Edward Jones: All Aunt Hagar's Children

The train did not stop for a very long time, after she had leaned her head against the window and fallen asleep about midnight. She was awakened a short time after the train left that station by a gentle shaking of her shoulder. She came to in a car of sleeping people. George was beside her. The train was all but dark. “Whatcha want from me, George?” There was no grogginess in her voice, only resolve. “Sayin I’m sorry.” “I want only to sleep now. I’m goin back home. I have a home to go back to.” “I know that, Anne. I know that bout you.” “Then let me be.” “Take my pology. I couldn’t mean anything more.” “I take your pology. Now let me sleep.” He was silent and she leaned her head back against the window. She had made her decision and everything was easy now. But as she neared the house of sleep, she sat up and said, “Your next woman down the line should not be treated like a child, George. Take that little piece of somethin and make somethin of your life with a nice woman, George. Try and do that. It won’t be hard. But me, I ain’t your child. I got only one father and he’s waitin for me in Mississippi.” “I know that, Anne. I know that. I’ll get you a ticket for home.” “I brought my own money, George.” He had had more words, but her last ones silenced him because they had such utter finality. I brought my own money. I will count off the days until I have a little peace, he thought. She returned to sleep and he sat and listened to the silence that was her sleeping. He was tempted to return to work even though he was free until morning, but he was now paralyzed by her words. Anne had thought they were far from Washington. She did not realize that they were way beyond the middle of Virginia. George stayed at her side. He did not know what else to do. Another man, someone with a living marriage and a wife still loving, would have stayed there, if only to wake his wife from some trifle of a nightmare, a little reassurance to her as they built the foundation of their life together. But that was a sweet chore he would no longer have. About two hours before dawn, George, after nearly a day and five hours mostly on his feet, went to sleep. Immediately, he began grinding—“gritting” as Anne’s mother called it—his teeth. More than an hour before dawn, Anne woke to find his head leaning softly on her shoulder. He could control many things about himself while awake, but sleep set him adrift. She pushed him away, back fully into his seat. His teeth began gritting again and he commenced talking almost in whispers in his sleep. “I’ll do it,” he said, “I’ll clean every barn before I sleep, master. No need for that thing. No need for that again. I’ll do it. I told yall I’d do it all.”

The sounds of the other sleepers now came to her as well, and there were many who were also talking in their sleep. Men and women speaking whole thoughts. A shout or two. A plea. Even the white man was talking as he slept, but not the Negro woman who was his wife. She, like all the children in the car, was dreaming in silence while the others talked. Sang. One sermon. Why, Anne wondered, had the previous nights been quiet? Why now, when the journey for many was nearing its end?

George began a gentle struggling, a man at the beginning of a job that would take far longer than he was telling the man in his nightmare. Anne turned and listened to him. “I’ll spic it and then I’ll span it, master,” he moaned. She shivered as she listened to him and the others in the car. “Close eyes, wait by side of mule, child, and angel come down for us like promise,” the man across from Anne whispered. She shivered again, the way she had as a small girl when her oldest brother told her and their siblings ghost stories way deep in the night forest. “You done done it and you know you done done it,” a woman far behind her hissed. “Why crucify me with them lies?” It was, in its way, like being on a train with talking dead people. So many times, her oldest brother had had to pick her up and carry her, shivering and crying, out of the night forest. “Please, don’t tell Mama,” he would say of scaring his siblings with his ghost stories. But she and her siblings had always gone into the dark of the forest of their own free will. “Don’t tell Papa.” “Master, please…,” George said. She took his head and laid it in her lap. She closed her eyes but she did not return to sleep. That was over. A little more than a half hour before dawn, she reached up and touched the window with all the fingers of one hand, and the entire train seemed to stop its shaking and rattling. “There,” she said as if the train could hear, as if it had granted some final wish. “There…” To get to where she was now in Virginia, it had taken three trains. She wondered how many it would take to return home, to arrive at a life without George.

Anne was not at all a morbid person, but it occurred to her quite simply that wherever it was she would die, it would not be in Mississippi. Within seconds of that thought, the train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great-grandmother to twins. George’s teeth ceased their gritting and Anne brushed the back of her hand against his cheek. The train slowed. “Mama, I’m a long way from home,” Anne whispered into the darkness and confusion. “Papa, I’m a long way from home.”

I am grateful—once more—to my editor, Dawn L. Davis (mother to Bijah), and to Rockelle Henderson and Jane Beirn at HarperCollins.

To Lil Coyne, Shirley Grossman, Marcia Shia, and Aslaug Johansen.

To Eric Simonoff (father of Henry and Lucy), my agent.

To Cressida Leyshon, Deborah Treisman, and David Remnick at The New Yorker.

I am especially thankful for the support and encouragement from the Lannan Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International -IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World ; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of short stories, Lost in the City , won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.