that he must face matters of guilt and responsibility; he must, as the storyteller, set his brother’s crime against ‘‘the crime of this female runaway.’’

The narrator’s reckoning process requires that he reconsider Sybela’s story in light of both his own and his brother’s life. When he revisits her ‘‘dash for freedom,’’ he finds that he wants to dwell on her first day of freedom, but cannot. The reason his imagination won’t stay fixed on how Sybela felt and what she thought that first day when she isn’t awakened by the sound of the conch shell is that her freedom is compromised and mediated, not simple, as he had always thought it was. Sybela’s freedom is incomplete, and her autonomy limited. She trades absolute freedom—and the risk of death and capture— for the protection she gets from remaining with Charlie Bell. On her first day of freedom, Sybela ‘‘misses the moaning horn and hates the white man, her lover, her liberator, her children’s father sleeping beside her.’’ In other words, the line between slavery and freedom is not absolute, nor is the boundary between evil and good, and hate and love. Sybela’s freedom, upon which the narrator’s entire family’s existence depends, is not the result of a singular, heroic act. Rather, she’s free because of an infinite number of calculations and compromises, all of which have consequences. She may have escaped the plantation and some of the strictures of slavery, but she remains bound to Charlie, at first because he knows where they’re going and later because he can offer her and her children protection. He knows his way in the world and she does not: ‘‘All white men seemed to know that magic that connected the plantation to the rest of the world, a world which for her was no more than a handful of words she had heard others use.’’

When the narrator imagines what would happen to Sybela if she had been caught, ‘‘a funky, dirty, black woman, caught and humbled, marched through like the prize of war she is,’’ he is compelled to ask himself ‘‘why not me.’’ And then he addresses his questions to his brother’s situation, also ‘‘paraded . . . costumed, fettered through the halls,’’ and wonders if he ‘‘could have run away without committing a crime.’’ Will running away always be a crime for descendants of Sybela Owens, the woman who never managed to quite run far enough? The narrator wonders if his own distance from, or escape from, Homewood constitutes a crime, or if it is compensated by his brother’s crime.

The narrator suggests that his brother’s incarceration is a consequence of Homewood’s history. According to May’s account, the land on which Sybela and Charlie originally settled is ‘‘fixed,’’ or cursed. She explains: ‘‘That spiteful piece of property been the downfall of so many I done forgot half the troubles come to people try to live there.’’ She describes how the beautiful babies she remembers later become men about whom there always seems to be some terrible story to tell: ‘‘I remembers the babies. How beautiful they were. Then somebody tells me this one’s dead, or that one’s dying or Rashad going to court today or they gave Tommy life.’’

Though it stops short of drawing conclusions, Wideman’s story suggests that even today in Homewood, a community founded by a runaway slave and her white lover, determining guilt and innocence is no simple matter. By setting up the comparison between Sybela’s incarceration under the institution of slavery and her moral but illegal escape on the one hand, and Robby’s flight from the law and subsequent imprisonment on the other hand, Wideman asks some troubling questions about justice and accountability. Is Robby’s criminalization inevitable? Is his flight from justice preordained and his imprisonment an instance of the historical desire of white America to subdue rebellious black Americans like Sybela? By examining his own role in the family and his safe, privileged distance from the kind of life his brother has led, the narrator wonders if his freedom had been purchased by his brother’s. The story implies that the curse of the piece of land on which Sybela and Charlie settled insists that the family has not yet paid for Sybela’s crime of resistance, and that it demands that every generation must offer up one of its own to white authority to compensate for Sybela’s refusal to give herself and her children up.

Just as the narrative landscape of Wideman’s story proves to be more complex than meets the eye, so does it’s moral terrain. Wideman challenges readers to sort out one voice from the next and leaves readers to wrestle with gaps and unanswered questions. On a moral level, however, his story has an even more profoundly destabilizing effect by linking Sybela’s ‘‘crime’’ of escaping slavery, to Robby’s crime and capture, to the narrator’s ‘‘escape’’ from the life his brother and so many others have been consigned to live.

Source: Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001. Piedmont-Marton teaches literature and writing classes at Southwestern University in Texas. She writes frequently about the modern short story.

