SOURCE: "Going Back Home: The Literary Development of John Edgar Wideman," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, March, 1985, pp. 326-43.

[Coleman is an American educator. In the following essay, he delineates Wideman's return to the thematic realm of family and community in his works following The Lynchers.]

In a 1972 interview [reprinted in Interviews with Black Writers, edited by John O'Brien, 1973], John Edgar Wideman repeatedly stated that in Hurry Home (1969) and The Lynchers (1973) he was interested in portraying the world of his black characters' imaginations. The imagination is a hellish, nightmarish place where the characters suffer the fears and horrors of past and present black reality in America. The story of the black past, present, and future that emerges is negative and hopeless.

The four black conspirators in The Lynchers, who have a revolutionary plan that is supposed to begin with the symbolic lynching of a white policeman and proceed to full-scale revolution by the black masses, are encumbered by hatred and distrust of each other, and fail for this reason. Each of the four characters reveals the nether region of his imagination at some point in the novel, but even some of the more positive thinking of the characters is revealed through a surreal dream consciousness that points to alienation and sterility more than to sustaining myth and worldview. The nightmarish quality of minds charged with hatred, distrust, and frustration distances and distorts everything.

There is a portrayal of family and community in the novel, but it is largely negative. The characters do not have positive family and community histories to relate, but are for the most part circumscribed by negative family relationships and tenuous community ties. Bernice Wilkerson at one point thinks of the blandness and drudgery of her life with her husband, Orin, and their children in the following terms.

Standing in the emptiness she liked to call her kitchen, where she reigned if nowhere else. Cooking and serving their meals. First two to feed, a neat ritual she could give herself to wholly, chiding him playfully to remember to bless the food, then three, a quiet settling down together, boy a image of his father, so pleased with himself, so grown when his seat hiked by a pile of cushions and phone books was pulled to the table, four, five, finally six, four, three, two again … sometimes, but not the same two, not the same sleepiness, the anticipation, the gently fumbling progress through the dishes, the down hill glide of simple chores always easing toward the bed they shared. Not the same two. A steep hill you climb then tumble down. One.

Orin Wilkerson and his male friends use their colorful, descriptive street language to tell humorous anecdotes about their sexual exploits and to define what seem to be strong bonds of camaraderie among each other. But Orin stabs to death Childress, his friend of fifteen years, in a drunken brawl over an insignificant sum of money. In spite of the years of shared experience, Orin and Childress still become knife-slinging "niggers" taking out their frustrations on each other.

The Lynchers established Wideman's credentials as a first-rate novelist, but after The Lynchers, Wideman did not publish another book-length work of fiction until 1981. The problems of getting works published (particularly Wideman's brand of works that are not easily accessible to readers) account some for the eight-year hiatus between The Lynchers and Wideman's next book-length works of fiction in 1981. But looking at the overall development of Wideman's fictional career, one still has to say that Wideman reached a point where he had to bridge a gap, to make a transition that would give him and his fictional world what they needed for continued development. This vital ingredient for continued growth is a myth that will sustain both Wideman and his characters. That a sustaining myth is what Wideman needed for his characters as well as for himself seems to be substantiated by the fact that, in the three works which he has published since 1981, he searches deeply for a sustaining myth in his fictional world.

As brilliant and well-wrought as The Lynchers is, and as fine an example of twentieth-century literary negativism as it is, its world of frustration, death, and sterile human imagination that yields no unifying stories or sustaining myth does not provide the impetus for Wideman's further fictional growth. To find the stories and myth that sustain, Wideman returns to his boyhood community of the Homewood section of Pittsburgh to explore his family history and the history of the community. Wideman says in a recent interview [with Linda Putnam in Rocky Mountain Magazine, April 4, 1982]: "Family is the metaphor that describes the whole community of Homewood…. It goes back to traditional African notions of family and community. Being and identity are founded in community. A man who doesn't reside with other men is like a butterfly without wings."

