Wideman, John Edgar 1941–
John Edgar Wideman 1941-
American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and memoirist.
For additional information on Wideman's career, see Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1.
INTRODUCTION
Wideman is best known for his short stories and novels that trace the lives of several generations of families in and around Homewood, a black ghetto district of Pittsburgh. In these fictional works, his dominant thematic concern involves the individual's quest for self-understanding amidst personal memories and African American experiences. Most critics assert that Wideman's blend of Western and African American literary traditions constitutes a distinctive voice in American literature.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Wideman was born in 1941 in Washington, D.C., and spent his early years in Homewood, a section of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This area has been a recurring setting for his later fiction. His family eventually moved to Shadyside, a more prosperous section of Pittsburgh, and he attended the integrated Peabody High School. After graduation, Wideman attended the University of Pennsylvania on a basketball scholarship, and received his B.A. in English in 1963. He was selected as the first black Rhodes scholar since Alain Locke in 1905. In England, Wideman studied eighteenth-century literature and the early development of the novel. He graduated from New College, Oxford University, in 1966, the same year he accepted a fellowship at the prestigious University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In 1967, his first novel, A Glance Away, was published. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wideman was an assistant basketball coach, professor of English, and founder and director of the Afro-American studies program at the University of Pennsylvania; in fact, he became that university's first African American tenured professor. He has also served as a professor of English at the University of Wyoming and the University of Massachusetts. In addition to these duties, he has been a curriculum consultant to secondary schools nationwide since 1968. Wideman has received many awards for his work, including both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the American Book Award for his novel Philadelphia Fire (1990), and a MacArthur fellowship in 1993.
MAJOR WORKS
Wideman's first two novels, A Glance Away and Hurry Home (1970), center on protagonists who are haunted by their pasts and who engage in a search for self. Both novels emphasize the theme of isolation and the importance of friendship in achieving self-awareness. In A Glance Away, a rehabilitated drug addict returns to his home, where he renews family and social ties while trying to avoid re-addiction; in Hurry Home, a black law school graduate seeks cultural communion with white society by traveling to Europe, then reaffirms his black heritage in Africa. These characters find hope for the future only by confronting their personal and collective pasts. In The Lynchers (1973), a black activist group that plans to kill a white policeman in hopes of sparking widespread racial conflict is defeated by internal distrust and dissension. Wideman's The Homewood Trilogy (1985), which comprises the short story collection Damballah (1981) and the novels Hiding Place (1981) and Sent for You Yesterday (1983), utilizes deviating time frames, African American dialect, and rhythmic language to explore life in the Homewood area of Pitts- burgh. The interrelated stories of Damballah feature several characters who reappear in the novels and relate tales of the descendants of Wideman's ancestor, Sybela Owens. Hiding Place concerns a boy's strong ties to his family and his involvement in a petty robbery that results in an accidental killing. In Sent for You Yesterday, Wideman put forth the argument that creativity and imagination are important means to transcend despair and strengthen the common bonds of race, culture, and class. The novel received the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. The eponymous narrator of Wideman's next novel, Reuben (1987), is an ambiguous and enigmatic figure who provides inexpensive legal aid to the residents of Homewood. These experiences provide insight into human relationships and the racial dynamic in twentieth-century America.
Race-related strife, violence, and identity are prominent themes in Fever (1989). In the collection's title story, Wideman juxtaposed present-day racism in Philadelphia, a city once offering freedom for slaves through the Underground Railroad, with a narrative set during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. In the novel Philadelphia Fire (1990), Wideman combined fact and fiction to elaborate on an actual incident involving MOVE, a militant, heavily armed black commune that refused police orders to vacate a Philadelphia slum house in 1985. With the approval of W. Wilson Goode, the city's black mayor, police bombed the house from a helicopter, killing eleven commune members—including five children—and creating a fire that razed more than fifty houses. The book's narrator, Cudjoe, a writer and former Rhodes scholar living in self-imposed exile on a Greek island, returns to his native city upon hearing about the incident to search for a young boy who was seen fleeing the house following the bombing. This fictionalized narrative is juxtaposed with Wideman's address to his own son, who was sentenced to life in prison at eighteen years of age for killing another boy while on a camping trip. The tales in All Stories Are True (1992) are autobiographical in nature and concern such themes as storytelling, family history, and memory. In Fatheralong (1994), Wideman again juxtaposed his own personal life with universal concerns. In this volume, he examined his strained relationship with his father and his difficulties with his own son, then placed these interactions within the context of all father-son relationships and America's history of racism.
Wideman combined elements of history, religion, and race to form the story in his novel The Cattle Killing (1996); the narrator's memories of his childhood in Philadelphia are woven together with the plight of blacks in the city in the late eighteenth century and the story of the South African Xhosa tribe. His next novel, Two Cities, (1998), chronicles the story of Kassima, a widow still mourning the death of her two sons and husband on the streets of Pittsburgh. When she meets the mysterious Robert Jones, Kassima must confront her own pain and inability to open her heart again. Kassima's story is intertwined with that of her tenant's, Mr. Mallory, whose poignant photographs record the violence and despair that characterize black urban life in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh in the late twentieth century. Hoop Roots (2001) traces the development of basketball to a worldwide sports phenomenon and contains a meditation on the importance of basketball to the African American community. The stories of God's Gym (2005) provide an unadulterated and nuanced view of family, sexual, racial, and personal relationships. In his 2008 novel, Fanon, Wideman synthesized fiction, history, and memoir in a narrative revolving around the life of psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. The first section of the novel touches on aspects of Fanon's life story, including his experiences as an Algerian freedom fighter and his death in a Maryland hospital; in the second, Thomas, a novelist and screenwriter, struggles to write a screenplay based on Fanon's life; and in the final section, a character named John Edgar Wideman realizes his growing obsession with Fanon and reflects on events in his own life, such as the incarceration of his brother and his mother's declining health.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics contend that Wideman's unique combination of fact, fiction, myth, and history has allied him with the modernist tradition and solidified his reputation as a leading American author. Many reviewers concur that his blending of European and black literary traditions constitutes a distinctive voice in American literature. Commentary on Wideman's strengths as a writer often focuses on the lyrical quality he manages to maintain in his prose even while he forges intricate layers of theme and plot and intermixes fact with fiction. This has led some critics to call his fiction complex and his technique experimental. Other scholars have praised his novels and short stories for the insight they provide not only into personal concerns but also into broad societal issues. In addition, his fiction has received acclaim for how it evidences his literary mastery over his material, with several critics remarking on how Wideman's highly literate style is in sharp contrast to his gritty subject matter. In assessing his short stories, numerous critics have compared Wideman to William Faulkner and have lauded the ways in which his novels and short fiction address both the role of the African American artist in society and the author's personal evolution as a writer and an individual.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
A Glance Away (novel) 1967
Hurry Home (novel) 1970
The Lynchers (novel) 1973
Damballah (short stories) 1981
Hiding Place (novel) 1981
Sent for You Yesterday (novel) 1983
Brothers and Keepers (memoir) 1984
*The Homewood Trilogy (novels and short fiction) 1985; also published as The Homewood Books, 1992
Reuben (novel) 1987
Fever: Twelve Stories (short stories) 1989
Philadelphia Fire (novel) 1990
The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (short stories) 1992; published as All Stories Are True 1993
Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society (nonfiction) 1994
The Cattle Killing (novel) 1996
Two Cities: A Love Story (novel) 1998
Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love (memoir) 2001
The Island: Martinique (travel memoir) 2003
God's Gym (short stories) 2005
Fanon: A Novel (novel) 2008
*Includes Damballah, Hiding Place, and Sent for You Yesterday.
