Northwest and Jones’s Short Fiction
Jones draws a map of Washington D.C. in his stories that presents readers with a vivid image of Chocolate City. Lost in the City complicates the contemporary discussion of gentrification as readers are presented with thriving Black communities in D.C., especially in the Northwest quadrant. He solidifies his representation of D.C. as Chocolate City by consistently tagging individual streets, landmarks, and the Northwest quadrant as the focus for the action and grounding environment for his characters.
The Northwest (NW) quadrant represents the center of daily life for the characters. Most of the characters in the stories attached their memories of D.C. to their lives in NW; for example, Joyce in “The Night Rhonda Ferguson was Killed” and “His Mother’s House” moves into an apartment on M Street in NW when she’s pregnant with her son as a teenager and then moves into a new house down the block which her son buys her, establishing this location within NW as the root of her story throughout her life.
NW, compared to the other quadrants, is the most common location for plot and character development. The majority of neighborhoods and landmarks mentioned are located in NW as can be seen from the chart below. Even in the stories that have settings at other quadrants, NW is central in Jones’ D.C. geography.
This chart reveals information about place settings in Jones’s two short story collections totaling to 28 stories. The various shades of green represent each of D.C.’s four quadrants. In the top left corner, the pie chart represents the percentages of times a specific quadrant appears across his two collections of short stories. To the right, the various boxes represent location types ranging from homes and neighborhoods to schools and churches. The larger the box, the more times a particular setting was used in a specific quadrant. Hovering over each box reveals the percentage of times the location was used in that quadrant. The bottom chart offers another visualization of the same information in the form of bar charts. This representation ranks the order of location types Jones features in his collections.
D.C. caters to pedestrian life in some locations, especially NW, however, journeying through the city is not as easy as Jones childhood memories show. Street names and landmarks may serve as guide posts, yet some character appear to be detached from their city and these streets are often transformed when businesses, and even the streets themselves, are converted. Unlike Betsy Ann in “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” who “came to know the city so well that had she been blindfolded and taken to practically any place in Washington, even as far away as Anacostia or Georgetown, in “Young Lions,” Caesar cannot make his way through the city without the help of his address book. Similarly, in “A New Man”, Rita Cunningham hangs a large map of D.C. in the kitchen to map the search for her daughter overwhelmed by the largeness of the city beyond her known world.
The risk of getting lost in the city echoes in the background of the majority of the stories. Interestingly, being lost is mostly attached to gender. Gender also plays a role in determining movement across the city. Female characters moving alone make up 49% of the movement in NW, while male characters, on the other hand, move 34% of the time. This mobile disparity indicates that Jones empowers female characters to move and speak through his writing. Interestingly, the difference is reversed outside NW, suggesting that this freedom is limited to the confines of the established community for women, while men move more freely throughout the city. The data illustrates NW having the highest percentage of characters’ movements while mobility is more limited outside this locus. Walking in NW reaches approximately 29% compared to driving which only makes up 10% of the movement within NW; characters only need to drive if forced outside their geographic community. The stories themselves thus map the changes of the city for Jones’s readers. This map shows that changes brought on by gentrification not only affected the demographics of the city, but it also influenced the ways people move within it.