Reading is Writing #9: Lost in the City
Clocking in at the grocery store.
Whenever I read books set in Washington, or Boston, or New Haven I get a little overexcited.
This is because I first came to literature as a “realist,” and, like all realists, I have a middlebrow obsession with what actually is/was. So in stories I look for bits of the real. Edward Jones’ 1992 short story collection, Lost in the City, takes place substantially in the areas where I’ve lived the last five years. The stories in this collection run from the late 40’s through to the early 1990’s,
Jones’ Washington is physically the same place as my Washington. Like several of Jones’ characters, I have spent many a contemplative moment on the brick wall outside Cardozo High School, which affords the best view of Washington of any point in the city.
But Jones’ city and my city are not the same place.* The city Jones described was majority black and possessed a substantial, if embattled, industrial workforce that existed in parallel to the service workers and professionals dependent on the American state and its immediate adjuncts for their living. Washington now is a plurality white city with an economy almost entirely dependent on the Federal government, the management and analysis of international capital, and meds-and-eds. There are still traces of Jones’ city in the rent-controlled buildings, the immigrant neighborhoods, the remnants of black majority neighborhoods. But these are small traces, erased a little bit every time someone calls Malcolm X park “Meridian Hill,” or describes 16th and U streets NW as “AdMo.”
One of Jones’ best stories is a close look at one neighborhood as its economic basis (measured by the health of a grocery store) erodes. That story, The Store is also a wonderful character study. I also love it because I worked for a time as the closing produce clerk in a grocery store, my first, and to date only, union job (UFCW Local 1445), and I have a sentimental attachment to retail work.
Lost in the City
Edward P. Jones’ short story “The Store,” collected in Lost in the City, follows one young black man in 1960s Washington D.C. as he searches for work, finds it at a corner grocery, and then sticks with the job as it reshapes his life. It’s a good story for a lot of reasons, particularly the restraint Jones employs when describing the narrator’s relationship to his employer, Penny. I’ll trace that relationship between the narrator and his employer here, because Jones’ character work is fairly subtle, and because I need to practice writing about how authors develop character relationships.
At the beginning of “The Store,” the narrator is down-on-his luck and pissed off, living with his mother after being laid off from a print-shop. His father worked at the same print-shop until his death. After seeing an ad for work at a store in the newspaper, the narrator shows up and discusses the job with Penelope (Penny) Jenkins, the store owner. She seems to discourage him from taking the job. “The work is from eight in the mornin til eight in the evening. Every day but Sunday and maybe a holiday here and there,” Penny tells the narrator on page 82. Despite the long hours and low pay ($30 a week, equal to about $320 dollars or $4.40 an hour using the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator) the unnamed narrator ultimately accepts the job, but he does so without a conscious decision. He goes to work the next day also without thinking: “I figured I just wouldn’t show up, but on Tuesday morning, way long before dawn, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep,” (82). His early work for her has an antagonistic quality, he works very hard the first week to impress her so that, when he stops working, she will miss him. He manages to succeed at the first part of this plan: “You surprised me, and no one in the world surprises me anymore,” (85). But when he comes back after no-call, no-showing for two days in the second week, Penny reasserts her power over him by not reacting to his absence or to his presence. Instead, she laughs when he injures himself. That degree of gleeful, semi-sadistic antagonism persists for months, yet the narrator persists: “But each Monday morning, like a whipped dog that stayed because he didn’t know any other master but the one that whipped him, I was at the store’s front door.” (87).
Penny is widowed and the narrator starts the story single, but their relationship never takes a romantic turn—she is older than him by some thirty years. It does become more complicated as he slots uneasily into a professional role once filled by her late husband and son. Despite being her employee, the narrator becomes something of a partner to Penny. This starts slowly: he jokes with her, she gives him a raise. But as he stays longer and longer, they become something resembling equals, despite her ownership of the store. When people in the neighborhood ask her to be godmother to children, they ask the narrator to be godfather. Jones shows this equality both by pairing them and by tying the narrator, who starts the story unwilling to leave his house, into the life of the neighborhood. He becomes something more than a disposable unit of labor power in the stores, and grows to be an integral part of a specific community. He meets a girl, Kentucky Connors, and begins to court her. For a time Jones lets the narrator and Kentucky grow into a comfortable black petit bourgeois couple, with the narrator gradually taking over the grocery store from an aging Penny. But Jones denies the resolution implied by that initial trajectory. The store demands more of the narrator than Kentucky is willing to tolerate. All through this book, the friendships and quasi familial relationships are dynamic and unbalanced. They break themselves apart as soon as they start to move, and their initial conditions are irretrievable.