CRITICISM
Jacqueline Berben-Masi (essay date summer 1999)
SOURCE: Berben-Masi, Jacqueline. "Prodigal and Prodigy: Fathers and Sons in Wideman's Work." Callaloo 22, no. 3 (summer 1999): 676-84.
[In the essay below, Berben-Masi analyzes the function and significance of the father-prodigal son relationship in Fatheralong.]
The current critical wave in France having recognized the autobiographical novel as its love child, I would like to extend the parameters to include a non-fictional work, albeit one whose material may well be transformed into fiction. My interest is the product of the writer's creative efforts in what is ostensibly an expository or a rhetorical domain. I want to study the figure of the author in the dialogue between himself and the reader, the roles the latter is implicitly expected to assume, and the outcome of this relationship in terms of a psychology of writing as well as an art. In adopting this approach, I closely follow François Dosse's study on Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault (11-43).
I set myself two tasks. The simpler is to identify the underlying structural patterns that give unity to the work as it echoes phenomena specific to the African-American experience. The more complex is to catch the author, or rather his persona, in the act of creating himself. Clues come from the primary experience he chooses to transcribe here, indicating selection and, at times, self-censure. In the role of chief enunciator of the text at the moment of its apprehension by the reader, the author persona operates within a traditional framework, one that lets me as reader anticipate implicit contracts. Following in the traces of Maurice Couturier, I take a fresh look at the implied author as a figure, a "fictional" construct insofar as he is the result of a filtering process, both conscious and unconscious (La Figure de l'Auteur 7-24, 59, 162, 167). How he manipulates the paradigms with which he has invested the genre, how he draws on different registers, crosses over categories, all to communicate his message, how he innovates his approach to direct interaction with the reader in a personalized essay form are all germane to my inquiry.
Perhaps as a result of rereading Mikhail Bakhtin, I found my two tasks overlapping. The deep pattern and the author-narrator persona influenced and enriched one another. Much like the earliest novels, Fatheralong accommodates many moods, modes, and styles. It combines sequences of provocation, self-searching, healing, and acceptance; it rallies support through the direct address to the reader who is apostrophized at every turn; it sounds a call to arms to unify the disparate readership into a militant corps; its modals of obligation repeatedly exhort us to face the challenge of eradicating race from the national consciousness, of establishing "terms of achievement not racially determined" (xxii). Added to this fiery sermon, there is an exemplum in confessional form: the genealogical search is a modest response to that challenge; the author-narrator urges others to tackle their own appointment with destiny, whether prosaic or epic, whether in the sense of what should or should not have happened. Like his own, their everyday life stories can "give race the lie." Race, which Wideman defines as "the doctrine of immutable difference and inferiority, the eternal strategic positioning of white over black" (xxii). He analyzes his advances and retreats, plumbs the kairos, those moments of axiological high tension that lead to an epiphany. He takes us to the crossroads where life and self meet in an encounter that alters the course of everything in its wake. Yet even minor events leave their permanent mark: each experience in life affects the makeup of the individual in the on-going rendezvous between self and life that German philosopher Gadamer termed Erlebnis. Or so literary convention would have it, from St. Augustin to the present day, as Georges Gusdorf shows us in auto-bio-graphies (447, 449).
Starting from one of Wideman's conventions, I would like to examine first how Fatheralong conforms to his now familiar tripartite structure, and then how the fable reinvests that structure. Theme, movement, and author persona depend upon a deeper triangle, presented from the unified perspective of the author persona, yes, but that of an author persona who shifts positions. Whereas in the novels A Glance Away and Hiding Place, three voices or character-focalizers develop parallel story lines which ultimately converge and inform one another, in the memoirs Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong the writer necessarily abandons his internal focalization through several characters and limits his omniscience to his projected author figure, focalizing upon the others from without. While the words he reports as theirs are not purported to be fictional discourse, the parts that these individuals play in the general organization of the work conform to an archetypal pattern. I refer to the parable of the prodigal son, replete with its cloture of ultimate recovery. Three rhetorical styles—one polemic, one discursive, one lyrical—reflect different purposes, moods, and content. They also correspond to the author persona's relationship with the implied narratees, primary and secondary, and with the figures his persona takes, now as father, now as son, in a series of overlapping triangles.
It becomes difficult to deal continuously in terms of fathers and sons without paying service to the theological implications. Certainly, Fatheralong can be read as a redemption gospel. Appreciation of the father's position, understanding and reintegration ultimately become the task of John, a father himself with two sons, one a prodigal like John's brother Robby whom their father Edward cannot bring himself to visit in prison. As I read the text, the "lost" son's mortal fate is irrevocably determined, leading to Edward's despair. His refusal to visit Robby in prison is his only means to not ratify the judgment passed against his son by witnessing the latter's punishment and degradation. Brother (and father) John, in contrast, clings to hope for the moral destiny of all prisoners: those locked behind metal bars and also those imprisoned by social and psychological barriers erected by race, as defined above by Wideman.
Virtually, another world, another America than the one portrayed in official histories and popular culture alike, is mapped out here. Wideman's invoking this dark side of America invites a reconstruction of Fatheralong in the mode that Bill Marling adopts in his study of classic American detective fiction, The American Roman Noir. To be sure, I do not confuse roman noir with African-American literature. In contrast, there is common ground in the parallel universes and archetypal characters invested in both forms. In the works of Hammett, Cain, and Chandler, Marling finds that the plot reposes on an underlying triangle of father, elder son and younger son, each behaving in conformity with the roles established in Jesus' parable (x-xiii). Obviously, for sake of the comparisons that I draw, actual birth order is inconsequential. The genius of Marling's analysis is having shown the consistency with which these roles are played, each in accordance with the different axes subjected to his critical analysis. Consequently, the theme of the prodigal son embraces economic, religious, cultural, social, sexual and metaphoric aspects that collectively confirm its psychological validity and necessity to our Western notions of order. From an economic viewpoint, for example, the father offers his patrimony and self, the elder son as mirror image of the father works the land and increases the family wealth, and the younger son wastes the fruits of his father's industry and management. From the carnal perspective, the father is associated with the mother; together they form a stable nucleus. The elder brother marries and founds his own family, but the younger brother undermines and destabilizes the order by multiplying his conquests, thereby blurring the lineage, if not actually running with harlots. Morally, father and elder son have soul; they give and share themselves; they dedicate themselves to working and providing for others while the sibling gives in to self-gratification, to the temptation of egocentric activities which ultimately lead to his personal debacle.
The heart of the story, however, lies not here but in the conversion and redemption of the lost son who returns under his father's roof and authority. He who went astray can redeem himself by seeing the light, recognizing his error, taking his lesson to heart, and ultimately succeeding. His "return" restores the initial order or stability of the basic structure, perhaps setting the stage for a new cycle in which the younger son can become a patriarch in turn. For Marling, the return is interpreted as the success or failure of the prodigal in terms of the American Dream. For Wideman, the American Dream is problematic; what counts is the final assuagement of the father's loneliness and grief.
