss Cora. She had seen the watchman and he had told her what happened. My mother grabbed me out of the bed and gave me a beating. (Laughter) . It was like "Everybody knows what I'm doing." You get a little paranoid, and that's how it worked. "I'm going to tell your mother" meant something to kids. Adults could give you a beating and then you came home and your parents gave you another beating.

Jackson: Your work includes a wide variety of black folk sayings from down-home. I wonder where some of that comes from.

Jones: I think almost all of it comes from my mother. If she told me to sweep the floor and I went in and did it for ten seconds, she'd say, "You didn't work on that as long as Pat stayed in the Army." When I needed a haircut she'd say, "Your head looks like a sheep's behind," and things like that. I remember black people's poetic language. "One monkey don't stop no show." "Every good-bye ain't gone." "Come day go day." If you were talking about somebody who really didn't care or paid too much attention to the way he or she went through life--every day the same--you would say, "Come day go day." Over years and years you absorb all of this stuff. I had a white friend at UVa whose mother had died. I shared this phrase with her and she eventually wrote a story, but she got the phrase wrong because it wasn't of her life. The phrase is "The wellest day you ever had, you're sick enough to die." You're in perfect health and you walk out into the street and you get hit by a bus and you're sick enough to die. I grew u p with this wonderful way of talking. One of the things I remember about reading Zora Neale Hurston was that in certain novels you hear it too much. If you have lines like that in every paragraph, it's too rich.