An Interview with Edward P. Jones - Interview

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

I just wanted to use this structure where you can't tell what's going to happen in the end. So, you have the main character Vivian who is living the kind of life that a lot of people think is very nice. When she gets to the church everyone is talking about how handsome her husband is, and no one knows he's dying of cancer or that sometimes, when she comes back from the church on Sunday, he has peed in the chair.

She began her life in the South with certain expectations. There were unspoken promises of courtship and the guy would come up and have lemonade with the family and always take off his hat. Vivian closes a very long day and her friend Diane McCollough gets in a car, and for that moment when the light is on a man takes off his hat. It reminds her of everything that she was promised, none of which has come true. She was left with taking these people to their houses and then going home to a man that was dying. It didn't matter that the boyfriend in the car taking off the hat could have been a bastard. She only knew that single moment which somehow commented on all that she had received in her life.

I think she's rather vain, which prevents her from telling anyone about her husband. She feels that she has attained a certain something in life which really isn't all that it's cracked up to be. I forget how I described her job, but it's not as if she's in an upper tier. She's somewhere in the middle. If you looked really hard at other things m her life you could see a facade. The reader can see that it crumbles when she sees the man in the car; then she becomes hostile.

I wasn't really going for gospel, because I don't like it, but for truth. For a moment in their lives, no matter what's going on, the singing alleviates some of the pain. Anita carries the burden of her father not speaking to her because she's unmarried and living with a man. And so for a little bit on Sunday she relieves the pain of her father not speaking to her. I could have done the same thing for the blind woman, but I would have upset the balance of the story. But the religious singing does something for them. The piano player has a drinking good time all Saturday night, but he's there playing the piano on Sunday morning. It Fulfills a need in their lives.

Lawrence P. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he teaches courses in African American literature and culture. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University in June of 1997 and is completing a biography of Ralph Ellison. He was a fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard in 1999, and his work has been published in Stanford Review, Massachusetts Review, and Baltimore Magazine.