At this point, my reading of Fatheralong might seem contradicted by the facts of the Wideman saga. Given the incarceration of sons Robby and Jake, their appeals for freedom denied, their return to their fathers by their own power leads to an impasse. Circumventing this difficulty, Wideman ends the biblical father's patient wait by setting him out in active search. The real-life commitment to freeing those whom he sees as unjustly imprisoned is echoed in a journey. Thus Wideman père et fils symbolically don the mantle of the prodigal, and depart in the opposite direction to retrace John's grandfather's people, to find "the father's father," the illustrious ancestor who can confirm upon his descendants status, virtue, pride, and unity. And, yes, legitimacy as worthy heirs to the American Dream, but one that forsakes material gains for spiritual ones. Thus, by the grace of their fathers and their fathers before them, Robby and Jake can be reclaimed, their dignity restored, their "presence" renewed in the family consciousness, in the men's circle. Where seemingly it all began, since a well-defined paternal line leads back to Jordan Wideman as father of Tatum while the maternal line has paradoxically been lost (127).
Here is where I see a clear evolution between the two memoirs. In Brothers and Keepers, the mother assumes the traditional father's position: giving, loving, accept- ing, and supplying soul and stability. She occupies the position of the biblical patriarch in life and literature alike. Where is the father, we ask ourselves? Wideman has often alluded to a family rift; in Fatheralong, he tells us Littleman and all his father's relatives were somehow lacking in his mother's eyes. Again, as reader filling in the gaps in this tale, in the context of protest surrounding the book, I am tempted to see a more global cause than personal conflicts at work. A cause that embraces the full gamut of the rhetoric the writer engages in. My construction was inspired by reading the statistics and arguments that Jennifer Hochschild marshals in support of her theory that a chasm separates poor blacks from their middle-class or well-off brethren in their belief in the American Dream. I wonder if the irreconcilable differences that estrange the author's mother and father figures in Fatheralong might not be inscribed in this phenomenon. The parallel interpretations of the American Dream Hochschild outlines would partly elucidate John's father's leaving the family and fold to pursue his own fate alone. In Fatheralong, we learn why Edward, the real father, is circumvented; although unjudgmentally presented, he, too, is cast as a prodigal, destabilizing the family unit and confusing the lines of identity with a parallel family. Before the mother's reticence to deal with her husband, the elder son assumes the burden of reclaiming the lost father and restoring him to his natural position in the triangle. The task of "recovering" the prodigal father falls to the elder son, making him father to his father, so to speak, and displaces the dominant matriarchal focus which sociologists lament as the decline of the family unit. Reaffirmation of the patriarchal focus asserts the legitimacy of the father and upholds his right to enjoyment of the role history and biology have confirmed upon him. For this story is not just another tale of divorce, a broken home, and a child in trouble. Rather, it is an episode in the epic struggle between the sexes and the races in America: all black fathers are cut off from their offspring, "As long as injustice persists and with it the gross disparities between black communities and white communities on all the scales truly a measure of the right to life, the primal exchange, black father to son, son to father, will be obstructed, poisoned" (F 66).
Nothing short of heroic action is called for, but overtly transforming Edgar and John's trip to Greenwood into a heroic quest would run the risk of turning to parody. Granted, the pilgrimage to Promised Land does reenact the myth of the eternal return to the origins for the secret of the birth mystery, the identity of the father, ultimate reconciliation with him, and the granting of a boon. Nonetheless, the venture of discovery through male bonding constitutes a mere subplot, motivated by the prodigal son paradigm. Each must recover a lost ascendant and descendant. John soothes his feelings of guilt for former neglect and ingratitude for all Edgar has given him. Edgar rises in John's filial esteem and their difficulty in communicating subsides. Both their internal journeys culminate in the recognition of alternative forms of success, proceeding from a core of great spiritual virtue, one that prepares the transcendental ascent into lyricism that concludes the book when John the father deals with the pain of losing his son Jake and applies the lesson learned "down home."
The quest as subplot to the return of the prodigal son reminds me of a Shakespearean device: the play-within-the play speaks an essential truth that the players themselves often fail to apprehend. For whose benefit—ourselves, Robby and Jake, the Wideman family, the author himself—does he relate the episode? Whereas Wideman's early fiction seemed to negate any hope for turning back once the connecting lines had been broken, here there seems to be a viable alternative, even if entirely in the mind. Especially if entirely in the mind, for Wideman sees the mind as the key:
History is mind, is driven by mind in the same sense a flock of migratory birds, its configuration, destination, purpose, destiny are propelled, guided by the collective mind of members of the immediate flock and also the species, all kindred birds past and present inhabiting Great Time.
(102)
We are dealing here with a story of a quest for the patrimony of "mind": family pride, identity, belonging, roots that paradoxically can only be reclaimed by physical displacement and male symbiosis. Like genetic traits such as body shape and size, common adversaries, albeit at different points in time, shared food, drink, talk, and time mingle the life-lines of fathers and sons, living and dead. The "return" to the origins in the South that grandfather Harry had begged the recalcitrant child John to make with him shifts gears from private time out for father and son to a drive to satisfy a mutual psychological need. The grandfather's wish at last granted becomes a consummate experience that perpetuates the family saga. Upon retrodding the ground of his father Harry's people, John's father Edgar plays Mentor and to the astonishment of his impatient son, makes meaning out of nonsense through persistence and by speaking in tongues of memory. The author paints an ironic self-portrait as an impatient man-child, tactfully trying to entice the father away from what the younger man perceives as foolishness, as squandering precious time. His realization that there is method to this madness enhances the older man's victory and stature. Edgar, as father, is in command, able once again to assume his role as provider. Together, they find "Littleman" whose circular South-North-South migration had once seemed tantamount to failure, but who now provides the key that unlocks the mystery John and Edgar need to unravel together. Together because their triangles overlap. Together because the success accrued here can remove the emotional blockages caused by physical prisons.
The symbiosis between author persona and father in Fatheralong reflects that between brothers in Brothers and Keepers with an important distinction. There, the link was more one of communicating vessels than Siamese twins: movements of improvement and failure constituted a double helix of ascent and descent; when one rose, the other fell. Author John needed to rehabilitate brother Robby in the eyes of a general reading public. Implicitly, he makes the analogy between his imprisoned brother and Malcolm X, whose discovery of religion and learning in prison ultimately freed him. Thus Robby's language evolves during the course of the book from street talk to standard American usage, demonstrating that he can, when he so chooses, operate like members of the mainstream. In addition, he has begun a technical course in preparation for a life outside confinement. Thus, he is ready for reinsertion. Not, however, without some "cost" to the author persona, for Robby's redemption sends John into a self-examination that instigates a private fall from grace. This downfall offsets his sibling's rise and recognizes the failed man's "success" which is prerequisite to his recovery by the family. Robby's bid for physical freedom having been refused, a suitable substitute must be found to conform to the parable. Idem for Jake in Fatheralong.
