SOURCE: Weets, Tatiana. “The Negotiation of Remembrance in ‘Across the Wide Missouri’.” Callaloo 22, no. 3 (summer 1999): 727-39.

Damballah, published in 1981 by John Wideman, is a text with numerous screening thresholds that cannot be crossed without due preparation. In fact, for the uninitiated reader, the assemblage of letters constituting the book's title corresponds to no previously encountered meaning. The title's opaqueness thus performatively announces the central issue of the book: how can memory be transcribed into words and given readable form. The sign “Damballah” only serves to visually and phonetically trace a rich curve with vowels and consonants alternating in a ternary mode and in which there is an oscillation between the matte sonority of the occlusives and vocalic clarity. We may be sensitive to the melodious and even tactile properties of the word. But more than this, its pronunciation prepares us to enter a territory of the unknown, the meaning of which escapes us.

Once past the title, the reader discovers a letter addressed to Robby, the author's imprisoned brother. It defines every story as a letter, “stories are letters” (269),¹ and the author adds, “long overdue letters from me to you” (270). The redoubling that occurs in the adjective “overdue” concretely underscores a central issue of these texts. More than simply letters, these texts bear the burden of lateness and delay, the debt of time. This temporal problematic recurs later when the title word is defined. Damballah the Serpent-God constitutes a unifying father figure belonging to the prelapsarian world: he embodies peace but also remembrance. To invoke him, as well as the other gods of the pantheon to which he belongs, is to conjure up the past in a unifying gesture: “To invoke them (these divinities) today is to stretch one's hand back to that time and to gather up all history into a solid, contemporary ground beneath one's feet” (272). Pronouncing the word “Damballah” amounts to laying the foundations of an overarching memorial project.²

The multiple screening thresholds—the last consisting in an incomplete genealogical tree, the tacit compact of a flexible autobiography—reveal the secret and dangerous nature of the writing to come. The aim of the collection, indicated by these way stations, is that of a temporal revolution, involving the reconciliation of yesterday and today by means of the conjoining hinge of memory. But these thresholds are also intended to fill the function of a user's manual and suggest that going through these stories requires a particular reading economy comprising pauses and connections, each step forward marking a new stage in the written restructuring of the debt to memory. This necessary internal rhythm to the reading of the stories may perhaps explain why the author considers Damballah a novel rather than a collection.

“Across the Wide Missouri” is found two-thirds into the collection and is embedded in a very specific context, placed between “The Songs of Reba Love Jackson” and “Rashad.” Each of these framing stories deals with an artistic medium other than writing. The first is concerned with the comfort brought by a friend's voice, its soothing, melodious modulations that extend beyond the limits of words. The second evokes a strange piece of embroidery. The object, ordered from a local craftsman by an American soldier stationed in Vietnam during the war, is supposed to represent the soldier's daughter. On his return home, the soldier's relatives come to understand that the embroidery quite probably represents the weaver's own child. The two girls are thus superposed and now indissociable. “Across the Wide Missouri” is located in between these stories—that is, between music and image—and, like them, also makes reference to another form of representation, the eponymous film. The recourse to music and pictures underlines the help necessary to tell a story and signals the shortcomings of writing as a mode of preserving memories. These deficiencies herald the central issue of this essay.

“Across the Wide Missouri” opens on a selective description of images from a movie—those that the narrator still recalls—thus underscoring an essential motif of Wideman's writing: memory and its handling. What can one remember? How should painful but precious memories be dealt with? By way of the compelling urgency and obsessive recurrence of these questions a reversal of the usual standard of the valuation of memory occurs and is replaced by a praise of oblivion. The very possibility of writing as a means of recovering lost memories is called into question, and a way is sought to assure the management of these painful but valuable perishables. From the moment that the declared aim of writing is to reconcile past and present, it becomes anchored in a memory economy, the currency unit of which is each instance of remembrance. Writing falls into debt, or a state of deficit, whenever it obstructs access to recollection or whenever it chooses not to awaken the past. It is therefore revealing that the story should focus on the petty theft committed by the narrator as a child. The stolen money materializes the question of costs and exchange. At the same time, failure to bring memories to mind, their retention outside of awareness as an unthought known,³ may be protective in at least two ways. It protects the subject, the initial owner of the story, but it also shields the object of memory. The mechanism of this story resembles the weaving of a kind of souvenir holder that encloses the currency of writing to protect it from wear. It will be the purpose of this paper to show how the tension arising from the conflict between payment of the debt to memory and its deferral or transformation is negotiated in this story.

