SOURCE: Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. “‘How Would They Know?’: Conclusion.” In John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality, pp. 113-21. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1995.

Just as I had completed what I hoped to be the next to the last draft of this work, Wideman published his third collection of short stories, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman. I read the New York Times review of the collection before I bought it. In fact, it was the review which determined for me the necessity to include the collection in this work. For the review emphasized the beauty of the older, Homewood stories, implied in fact that the works included in the Homewood Trilogy were more lyrical and thus more powerful works of art than the more recent ones included in the new collection:

Many non-Homewood stories in this volume tackle the thorny subject of relations between the races … these stories are fairly conventional tales that could have been written by any competent graduate of a fiction-writing class. They lack the assurance of the Homewood stories and their ease of language and liberty of form.¹

I was doubtful. How can the works produced by Wideman in his early, European-centered period be more powerful than those written after he had reclaimed his African Personality? It would be like saying a blind person could see better when he was blind than when he regained his sight. Of course, the critic's view is not one that is African-centered. Otherwise it would be more likely that the criticism would have been just the opposite: “Though lyrical Wideman's early Homewood stories lack the potency and relevancy of the new stories included in his recent collection.” Interestingly, the critic reveals that for him or her the appeal of the Homewood stories rests in part on their “Faulkneresque” quality.

Before attempting to classify these new stories as better or worse than Wideman's earlier ones, perhaps it would be useful to discuss comments such as “fairly conventional tales that could have been written by any competent graduate of a fiction writing class” and “lack the assurance of the Homewood stories and their ease of language and liberty of form”. Is the choice of subjects or the language of the graduate student being measured? According to Frantz Fanon, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. The Antilles Negro who wants to be white will be the whiter as he gains mastery of the cultural tool that language is.”² That Wideman's language (style, in this case) in these stories is not Faulkneresque is a credit to him since it signifies his rejection of the western literary standards he had earlier embraced. The language (the use of the English language, in this case) of the graduate student must reflect good grammar and writing skills or else s/he would not be labeled “competent.” To call stories which have as their subject matter apartheid, teenage pregnancy, and infanticide “fairly conventional tales” seems inaccurate as well.

Though I admit that I do not know what is meant by “ease of language” since “ease” means freedom from pain and only animals experience pain, “liberty of form” suggests creative narrative form. Structurally, the stories in this collection are Wideman's most creative, beginning with the use of lower case letters for its title and for the author's name. In this work, more than in the earlier ones, Wideman enlists structure in service of theme. “I'm no higher, no bigger, than the people whom I represent,” he announces.

Clearly, Wideman demonstrates an increased consciousness of himself as an African in this collection. In fact, these recent stories almost pick up where Philadelphia Fire leaves off. Philadelphia Fire demonstrated Wideman's growing concern for African people in general, not just those of his family. In that work, he began to ask himself the “cause” question concerning the race: What is the cause of the African's exploitation and oppression? His answer revolved around the Prosperos, those early European capitalists, or agents of capitalists, who went around “discovering,” exploiting, and oppressing other people for profit. In these new stories Wideman continues to probe the cause question by first looking at what happened to himself; then by looking at those like Robby, those not so conditioned by “the system”, who grew up in Homewood; and finally by looking at what's happening to African people worldwide.

In “Backseat” Wideman gives us a glimpse of his early lessons in how not to be an African. He is taken by his paternal grandmother to the home of the Europeans she maids for because they have heard about how smart he is. While eating breakfast with them, his grandmother maiding all the while, he is so scared, so afraid of doing a “Nigger” thing that he eats what he hates: soft scrambled eggs (35).³ His adult perspective on his conditioning is all different now from what it was in early works, including those in the Homewood series. Unlike the man/boy in “Across the Wide Missouri,” Wideman's view of his father and his father image, Clark Gable, is at odds. Now this “white man tall in the saddle calling all the shots” is likened to those capitalists who have exploited and oppressed Africans and other people of color. He is the “Great White Father,” this “white man tall in the saddle” who thinks of the world as “his world” (29). Wideman also learns that his “opportunity” to leave Homewood does not mean that everyone has that same opportunity, no matter how qualified they are, or that Homewood will benefit from that opportunity. Being “the only one” of your kind not only robs you of your identity, but also does nothing for the rest of the African world: “I thought when I returned home one time it would be different. I didn't know exactly how but maybe better somehow” (“Everybody knew bubba riff,” 72). One of his old running buddies “schools him” that his leaving didn't change things for them or Homewood: “cause everybody knows the way it goes moving west mister moving on out bro up and out to star time don't fuck with the product” (73). The language, in slang and elliptical, reinforces the notion of just how broken up things are in Homewood. Far from making conditions better, opportunities for a few Africans have often served to rob the African communities of their most valuable resources. Those with the most potential to give and to share have been extracted from the communities just as the slave trade robbed Africa's best, those who were between the ages of five and thirty-five, and left the infirm and the elderly to survive as best they could.