Earlier I spoke about what form this recovery had to take; now I would like to refine the notion of prodigality in the context of Wideman's book. It seems clear from his strong position on the catastrophe that race continues to wreak on the American society that the prodigal's self-exile need not be a sojourn in the moral or criminal underworld. Might it not be the African-American reinterpretation and adaptation of the American Dream to the structural differences in the socioeconomic reality of the U.S. as theorized by Jennifer Hochschild? Does faithful son John, despite his vehement words of alienation, actually espouse a different value system that assimilates him to the white power structure? I hear his call to "transform ourselves, subdue our selfishness and shortsightedness, and thereby change the direction the country is going" (66) as addressed to all Americans, not just the black minority. Prodigal son Robby's exclusion depends on other factors than the inherent personality fault often attributed by American sociologists like Daniel Bell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan to those who transgress society's rules. In Wideman's words, "Difference becomes deviance becomes division becomes demonization. A campaign is mounted to deter, punish, exile, or eradicate the problem group" (67).
Robby and Jake do indeed belong to a problem group. Hochschild cites Pete Hamill's lament on the "Underclass … living in anarchic and murderous isolation …, [in a] ferocious subculture … [which is] the single most dangerous fact of ordinary life in the United States" (201). Moreover, she specifically refers to Robby Wideman. She in turn suggests that he is not an alien who rejects the tenets of the American Dream instructing our entire American society, that drug dealers and hustlers are also interested in achieving success, that equality of opportunity is there in the streets, and thus anyone might pursue it there, that wanting something badly enough leads one to the acts that ultimately deliver, that "virtue" is both tangible and intangible, that it can be seen by the outward signs of wealth as well as the "bad" reputation one can establish (200-13). Just as mainstream society concedes that success often means stepping over others, in the business of getting ahead in the world of hustlers and drug dealers, the ends also justify the means. Therefore, they do not preclude violence as a political weapon in this economic struggle. Robby had a legitimate, if self-aggrandized, vision of personal success which Hochschild quotes from Brothers and Keepers :
I wanted to be a star. I wanted to make it big. My way. I wanted the glamour. I wanted to sit high up…. See, in my mind I was Superfly. I'd drive up slow to the curb. My hog be half a block long and these fine foxes in the back. Everybody looking when I ease out the door clean and mean. Got a check in my pocket to give to Mom. Buy her a new house with everything in it new. Pay her back for the hard times. I could see that happening as real as I can see your face right now. Wasn't no way it wan't gon happen. Rob was gon make it big.
(191)
But then so perhaps was the prodigal son in the New Testament parable when he applied to his father for a premature share of the still-living father's assets. Gambling, frequenting other big spenders, create the illusion of having made it. Selling drugs and hustling are shortcuts. If hard work was primordial for new white immigrants to America in the 19th century to integrate the society, statistics on the high rates of violence and criminality among these groups reveal a similar perception of where to find the fast track to the relatively more easy life and work style that reigned among established Americans (225-49).
The Casuistic argument may run counter to the rule of law, but it does not contradict the drive for self-improvement that informs the national myth. Fatheralong is an impassioned plea for us all to reconsider our notion of the prodigal and to purge our society of the race issue that distorts our vision of certain Americans and short-circuits their access to the American Dream, leaving them no alternative but to evolve their own version thereof. And leaving us in a quandary as to our own reaction and response, active or passive, committed or detached. Not guilty, but responsible. We all face these choices.
In conclusion, what I had at first perceived to be an unresolved tension in Fatheralong, i.e., the adamant appeal, the imperious summons of the early sections of the book as opposed to the supplication for grace at its close, now appears to be the systolic and diastolic pressures that regulate the flow of the text. The change in diction as the author persona addresses himself to the faceless public multitude and then to the intimate private circle reveals an author persona engaged in paternal psychology, giving according to the needs of the receiver, and adopting a discourse proper to each. The public becomes like the stalwart, older son in the parable of whom the father expects nothing less than full compliance and support. In the intimacy of his direct, father-to-prodigal-son communication, however, poetry displaces the rhetoric of protest. Wideman has made his overture to universal suffering and can turn to fantasy, can refashion reality in a manner worthy of the pens of Borges and Rushdie. Moreover, I detect an intertextual allusion to the latter's Haroun and the Sea of Stories in Wideman's oft-repeated allegiance to the story as a prime necessity as well as a letter to his loved ones. Both come together in a theory that René Fuller maintained in an Omnibus article in the late 1970s: the story provides the smallest sense unit of communication; it is an engram, "a persistent protoplasmic alteration hypothesized to occur on stimulation of living neural tissue and to account for memory" (American Heritage Dictionary 434). In the ongoing Wideman saga and opus, I suggest that the story is the authorial presence, with its infinite potential to create anew, with its implied roles in relation to waiting audiences. Granting life by supplying the means to perpetuate the circle, giving life instead of imitating life. Is it coincidence that the story proper in Fatheralong ends in a marriage? As in Shakespearean comedy, the wedding that concludes the action can be read as a positive sign of stability for the reign. Despite having a video camera on hand to record the event, the storyteller is still indispensable to the event. Similarly, it is he who provides an "open cloture" to the work, he who composes an epilogue of lyrical flight that offers transcendence to a higher spiritual level where questions of race cannot camouflage virtue nor deny the right to succeed.
The sotto voce finale to Fatheralong lends an incantatory effect to the process we are witnessing. I hear the hymn that instructs the title. I feel the church-like atmosphere I felt at the end of Hiding Place. Wideman repeating a spiritual ritual. Can he conjure up the desired result? In my eyes he does. To compensate for the ephemeral nature of the epiphany, Wideman, like Joyce, resorts to recurrences of the event. In this manner, he sustains the father-son connection without betraying the militant posture of the opening. Indeed, this ambivalence between optimism and pessimism also makes the text advance. The word ‘dread’ punctuates the discourse, as the author persona shifts back and forth in his attitudes towards his own son-father relationship. Is the dread a threat lingering over our heads lest we drop the struggle, condemning the African-American experience to be forever one of exclusion, the minority man and woman denied participation in the myth, refused access to the normal order that rules the European-American universe? Or is it simply the inescapable necessity to begin afresh with each renewed contact, a Sisyphean task, but one that nonetheless confers meaning upon the lives of those who persevere?
Works Cited
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969, 1981. 434.
Couturier, Maurice. La Figure de l'Auteur. Paris: Seuil, collection Poétique, 1995, especially 7-24, 59, 162, 167.
Dosse, François. "Barthes, Lacan, Foucault: l'auteur, la structure." De l'auteur à l'oeuvre. Ed. Patrick Di Maschio. Paris: Ophrys, 1996.
Gusdorf, Georges. Auto-bio-graphies. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1991.
Hochschild, Jennifer. Facing Up To the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Marling, William. The American Roman Noir. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1995. x-xiii.
Wideman, John. Brothers and Keepers. London, Allison & Busby, 1985.
———. Fatheralong. New York and London: MacMillan, 1994.
Kimberly Ruffin (review date summer 2000)
SOURCE: Ruffin, Kimberly. Review of Two Cities, by John Edgar Wideman. African American Review 34, no. 2 (summer 2000): 368-69.
[In the following favorable review, Ruffin highlights the significance of the Bible, the dictionary, and black English to Two Cities.]
The Bible and the dictionary are not the typical cornerstones of love stories, but they rest at the foundation of John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities alongside the musicality of Black speech and the sounds of memory. This may be in part because Wideman explores, among other things, the kind of love James Baldwin called a "tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth."
This Baldwin-esque notion of love foregrounds Wideman's most recent look at contemporary urban Pennsylvania via the two cities of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The three main characters in the novel, Kassima, Robert, and Mr. Mallory, deal simultaneously with repeated personal and community losses in addition to their longing not only for healing but also for the courage to love again. In weaving their stories together, Wideman expands our notion about what a love story may be as he advances the long history of African American orality and literacy with innovative stylistic choices.