John Edgar Wideman’s short story, ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ is a complex assembly of smaller stories that the narrator attempts to meaningfully string together. The many stories he tells appear in the letter written from the narrator to his brother, imprisoned for life for a murder to which he was an accomplice. That letter is the short story ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood.’’ His brother’s fate prompts the narrator into ‘‘trying to figure out why I was on a Greek island and why you were six thousand miles away in prison and what all that meant and what I could say to you about it.’’ Feeling he must say something to his brother (‘‘the only person I needed to write was you’’), he begins a letter, but ‘‘five or six sentences addressed to you and then the story took over.’’ The narrator never finishes this original letter or its story. He does, however, later re-read it and is provoked to write the second letter—the present story. The first story the narrator tells, about a letter becoming a story but never getting sent, establishes one of the major themes of ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ namely, the attempt to make sense of events through telling stories. Additionally, the structure here serves to blur the generic distinctions between letters and stories, suggesting that stories take on much of their meaning through whomever the writer is addressing, and that, conversely, letters to others may be not very different from stories we want to tell them, specifically and individually.

The second story the narrator wants to tell his brother, that of their great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens, he calls both a story and a meditation. Moreover, it is a meditation that he ‘‘had wanted to decorate with the trappings of a story.’’ As the short story ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood’’ is both story and letter, here the story of Sybela is both story and meditation meant to look like a story. The effect is a further blurring of genre distinctions, which here suggests that stories might be characterized as meditations, instruments for thought processes that change the reader or listener. With that invitation to meditate on Sybela’s story, the narrator proceeds. Sybela had been a runaway slave, and the theme of the story as the narrator wants to tell it is ‘‘the urge for freedom,’’ presumably because his brother feels the same urge. But this application gets too complicated. His attempt ‘‘to tell Sybela’s story as it connected with yours,’’ proves difficult since she ran away from slavery, and his brother ran away from the scene of a murder he committed. It would seem obvious that a slave who runs away is certainly less a criminal than a man who commits murder and runs from the law. Therefore, there is an initial impulse to say something to his brother with this story, but the message is deferred because the narrator is uncertain how to make sense of it; the parallels between the stories of Sybela and his brother seem difficult to maintain. Still, in the face of this frustration, he persists, faithful that telling the story will yield some meaning, some understanding for his brother and him. Straining to relate his brother’s story to Sybela’s, he wonders whether the difference might be one of language, whether there are ‘‘names other than ‘outlaw’ to call you,’’ whether ‘‘words other than ‘crime’’’ might ‘‘de- fine’’ his brother’s actions. Though during slavery a slave who ran away was, legally speaking, committing a crime, few people would today call a runaway slave a criminal. Perhaps such a change in perception could redeem his brother. But imagining such a change is a difficult and complex task. The narrator wants to tell a story that can console his brother, offer him some kind of redemption, some kind of connection, but there are parts that don’t fit, that he can’t make sense of. This is presumably why the original letter was deferred for so long.

Yet Aunt May’s voice, which echoes throughout ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ gets him ‘‘started on the story’’ of Sybela. Like Aunt May, the narrator allows himself to make ‘‘digressions within digressions.’’ Imitating Aunt May’s stories that ‘‘exist because of their parts and each part is a story worth telling, worth examining to find the stories it contains,’’ the narrator takes two important ‘‘digressions’’ off the Sybela story, seeking ‘‘to recover everything.’’ These are the stories of Sybil and Belle. Sybela’s very identity—her name—preserves both of these women’s stories. Sybela and Sybil the Greek priestess are both imprisoned, but Sybela overcomes the death of spirit that comes from being caged, while Sybil begs for death. Thus, Sybela’s triumph of spirit is highlighted through contrast. It becomes an example the narrator wants to hold up for his brother. Sybil’s story contributes meaning to Sybela’s and, by extension, to the story of the narrator’s brother. Sybela, Sybil, and Belle— who encloses her head in a bird cage to ward off the sexual advances of white men—all struggle with captivity and the waiting it entails. They raise the possibility of, and complicate the issue of, dignity within captivity. In the worst case scenario, captivity might finally allow no hope except the ‘‘hauntingly human expressiveness’’ with which one can sing Sybil’s song, ‘‘I want to die.’’ As these stories provided ways for her fellow slaves to interpret Sybela, so they all three might provide interpretations for the situation in which the narrator and his brother find themselves. The quick complications the narrator brings together with this grouping of stories—those of Sybela, Sybil, Belle, and his brother— demonstrate his readiness to concede that there are no easy answers and to deal with the difficulties directly. Striving to be the kind of storyteller Aunt May is, one whose stories take shape in the process of telling, he has faith that the stories, however disparate, can be pieced together into a unified and meaningful whole. And so he continues to tell them.