Wideman starts in Hiding Place (1981) almost as far away from any realization of family and community as he ends in The Lynchers eight years earlier. We see the novel through the eyes of three characters, Clement, Bess and Tommy, who all begin as alienated, frustrated people separated from the center of family and community. Much more than in The Lynchers, the language of the characters is the vernacular of the Homewood streets, and there is less of the surreal and abstract. But still, Wideman limits the perspective and keeps us closer to the interior of the characters' minds than to the exterior world. The technique, as is often true in The Lynchers, is Wideman's own stream-of-consciousness technique. Given the limited perspective of the minds of alienated and frustrated characters, the reader must necessarily be inundated by feelings of alienation and frustration.

At the beginning of the first section of Hiding Place in which she appears, Bess hears a story about her youth, told by someone else, and a song out of her past, and remembers a terrible dream, "which wasn't a dream but the edge of a stormy sea, tossing, wailing, shaking her soul like a leaf till she drowned in sleep." In spite of the story she hears, Bess does not believe in anything enough to make her own stories. She has been alienated and isolated too long, living alone at the top of Bruston Hill. At the end of her first section in the novel, she remembers the gallery of family faces that used to occupy her thinking, but now feels that she no longer desires to visualize the "sweet babies" and older people in her family who represent the family connections:

Used to do a lot of that [thinking about my family]. But I been up here too long now. Too many new faces and I can't see nothing in them. No names, no places. Just faces and I think on them and all I see is Bess, myself behind my eyes and I mize well be blind as Mother Owens [the first black family ancestor in Homewood] cause I been up here on this hill too long.

Bess goes on to reconstruct her family gallery, to hear clearly the music of her past, to distance the dreadful dream that inundates her consciousness, and most importantly, to create and tell the story of family and community that becomes the myth which brings her back to life, which reintegrates her back into family and community. Bess creates the story of her family, one in which all the girls "had that long, good hair," "long straight hair [they] could sit on," that was strong and persevered through hard times. All the girls except her reproduced "as easy as dancin," and there was even the miracle of the life of Lizabeth, born dead but brought to life when she was plunged into a snow bank by her crazy Aunt May. And there were the times when her husband, Riley, brushed her pretty, long hair and whistled those pretty blues songs. Her sister Aida's husband, Bill, could also play pretty music on his guitar, Corrine. And Bill, Riley, and John French, her niece Freeda's husband, could make some of the most beautiful music ever made. In spite of Bess' personal hardship (she had only one child who was killed in World War II), she tells the story of her family, creates the myth of its history in Homewood, as a strong, beautiful one that overcame poverty and hardship to produce bountifully and forge a good life for itself out of its own resiliency and resourcefulness.

From part of the story that Bess tells, we learn that the family forced her down off the Hill to attend the funeral of Kaleesha, Bess' little relative whose mother brought her to Bess so that her evil-witch powers could cure the girl's illness, and at the funeral Bess remained isolated from the others and swore she would never come down off the Hill again. Bess fortified her isolation by creating a "cellophane-winged angel in a blue-eyed gown" who picked apart a cobweb in the roof of the funeral home. On the last page in the novel, Bess used her powers of imagination and creation to convert the "blue-eyed gown" angel into an image that incorporates the life and death of Kaleesha and the struggle leading to transcendence of personal tragedy and alienation that she must wage to be a part of family and community:

[T]he angel in the blue-eyed gown works with her to set the house on fire. We gon do it, gal. Yes we are. Thank you you little fuzzy-headed got the prettiest black-eyed lazy Susan eyes in the world thing. Don't matter if they's crossed a little bit, don't matter if they roll round sometimes like they ain't got no strings and go on about they own business. And you [her dead husband]. You get up off that bed, man. Cause it's going too, everything in here going so get your whistling self up off that bed and come on.