Written texts such as the dictionary and the Bible are crucial to the narrative but play no more important role than Black vernacular speech, whether vocalized or only "uttered" in a character's memory. Wideman highlights the lyricism of Black speech in his text: His words seem well-suited to the page yet they resonate in the ear. The absence of quotation and question marks in Two Cities enhances the written word by forcing it to yield to the world of sound. A rhythmic labyrinthine effect results from Wideman's time-collapsed mixture of the narrator's voice, characters' voices, letters, seemingly unvocalized speech, and dialogue.
The struggles of enslaved Africans who used the Bible to obtain literacy echo in this novel. Kassima, following in her ancestors' footsteps, uses her literacy to re-claim this classic in Black letters. The younger member of a May-December romance, she must first wrestle the Bible from the "Bible crazy, church crazy" people who "hurt [her] bad as a child." Freed from their scriptural monopoly, she "finds her story" in the book of Lamentations. After Kassima uses a dictionary to complement her reading, she reflects on what she thought "Lamentations" meant, saying:
Looking at the word, not having the slightest idea what it might mean, my guess was it might be something happy, a happy, dappy, fa-la-la ring to the word, something maybe to do with music, bells and tambourines and drums and long curvy goat-horns, you know, kind of stuff they play music with in the Bible days movies. Lester and the Lamentations, I thought that dumb thought too, thought the word sounded like Temptations or Sensations or Sweet Inspirations, the la-la-la names singing groups give themselves. Latin Lester and the Fabulous Lamentations. Little did I know, no clue what I was getting into when I started to read myself the book in the Bible with that name.
Although the actual biblical book "Lamentations" and Kassima's early associations share little similarity, they both return her to ritualistic places in human emotion: love and mourning. After her dictionary consultation and in-depth reading. Kassima rescues Lamentations from the all too righteous to address the mind-numbing grief following a ten-month span in which she loses her husband to AIDS, which he contracted in prison, and two sons, casualties of the inner-city plague of gang violence. Kassima soothes her wounds with the ancient sorrow songs "about people beat down so low they got to pray for a reason to pray."
Kassima's boarder and a veteran who never makes it back to his family after a traumatic tour of duty in World War II, Mr. Mallory is haunted by his war experiences and the bombing of the MOVE community. The remembered conversations between Mr. Mallory and John Africa, one of the victims of state-sanctioned violence, reads like a conversation between Lamentations' voice of mourning and a combination of Isaiah's prophetic alarm and Revelations' apocalyptic dirge.
Mr. Mallory, who travels around his community with a camera in a shopping bag, also writes to Italian artist Alberto Giocometti that his "work is taking pictures." In his letters (which result in a kind of one-sided conversation) to "Mr. G" he notes, "I'm not an artist but I'm learning from your art to use my camera in new ways. Difficult ways that will probably wear me out before they produce decent pictures…." His passionate devotion to his art stems from his desire to create "one among countless ways of seeing, [a] density of appearances [his] goal" and an art that can speak "the language spoken by the people who taught [him] to feel, to live in a body." Mr. Mallory not only writes and paints but also fuses these two genres to reflect each other. His love for his art and attentiveness to mastery prompt his deathbed request that his unfinished project be burned, although Kassima's refusal to honor his request assists a community in crisis.
Robert reunites with Kassima when she requests his help after Mr. Mallory dies. He is elated that their breakup, prompted by Kassima's fears, has ended, and distantly sad about Mr. Mallory's demise, for he only knew him as an "old dude [with a] shopping bag" who was so common an appearance that he was "just part of the street."
Robert comforts Kassima as they take care of Mr. Mallory's arrangements, and he slips back into their relationship, which navigates the crossroad of his adult desire and his childhood memories. Just as quickly as Robert and Kassima's presumed one-night stand blossoms into a mature love between two people familiar with hurt, Robert surrenders to the remembrances that flood his childhood neighborhood of Cassina Way, the street on which Kassima lives. Understanding the power of this intersection of memory, love, desire, and awakening, Robert fortifies himself so that he can share his story without losing himself. He explains:
Yes indeed, it was some night and quite a day too and everything that happened comes back when I let it come back but I'll only tell you bits and pieces. Turning it all loose would wear me out. couldn't stop it coming. Story catch me before I got to the end, swallow me in one bite.
The synchronicity of Wideman's multidirectional style and richly drawn characterizations make it worthwhile to read Robert's story, told in the "bits and pieces" he can offer. Because John Edgar Wideman finds a storytelling style that befits the characters' complexities, this "love story" has many textures. This love isn't satisfied with what's easy or necessarily comforting; it pushes those determined enough to keep it to strive for more.
Jacqueline Berben-Masi (essay date 2006)
SOURCE: Berben-Masi, Jacqueline. "Of Basketball and Beads: Following the Thread of One's Origins." In Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman, edited by Bonnie TuSmith and Keith E. Byerman, pp. 31-41. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006.
[In this essay, Berben-Masi asserts that Hoop Roots is not only about the evolution of basketball, but also centers on Wideman's connection to his African American heritage and community.]
The game a string of beads, bright and colorful. You dance them to catch the light, coil them, let them spill through your fingers, mound in your cupped hands. You play the beads, observe how each tiny sphere's a work of art in itself. Time's an invisible cord holding them together, what you can't touch, can't see, time connects glittering bead to bead, forms them into something tangible, a necklace, a gift.
—John Wideman, Hoop Roots
Ostensibly about playground basketball and its evolution, John Edgar Wideman's nonfictional work Hoop Roots is a love song to an implied primary audience and a paean to an all-encompassing sport. We are dealing with a confessional exploration of the soul of the mature artist who is conscious of who he is—where he came from and how he got here—and desperate to keep in touch with his inner self. The author shares his universe directly with us, now as if they were his thoughts, now filtered through the device of a primary reader whom we must intuit. Textual clues indicate it is not the French journalist "Catherine" to whom the book is dedicated, but an African American lover lost, recovered, and volatile. The final chapter of the book becomes epistolary in a belated letter that hints that there was always another reader intended: namely, the deceased grandmother whose presence overshadows the work. Grandmother Freed adorns the book's dust-jacket photo where she stands with a child—the author's mother—in her arms. The latter, too, is meant to "receive" the tale. Hence, the "love song" is sung with a tripartite primary audience in mind.
That love is filial and romantic in turns. In keeping with this sense of an intimate communication, Wideman maintains a predominantly first- and second-person dialogue. This artistic choice accentuates the sensation of confidentiality and passion: we readers eavesdrop on a private conversation, perhaps put ourselves into the "you" or the "I" as we participate vicariously in the unfolding of the narrative. Experiential, composed of multiple segments, the book advances the basic themes set in the subtitle of the book—"basketball, race, and love"—plus one: the experience of writing. This is a highly self-conscious work wherein how the story gets told is as important as what it has to say. The various themes occur sequentially, but also simultaneously when they overlap in memory and time. Conversations minus the tags "he said, she said"—a trademark of Wideman's style—have the effect of speeding up the exchanges and making them seem less "contrived" or written. They involve the reader by requiring a close following of the communication back and forth as each interlocutor "threads the pill," i.e., passes the ball back and forth to his or her teammate and adversary. A split-second's inattention and the identifying voice is a lost cause, like the pea in the shell game or the ace in the three-card shuffle that street hustlers ply. "Now you see me, now you don't" demands concentration beyond normal reader investment. Yet, read aloud, it makes for a more natural rendering of speech, and adds immediacy to the reader's participation in the event's unfolding.