THE WEAVING OF MEMORY

The initial clause of “Across the Wide Missouri” is nothing other than the title of the movie evoked in the story. This title, an invitation to travel, takes on performative meaning as we progress in the text which encourages us to cross the river of time. This crossing is not limited to the mere passage from one bank to another. Involved, rather, is a voyage in the river of time, into the past, a past that raises questions about the relationship of the narrator to his father and the latter's apparent indifference to his yearning son. Travel along the river takes us to the junction of memory and disappointment in an undertaking to reconcile past and present. The title's declaration is thus misleading as, far from reaching the opposite shore, the reader is sucked into the river's turbulent currents with their heraclitian vortices and compelled to follow the winding, haphazard course of remembrance. We are striving for some farther shore, an ineffable beyond. The aquatic milieu alluded to in the title resurfaces constantly by dint of the fluidity of memory that is prone to evanescent evaporation only to suddenly recondense elsewhere.

The story is constructed by successive vignettes. Each tableau has one focus but multiple vanishing points so that no summary can do full justice to it. At best, its trajectory can be delineated and its ternary structure highlighted.

The text opens on a series of blurred, out-of-focus images, among others that of Clark Gable looking at himself in a mirror: “the images are confused now. By time, by necessity. One is Clark Gable brushing his teeth with Scotch, smiling in the mirror” (370). This smile is the catch of the story, drawing us in, a guiding thread that abruptly disappears a few sentences on as if to show that the polished surface of the looking-glass necessarily announces a text made of reflections. The writing of remembrance is (self-)reflective, but also refractive and refractory.

The seemingly casual image of Clark Gable brushing his teeth with Scotch in fact serves a very serious purpose. Indeed, the memory of a white actor is not gratuitous as the end of the sentence makes clear: “this image … may have been in Gone With the Wind, but then again just as likely not” (370). Whether it is taken from this film or another makes little difference; the same alienating stereotypes apply. The color of one's skin determines one's role always and ineluctably. In this context, the sudden affirmation that the white face in the mirror is that of the narrator's father effects an unexpected reversal. Once again, images mingle, taking us by surprise, throwing us into the tumult of re-memory⁴: “The white man at the mirror is my father” (371). The mirror, avatar and metaphor of remembrance, seems to have gone mad, becoming a malevolent object that decides to substitute an image of its own choosing for the one it is presented. This refusal to mirror, but also deformation in mirroring, is considered to be the cause of all pain: “then I know why I am so sad” (371). It is the denial of identity that is so undermining and wounding.⁵ It is as if the social object affirmed, “Either the face is white or I won't reflect it.” Over and above the ambiguities of this affirmation, the white face may be understood as a relaying of the scopic by the spectral. Memories are always a little blanched by time, and writing does not always succeed in reliably recoloring them.

In this initial moment of the story, the narrator occupies an emblematic space-time, that of a deceptive spring which should hold the promise of returning color, but is rather reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's cruel April.⁶ Spring is a season of transition which here refuses to yield its warmth and comfort, perhaps thus indicating the difficulty of transitions in general, a difficulty which may explain why the story contains none.

It's spring here in the mountains. The spring which never really arrives at this altitude. Just threatens. Just squats for a day or a few hours and then disappears and makes you suicidal. The teasing, ultimately withheld spring that is a special season here should have its own name. Like shit. Or disaster. Or something of that order.

The false promise of spring, which shows its face only to suddenly disappear, leads us into the field of deception and disappointment already foreshadowed by the alliance against nature linking “spring” and “squat.” How can a season bearing such a name be trusted, a season ready to spring at you, spring a trap on you and abruptly withdraw? This tantalizing season with its inherent threat is the primer of the story. Because spring betrays our expectations, it must be re-named. There follows a lexical highjacking of words which are summarily waylaid to fill in for what is missing. Recourse to all sorts of strategies is necessary in the attempt to recapture this fugitive season (a metaphor for memory), so as to re-inscribe it in a construct that will put an end to the flight of memories and embank the flow of loss. Thus spring's unkept promise triggers the story and the narrator gives us all its components at once, seemingly at random.