It takes an unwanted encounter with her great, great nephew Tommy, who is Kaleesha's uncle and who runs from the police to Bess on Bruston Hill, to force Bess to this transformation. Tommy is a young man with a gift for song and talk, but also a young man who has destroyed his life. He has been in jail before, has deservedly lost his wife and son, and is running now because he was involved in a robbery where his friend killed a man. Part of Tommy's problem is that he is a part of a fragmented world of the '60s and '70s, but like Bess, he is isolated and alienated (and he, too, stands apart from the rest of the family at Kaleesha's funeral) for more personal reasons that he must make some attempt to transcend. There is obviously a break in the connection between Tommy and the rest of his family, particularly the older generations, and he has lost most of the mythic support that centered the older people, the support Bess can still call on to reintegrate herself into family and community. In fact, Tommy has no story or mythic structure to center himself, and he has turned inward, where he only finds emptiness, self-pity, and isolation from everything but his own needs. Tommy often finds refuge in a dream state that is sometimes horrible but still provides shelter from the realities of the outside world.

As Tommy looks around Bess' cabin, he sees nothing to connect him to "the time in which he belonged," and he futilely tries to tell a story that will anchor him in time:

Once upon a time. Once upon a time, he thought, if them stories I been hearing all my life are true, once upon a time they said God's green earth was peaceful and quiet…. Aunt Aida talking bout people like they giants. That world was bigger, slower and he'd get jumpy, get lost in it…. Once upon a time him and Sarah [his wife] alone in the middle of the night…. You're in a story. There's room enough to do what you need to do, what you have to do….

The stillness unbroken. Sarah rolls closer to him and rises slightly on her elbow so the ring of darker brown around her nipples is visible an instant as the covers fall away from her brown shoulders and he swallows hard because these soft eyes on her chest have a way of seeing through him and taking his breath away. He swallows hard in the stillness because he is seeing another life, a life long gone. Then he is nothing. Smaller than nothing and alone. Stories are lies and Mother Bess pigging down her soup brings him back. Her loud slurping on the soup drowns the noise of his blood, the noise of his heart.

Tommy's use of words suggests that he wants his world to have the romantic quality of a fairy tale, without even going through the fairy tale's grim ritual to reach the romantic and idyllic. Aunt Aida does indeed talk about people "like they giants," but Tommy does not understand that Aunt Aida's stories and experiences also incorporate the hard-ships and pain of living and participating in family and community. The myth Aunt Aida creates is positive and supporting, but it develops out of a commitment to life that Tommy has been unwilling to make. He cannot hold the positive image of himself and Sarah together because he has not committed himself to Sarah and honestly struggled with the relationship. His romantic image has none of the strong fiber and undergirding structure of positive human participation. He is "smaller than nothing" and his "stories are lies" because he always dwells in the selfish center of himself.

Later in the novel, Bess wakes Tommy from a dream in which he is trying to tell his son "a story [which will] make [him] happy. No fairy tale or nonsense like that. Telling him about life. Real life…. When life was full of good things and safe." Again, Tommy's problem is that he wants to get to the good story of real life without actually encountering the life experiences from which one distills the good story and which give that story reality.

Bess' confrontation with Tommy jars her out of her isolation, and interacting with Bess as she makes the connections and reenters family and community also has a positive influence on Tommy. By the end, he at least realizes that a large part of his fear has developed since his granddaddy John French died and "his house fell to pieces," scattering the family members. He knows that he has lost his wife and son and shamed his family, but that he has to conquer his fear and go back to face the consequences of his actions. He knows that he "ain't killed nobody," and says. "I'm ready to live and do the best I can cause I ain't scared."

Part of the ending is ambiguous and alludes to a symbolic action by Tommy that is probably one of the few things in the novel that Wideman does not handle well. It seems implied at the end that Tommy, when running from the police, climbs the mysterious, fairly-tale-like tower on Bruston Hill. This tower has always fascinated him, and he has heard stories about other kids climbing it to discover its mystery, but he has never had the nerve to do it himself. The only way to discover its mysteries for himself is to climb it. His climbing the tower could symbolize an initiation into life and all its possibilities that will allow him to make the connections and tell the good stories he wants to tell. But especially since the ending also leaves open the possibility that the police will kill Tommy, we cannot tell if he, as a member of the present generation, can ever move beyond yearning for lost connection and bold assertion of the self in the face of destiny, which may be fatal, to actual reintegration into family and community. The possibility that Tommy may not actually make the connection makes him similar to John, his brother in Hiding Place who "lives out with the white folks" in Wyoming, and Doot, the educated member of the family in Sent for You Yesterday (1983) who tries to soak up family and community stories. Both John and Doot are thinly disguised portrayals of Wideman himself.

