‘‘The Beginning of Homewood’’ and the volume of short stories of which it is a part, Damballah, belongs to the stage of Wideman’s career when he began to write from an Afrocentric perspective. After the eight year hiatus following the publication of the novel The Lynchers, Wideman moved his family back East and shifted his literary interest to stories more connected to his own life and to African-American culture and history.

Critic Doreatha Drummond Mbalia explains that this process is necessarily incremental. Wideman’s literary education, Mbalia explains, was Eurocentric. That is, he was taught to view the world from a European, or white, point of view and came to internalized European standards and values for art and literature. Thus, when he began his career as a writer, he emulated white writers like William Faulkner and James Joyce. According to Mbalia, Wideman, like so many African-American authors, needed to ‘‘reclaim his African personality.’’ This process ‘‘occurred in developmental stages, she continues, ‘‘caused by a quantitative buildup of a number of factors, largely negative, involving family members, race concerns, and the writing process itself.’’ For Wideman, the most influential of these factors was his brother Robby’s arrest for murder, which brought him back into the fold of his family for the first time in years. He writes about this experience in the memoir Brothers and Keepers: ‘‘The distance I’d put between my brother’s world and mine suddenly collapsed. The two thousand miles between Laramie, Wyoming, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my years of willed ignorance, of flight and hiding, has not changed a simple truth: I could not run fast enough or far enough. Robby was inside me. Wherever he was, running for his life, he carried part of me with him.’’ ‘‘The Beginning of Homewood,’’ then, is a story about his own ancestor, Sybela Owens, who came to Homewood in 1859 but is addressed to a fictionalized version of his incarcerated brother. The story is about both Sybela’s and Tommy’s (Robby’s) flights from bondage— hers from slavery, his as a fugitive—but it is also about Wideman’s narrator’s struggle to reconcile these two stories and to locate his own voice in them.