rev. of The Stories of John Edgar Wideman
The Stories of John Edgar Wideman includes two previously published collections,
Fever and
Damballah, and ten new pieces gathered under the title
All Stories Are True — an African proverb that has become Wideman's guiding meditation. For in all his works, in his stories and his memoir and his seven novels, Wideman shatters the barrier between biography and fiction.
In the 1984 memoir
Brothers and Keepers, Wideman tried to comprehend why his brother Robby ended up being sentenced to a life in prison, while Wideman himself became a Rhodes Scholar and college professor. He discovered he could not understand or write
about his brother's life — his childhood, his addiction, his crimes, his imprisonment — without imagining that life fully, without confronting his own life and reinventing experience. Now, Wideman goes even further, saying there is a place where memory fails, where "I'm beginning to fabricate what might have been said. Devise a history I don't know." And there are times when facts are inadequate, when they conceal the truth. In the story "Newborn Thrown in Trash and Dies," the omniscient infant tells us: "I believe some facts are unnecessary and that unnecessary borders on untrue. I believe facts sometimes speak for themselves but never speak for us. They are never anyone's voice and voices are what we must learn to listen to if we wish ever to be heard."
Wideman does listen, to this child, to all his people. His stories open at the center, where a voice suddenly starts speaking. Sometimes it is his own: "I think I murmur their names, a silence unless you are inside my skull"; sometimes it is the voice of an aunt or grandmother, coming to him with a small gift, a piece of his family history: "What seems to ramble begins to cohere when the listener understands the process, understands that the voice seeks to recover everything. . ." Often the leaps are daring: the voices erupt, and Wideman finds himself hearing a retarded man or a murdered baby or an American jazz singer in a Nazi death camp.
No matter whose voice he hears, Wideman immerses himself. The truth can be discovered only by telling the tale, so every story is a journey, unexpected and scary, a plunge into the unconscious mind. Reading these pieces, you feel a disturbing sense of risk, the fear that Wideman moves without plot, intuitively, and might not know his way back to the surface, that he is struggling to find meaning and hope in the midst of chaos and despair, that he has asked us to come with him but can make no promises.
We follow him on faith because his vision is humane, his love for his people passionate but honest, his poetry transcendent. What these stories lay bare, what they impel us to face in ourselves, may startle and bring sorrow, but will redeem us in the end if we embrace what it means to hear other voices in our own skulls. It is the most intimate of bonds, this merging, where distance collapses, where the dead live in our bodies, where the imprisoned walk free beside us, where the brother of a crippled girl can make amends and be forgiven.
In "Loon Man," one troubled man tells another it's "really crazy not even keeping straight who you are not. Who you are is hard. But Foster, any bird or beetle knows who it is not." Yet Wideman himself is crossing that boundary all the time,
forgetting who he is not, imagining another person's life and entering his soul, learning to see through his hands: "Look at the blood in the ropes in the backs of your hands. Think of that blood leaving you and running up in somebody's else's arms, down into somebody's fingers black or brown or ivory just like yours. And listen to those hands playing music. Now shut your eyes. Shut them for good. And ask yourself if anything's been lost, if something's been taken away or something given. Then try to remember the color of light."
Stories save us, reveal us to one another, give back memory. Writing to his brother Robby, Wideman said: "Stories are letters. Letters sent to anybody or everybody. But the best kind are meant to be read by a specific somebody."
Sometimes these letters are the only hope we have. In "Casa Grande," a father visits his twenty-one-year-old son in prison. He says he cannot bear "the terrible reality" of his son's life, cannot think of it for more than a fraction of a second. Then he discovers a story the boy wrote when he was ten, a tale of a trip to Jupiter. The father believes he had no memory of the story, that it was lost completely. But in his own journal, he finds this entry, written a year before the tale resurfaced: "He sits on a planet ten million light years away, waiting for time to change the place he is to another. . . . He dreams a forest of green creatures, some tall as trees, many man-sized, others a foot or two high."
Nothing is lost. The imaginations of father and son tangle as one. What the father thinks he cannot do, he has done already: their lives have been exchanged: their intimacy is absolute.
But words fail. Wideman's own son was incarcerated for manslaughter. The pain of having a brother and a son in prison cuts too deep. Letters are incomplete. Understanding eludes us. Ultimately, we must trust the struggle for its own sake, must have faith in the desire to communicate and in the longing to find connections. Exploring "The Beginning of Homewood," a story that began as a letter to Robby, Wideman tries to grasp the link between his great-great-great-grandmother and his brother, both "outlaws": "I ask myself again
why not me, why is it the two of you skewered and displayed like she would have been if she hadn't kept running. Ask myself if I would have stayed and tried to make the best of a hopeless situation. Ask if you really had any choice, if anything had changed in the years between her crime and yours."
To say,
You suffer what I do not, is close to saying,
You suffer for my sake. This humility, this wonder in the face of sacrifice, is a theme that haunts Wideman. Some submit by choice, others are sacrificed against their wills. The young woman in "Signs," besieged by threats and racial hatred, abandons hope of ending the abuse and finally claims she made up the story, that she is responsible for the notes in the bathroom, the scrawls on her door. Only this "confession" will satisfy her tormentors. "Could this be called fighting back. Offering up your flesh and blood until the beast chokes on your bitterness."
In "Fever," a story set in plague-ravaged Philadelphia, a man with only a first name nurses the dying and hauls out the dead. Each body he touches brings him closer to his own death, and he knows this. But he stays, and dies. People find explanations for the fever that devastates the city, and Wideman hears these voices, scientific and precise, defining Dengue and Yellow Fever, describing how mosquitoes carry disease. A mythic passage tells the tale of a mosquito biting a slave, as if the mosquito is lover, goddess, demon, liberator. But another voice speaks the simple truth. The city is a body, sick like the bodies of its people: the world is a larger body. "Fever grows in the secret places of our hearts, planted there when one of us decided to sell one of us to another. The drum must pound ten thousand thousand years to drive that evil away."
Winter comes, and frost. The mosquitoes die. Many people live, spared by the sacrifice of others. Wideman sees how capriciously some are chosen and keeps asking:
Why not me? There is reverence for those who offer up themselves in these stories, and there is awe, a collision of tenderness and terror, sorrow and hope.
Melanie Rae Thon is the author of a collection of stories, Girls in the Grass,
and a novel, Meteors in August,
which have just been released in paperback by Faber and Faber. Her second novel, Iona Moon,
will be published by Poseidon next year.
