Trying to Get Lost in Edward P. Jones’s “Lost in the City”

 In Edward P. Jones’s “Lost in the City,” Lydia Walsh asks a cab driver to get her lost the morning her mother dies. The cab heads north from her town house in Southwest into Shaw, past the addresses of her childhood with her mother.

By Kenton Rambsy

Edward P. Jones builds “Lost in the City” around a cab ride from Lydia Walsh’s town house in Southwest to the Shaw neighborhood where her mother raised her in a majority Black neighborhood in DC.

The morning her mother dies, Lydia asks the driver to get her lost, and he heads north from her gated compound up 5th Street. At the old K Street market she wonders whether she ever wrote down her mother’s beef stew recipe, and at 1122 5th Street, where her father died, she remembers her mother telling him she loved him. The cab passes 457 Ridge Street and her mother’s house on O Street, then turns down Rhode Island Avenue past Frazier’s Funeral Home.

The driver thinks the side streets of Shaw will be unrecognizable to Lydia. Instead, the farther north he goes, the more she recognizes. Jones uses the driver’s mistake to fit her family’s history into one short ride.

As the cab pulls out of Southwest, Lydia remembers wanting to buy her mother a town house nearby and her mother doubting she could live among so many white people, saying, “I’m not used to their ways and such like you are, Lydia.” Her mother also knew people who lived in Southwest “before they threw the colored out and made it for the wealthy.” In 1980 Lydia’s Southwest census area was about 48 percent Black, while the Shaw blocks were 94 to 98 percent Black and DC as a whole was 70 percent.

By sending the cab up real DC streets, Jones turns Lydia’s attempt to get lost into a ride back through her younger life in Black DC.

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• Black Short Story Findings