Clement is the other character whose perceptions shape the narrative structure of the novel. He is a slow-witted orphan who works in Big Bob's barbershop and sleeps in the back. His only community is the barbershop community, which views him as a curious outsider because of his slow wittedness. Clement begins his connection with Bess as a result of a barbershop patron hitting a number after dreaming about Mother Bess. (And it is important to say that dreams do sometimes have a magical quality that is productive, but this is not true of dreams that develop out of the preoccupations of the self in isolation, like the dreams of Tommy, for example). The man sends Clement to Bess with ten dollars for gratitude and for the purpose of appeasing the source of magic. From this point, Clement becomes involved with both Bess and Tommy, and he watches their connection strengthen. At the end, Clement also knows the importance of being connected as opposed to living in isolation. Clement is "going down the hill for them, not for her, so he'll have to start all over again. Start with one again." The emphasis on the words "them" and "one" says to the reader that "them" and "one" are the same.

Alienation is psychological, and hence we can see how the predominance of the stream-of-consciousness technique in The Lynchers and Hiding Place is functional. Wideman certainly does not abandon this technique in all the stories in Damballah (1981), but does vary his style in some. In these stories, Wideman uses more conventional third- and first-person points of view to remove us a significant distance from the center of the characters' minds, thus providing a more positive setting distanced from the psychological center of alienation.

In Damballah, we hear a variety of voices; among them are the voices of the characters, speaking in their own language, the voice of John, the educated relative who lives in Wyoming and is sometimes a first-person narrator, and the voices of the third-person narrator, who is omniscient and sometimes uses the language of the characters and at other times an educated language that the author is capable of using. The point of view sometimes changes within individual stories, and sometimes within a paragraph. But all the voices in the stories combine to tell a story of birth, death, tragedy, struggle, and love, the story of Homewood. In each story except "Tommy," which is told in Tommy's lost, hopeless voice, the voices combine to raise these elements of life high above the flat and mundane, combine to give real human dimension and significance even to death and tragedy. The voices structure Homewood's life events into a triumphant myth.

The title piece "Damballah," the name of which is taken from an ancient African god, presents the account of a native African's heroic attempt to keep alive among American slaves the ways of Africa. The example of Orion, the African, has a profound effect on his community, and the story clearly implies that through a slave boy Orion disseminates his African ways to future generations, giving them many of the qualities of strength, endurance, and transcendence we see in the other stories.

"Daddy Garbage" shows how the rough camaraderie between John French, John and Tommy's grandfather, and his friend Strayhorn is firmly set in values that give them an undeviating moral sense of ritual that belies their poverty. "Lizabeth: the Caterpillar Story" is French's daughter and wife's tender, loving reflection on French, the big, loud gambling man who was good as gold in his heart.

"The Songs of Reba Love Jackson" is one of the more interesting pieces in the volume; it focuses on Reba Love—who is not a member of the Hollinger-French family—and her moving gospel songs that are so important to Homewood and that carry so much intense black experience. Reba Love and the other characters in this story often speak in their own voices, and they articulate powerful, centering religious beliefs that overarch the myth of family and community that is so important to Wideman.