The reader gets a better glimpse of Wideman's increased understanding of the cycle of oppression experienced by African people when he discusses the future of African males:

all the brothers got a chain round they necks and a number on the chain and somebody pulling numbers daily bang bang down you go it's just a matter of time bloods be extinct you know like them endangered species and shit don't laugh it's true we ought to fire up a campaign shit they got one for elephants and whales and ring-tailed sap-sucking woody woodpeckers why not posters and TV ads and buttons and T-shirts S.O.N. Save Our Niggers

(71)

The passage lacks punctuation; sentences are all run together suggesting the chaos and decay of African communities and the loss of African values and lives. Structurally, then, the passage reinforces the idea of oppression in the African communities that Wideman is attempting to convey.

Rodney King is an example of one of those “black boys” who fights in U.S. wars, manages to stay alive, and then comes back to potential or actual extinction. Who else is Wideman referring to below as the “black man beat to his knees by a whole posse of cracker cops”?

Then what will those black boys think who risked their lives and lost their lives to keep a grin on the face of the man who rode Willie Horton bareback to the White House. Twelve, fourteen cops on TV beating that boy with sticks long as their legs. Our young men not even home good from the war yet. What you think they're thinking when they see a black man beat to his knees by a whole posse of cracker cops. Somebody ought to tell them boys, ought to have told me, it happens every time. After every war. Oh yeah. They tell us march off and fight in some jungle or desert. Be heroes and save our behinds. We'll be here rooting for you. But when you come back across the pond, if you make it back, don't forget where you are. You ain't no hero here. You know what you are here. And in case you don't remember, here's a little reminder. A forget-me-knot upside your nappy head. Bop bop a loo bop. Bop bam boom. Rolling around on the pavement beat half to death just in time to welcome our boys home.

(“Backseat,” 28-29)

Wideman is not just concerned about the African male, but also African children, the most vulnerable sector of the world. His most creative work to date, “Newborn thrown in trash and dies” is a fine example of just how much Wideman has reclaimed his African Personality. The voice, we discover well into the story, is that of the newborn of the title, an infant girl thrown forty-five feet out of a window into a trash bin. Her material conditions in life, her environment, are so horrendous that in just the time it takes her to be born and her nineteen-year old mother to throw her away, she encrues the intelligence of an elder. Out of the mouth of babes, or so they say. It is this “they” who are to blame for the conditions in which she is born and dies: “They say you see your whole life pass in review the instant before you die. How would they know” (120). It is a questioning/probing voice (the baby girl's and Wideman's), the voice of a thinking person free of the chains that have conditioned the African's mind for so long. (The infant has not been living long enough to be brainwashed and Wideman's “brain” has just been freed.) This freedom allows the narrator to look at U.S. society without blinders on.⁴

Born in one of the housing projects that breeds disaster, the infant uses the dwelling to size up the nature of capitalism in the U.S. Each floor symbolizes a particular class in the society. Using her quick downward flight to analyze the nature of each of these classes, she understands quite clearly that “each floor exists and the life on it is real, whether we pause to notice or not” (125). Appropriately, the bottom floor, the foundation of the building, is the most corrupt floor and happens to be that which represents the president of the U.S.:

El Presidente often performs on TV. We can watch him jog, fish, travel, lie, preen, mutilate the language. But these activities are not his job; his job is keeping things in the building as they are, squatting on the floor of power like a broken generator or broken furnace or broken heart, occupying the space where one that works should be.