Around the middle of ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ the narrator writes his own version of a piece of his brother’s story, the scene at the courthouse in Fort Collins, Colorado. The imagery in this account provides links to the other stories, inviting comparisons. For example, details such as the hallway that ‘‘some other black prisoner mopped’’ and the ‘‘drag of the iron’’ that binds their legs suggest the slavery and bondage of the narrator’s brother’s ancestors. The narrator’s brother and accomplice pretend no awareness of the chains that cage them at the courthouse, creating around themselves a ‘‘glass cage,’’ in which they perform for the onlookers, and asserting their spiritual independence from the physical chains that bind them. This ‘‘glass cage’’ is part of a pattern of cage imagery that links many of the stories, and how these characters respond to the cages is a good point of contrast. The image of the cage recalls the self-imposed cage worn on Belle’s head, which became a symbol of self-rule and dignity to protect her from the sexual advances of the white men. Sybil is caged by the magician and wants to die. Sybela flees her cage, and escapes. Yet the most important cage is the prison that holds the narrator’s brother, and the question that drives this story is: What should my reaction to this cage be? It’s a question as urgent to his brother as to the narrator.

In the project of telling stories to find meaning and order, the narrator might also hypothesize variations on those stories. For example, he realizes that Sybela is a much closer parallel to himself than to his brother since he and Sybela both escaped—she the slavery, he the conditions that have landed his brother in jail. So by imagining her getting caught, he distances himself and turns Sybela’s story, once more, into his brother’s: ‘‘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.’’ In this comparison, his brother becomes a victim of the social forces around him, as sympathetic as a runaway slave. Tinkering with the story allows the narrator to wonder, to question the society that has jailed his brother. Yet, the tone is not argumentative. It is openly exploratory, not angrily condemnatory. He wonders ‘‘if you really had any chance, if anything had changed between her crime and yours.’’ The tension is not relieved, but the hypothesized story creates new possibilities for the narrator to consider in trying to make sense of his brother’s situation, and thus the layering of these stories continues to fulfill an important purpose.

Yet another story, that of Sybela’s life at Homewood, finally shows the significance of the title, ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood.’’ Like most of the stories the narrator tells, this one has no real conclusion; it ends in a kind of limbo. Racists in the community run Sybela and Charlie Bell off the property at Hamilton Avenue, and legend says that ‘‘Grandmother Owens cursed it.’’ As evidence of this curse, Aunt May offers two more stories, one of a ‘‘crazy woman’’ that tried to live there and ‘‘strangled her babies and slit her own throat,’’ and another of a Jehovah’s Witness church there that ‘‘burned to the ground.’’ The property is ‘‘still empty ’cept for ashes and black stones.’’ All of these details suggest that things have not yet been set right. The land from which this family springs is still cursed and at odds with its surroundings, and no one knows how to release it. There is sterility, lack of peace, and discord. The story is called ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ because this beginning is what still determines the lives of these family members, and the story has no end yet. Still in the beginning stages of making sense of Homewood and its people, they wait for an authentic resolution.

This theme of waiting pervades ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood.’’ In the first paragraph, the narrator’s report that he has delayed the writing of the letter—the telling of the story—establishes the mood of ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ one of uncertain waiting and incompletion. Furthermore, the narrator’s brother waits in prison. Sybil waits in a cage. The isle of Delos waits in a barren limbo with no death and no birth. The narrator has just visited Dachau, where prisoners waited and died, hopelessly. Aunt May’s plea in her song for the lord to come down and touch her expresses a reverent waiting. May and Sybela Owens wait for each other in their exchange of gazes, wait to share the truth, wait to hear it, wait upon each other. The narrator wonders whether he would have tried to escape slavery, or waited in its hold. The narrator ends this letter to his brother with the words, ‘‘Hold on.’’