The weather however has nothing to do with the images … nor do geography or climate account for the inevitable succession—the river, the coins, the sadness, the recollection—of other images toppling him and toppling me because it happens no matter where I am, no matter what the season. In the recollection there is a sort of unmasking. The white man at the mirror is my father. Then I know why I am so sad, why the song makes me cry, why the coins sit where they do, where the river leads.

Following this listing, the story resumes its pace without any further clarifying elaboration. Disequilibrium is thus the rule: on the one hand, there is a state of too much,⁷ too much has been promised by the factual advance; on the other there is a lack, too little explanatory meaning has been provided. There is an imbalance in the narrative budget. The narrative overload functions as would any interest on a debt: the debt paid is never equal to the debt contracted. Recollection has its costs, and that is why the list, imprisoned between dashes (“—the river, the coins, the sadness, the recollection—”) reads like its tribute, each word clinking like so many coins paid into the slot of a time machine. In order to use it, memories have to be broken down into manageable units. Memories must be formatted.

The interplay of prefixes in the sentence “In the recollection there is a sort of unmasking” gives us a key to the inner workings of the story. Wideman's literary territory is located between the “re” and the “un,” between return and negation. Loss, like forgetting, is part of remembering. The alliance of more and less, positive and negative, is figured by these prefixed words which do not conceal their anatomy. In effect, the reversal of meaning is entirely contained in the added prefix re-collection. The temporal return of such collection calls for the dropping of masks, a cruel unveiling. Remembering is not only restitution. The vulnerability of the narrator, suddenly assaulted by literally overwhelming images, metaphorically brings him back to the fragility and precariousness of his former status as a child. In spite of his affirmation that he knows the reasons for his sadness, these reasons are never voiced; they remain mysterious, textually enigmatic, and the story follows its course, carrying in its flow implicit connections and murky memories. That there may be method to his sadness may serve as a reassurance—a certainty in the face of the uncertainty of memory—as to where it may arise and where it, like the river, may lead.

We thus reach the second moment of the story, the beginning of the central reminiscence. The narrator as a child is to meet his father so that just the two of them can spend the afternoon together. At this point temporal complexity intensifies. The father works in a restaurant where the child goes to join him. The past here is interwoven with the present, and the plot thickens. We thus learn that this story—the one we are reading—has already been written (“I have written the story before”), but these earlier versions are lost to the reader, effaced by the most recent one, much like the palimpsest of a fallible memory. The description of the restaurant in what follows overrides the depiction of the emotional landscape. Here again a visual and factual surplus (too much) is intended to conceal a lack of words.

In this way a shuttling movement is set-in-train, interweaving the events of the story of this particular afternoon—how the child steals the tip left on the table, how a movie is chosen that father and son will go and see, how comforting the father's physical presence is—with other events occurring either before or after this central story. The restaurant's description is not as off-handed and anodyne as might appear at first sight. The passing formulation of numerous hypotheses mark its depiction and the recounting of events transpiring there: “there must have been,” “perhaps,” “I must have said” (372). The resorting to hypothetical details serves to indicate that the scopic opens up a speculative domain—a reflexive, specular space where debts are readily contracted.

Finally, in the concluding movement of the text, the possible or impossible perenniality of painful memories is addressed. The father's description, based on a snapshot from a photo machine, is followed by the evocation of a song from the movie which the narrator only vaguely recalls. The song's lost melody, its missing sounds, functions as a kind of foreign language that must be translated, a foreign currency requiring conversion. In contrast to the narrator himself, his son knows the entire song but, as if to counterbalance this, he sometimes forgets his grandfather: “(he) doesn't even remember who his grandfather is” (378). It is through the vehicle of the third generation that the issue of the residues of memory, those that are not readily accessible, is considered.

REMEMBERING IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Although the narrative of “Across the Wide Missouri” is punctuated by the presence of a certain number of identifiable material objects, the overall impression given by a reading of the text is one of dreamlike vagueness. The narrator only recalls some of the images from the film, some bits of its dialogue, and this yields a pervasive feeling of strangeness. It is as if we were witnessing the exile of the familiar. In a way, this story might be said to resemble a photo negative in that it effects an inversion of our expectations. And indeed, there is a photo at the heart of the story, even though it is initially blocked from view by the eponymous film.