The stories of death, tragedy, and suffering usually pull great meaning and human stature from these experiences. In "The Chinaman," John and his mother Lizabeth recount the life and death of John's grandmother Freeda. John concludes from his mother's often-told story about Freeda's confrontation with the Chinaman just before her death that "the Chinaman is a glimpse of [Lizabeth's] God who has a plan and who moves in mysterious ways." "Solitary" presents the quiet but powerful confrontation with God that Lizabeth has after her deep foundations of faith are shaken by Tommy's imprisonment. "Hazel" is the very painful and tragic story of Hazel's accident that leads to permanent paralysis and her mother Gaybrella's painful death at the end as she accidentally sets herself on fire and burns alive. In spite of the story's searing pain and tragedy, Gaybrella maintains purpose and values in her life, although her daughter's plight certainly twists and cripples her psychologically. And Faun, Hazel's brother who accidentally pushed her down the steps and crippled her, shows, through Lizabeth's account at the end, that he has undergone a long struggle with the reality of his act that has taken him to depths of human compassion that few of us experience.

In "The Beginning of Homewood," the last story, the first-person narrator, a writer, tells the story of Sybella Owen's heroic escape from slavery that led to the beginning of Homewood; part of the story is the connection between Sybella and the present generation of her family, of which the troubled Tommy is a part. At places in the story, the narrator calls on the voice of May to help him tell the story. May is very sympathetic when she views the present generation and draws the connection; the narrator is puzzled but positive and tries to end the volume positively:

So the struggle doesn't ever end. [Sybella's] story, [Tommy's] story, the connections. But now the story, or the pieces of story are inside this letter [story] and its addressed to you and I'll send it and that seems better than the way it was before. For now, Hold on.

"The Beginning of Homewood" adds to the triumphant myth that grows throughout Damballah, but ends the volume on a note where the first-person narrator, a member of Tommy's generation and a character very much like John and Doot in Sent for You Yesterday, wrestles with the significance and efficacy of a triumphant myth for him and the present generation. Doot in Yesterday carries on this struggle to make the connection and discover the significance of the central myth of family and community for the present generation.

Yesterday focuses on a broader range of Homewood life than Wideman's last two works; the focus is still the Hollinger-French family, but the larger Homewood community is much more prominent here. Orally transmitted stories are central again, and Wideman uses Doot as his surrogate in the process of testing the substance and reality of myth for himself and the present generation. Wideman the author, academic and intellectual, also wants to reach down to a level below the conscious thinking of the characters, and even sometimes below Doot—who is educated but still a character in the novel—to look at the underlying symbols and ideas of the oral myth with the eye of the intellectual and artist. Since the quest here is at least partly a personal quest for Wideman the artist to keep his art alive, to validate the deepest substance of the energizing myth, we can see the need for this level of treatment. Because of this exploration of the region below the surface, Wideman's style in Yesterday at places is more difficult than it has been since The Lynchers. At stake in Yesterday is making the connections and making the myth of family and community a substantive reality for the Homewood product Wideman, who is Doot in the story, and the present Homewood generation, and also making the mythic foundation of family and community one that Wideman the artist and intellectual can truly rely on for support.

In Damballah, Lizabeth reflects that "Telling the story right will make it real"; in Yesterday, the first-person narrator Doot calls the stories of the street Cassina Way "timeless, intimidating, fragile." Particularly in part two, "The Courting of Lucy Tate," Wideman draws our attention to the process through which Doot has acquired the "right" information to make the "timeless, intimidating, [but] fragile" stories "real" for him. In "The Courting," Doot recounts the courting of Lucy Tate by his Uncle Carl, which took place before Doot was born. A part of Doot's story is the story that Lucy told Carl, years ago in the Velvet Slipper, about the shooting of community hero-musician Albert Wilkes by the police in 1934. We see how this story, along with others, was told to Carl by Lucy and, by implication, how Carl must have told Doot, who is now making it part of his story. As time sequences switch back and forth, stories are entangled in stories, past and present, and the process of understanding how Doot gets his version of the courtship becomes difficult. Obviously, here Wideman is concerned with validating and authenticating the process of oral transmission in a way that he is not in Hiding Place and Damballah. This validation and authentication is not for the benefit of the older generation, which is already immersed in the stories that produce the myth, but for the benefit of Wideman, Doot and the present generation, who are still uncertain about the reality and efficacy of the stories and the myth. Doot never resolves his questions about the rightness of the stories and myth for him, but wants the mythic foundation and accepts the stories of family and community griots, in spite of his questions. Later, a treatment of the ending of Yesterday will give further insight into this problem.