Penny accidentally runs over a child, the daughter of a woman who buys everything on credit. The mother of the dead child accuses Penny of intending to kill the girl. Penny retreats from the day-to-day running of the store. With the narrator now acting as manager, Penny meets with him once a week to discuss the events. These meetings happen all over Washington, always far from the store.
The narrator begins to grow in his self-control and his confidence over this period: “when I began to see how important our meetings were [to Penny], I began to set aside some reserve during the day for that night’s meeting,” (98) he becomes part owner and makes changes to the store now that she avoids it. But his attachment to Penny and the store, while giving him self-confidence and a sense of control, also eat away at his other relationships; he often sleeps at work rather than walk to Kentucky’s. This eventually destroys his relationship with Kentucky.
Jones often handles moments of high drama by stating outright what has happened before proceeding to a description of the event (see the title of “The Night Rhonda Rhonda Ferguson Was Killed,”). Jones uses a variation of this technique to produce one of my favorite moments in any book I’ve read this term, which I’ll quote here at length:
At one point, I stood to stretch and looked out the O Street window to see Penny, with shorter hair and in her apron, looking in at me. I smiled and waved furiously and she smiled and waved back. I started from behind the counter and happened to look out the 5th Street window and saw my father coming toward me. When I saw that he too had on an apron, I realized that my mind, exhausted from a long day, was only playing tricks.
I do not know what would’ve happened had Penny not decided to sell. (103)
Jones shifts from a quiet moment of confused attachment to a fact that alters the dramatic situation of the story entirely. This is effectively the end of his relationship with Penny. The narrator’s father died before the start of the story, and his reappearance here sets up Penny’s departure and the closure of the store. His father had got him his first job, but died before he was laid off. There’s a structural resonance between the father-death-layoff and Penny killing a child, leaving the store and then selling it. It’s not quite parallel, but it illustrates the almost fatherly role Penny has taken on.
The narrator has a final conversation with Penny down the block: “From meetings far, far from the neighborhood, we had now come to one that was just down the street from the store.” (103). As his first job once made his world large, then confined him to his room with its loss, so this job made his world larger, then gradually shrank it until his life fit into the backroom of a grocery that wasn’t even his. But he has changed, morally and materially, grown more confident, more ambitious. Penny gives him enough money that he can enroll at Georgetown. So the loss of this second job and the whole world it once opened, doesn’t constrain him as the “first slave” did. Instead, through his relationships with Penny and with Kentucky, he’s set free, in a sense.
Some housekeeping notes of interest to readers:
It is the busy season at my job, later this month, I will be covering a major industry conference for work. Because this neatly aligns with the end of Bennington’s semester, I will not be missing a week. It is possible, however, that I will miss a week because I have an unfortunate habit of getting severely ill right at the start of the summer. With that in mind, this is the tentative schedule for the next several weeks:
May 15: Reading is Writing 10: Michael Knight’s Eveningland
May 22: Reading is Writing 11: A barbecue of dogs, hogs and wives (Last days of the Dog Men round 2)
May 29 (tentative): A reflection on my first semester as an MFA student
June 5: Do Whatever You Want All the Time: Ferris Bueller is the American National Epic (this post will be the first subscriber-only piece, and it is likely that once every 4-6 weeks from now on one post will have a paywall.)
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*Until very recent history, all or nearly all cities had a much higher death rate than birth rate. What this means is that for the first 9,200 years (give or take) of urban history, it almost never made sense to speak of a city as having a continuous, native population. The city drew its people from the countryside, from other cities, from the constant stream of trade from far flung lands and nearby satellite settlements. The idea, then, that a city has a permanent population does not have its origin in urban history. The city is for everyone. But there can still be injustice in that fact.