He is six foot tall. His skin is brown with indian red in it. My mother has a strip of pictures taken in a five and dime, taken probably by the machine that was still in Murphy's 5&10 when Murphy's was still on Homewood avenue and I was little … Mom looks pale, washed out, all the color stolen from her face by the popping flashbulbs. His face in the black and white snapshot is darker than it really is. Black as Sambo if you want to get him mad you can say that. Black as Little Black Sambo. Four black-as-coal spots on the strip. But if you look closely you see how handsome he was then. Smiling his way through four successive poses. Each time a little closer to my mother's face, tilting her way and probably busy with his hands off camera because by picture three that solemn grandmother look is breaking up and in the final picture she too is grinning.

(375)

The father's description is based on a photo and carrying it out involves translating the image. The limits of this translation mirror those intervening in the recovery of memories. In effect, such a translation must necessarily be awkward, as evinced by the fact that the father's size cannot be adequately rendered by the format of these snapshots. The format of daily life does not coincide and interface with that of remembrance. Another difficulty stems from the father's true color which is lost in the monochromatic photo. One final constraint encountered by the reader concerns that of the off-camera, ushered in by the word “probably.” The adverb refers both to what putatively lies outside of the picture frame as well as to causality, two elements beyond the reach of the stationary camera's expressive power. The author may be asking, “How can a still photo be a moving picture?”

The question of the shortcomings of translation does not stop here; there is also an oblique reference to it figured in a suspicious repetition. The probable name of the store in which the picture was taken is first spelled out and then printed in numbers. The store's degree of definition increases as we go from the general (“a five and dime”) to the particular: “Murphy's 5&10.” The fall of this sentence furnishes the key to its understanding and accounts for the added precision: “when Murphy's was still on Homewood avenue and I was little.” The store's generic name in letters corresponds to the narrator's speech in the present whereas “Murphy's 5&10” reproduces the sign the child used to see. The sentence's progression marks a return to the past that coincides with a temporal regression in mentation as the visual shape of the digits supplants the letters that the child may not have been able to read at the time. The writing becomes iconic.

Finally, the fallibility and betrayal of translation is spelled out. The photo-machine, the double of a deforming mirror, seems to engulf the mother's image. The machine over-translates one face and under-translates the other as an unscrupulous translator would. The mother's washed-out paleness contrasts starkly with the father's excessive darkness, thus forming a visual chiasmus. The father's added coloring produces a series of meaningless forms on the film strip, when perceived at a certain degree of resolution. These spots represent the pitfalls of translation but also refer to the black holes into which memories may be irretrievably lost. A little further on in the story we are told that the pictures have dulled, and that the father has turned purple (376). Purple is the color of bruises, a discoloration of the skin due to injury. When memory suffers, it produces bruising recollections.⁸

The darkness of the father's face foreshadows that of the movie theater. Yet nothing is said of the movie, as if the dark spots on the strip of still-photos had spread to obscure the motion picture reel. The obscurity of the film house propagates to contaminate gradually the rest of the text. A nocturnal mode of writing supplants the diurnal mode. A shadowy vagueness infiltrates language and undermines its capacity to designate:

The song goes something like this: A White Man Loved an Indian Maiden and la de da-/-la de da. And: A way, you've gone away … Across the wide Missouri. Or at least these words are in it, I think. I think I don't know the words on purpose. For the same reason I don't have it on record. Maybe fifteen or twenty times in the thirty years since I saw the movie I've heard the song or pieces of the song again. Each time I want to cry. Or do cry silently to myself. A flood of tears the iron color of the wide Missouri I remember from the movie … The last time I heard it my son called it Shenandoah. Maybe that's what it should be called. Again I don't know. It's something a very strong instinct has told me to leave alone.

(276)

The text here is the theater of a difficult translation. The etymological meaning of “to translate” is “to cross.” Just as the river is not really crossed in the story, the passage from one language to another always remains incomplete. Nevertheless, the attempt at translation is at least twofold here, first temporal and then musical. Even though the language of the text and the song's lyrics are apparently identical, the reader feels a widening gap between them, a resistance to elaboration. This resistance stems partially from the loss contained in any translation, even within the same language (i.e. at different levels of mentation⁹), but also arises as a consequence of self-protective measures. For this reason, the narrator moves forward cautiously over the rough terrain of memory that may still be mined. The failure to recall the movie is doubled by the failure to recollect the song. The text clearly lapses into a state of deficit. By means of this attempt at translation, the tense transaction between the economy of memory and that of oblivion is played out.