In the last story the narrator tells, people wait to hear the Supreme Court. The Court will be hearing a story to which it must offer some kind of resolution, a case involving prison conditions and inmate rights. Though it does not seem that this case would directly affect the narrator’s brother, it offers hope because the Court may be able to re-conceptualize human rights; it has ‘‘a chance to author its version of the Emancipation Proclamation.’’ The simple hearing of an unusual story might cause the Court to see things differently, the narrator hopes, to probe deeper than present ideas of ‘‘crime,’’ to ‘‘ask why you are where you are, and why the rest of us are here.’’ For the narrator, there is no simple conviction that everything will turn out well, but his faith in storytelling allows him to have faith in the institutions of justice that have imprisoned his brother. Given the circumstances, that is a tremendous accomplishment.

At the conclusion of ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ none of the stories end. There is still waiting to be done, everyone must ‘‘hold on.’’ They will all wait for some resolution, for some new version of the Emancipation Proclamation, for the Judgment Day that Sybela’s neighbors saw portended in the falling of stars, stars who come to symbolize her descendants and their falls. While that waiting is uncertain in nature, the stories told can begin ‘‘to cohere’’ and offer hope that their lives may finally do the same.

Source: James Frazier, Critical Essay on ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001. Frazier is an instructor of high school and college English literature and composition.

I went to Amherst, Massachusetts, on April 23, 1992, to talk with John Edgar Wideman on the U Mass campus, where he teaches a graduate course in creative writing. Wideman’s literary mapping and charting of Homewood’s neighborhood streets and people indicate the complexities and paradoxes of contemporary American urban literature. In discussing his portraits of Homewood in Damballah, Hiding Place, Sent for You Yesterday, and Reuben, we explored the ways in which fictional, constructed landscapes can be read.

[Lustig:] You moved from Homewood when you were twelve, yet it’s the place that you keep circling back to. I find it interesting that, despite all those years away, it’s the primary place in your work, that you keep going back to it as defining home. Maybe you could talk a little about that. [Wideman:] Okay, but let me start with a distinction.

There is a neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Homewood. It was there before I was born, and probably when I’m dead it will still be called that. It’s considered a number of streets, houses, population changes—people get old and die. It’s a real place in that sense. Now, for many of the years between birth and about twelve, I lived in Homewood. Other times I’ve lived in Shadyside, which is a completely different neighborhood. That’s the level of fact. The distinction I want to make is that, once I started to write, I was creating a place based partly on memories of the actual place I lived in, and partly on the exigencies or needs of the fiction I was creating. Once I began to write, to create, I felt no compunction to stay within the bounds of Homewood. Now how that fictional place relates to the actual Homewood is very problematic. And, depending on the questions you ask, that relationship will be important or irrelevant, superfluous.

If I were to tell the story of your life in my fiction, I might talk about your height, and keep you tall, but I also might make your hair dark, because I want a heroine who has dark hair. And I might know your parents well, or know just a tiny bit about them, but I could make one a sailor, and the other a college teacher, just because that’s what I need in my fiction. People could then go back and say, well now, what did Wideman know about this young woman named Jessica, and how long did he know her, and how tall is she really, and what do her parents do? But all that might or might not have anything to do with the particular book in which you appear. So although I have lived in other places, the Homewood which I make in my books has continued to grow and be confident. It has its own laws of accretion and growth and reality.

What I think is really interesting about the way this Homewood, in your books, is figured is that the post-1970 landscape has been in a lot of ways devastated. Your characters—and you, for that matter—talk about Homewood Avenue as it is now, as opposed to what it was in the ’50s, or the ’40s. And yet the way in which the people relate to each other makes it feel almost like a rural place, like a small town. I think that a neighborhood is an urban construct, so I’m very interested in the way that these people seem to interrelate as a small-town community.

I go in the other direction. I think it’s the people who make the neighborhood. That’s the difference between learning about Homewood through my writing and learning about Homewood from sociologists. There have been interesting books written about Homewood, but the people make the place. They literally make it. Yes, Homewood Avenue is devastated, but when the character in ‘‘Solitary’’ walks down that street, she sees the street at various times in its history. So it’s populated by the fish store, by five-and-tens. She remembers places that were there when she was a little girl. Characters do that all the time. They walk through the landscape which, from the point of view of some person who’s either following them with a camera or looking at them from a distance, is just vacant lots, but the person in the story sees something else. What counts most is what the person inside the story sees. That’s where the life proceeds; that’s where Homewood has a definition.