The prefatory paragraph quoted above explicitly draws a parallel that is woven throughout the book and that we cannot avoid exploring ourselves. In short, basketball is as much a cultural ritual for the African American community as the intricate, patterned beadwork that retraces timeless symbols of the interpretation of life and the realms that constitute it among the Yoruba peoples of Africa.1 Like beads, it has become part of Great Time: timeless, permanent, formative, defining. And like beads sewn into age-old designs of the cosmos that guide life in the here and now, the past, and the hereafter, Wideman implies that the movements on the basketball court, the apparel, the colors and textures, and the body language are all-determining for a lifetime in a black man's existence:
If urban blight indeed a movable famine, playground ball the city's movable feast. Thesis and antithesis. Blight a sign of material decay; ball a sign of spiritual health rising from the rubble. One embodying apartheid, denial, and exclusion, the other in-your-face, finding, jacking what it needs to energize an independent space. The so-called mainstream stigmatizes the "ghetto" while it also celebrates and emulates hoop spawned in the "ghetto," discovering in playground basketball a fount of contemporary style and values. Feast and famine connected, disconnected, merging, conflicting in confounding ways, both equally, frustratingly expressive in their separate modes of the conundrum of "race."
(50)
On the one hand, the basketball court is an escape valve from the ghetto conditions of life; on the other hand, it is a celebration of triumph in the creation of a counter-culture adulated even by those who normally exclude the residents of the ghetto. There is a dimension that goes beyond mainstream's grasp of hoop: the basketball court is also the scene of an initiatory passage from adolescence to manhood, guided by the experts of the game. The initiates are both harassed and protected even as they are tested before being recognized and admitted to the fold. Wideman illustrates the process:
My father … would have taken a prodigy like Ed Fleming under his wing, tested him, whipped on him unmercifully, protected him with hard stares if anybody got too close to actually damaging the precious talent, the fragile ego and vulnerable physique of a large, scrappy, tough kid just about but not quite ready to handle the weight and anger of adult males who used the court to certify their deepest resources of skill, determination, heart, resources they could publicly exhibit and hone few other places in a Jim Crow society…. More abstractly applied, the lesson reminds you to take seriously your place in time, in tradition, within the community of players. Ed Fleming and the other vets teaching me to take my time, no matter the speed I'm traveling. Teaching me to be, not to underreach or overreach myself. Either way you cheated the game, cheated your name, the name in progress, the unfolding narrative, told and retold, backward, forward, sideways, inside out, of who you would turn out to be as you played.
(54-56)
On one level, battles are waged, and won or lost. The adversaries are racial and/or social discrimination: one must earn and establish a name, a reputation to be known by. The ultimate emergence and dominance of the jungle rules of playground ball in the professional domain bespeak the shift from one set of rules to another, from mainstream's monopoly over the game to begrudging acknowledgment of a different form, more improvisational, jazzlike, individualistic, calculated—and impulsive—rather than team coordinated. In parallel evolution with the author's own coming of age viewed at different periods of his life is the emergence of an alternative form of the game. The latter at last compensates for neglected homage to the long-overlooked role of the black minority in acculturating a homebred sport before its export around the world. That homage gets paid in a lyrical approximation of ghettospeak—with rhymes, repetitions, and oppositions that suggest a musical theme, a backdrop against which to play the game, a fight song for the fans, a hymn to the heroes. On another, more personal level, this is the social finishing school whose unwritten rules convey the deeper sense of community values, of living together as a civilization. Basketball supplants the novels and films that teach the mainstream its mores and values, its "do's and don'ts," its rhythms of life, its manner of looking at itself in the mirror.
In brief, the basketball sequences are principally about the socialization of the author as youth: his ritualistic trials in the initiatory rite of becoming a black man in America, where the basketball court furnishes surrogate fathers and role models. In contrast, the episodes of the adolescent's patiently watching over his ailing grandmother define his relationship to the female element—running the gamut from male protector, respectful to the nth degree, to male predator of the desirable woman and her body. The two constitute a dual loss of innocence: learning the boundaries and limits, grasping when the latter can be bypassed to enable the necessary maturation of the author-subject. On another plane, the segments about the Aztec ruins at Chichén Itzá and the internal stories associated with this experience compose a single strand: it is the wooing of the ideal love and the struggle to hold on to her, as well as a dream of the self that does not negate the effects of time's passage on the body and mind of the adult-implied author. The preoccupation with controlling all stories told opens onto the question of art itself:
Art is someone speaking, making a case for survival. The art in our styles of playing hoop as eloquent as our styles of playing music. Art is what we experience, how we feel about being alive. Art's a medium for expressing what's crucial and worthy of being preserved, passed on. What works and doesn't. A culture's art shouts and whispers secrets the culture couldn't exist without, unveils its reasons for being.
(230)
In essence, basketball is art: it is a narrative of its own with a clear plot and development. Like jazz, it has its own rhythms and riffs. As a tradition, it preserves the culture. Ultimately, it provides the thread connecting the episodes of this book into a life, an autobiography based on relationships over time with family, game, and art. For basketball, over the centuries, over a lifetime, lets us step out of linear time and into Great Time. It inscribes itself into the cosmic sphere, where Wideman patiently tries to lead us. Basketball is a portal to another universe.
In a broad sense, Hoop Roots picks up where Fatheralong leaves off. The latter work portrays the author through the prism of his male genealogy: the missed occasions for cementing ties between father and son, the tantalizingly missing links and the attempts at compensating for what never happened but should have. Brothers and Keepers provides the first installment of John's autobiography based on the relationship between himself and his imprisoned younger brother Robby, but also between all black brothers and their prison guards, whether those brothers are incarcerated or simply visitors. Body language between the two camps communicates the patent demarcation between those in control and those who are controlled. There, too, basketball serves as a channel of understanding between the brothers, a glimmer of hope for change—leading the transgressor back to respect for the rules, back to a place on the team and in society. Wideman is rounding out his personal history not chronologically, nor methodically, but through exploring the formative and defining links most important to his adult life. Although the spotlight shines on another subject, the one we learn the most about in these three books is John Edgar Wideman. The practice is not unique—in L'Afrique fantôme (1934), L'Age d'homme (1939), and La Règle du jeu (1948-1976), Michel Leiris inscribed his autobiography thematically—but it is both unusual and effective as a form. By sharing his hobby horses, the author portrays himself riding them, allowing glimpses of the self that seem more natural, more candid, more complete than if he had written a classic, chronological history. As D. Bergez points out in an article on Leiris, the result of the displacement is a less narcissistic attitude of accom- modation and a renewal of the genre as such.2 It is my conviction that Wideman accomplishes the same in these nonfictional works, making a seamless piece of the three.