The above excerpt functions according to the mode of suspension. It starts by restituting a conventional sentence segment, then breaks off. The first italicized clause already contains an element of disruption: while the two elements of the first group “Indian maiden” rhyme, its correlate “white man” produces no other echo than that of usurped superiority. The italics are later dropped, indicating that the present tense has taken over the past and that the quote from memory has ended. Then arises a mirror construction: “and la de da -/- la de da.” Each side is mirrored by the other through a central symmetry. If we accept this mechanism we obtain the following equivalence: “and” equals, in other words, the sequel equals the end. Once again, the mirror is deceitful and reverses what it should restitute.

Indeed, something is lost in this central mechanism: -/-. The silent sign absorbs a not-yet-elaborated part of the story. This silence which separates the mutually mirroring units embodies the absence necessary to regain one's breath, oblivion as the warrant of survival. Then, by means of the “And” which follows, the text resumes its course, presenting a situation entirely different from any previously encountered. The text now addresses an undefined person. The two characters of the anticipated romance have vanished. Moreover, the “you” has also disappeared: “you've gone away.” Doubly confiscated (by anonymity and departure) the “you” makes no sense, except by default. It would seem that between the two bits of song, something occurs that is subsequently lost. Similarly, the narrator loses something of himself in the depths of the unrecoverable memories of this particular afternoon that, of inner necessity, must remain beyond his awareness.

The function of the text that follows the aborted retrieval of the song is to defuse its explosive charge. The cautious tone, very unusual for Wideman, signals the overhanging danger of this memory, holding all the threat of a suspended sentence. By developing it as little as possible, he seeks to avoid its falling. A liquid medium here fills in for words, bridging past and present while silently smoothing over the fissure of their painful wellspring. “A flood of tears the iron color of the wide Missouri I remember from the movie.” The reiteration of the words “wide Missouri” clearly indicates that the memory—the river as defined by its wideness is fixed in the past—cannot be modified, just as the events of that afternoon are irreversible. This idea of immutability is already contained in the word “iron” which simultaneously signifies the color, the material, and the object—the branding iron. It would not seem to be fortuitous that the expression “iron memory” can be found in Wideman's later novel The Cattle Killing, thus explicating through a temporal resonance the issues at stake in the color of the river (and the tears) described some sixteen years earlier. Some memories are branded into us and are, in turn, branding. “Iron” is thus the perfect chromatic metonym for an elliptic memory that may be lost but that cannot be effaced.

Finally, the hypothetical name of the song surfaces. Exotic in appearance, it is easy to pronounce in English and yields smooth, peaceful sounds. Because it comes so readily to mind by way of his son, the narrator entertains a toying and uncertain relationship to it, then uses it to resist the backward movement to the past. Instinct takes over: “It's something a very strong instinct has told me to leave alone.” The point being to let sleeping dogs lie.

Just as we don't learn the song's name by the story's end, no other proper name is given. The identity of the protagonists is stolen. Here anonymity stems from mistrust of language. Indeed the theme of the ineffable is taken up later, once more in The Cattle Killing. In this novel, one of the narrators, usually eloquent, is reduced to seeking refuge in stammering, as he can no longer bring himself to use a language that, symbolically, has cost him too much to learn. Paying back the debt may be akin to a revenge of sorts, consisting in disfiguring one of the languages of slavery.

THE UNREDEEMABLE

Through its insistence on the multiple aspects of loss, the story also deals with the issue of what remains, the residue that survives loss. The passage evoking the filching of the tip associates the residual with theft as if what remains is necessarily stolen from oblivion. When the child arrives at the restaurant a friend of his father seats him at a large table.

He had scraped a few crumbs from the edge of the table into his hand and grinned across the miles of white cloth at me and the cups and saucers. While he was gone I had nudged the saucer to see if it was as heavy as it looked. Under the edge closest to me were three dimes. Two shiny ones and one yellow as a bad tooth. I pushed some more and found other coins, two fat quarters neither new nor worn. So there I was at that huge table and all that money in front of me but too scared to touch it so I slid the ten-pound cup and saucer back over the coins and tried to figure out what to do.

(373)

By not mentioning the father, the excerpt performatively underscores his absence and introduces the question of substitution. The father is not there and is replaced by a colleague referred to only as “he,” as he is merely a generic substitute. Similarly, the meal which took place at the table is over; the bread has disappeared and only crumbs remain. The residual is present from the start through the image of the crumbs, their position on the table heralding that of the coins. But in contrast to the crumbs, the change remains on the table, the tip replacing the meal. This symbolic connection between heterogeneous elements is already prefigured by the zeugma that associates with grating humor the child and the cups. The child becomes a piece of crockery, but the reverse is also true as objects take on human form.