In other places in my writing I talk about how the old people made, created the town. But they created it not so much with bricks and boards; a lot of them simply moved into houses where other people had lived. They created it through their sense of values and the way they treated one another, and the way they treated the place. That’s crucial to the strength of Homewood, and it’s something very basic about African-American culture. Africans couldn’t bring African buildings, ecology, languages wholesale, in the material sense, to the New World. But they brought the invisible dimensions of their society, of our culture, to this land. That’s what you have to recognize: This world that’s carried around in people’s heads overlays and transcends and transforms whatever the people happen to be. So it’s not anything that people in Homewood invented. To make something from nothing is almost a tradition.

Home, what could be called territory or turf, in your books, is often shaped by streets. You know, some of your characters will sort of read a litany of streets. I know that’s so in Hiding Place. That seems to me like the equivalent of boundaries or property lines in rural or suburban areas, like a sense of possession, or of defining your place, your landscape.

Absolutely, and I’d take your point a step further. That litany, or incantation, is a way of possessing the turf. You name it, you claim it. There isn’t that much physical description, I don’t think, of Homewood. It’s mostly the inner geography, and then street names as the most concrete manifestation of that geography. The street names are there, I think, because they have a magic. They have an evocative quality, and that’s something that can be shared when you speak. There are streets, and when I say them to you and you walk down them, that’s the opening. It’s no coincidence that some of the great catalogues that occur in classical literature have to do with the names of the ships, the names of places. For sailors or voyagers or travelers, naming is a way, literally, of grounding themselves.

Talking about streets, or a neighborhood, in connection with this whole idea of memory and memory links, and evocation, and incantation . . . what I find so striking is what you do with time, and how much of your work starts or is set in the present and then goes back, and back, and back. And a lot of the time the look of the present is very different from that of the past, especially since urban renewal. You often refer to the effects of urban renewal as having devastated whole blocks or houses that you used to live in or live next to. I think that could be an interesting argument against urban renewal, because of the idea of memory, those memory links, the tangible memory links or the physical memory links, to the past.

I don’t know that it’s so much an argument against urban renewal, because urban renewal is a big political decision, and lots of factors go into it— and some of the reasons for doing it are very good indeed. I mean, if you take that preservationist argument to its logical conclusion, then there’s a good reason for keeping the slave barracks in the South behind the big house. You don’t want to lock yourself into some ghettoized existence.

There’s nothing essential about things; it’s how people see them, how people treat them. You could have the same attachment to a shiny new house, if you really felt it was yours, if you felt you had experience in it. For instance, the house that the Tates live in in Sent For Your Yesterday, that’s a big house, a roomy house. And there are obviously well-put-together staircases and stuff like that. It might even be a house that had been urban-renewed, at least remodeled, et cetera. And it’s a perfectly good situation, although it’s kind of haunted and scary, too.

Well, I’m thinking more of urban renewal as it was conceived of in the late ’50s and during the ’60s, as it involved the razing of blocks and sometimes of entire neighborhoods.

The impetus behind that kind of urban renewal was a simple-minded remaking of people by changing their external circumstances.

Or slum clearance, as it was sometimes called.

What that really was about was turning black people into white people, without a critique of what was wrong with white people, what was wrong with the world that blacks were being asked to become part of. That’s the whole integration-into-a-burning- building kind of thing. That’s why it didn’t make any sense, and why it was devastating. Nobody asked what was important, what was valuable about the black community that shouldn’t go, that should resist the bulldozers. There was just a wholesale exchange. We’ll give you these external circumstances because we think they’re good, because our lives are prospering. We’ll plunk this down on you, and it’ll become your world. When you examine it that way, then the real problems behind urban renewal become clearer.

You say, I think it’s in Brothers and Keepers, that your grandmother’s house on Finance was your link to Homewood at the stage when that book was being written, the early ’80s, and you were remembering the railroad tracks going overhead. I know this isn’t a fictional work, but that image sticks out for me because it’s very evocative, because I understand the sense of this place that is yours, that you’re linked into through your grandmother, because I have that with two neighborhoods in Brooklyn that were home to me. I’d like to hear more about why it’s a Homewood, and not parts of Philadelphia, not parts of Laramie, that you write about. You’ve been in many places that you could write about as, figure as, home—many places in which you could absorb the stories. A lot of times it seems that your places are alive because of the stories that people tell about the places, continually, to keep them alive.