The voice that speaks from below the surface is sometimes Doot's, but the voice has a deeper omniscience than we can fully attribute to him. The voice is at least partly that of an omniscient narrator who presents the deepest insights, examines the subjective reality, and portrays the underlying symbolism that concern the artist and intellectual. And the style in many places captures the subjective and symbolic more than the concrete. At this level, there also has to be a way of testing the stories and myth that satisfies Wideman. The myth has to withstand this probing of its misty region where Wideman the artist and intellectual plunges with his deep mind and difficult, sometimes almost expressionistic style. Wideman has to be able to arrange the symbols and subjective reality into some form that is artistically pleasing.

It is not always possible to see clearly when this omniscient voice usurps Doot's voice, but for the shaping of parts of the stories told about each major character, we should clearly be listening for this omniscient voice. In recapturing the stories that the omniscient narrator tells for Albert, Lucy, and Brother, which are similar and merge together into one story, a composite of the black experience, one must interpret the subjective and symbolic and blow out the rich implications of meaning.

Albert Wilkes' piano-playing ability, killing of a white policeman who discovers Albert's affair with his wife, and consequent killing by the police when he returns after seven years are all a part of the Homewood story that the characters know. At the novel's deepest level, Albert Wilkes personifies the heart and soul of black music, and Homewood and its people are central to his life. In Homewood, he can reconfirm contact with his people, and as his foster mother, old Mrs. Tate, tells his story, Albert steps "right dead in the middle of her story and you play awhile [on the piano], measure for measure awhile until the song's yours. Then it's just you there again by yourself again and you begin playing the seven years away." When the police splatter Wilkes' brains and blood over the Tates' house, in a figurative sense they disseminate his musical heart and soul—in which are mingled tragedy and a transcending beauty and sweetness—to the future Homewood generations.

The story the narrator tells for Lucy Tate includes Albert, Brother Tate, Brother's son Junebug, and Samantha, Junebug's mother. Brother Tate, Lucy's brother because they were both adopted by old Mr. and Mrs. Tate, and his son Junebug were both ugly albinos enclosed in their ugly white skins, which at the deepest level are somewhat similar to the folklorist witch's skin which protects a witch and gives her the power of evil. The ugly white skin bodes evil and tragedy for Brother and Junebug, but it also acts as a caul of clairvoyance and insight. At this deep level, Brother and Junebug, like Albert Wilkes, are symbolic of the ugly and tragic aspects of blackness, but they also represent that ability of blacks to pierce through these aspects of their lives to see the meaningful, positive aspects, to see and understand the beautiful, transcendent quality of their music, to see the value in black strength and perseverance.

Junebug tragically died in a fire, and Brother died mysteriously on the train tracks sixteen years after Junebug's death. But silent, scat-singing Brother, who said very few words at any time, and no words at all during the last sixteen years of his life, shockingly duplicated Albert Wilkes' music on night in 1941, and also drew very revealing pictures of Homewood black people with wings, standing for their ability to soar and transcend. And Brother died on the railroad tracks, playing again the dare game with the trains that he and Carl played as Kids. His death certainly points out his vulnerability as a black person, but it also points out the black determination to manipulate and not be intimidated by the dangerous, implacable forces that roar through black life on undeviating tracks.

In the last section of the book, entitled "Brother," Wideman takes us to the deepest level of Brother's reality. At this level, Brother, from age twenty-one to his death, finds his life dominated by a horrible train dream in which countless people, including himself, are being flung helplessly about in a pitch-dark train boxcar. The people in the boxcar are like anonymous cattle on the tracks to death. Brother knows that the dream can take him again and again and that it can kill him. In the dream, Brother merges with an becomes Albert Wilkes returning to Homewood after seven years. He becomes Albert Wilkes returning to Homewood to the center of his life, where the police blow him to pieces as he plays his hauntingly beautiful music. Albert Wilkes' life hangs on "him like a skin to be shed, a skin he couldn't shake off, so it was squeezing, choking all his other lives." In the dream and its association with Albert Wilkes, Brother understands a lot that is the essence of the black experience, and in his rattled consciousness at least, he is the one who informs the police on Albert so that Albert's life will stop killing him.