(126)

Perhaps what is most unique about these new stories is that for the first time we get stories about the condition of African people worldwide. Wideman does not restrict his pen to the boundaries of the U.S. Perhaps his increased awareness of the Prospero mentality, discussed in Philadelphia Fire, has enabled him to see that the nature of capitalism has not changed significantly. Instead of individual representatives of capitalist countries going out to conquer new worlds and peoples, the countries themselves are performing these tasks. One thing for sure, Wideman notices that African people worldwide are suffering from the same conditions. While in South Africa, the narrator of “what he saw” makes the connection between living conditions there and in Pittsburgh: “Acres of shanties, shacks, lean-tos, tents, shelters so mean and bizarre they take me back to the vacant lots of Pittsburgh, the clubhouses my gang of ten-year-olds jerry-rigged from whatever materials we could scavenge and steal” (96-97). And what happens to the people, the uprooting process in South Africa and urban renewal in the U.S., is the same: “In Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina uprooted even after we're dead. Blades dig up our ancestor's bones, crush them, scatter our cemeteries to clear the way for shopping malls, parking lots” (98).

Not only are connections made between African people within the story, but also among stories. For just after the South Africa story—one about police brutality—appears a story about police brutality in an African community within the U.S., “a voice foretold.” The story concerns the aftermath of an incident in which New York policemen force their way in on an innocent couple and murder the man—all in a case of mistaken identity, no questions asked, no apologies given: “What makes it so bad they [the couple] ain't never done nothing to nobody. Happy living together up in that apartment. Make you feel good when you see them on the street. One day in the prime of life. Next day those dogs come and both them children gone” (117). Unlike the South African story, however, this one sends a message that something has to be done, something will be done: “Think of up and down and paths crossing and crossing roads and crossroads and traffic and what goes up must come down and heaven's gate and what goes 'round come 'round” (119).

The extent to which Wideman utilizes African women as main or significant characters as well as the quality of the remarks he makes about them in this collection are refreshingly progressive.⁵ In “Backseat” he remembers an occasion when he had a sexual encounter in the back seat of his Uncle Mac's 1946 red Lincoln Continental. He “opened her fat thighs, jiggly as they wanted to be, but like a compass too, hinged, calibrated so you can keep track of how far they spreading” (23). Here the African woman is not ridiculed for her “bushy hair” as in Hurry Home; the depiction is more positive because it is the thighs of the African woman that serve as guide. And the narrator has no doubts about the pleasure of the experience. Wasn't it good? “Yes. Yes.” Within the same story, the narrator expresses his preference for a “full-bodied” woman, certainly a change from early works in which Wideman's ideal woman was always slim (and most always European): “I want her robust, those wide hips and broad shoulders bumpered with flesh” (25). Seemingly, Wideman is turning his earlier notions of African women—ones based on a Eurocentric perspective—upside down, topsy-turvy. In fact, in “welcome,” his image of them is switched in midstream, right in the middle of a sentence: “There was this fat girl in the Woodside. No, not fat. A big girl, solid, pretty, light on her feet, a large pretty big-eyed brown girl thirteen or fourteen with black crinkly hair and smooth kind of round chubby cheek babydoll face” (141-42). An earlier notion of the African woman, an earlier way of seeing, a “throwback” is revised in mid context to reflect the new consciousness Wideman has of himself and his people.

The intellectual who is Wideman in these stories is even more self-critical than the intellectuals in Damballah and Philadelphia Fire. He is also more conscious of the role he plays as a university professor and writer. In “Backseat,” Wideman examines the significance of his using three names on his novels: “When I published my first novel, I wanted my father's name to be part of the record so I was John Edgar Wideman on the cover. Now the three names of my entities sound pretentious to me, stiff and old-fashioned. I'd prefer to be just plain John Wideman” (42). The words “just plain” are significant for they reflect Wideman's desire to be part of the masses, not distinct from them as in Hurry Home. In that novel as well as in the first, there is the suggestion that the three names were used not only because he wanted his father's name to be part of the record, but also because using them was a way of distinguishing himself as important, unique, a somebody distinct from and superior to other Africans. Now as an African-centered person, he sees no significant difference between himself and his people. Just how far Wideman has come from that early petty bourgeois intellectual position is demonstrated by his almost exclusive use of lower case letters for titles, and at times within the text itself, of the new stories in this collection. Moreover, the title of the book itself, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, is in lower case letters to reflect the humbling process, the Africological process, Wideman has experienced.

