“The Curious Alphabet of Our Lives”: Transgenerational and Vicarious Childhood Trauma in Edward P. Jones’s “Spanish in the Morning” and “Common Law”

In two of the most powerful stories from Edward P. Jones’s second collection of short fiction, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006), a young girl exhibits physical symptoms of trauma after her exposure to violence. Jones links each child’s individual terror to the legacies of fear and oppression marking the Black experience in America. The children’s repressed memories of racial trauma assume the role of a “foreign presence in the self,” one which they cannot access consciously nor explain in words. By invoking images of slavery and lynching, Jones suggests that the girls’ witnessing of violence triggers deeply buried ancestral knowledge of American racism. The child in each story, unable to articulate her experience verbally, reaches those around her through the “curious alphabet” of her bodily responses to traumatic memory. In both “Spanish in the Morning” and “Common Law,” Jones, providing a note of hope in his disturbing portrayal of transgenerational trauma, affirms the enduring strength and compassion of the embattled Black community in enabling the children to begin the process of recovery.