Junebug's death forces Brother to try to articulate to himself some important things about black life. He talks about the long stream of brutality, murder, rape and torture, and tries to talk positively:

Listen, son. Listen, Junebug. It all starts up again in you. It's all there again. You are in me and I am in you so it never stops. As long as I am, there's you. As long as there's you, I am. It never stops. Nothing stops. We just get tired and can't see no further. Our eyes get cloudy. They close and we can't see no further. But it don't stop.

But Junebug has been burned to death, and Brother wonders if he has lied: "What bright, shining day ever came?" He knows he should tell someone the train dream, but he will never speak again the rest of his life.

At its end, however, Brother's life does maintain positive value. Before he steps up to dare the thundering train, the mate of the dream train, he hears the long-gone voices of Doot's grandfather John French and his wine-drinking buddies "laughing over his shoulder." He tells Junebug: "Ima win this one for you…. Watch me play."

Samantha is a physically attractive black woman with a lot of children; she says, "When this old ark [her house] docks be a whole lotta strong niggers clamber out on the Promised Land." But Samantha's life is fraught with tragedy: her involvement with Brother; the experience of Junebug, who is totally rejected by her other children because of his whiteness and ugliness; the deaths of both Brother and Junebug; and her own eventual insanity and institutionalization. Samantha's experience seems more uniformly tragic than that of the other characters, but at the deeper level of reality, she has depth, vision, and understanding, somewhat like Brother, that grow out of her tragic experience. The tragedy of her life is tempered by the memory of the beautiful woman "who used to stride through the Homewood streets like a zulu queen" and by the sacrifice and nationalistic vision she exhibited.

By the end of the "Brother" section, Wideman has used Albert, Brother, Junebug, and Samantha, four characters who are part of the Homewood myth and not a part of the novel's present action, to present an underlying reality that is subjective and symbolic. This territory is misty and foggy, but Wideman uses his tremendous artistic ability to shape and define the contours of thought and form here. Maybe the myth can support the artist and keep the deepest levels of his art alive. But after Wideman has apparently satisfied himself at this level, he must come back to the surface level of the characters' oral stories and myth, where Doot—who again is a surrogate for Wideman the young Homewoodite who searches for foundation and structure in his life—must take some action. At the end Doot is at Lucy's house with Lucy and his Uncle Carl. Doot's fondness for the stories is shown by his desire to hear again about Brother, whose story he has been hearing throughout the book. His uncertainty about the stories and myth is shown by his unwillingness to take action and live with the myth as his centering force: he still wants to listen. But significantly, Lucy pulls him away from listening to stories toward action. She has already told Doot that when he was born she "looked for the old folks [in his eyes]." She feels that the old folks, like Doot's grandfather John French, were tough and persevering, unlike her and Carl, who "got scared and gave up too easy." She reminds him of the time years ago when she got him up to dance to "Sent for You Yesterday, and Here You Come Today." In the last paragraph, Lucy puts on Smokey Robinson's "Tracks of My Tears," and Doot is "on [his] own feet. Learning to stand, to walk, learning to dance." If Wideman can show us how Doot can move from the "learning" stage to scat singing—like the name Brother gave him suggests—and dancing, then the stories will become "real" for Doot, more than sentimentality and nostalgia.

Wideman almost must write a sequel showing Doot, or some similar character, integrating the stories and myths in some way like the Homewood blacks of the older generations. This novel needs a sequel like Hiding Place needed Damballah, like Damballah needed Sent for You Yesterday.

In his three most recent works, Wideman again shows us his vast talent and has put together a lot about his family and community and the black experience. Wideman can further use the Homewood material to be prophetic about the black experience, to establish himself as a truly great writer who has been more insightful than most writers.