“Signs” is a powerful story in its revelation of just how far Wideman has come in reclaiming his African Personality. It is a story about an African woman who is a professor at a predominantly European university. Two incidents are revealed in the story or rather there is a story within a story. Both involve racism or its consequences. The incident that occurs first in time is one when the professor, Kendra Crawley, is harassed at graduate school, the only African in a girl's dorm: “When she's seen the first sign, a piece of cardboard thumbtacked to a door, she'd thought it was a joke, poor, poor taste, but a joke nonetheless, the Whites Only sign stuck to the communal bathroom door” (80). But she soon discovers it was no joke. The harassment continues and increases. Those who could come to her aid—African male graduate students—are “too tame, too bourgie, too white … No. They roomed in town where they could cop to their heart's content, tame, bourgie, white pussy in private” (82). Perhaps this indictment against young African men includes Wideman himself when he was a student at the University of Pennsylvania.

The second incident, the one that occurs when Kendra is a professor at a similar university, revolves around a discussion she has with one of her students, a European male who does not understand the relevance of studying Milton's Paradise Lost. Her reaction: she feels she's going to explode, dealing with “little blond, blue-eyed devil” European students (79). Why ask her the reason for making Milton a requirement. She too is following orders. If she had her “druthers,” she would require that they read about the

Rebel angels … Martin, Malcolm, Mandela. Saint Douglass. Saint Harriet. No, not Ozzie's wife, cracker. Ms. Tubman to you. If the syllabus of Western Civ ever tilted my way. Which it don't, boy. So ask your mama to apologize. Not me. She married the boss. Raised you. I was just someone to fetch his slippers. Iron his pants. A little action on the side.

(78)

This Wideman is clearly not the same one who escaped to Laramie, Wyoming. Rather, the passage reveals a Wideman who would run from Laramie, skip over it entirely, if he could. Purge it from his memory.

Wideman's increased consciousness of the writing process—the use of form to enhance content, but perhaps most importantly, the use of form to reveal the consciousness of the author—is demonstrated throughout this collection. There are three significant examples: First, as mentioned, Wideman uses lower case letters for titles, an effort to minimize distinctions based on superiority or inferiority, between words as well as people. His name and most of the titles, including the title of the book, are in lower case letters. Secondly, Wideman arranges his stories so that the very arrangement conveys a message to the reader. By placing “a voice foretold” directly after “what he saw,” Wideman implies that there is little difference between the nature of the African's oppression in South Africa and that in the U.S. For one thing, there is police brutality of the African community occurring in both countries. Third, he indicates that the mere writing process, although limited and long-range in its impact, contributes to the liberation of African people: “Try as they might, they could not usurp her story. In her own good time, in words or deeds or fiery silence, the truth of her witness would be heard” (“Backseat,” 30). Not only is truth liberating in itself, but also it will eventually come out, “be heard.”

All in all, Wideman's process of reclaiming his African Personality continues in The Stories of John Edgar Wideman. And if so, how can the works in this collection be less powerful, less liberated in form than those in Damballah as the New York Times critic contends? In 1992 Wideman knows more, has experienced more about the African's reality. Not only does he have a Homewood perspective, a “down home,” “back home,” perspective, but also an international one in regard to African people, a perspective which gives him the assurance to burst the traditional forms of fiction, to write an uninhibited, e.g., unpunctuated, text. So he is at ease in writing about the death of an African male struggling to survive in the streets of Homewood in “Everybody knew bubba riff” or of writing in the voice of a newborn girl in “Newborn thrown in trash and dies.” How can these kinds of stories be considered conventional tales? So while there may be an absence of a “Faulknersque” quality to these stories, there is the presence of an “Africanesque” one.

Notes

1. Review of The Stories of John Edgar Wideman in the New York Times, 21 July 1992, B2.

2. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 38.

3. Wideman, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (New York: Pantheon, 1992). All page references are in the text.

4. It is interesting that Wideman chooses an infant girl rather than boy as his protagonist, for not only are African youth most oppressed in our society, but also, within this sector of the population, the African female youth are most vulnerable. This choice reflects Wideman's increased consciousness of the plight of the African female. Clearly, Wideman is thinking of the problems confronting African people and possible solutions for them at this stage in his writing career.

5. Significantly, there are no European female characters in these new stories. Contrasted with his earlier works, from A Glance Away to Sent for You Yesterday, this omission is quite a useful gauge of Wideman's “new thinking.”