Shining City, Tarnished Dreams

Most of them are still intimately connected to the rural, small-town South from which they or their forebears came to Washington, but they live very different lives. In "Tapestry," the young woman and her new husband ride in a crowded train car: "They shared food, they shared stories about home, about Southern places that would be the foundation of their lives in the North. None of them could know that the cohesion born and nurtured in the South would be but memory in less than two generations." In the South, they imagine Washington as Shangri-La, a place "where, South Carolina old folks said, people threw away their dishes after every meal because it was cheaper to buy new ones." The sleeping-car porter in "Tapestry" says:

"They treat colored people like kings and queens in Washington, cause thas where the president lives. Would they treat colored people anything but good in a city where the president hangs his hat and pets his dog and snores beside Mrs. President every night? Now would they? ... No. Course not. They wouldn't do such a thing to us."

But of course they do. Some of the trouble comes from without, some from within: "Two weeks ago a woman on New Jersey Avenue returning home from work had been robbed and hit twice in the head with a gun, the worst crime many had heard about in some time. Roxanne was realizing that Washington was getting less and less safe for people like her. The good and the decent. Men with little in their pockets had done the city in." A preacher looks out on his congregation: "It might have been all the grandparents he saw before him, all the people who had struggled into old age only to find themselves parents once again.... All of them the kind of people the preacher had built his rock on. The world was turned upside down when the mature ones were forced to do what the younger ones should be doing."

One is far more aware of this altered and diminished Washington in these stories than in the stories of 14 years ago in Lost in the City. From the vantage point of a farm in North Carolina or Mississippi a couple of generations ago, Washington may have looked like Gold Mountain, but now it looks quite different: still offering hope and happiness, but riskier, tougher, crueler.

Yet this, as Jones sees it, is an obstacle, not a dead end. These people are in it for the long run. They persevere. One of them says: "We want, we rage, we desire, we fail, we succeed. We stand in that long, long line." Another says: "The heart can be cruel, the heart can be wicked, the heart can give joy ... but it is always an instrument we can never understand." Or, as that same character thought when she was nearly seven decades younger: "Her heart was breaking, but that was in the nature of hearts, she told herself.... It was also in their nature to heal for however long it took, six months, a year, two years."

None of these people has it easy. Some of them fail, some suffer heavy losses, some die in violent or untimely ways. Some, too, are granted a measure of absolution and grace, such as a grandfather and grandson who somehow reach across a great distance and touch each other. Jones is an honest writer but also a kind one. He loves the people whom he brings to life, including those who clearly vex or infuriate him. The stories of All Aunt Hagar's Children, like all his previous work, radiate decency, humanity and an abiding faith in human possibility.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj@washpost.com.