The personification of the change also substitutes an absence for a presence The father may be lost amidst the white tablecloths but the coins introduce color into this monochromatic setting. Two coins are shiny and might thus alluringly embody enticement and the desire to steal, while the tarnished coin might stand for the prohibition on and punishment for theft. It is highly meaningful that the child's first discovery is of the dimes and not the quarters. Built on the same root as the French word “dîme,” it is necessary to undertake a passage to a foreign as well as earlier version of the language (a process of translation) in order to reach what is at stake in the choice of this word. In French “dîme” (Middle English, dyme) means the tenth (tithe) of the harvest that had to be paid to the church. Here the dimes represent the fraction of memory invested in the story. The purpose of the plump quarters—they are found later—is to conceal the smallness of the investable sum. But the depiction of the quarters also reflects a mechanism of Wideman's storytelling at work here which consists in saying too much in order not to tell all of the story. Moreover, the counterfeit nature of the coins (from the standpoint of the child's yearnings) and of the recounting itself (it too entices us) is revealed by what follows. In effect, the recollection of the alluring tip is lost in the meanderings of text, and, to the extent that its meaning is not integrated, it remains sequestered and dispersed, no true recollection and no real tip to the reader. After the petty-theft, the incident is never mentioned again; it disappears from the surface of the text as from consciousness and sinks into oblivion, but it does remain on the books of memory. No other object fills in for the possibilities of the coins which are (secretly) spent in an effort to make good on an earlier loss, that of the father, one that has no price. Counterfeiting and counterfeit needs are only some of the numerous consequences of abandonment.

The disappearance of the coins is accompanied by the final clouding out of this encumbering memory. At the precise moment when we are expecting the reflective reassessment of the meaning of this memory, it dissipates, leaving us short-changed, much as the father's colleague was and ultimately the child (who by the reversal of passive into active does unto others as was done unto him). Symbolic (verbal) representation of meaning in the present is devalued in favor of the claims of the concrete inactive representation of needs from the past: “words were unimportant because what counted was his presence, talking or silent didn't matter. … His presence my feast” (374-75). Words may have been unimportant then in view of the concretely needed fatherly presence, but the disappointment, hurt, and loss can only be assimilated now by using them, by an integrated, integrating, recounting. The narrator's late-coming avowal constitutes the last turning point in the story, the last side-tracking of memory. It also helps to explain why the story retains such an ungraspable, fluid character, why something in it doesn't take, and why its liquid movement is as slippery as the mirroring surface that it creates. The remembrance of the father's presence accounts for the volatility of memory.

The presence of the father smoothes out the asperities and overrides the absence necessary for the fixing of memory. The experienced state of wholesome satiation leaves no room for anything but touch. The declaration of satisfaction reads like a celebration of the perfect symbiosis that precedes the arrival of words and of troubles. All lesions are instantly repaired as if a skin graft had effaced all wounds. Contentment is complete: “his presence my feast.” But satiation leads to sleep and not wakefulness. When the other becomes a moveable feast, the self is lost to this dual unity. Satiation leaves no space for memory. Memories are irretrievable when the moment is consumed and not preserved. It is as if there is a self-consumption of memory. Another mode of conservation must be sought, here the imprint.

He's the kind of kid who forgets lots of things but who remembers everything. He has the gift of feeling. Things don't touch him they imprint. You can see it sometimes. And it hurts. He already knows he will suffer for what he knows. Maybe that's why he forgets so much.

(378)

Here the question of remembering converges with that of imprinting. It is a last instance of an intermixing of a state of too much (excess) and too little (lack). If the forgotten could be redeemed by remembering, a stable system of compensation could exist. Yet the story's economy is based on disequilibrium, and this reflects the imbalance in the verbal economy of memory that prevails in it. The lack of words to recall or make sense of what has been forgotten is counterbalanced by our being shown too much; hence the imprint. We then understand that the imprint links the story's three generations together. The reader must backtrack (on a hunch) and return to the beginning of the story.

Daddy. Daddy. I am outside his door in the morning. His snores fill the tiny room. … Your father worked late last night. you all better be quiet this morning so he can get some sleep, but I am there, on the cold linoleum listening to him snore, smelling his sleep, the man smell I wonder I wonder now if I've inherited so it trails me, and stamps my things mine when my kids are messing around where they shouldn't be.

