By Kenton Rambsy
Edward P. Jones’s stories preserve a literary record of Black people and places in Washington, D.C., allowing readers to revisit neighborhoods that have changed dramatically over the last half century.
I matched the 403 DC places Jones names in his two story collections, Lost in the City (1992) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), to census records. The neighborhoods around those places lost their Black majorities faster than the city overall. In 1970, 70 percent of his places sat in majority Black neighborhoods, about the same as the 72 percent of DC neighborhoods that were majority Black. By 2020, only 20 percent of the neighborhoods around Jones’s places were majority Black, compared with 37 percent citywide.
Literary geotagging, that is, tracking the real places a writer names and connecting them to geographic data, helps reveal changes that are difficult to see from the stories alone. Jones makes this approach especially productive because his characters live on named streets, shop at named stores, and travel through identifiable neighborhoods. With my research assistants, the Data Rangers, I annotated these places and connected them to Open Data D.C. census records across several decades.
Half the settings in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” from Lost in the City fall on one block of Myrtle Street NE, a street the city closed in the 1960s. That neighborhood was 81 percent Black in 1950 and 18 percent Black in 2020.
In the title story, Lydia Walsh’s cab passes the Ridge Street block where her family lived. It was 95 percent Black around 1980, when the story is set, and 43 percent Black by 2020.
The census counts who left. Jones’s help us imagine and remember what life was like on those blocks.
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