Like Brothers and Keepers and Fatheralong, part of Hoop Roots is written in Wideman's "other voice," what he sometimes refers to as his "other language." This is the blend of black English, street talk, scraps of black folklore, family tradition, skipped copulas, noun clauses rather than full sentences—or predicates without repeated subjects—punctuated with grunted expletives like "Uh huh!" or "Huh uh." There is an alternation between the scholarly and the colloquial, creating a linguistic blend that leaves the author's indelible mark on the work. At the same time, the coexistence of two voices allows both sides of the author's being to come to the fore and impress upon the reader a complicity that runs the gamut from the intensely personal to the strictly intellectual, from the women's domain to the men's. For Wideman's agenda restores the equilibrium to the purportedly matriarchal African American family unit by showing its protagonist participating in both domains, being deeply struck by the exquisite, life-catching moments that make up the daily routines of both sexes. Animus and anima are truly complementary, no matter what differences might pit seemingly opposing philosophies. Hoop Roots works in both directions: on the one hand, it delves into the roots of playground basketball; on the other, it clarifies basketball's role in helping a young man set down his own roots. It expands upon the book's introductory passage, underlining the need for separate interests to be shared at day's end by men and women (1). Between the lines, we intuit that this is a group history, one common to many African Americans. Indeed, setting down those roots is tantamount to claiming one's masculinity and black heritage with the encouragement of the women who surround and assist one. The women's role in John's upbringing (but also that of other young blacks in the ghetto) is germane to the love song the author sings in this book. His appreciation for the women's gifts, support, and understanding inform the intuited lover-reader, hence us as well, about the man courting her. It entices her into his world, implicates her in a social circle to which she is foreign and uninitiated—but not alien in the sense of a deliberate exclusion.
Highly diversified sequences are wound together, much like the grandmother's long braid of good hair. Arguably an African American obsession, that good hair intertwines the dark and the silver, all of it a shining mass offered to the lover like a string of multicolored beads, each hue rich in symbolic values such as virginity, fertility, and magic powers. In microcosm, the visit to Chichén Itzá with the mysterious re-found love repeats this pattern in the stories told by the lovers to mutually entertain and challenge one another, again much like the one-on-one of play-ground basketball. The true stories exchanged, like all nonfiction, involve the listener and invite contradiction. Between the lines the implied message reads as follows: You tell me a story that catches me by surprise; I one-up you by my own tale. If your story doesn't satisfy me, I recast it to correspond to my expectations and demands. Thus, one barebones account goes through four distinct versions or putative approximations of what really occurred. Here, the storytellers act as players in a simulated game of hoop: each tests the limits of the other's strategy, possessiveness, trust, and vision of life. They take on the accomplice-adversary and offer titillating episodes, but neither listener can resist intervening—challenging the teller's sincerity or objectivity. Both teller and listener reveal secrets that invite analysis and unveil deep feelings. Again, here is the indirect approach to the autobiography: we readers observe the subject interacting with others while reflecting upon his behavior and struggling to drop the mask even as he must retain a certain author persona—for the essence of truth cannot be unfiltered or unshaped, lest it lose its unity and impact.
Thus, as autobiographical treatise, Hoop Roots stretches the conventions of the genre: Wideman cannot resist revising the mythos of a fact to suit his own aesthetic needs, thereby fictionalizing the nonfictional and raising the text to the metafictional level. Dialogue between the teller and the listener heightens the antagonistic stance. As audience as well as artist in these sequences, Wideman can never drop his guard in the game because of his need to "score a point" on his partner. Why else invert the roles in her story about introducing a dog into an erotic scene—first assuming a macho subtext rather than a feminist reading, and then inserting a historically antiracist theme to subvert the entire anecdote? Her rejection of his interpretation signals the gulf in consciousness, each teller's take on life and time. While she can forget the past, he needs to insert all elements into an overall pattern of Great Time, because the "past is present," as Wideman reminds us time and again throughout his oeuvre. No incident is without universal significance. How a story is remembered and edited forges the links between yesterday and today and solders these links into a continuous chain. Again, as in Brothers and Keepers, the reader encounters a self-accusing narrator blaming his own spontaneous behavior for the consequences he has dreaded facing. Dread, guilt, and acceptance underpin the main themes in Hoop Roots, for love without betrayal of one kind or another requires a superhuman being. Such a creature's place is not in a realistic, nonfictional piece where the reader can challenge the text's authority, can exert his or her right to an opinion, and can exercise options as a caring agent with a stake in the tale.3 And Wideman is not indifferent to our having a stake in his tale, as the militant tone of the final pages makes clear. His autobiographical essays are a manifest polemic designed to draw the reader into either collaboration or confrontation.
Deliberately or not, the reader unwittingly dons the garments of "the other" and gradually slips into the "you" of the text. Like twin mirrors, each reflecting the perceived image of the other, we alternate in voyeuristic turns—just like the lovers spinning their tales: "Did I ask you to tell your stories so I could watch. Imagining myself a fly on the wall. Invisible, powerless, watching. Could I bear the sight of you in some white man's arms. A black man's" (124). The lover whose story unfolds is now the grandmother whose scrutinized body reveals her stories, now the younger woman lover. The "you" being spied upon through a crack in the door is also both women—one literally, the other figuratively. Moreover, we readers meld into that "you" in both directions. The author tests us, staring back at our "reflections" of the face he has chosen to uncover, at our reactions that he controls by his "now you see me, now you don't" style. In exchange, we train our vision on the man—relating experiences that are at times his own, at times fictionalized accounts that allow him to increase the distance between teller and tale, to change the vortex from centripetal to centrifugal, from inward to outward orientation. In these exchanges, the rule is the same as in basketball: "There are no shadows on the court. No place to hide. Everybody alone. Vertical" (108).4 Before such exposure, we each contemplate the other, searching to recognize ourselves in the image. It is hardly coincidental that a mirror motif returns again and again throughout the text—the man trying to catch a glimpse of himself, turning the mirror to catch the other's, watching us watch him, perhaps judge his portrait. But also watching him watch us, gauge our reaction, anticipate our next move. The double mirror he invokes in Brothers allows constant surveillance. Meanwhile, he is both vulnerable and in control by choosing the information acquiesced: love and jealousy, sexual awareness and desire, racial identity and militancy—tricks and treats of reading African American culture in its multiple forms.
Admittedly, this book is a quest for self-knowledge in process, a confession that seeks first to bare, then to claim the self in the soul laid naked. So were Brothers and Fatheralong. As seen above, two voices relate the journey to the center of the man's private universe. I would now like to show how the two collaborate in a specific example. The colloquial style of the italicized first enunciation calls attention to itself and surprises the reader, heralding more intimate communication to come. It implies the reader is part of an inner circle. The more writerly style of the second passage, closer to Wideman's fictional voice, takes successive approximations of the truth to arrive at a precise rendering:
One reason I'm telling all this old stuff, the hard stuff and silly kid stuff too, is because it ain't over yet.
(102; italics in text)
Have I harbored some deep, dark secret. Do I own a face I cannot bear to behold, a mask beneath the other masks that would turn a lover's heart to stone. Nothing so melodramatic, I hope. Rather a reckoning. A slow threshing. Grain by grain I must dig and sift, lift and comb. Not to censor or reveal things I've wished away. Not to confess or beg forgiveness. To see. To name. To enter the room, then begin to find my way safely out.