Well, there’s something simple going on here. Those elements of Philadelphia that I came to appreciate and enjoy, and the same with Laramie, I plug into Homewood. They’re in there, although they’re kind of disguised. If I met somebody yesterday who had some quality that I felt was fascinating, and it either reminded me of my grandfather or suddenly opened up some mystery that I had in my mind, well, I might stick that in. It’s not like there’s this well of Homewood experiences that I keep drawing from; it’s stuff in the future that I’m also locating there. It has to happen that way, or else the work would become static, a moldy thing, nostalgic. The neighborhood, the place, is an artistic contrivance for capturing all kinds of experience, and it works to the degree that it is permeable, that things that happen outside Homewood continue to grow up.

That makes sense. The idea of plugging in the different parts is an elegant way of putting the writing process, or the writerly process. But if we’re talking about the neighborhood as sort of this artistic crucible for you, I’m interested in the environment that you create in your books; that is, Homewood. Am I correct in understanding that the environment forces some of your characters into situations? I read Tommy, in Hiding Place, as having been forced into his situation through an accumulation of circumstances.

I think it’s safer, and it’s always more productive and useful, to look at the individual case. That’s, again, the break in the fictional from the sociological. The play of environment versus character, versus the individual, to me is pretty meaningless when translated into the statistical terms that you use for gas molecules. You know, where and how they separate, how many will end up in this corner. That’s sort of silly when you only have one life and your life pushes you in the way that it does. It’s also kind of dangerous to generalize from one life. I want to examine the interplay of environment and character at the level at which it’s meaningful, and that is the individual life. What part does biology play, what part does nature, as opposed to nurture, play? You can only answer that, and even then in a very tentative way, by looking at the individual life. I’m not making any case, except the case of the person.

And so this play of the place, and the individual, is going to create different stories for each of the persons in that place?

Exactly. I mean, it’s not because Robby gave in, because something in the shape of Robby’s life was the shape it was. I had other brothers; there were lots of other kids like Robby who turned out a different way.

I understand. Let me ask you another question about Hiding Place. The last line of that book is, ‘‘They better make sure it doesn’t happen so easy ever again.’’ It’s Mother Bess, you know, talking about Tommy’s situation. I think that can be really interesting in conjunction with what you said about incantation, and litany. That line, for me, embodies what I see you doing with different memory links as stories passed between people, and between generations, because I think one of the most important things about this place that you create in this book is that it’s generational. It’s an established neighborhood that’s generational, that continues to exist with links between generations. As a reader you wonder, what’s going to happen in this place? What is happening with the new generation? I’m not asking you to say, here’s what’s happening, here’s the news, you know, but that kind of line, coming from a representative of the older generation, not the younger one . . . as readers, can we infer that you are saying that, for these people, a memory link has got to be established, and strong, or else the nature of Homewood will be lost, as a place, as a home?

I think that’s fair enough, if I understand what you’re saying. The learning goes in both directions: Older people teach younger people, and younger people also teach their elders. I wanted Bess’s last words to reverberate. I wanted almost to make hers a kind of avenging, or a threatening, voice. The community has learned something, she has learned something, and now it’s in the air, it’s out there, that idea should be out there. And if that idea is out there, an idea that has a certain amount of anger, because of what’s happened to this relative of hers and, knowing something about his life circumstances, the rotten dead he got, the love she has for him . . . these are things that are very powerful. They can only be allowed to fester, or be ignored, at one’s peril. She’s arming the community with a knowledge of itself which will hopefully open the door to a healthier future. The singer, or the storyteller, if he or she is functioning the way he or she should, traditionally, should arm, should enlighten, should tell you what’s happening, tell you what you need to do, what your choices are. That’s the stage I wanted to take Bess to, in that book—and, with her, the reader and the community. Bess inhabits the same world the little fairy who helps to burn things down in Hiding Place inhabits. Hers is a blood knowledge, it’s very palpable, but it’s also a world of the spirit.

It’s what you can call upon.

Yeah.

Source: Jessica Lustig, ‘‘Home: An Interview with John Edgar Wideman,’’ in African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 3. Fall 1992.