(372)

The very first words of this passage encapsulate the entire story: its topic, the father; its mode, the italics; and its yearning tension stemming from reference to a present past. The voice of the past is heard by means of resort to self-citation. The child's voice that pronounces “daddy” is covered over by the adult's writing which introduces an element of temporality through the adjunction of italics that also serve to isolate it and perhaps imprison it as an inner utterance that must remain unspoken. Once again we encounter the founding tension between loss, the inaccessible and lost father, and recovery, the ceaseless effort to recapture the past through writing, the inevitable shortcomings of which are glossed over by calligraphy. Beauty is only a palliative to conceal sadness.

Here, the choice of the present tense effects a backward movement in time and a return to the threshold of the bedroom. The second series of italics also sets in relief a quotation, this time of another's voice. It is the mother who is heard in this exclamatory interdiction, now probably an inner yet foreign voice that the narrator cannot claim as his own. The smell of the father's sleep is used to make up for his visual presence, screened by a curtain closing off the room, as well as his psychological unavailability (he is asleep). Smell supplants sight. The deficiencies of the father-son relationship, indicated by the difficulty to remember a shared past, is redeemed by automatic inheritance, that of genes. The memory is immediate, an olfactive madeleine. In spite of the emotional distance, the manhood transmitted by the father surfaces through the olfactory sphere. It is here that the necessity of making one's own primary imprint is driven home: “stamps my things mine.” In this elliptic sentence, imprinting is suggested by every word, insisted upon three times as if to remedy a protean identity that has been rendered insubstantial because of deprivation of the consolidating experience of shared, memorable events.

A retrospective reading thus shows that the theme of the imprint as the embodiment of memory appeared as early as the story's second page. Hungry for a plot, the reader has undoubtedly passed over this clue, thus further dispersing the fragments of memory. For the reader, too, has a role to play in this enterprise of remembrance.¹⁰ This is one of the meanings of the omnipresence of the specular. Through the intermediary of reflections, the story holds up a mirror to the reader, asking us to reclaim what we too have chosen to forget. “Across the Wide Missouri” calls for the undertaking of a particular kind of voyage, that which is required for the visioning of a phantom film. Our outer blindness refocuses vision on memory and leads to introspective exploration.

Introspection is also central to another text, Fatheralong, [Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society] that inquires into the relationship of fathers to sons, this time in a non-fictional mode. Here, Wideman proposes another definition of stories: “stories are like onions. You peel one skin and another grins at you. And peeling onions can make grown men cry” (61). This definition contains all the themes that are essential to the process of memorial writing. To the skin—the skin of bodies and minds and the skin of words¹¹—is added the tears and the density of these multi-layered texts. But peeling an onion is essentially characterized by its consequences, tears, and a strong, disagreeable, and refractory smell. The scent remains on one's hands for a long time, a tell-tale sign of what has been carried out. The onion, by the compact network of its skins and the permeating acridness of its scent symbolizes the painful memories—the unthought known—that one keeps unwittingly.

“Across the Wide Missouri” modulates memory in a dual mode, the olfactive and the visual; in other words, that which can be effaced. Yet, memory is essentially remanent, persisting after the disappearance of its causes. This would help explain why the imprint is the correlate of effacement, its inverted double. The hold of the past cannot be escaped; it impregnates our skin and soul. Oblivion, like any luxury good, can only be bought at a high price.

Notes

1. All references are to the Picador edition.

2. James Coleman, in his monograph on Wideman, situates the collection in the following way: “The most important thing Wideman does in Damballah, however, is to describe the black intellectual writer's arduous movement back towards the black community and black culture” (79). It would seem, however, more meaningful to stop at “back” in order to do full justice to the more universal dimension of Wideman's undertaking.

3. C. Bollas, The Shadow of the Object.

4. To borrow Toni Morrison's term from Beloved.

5. The work of Heinz Kohut (1971) has shown the vital role of mirroring for establishing and maintaining a core sense of self.

6. T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland and Other Poems, “Gerontion.”

7. L. Shengold, Soul Murder.

8. The physical manifestation of memory is also present in another work in the collection, “The Caterpillar Story.” More generally, the issue of memory as a scar is a leitmotif in Wideman's work.

9. See J. Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature.

10. The author says so himself: “the kind of writing I do requires participation” (Carol).

11. See D. Anzieu, The Skin Ego.