(103)
Note that there are inside voices and outside voices as well. In counterpoint to the adult voices tracing a pattern of proper conduct, which amounts to the internalization of other values, is the adolescent's discovery of an escape route that allows him to be simultaneously dutiful and prodigal. Creating a mental void, inner silence serves as a cosmic portal for safe entry into another dimension without abandoning his post at Grandmother Freeda's bedside. Just as the young author-would-be-ballplayer first watches and plays at a distance, wordlessly, he accompanies his grandmother for days on end in a state of suspended preoccupation:
The quiet I carried with me from the room didn't fit in. I had to preserve a place within myself for silence, where I could steal away and be alone with it. Quiet a defense and refuge, a refusal to connect with everything it wasn't, couldn't be…. If I didn't let the quiet go, I could leave the house and not lose. And that was an immense relief, a freeing, even if maintaining inner silence exacted dues I've never, then or now, learned how to stop paying.
(98-99)
Quiet becomes a talisman for acceding to, then hanging on to, what counts most.5 It is a means of reducing the distance between the I and the you as long as Wideman's lover persona takes precedence over the militant black rights activist. The latter stealthily emerges in the final chapters of the book: temporarily, the context shifts from the first- and second-person dialogue to a third-person narration resembling fiction. Under the title of "Who Invented the Jump Shot, A Fable," Wideman retraces a plausible, perhaps authentic, episode of the adventures of the early traveling Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. Their hectic, one-night stands in the heart of "cracker" America are juxtaposed with the static story of an archetypal ghetto figure, a slightly retarded black man who witnesses a racist pogrom and becomes the victim of a lynching.6 His portrait is tenderly drawn; his ostracism from the white community painfully depicted. Once the atrocity of this innocent soul's being sacrificed to white racial prejudice has been touched upon, there is no avoiding a denunciation of the general appropriation of all things black by whites trying to make a buck, to rob the blacks, to exert and reassert their dominance. Here, too, is the author assuming his burden of social responsibility, championing lost causes like that of Mumia Abu-Jamal or of Robby Wideman. Instead of saying, "I am a militant!" he demonstrates his militancy directly. The autobiographical may seem to take a back seat to the oratorical, yet the confessional mode does not disappear. In this harangue, the author vents his outrage as if forgetting momentarily that he has another agenda to honor. Yet, he has revealed a great deal of himself even as he tries to recover from this lapse. A handy transition appears to end the digression as the author tosses in an admission: he is perhaps jealous of a ballplayer he and Catherine are watching. He is called back to the present moment and steps out of Great Time to reassume his role as wooer and "confessor," after having stepped up to challenge the evils of racism and the double standards imposed by the many upon the few. Somehow, though, his inner peace seems shattered. One wonders if the explosion is the price he refers to paying for his earlier silence. Or, is it more the turn he takes with the ball, scoring points as long as he can, having at last earned his chance by seizing the rebound from the shift to third-person voice in "Jumpshot"? There is an "in-your-face" quality to the opening and closing lines in that section, mocking scholarly attempts like the present essay to pin down the ephemeral so we can analyze, dissect, and discourse over it. The implication is that the truth lies in another dimension of reality. We university critics find ourselves under the microscope, find our pitiful efforts derided as we struggle with the pregnant silence a work like Hoop Roots leaves in our own minds. It seems insufficient to look at questions of voice, form, and style—of social, cultural, and racial grounding. Yet, it looks equally perilous to pursue further analysis and risk breaking a butterfly on the wheel. For such is the true nature of this text: real and imaginary, solid yet evanescent, permanent but temporal, strong and fragile. The book is a true reflection of the dust-jacket photo on its cover: deep emotions that emanate from the slightly faded images which, despite the uncompromising eye of the camera, maintain an aura of mystery.
Notes
1. See Drewal and Mason's Beads, Body, and Soul. Wideman prefaces his novel with a quote from this source and intersperses his text with brief excerpts. Read in conjunction with Hoop Roots, it becomes impossible not to see the deliberate thread spun between them.
2. On Leiris, see Bergez, 2024-25.
3. Here, we are following various theories on narrativity in nonfictional works, from Northrop Frye through James Phelan, David Lehman, and Eric Heyne. An interesting overview and criticism of the issue and the critics are to be found in a dialogue of three articles published by Heyne and Lehman.
4. "No place to hide" recalls the lyrics of a favorite hymn Wideman evokes in his 1981 novel, Hiding Place.
5. See "In Praise of Silence": "Silence times our habits of speech and non-speech, choreographs the intricate dance of oral tradition, marks who speaks first, last, how long and with what authority. Silence indicates who is accorded respect, deference, modulates call-and-response, draws out the music in words and phrases. Silence a species of argument, logical and emotionally persuading, heightening what's at stake. Silence like Amen at the end of a prayer invokes the presence of invisible ancestors whose voices, though quiet now, permeate the stillness, quicken the ancient wisdom silence holds" (549).
6. Like the one encountered by Clement in Hiding Place or again in "Loon Man" in All Stories Are True. In a September/October 1984 National Public Radio interview, Wideman commented on the inescapable presence of such figures in every ghetto community.
Works Cited
Bergez, D. "Leiris Michel, 1901-1990." Dictionnaire universel des littératures. Paris: PUF, 1994.
Drewal, Henry John, and John Mason. Beads, Body, and Soul: Art and Light in the Yoruba Universe. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum, 1998.
Heyne, Eric. "Where Fiction Meets Nonfiction: Mapping a Rough Terrain." Narrative 9.3 (2001): 322-33.
———. "Mapping, Mining, Sorting." Narrative 9.3 (2001): 343-45.
Lehman, David. "Mining a Rough Terrain: Weighing the Implications of Nonfiction." Narrative 9.3 (2001): 334-42.
Wideman, John Edgar. All Stories Are True. New York: Pantheon, 1992.
———. Brothers and Keepers. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
———. Fatheralong. New York: Random, 1994.
———. Hiding Place. New York: Avon, 1981.
———. Hoop Roots. Boston, New York: Houghton, 2001.
———. "In Praise of Silence." Callaloo 22-3 (1999): 547-49.
FURTHER READING
Criticism
Dreiser, Petra. "Black, Not Blank: Photography's (Invisible) Archives in John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities." Mosaic 37, no. 4 (December 2004): 185-201.
Centers on the act of photographing in Two Cities, focusing specifically on how Mr. Mallory uses the camera "to create a counter-archive of lived black experience."
Grandjeat, Yves-Charles. "Brother Figures: The Rift and Riff in John E. Wideman's Fiction." Callaloo 22, no. 3 (summer 1999): 615-22.
Elucidates the function of the brother figure in Wideman's fiction.
TuSmith, Bonnie, ed. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998, 224 p.
Collection of nineteen interviews with Wideman, conducted between 1963 and 1997.
Additional coverage of Wideman's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Gale: African American Writers, Eds. 1, 2; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 10; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography & Resources, Vol. 4; Black Literature Criticism, Ed. 1:3; Black Writers, Eds. 2, 3; Concise Major 21st-Century Writers, Ed. 1; Contemporary Authors, Vol. 85-88; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 14, 42, 67, 109, 140; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 5, 34, 36, 67, 122; Contemporary Novelists, Eds. 4, 5, 6, 7; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 33, 143; DISCovering Authors Modules: Multicultural Writers; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. 2; Major 21st-Century Writers, (eBook) 2005; Modern American Literature, Ed. 5; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Reference Guide to Short Fiction, Ed. 2; Short Stories for Students, Vols. 6, 12, 24; Short Story Criticism, Vol. 62; and Twayne Companion to Contemporary Literature in English, Ed. 1:2.