Love Thy Neighbor

In the short story "Bad Neighbors,"Edward P. Jones illustrates a story of the classism and prejudice a family experiences when they move into a "good" neighborhood. For the most part, this story excludes racism because the neighborhood is predominately black, because of this Jones leaves the reader with an excellent way to examine class within racial boundaries. I have chosen two quotes that contrast the meaning of being a "good" neighbor and beg the question of what being a "good" neighbor truly means. 

"He had heard, too, that the police there were brutes, straight out of the worst Southern towns, but he had come a long way since the boyhood days of helping his father deliver coal and ice throughout Washington. 'Dirty nigger coal man and his dirty nigger coal son,' children had called them. And that was in the colored neighborhoods of maids and shoeshiners and janitors and cooks and elevator operators. But he was a thousand lives from that now, even though he wasn't anybody's lawyer." (43)

"We are the future, Lane Stagg had proclaimed at a final dinner party at the Sheraton Hotel for the good neighbors. Who was left there now? Bad neighbors, her father had called those who came after them. Bad neighbors." (46)

Lane Stagg represents a man that has turned from his past and left his experiences completely in the dark. Even as a man that once excluded from his own neighborhood he cannot learn from his past and start a new, more kind cycle due to the shame he carries about what he once was, a working class boy from a working class family. The Stagg's have the opportunity to be "good" neighbors to the Benningtons, but instead exclude them into the judgmental, category of "bad" neighbors and attempt to replace them with "more agreeable people" (42). Although the other neighbors pasts are not examined, the reader can assume that at least some of them have come from hardship and discrimination, most likely racially or economically. The neighbors actions completely disregard the golden the rule, that all "good" people must follow, "do unto others what you would have them do to you" (Matthew 7:12). This causes the reader to examine who the "good" people really are in this story and how "good" people should behave. 

In the closing moments of the story, Derek Bennington and Sharon Palmer Stagg reconnect in the climactic moment of story. Derek acts a "good" neighbor and saves Sharon from a group of drunk boys attempting to sexually abuse her. In this moment Jones ironically makes the former "bad neighbor" into a "good neighbor" by being Sharon's savior. This again causes the reader to reexamine the meaning of "good" in this story.

What is Jones telling the reader about the Benningtons, or people like them, in the final moments of the story? What is Jones telling the reader about the "good neighbors"?