Edward P. Jones, a Black Storytelling Demographer

This article expands the scholarship on Edward P. Jones by highlighting his abundant character and spatial depictions while at the same time situating analyses of his work at the intersection of African American literary studies and digital humanities. Specifically, this contribution examines Jones’s depiction of two characters, Anita Hughes and Caesar Matthews, across his two collections in order to highlight Jones’s remarkable attention to detail—an innovation in Black short fiction. By including such a high number of characters and presenting so many places, Jones expands the density of Black representation and accentuates the nuance of a distinct geographic locale (Washington D.C.) in short fiction. This analysis draws from a dataset on Jones’s short fiction that identifies the hundreds of characters that appear in his works. The dataset tracks character interactions and charts their movements across various settings. This comprehensive documentation of people and places makes it possible to consider the details and totality of Jones’s work.