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| In Edward P. Jones’s “A New Man,” Woodrow Cunningham searches DC for his missing daughter, from R Street and U Street in Northwest to 21st Street off Benning Road in Northeast. In 1980 those census areas were 95 to 99 percent Black, in a city that was 70 percent Black. |
Woodrow comes home early and finds his fifteen-year-old daughter, Elaine, skipping school with two boys and smoking in the apartment, and he slaps her. Soon after, she runs away from their apartment on R Street in Northwest. For months he and his wife, Rita, search together, starting at the police station at 16th and V Streets, and Rita’s map of the search reaches Petworth, Lincoln Park and Anacostia before she takes it down in late April.
Woodrow keeps going and carries Elaine’s picture into a young mother’s home on U Street a few blocks from R Street, an old woman’s home on Harvard Street about a mile north and a man’s place on 21st Street off Benning Road, nearly three miles east. The search keeps him away from Rita, and he begins to tell a different version of events every time she asks, “What happened? Whatcha say to her?” In Jones’s words, “the more places he visited the more places he wanted to see.”
Geotagging the homes Woodrow enters shows the search spreading from a few blocks to nearly three miles from R Street, through census areas that were 95 to 99 percent Black in 1980, when DC was 70 percent Black. The map keeps growing after the couple moves to Independence Avenue in Southeast, where Woodrow leaves Rita at home on a freezing night and wonders whether to walk down 15th Street to a house he has not visited. Mapped together, these places show Jones using one father’s search to take readers inside Black homes across the city.
Jones uses Woodrow’s widening route through DC to show a grieving father becoming the new man of the title. Related:
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