American Histories
John Wideman
Review by Jan Schmidt
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In his 2018 collection of short stories American Histories, novelist, essayist, and two-time winner of PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, John Edgar Wideman ruminates in collage-style prose/poems on family, life, death, justice, no justice, racism. Though as I write that I realize probably all short stories and novels are about family, life, and death, but not all tackle racism and justice. The thought of reviewing these short stories, written with Wideman’s exquisite jazzy improvisational musicality, completely intimidates me.
How could I ever use my words to get anyone else to feel the joy and power inside these stories that radiate beauty from dead center out of these tormented, twisted lives? The first story called “A Prefatory Note” is a letter to a future president asking if there ever will be an end to slavery. Then in “JB & FD,” Wideman moves right into an argument over tactics and ideologies between John Brown and Frederick Douglas. In all the stories, Wideman slips and slides between slang and high literary style, though it turns out grand philosophical thoughts are most sharply expressed in local speech. |
Bobbing and weaving, he digresses in and out of the present, the past, his own life, lives of historical people and turns the difference between fiction and non-fiction on its head. Even those stories whose characters lived over a century ago flit around time and place so we feel them contemporaneous. In his wanderings, he seems to speak to me personally—Wideman and I do have some things in common, age, neighborhood, twisted internal monologues, though our differences of race and gender are no small distinctions. But, as he restlessly searches and examines his life, it’s as though he’s inside my head and writes what I’m thinking, feeling, turning us—Wideman and me—inside out. Not to mention that he’s turning history itself inside out.
And he’s a master at suspending the reader’s disbelief. In “Williamsburg Bridge” Wideman’s narrator sits on the outer railing and muses about hearing Sonny Rollins play the trumpet on the bridge and compares the “rust-acned rails” and “crimson barrier of heavy-gauge steel” to the Rollins tenor sax colors, “midnight blue” and the “grudging color of a colored soldier’s wound.” Nat Turner talks to us from the platform where he is about to be hanged. The implausibility of either of them being able to write or otherwise speak to us from those positions matters not at all. What really matters is Wideman’s ability to bust it all down to the white meat, exposing the truth, which turns out to be beauty, as Keats so famously taught us.
In “Williamsburg Bridge,” his narrator says: “. . . so today I’m certain and determined to jump, though not in any hurry. Why should I be. All the time in the world at my disposal. All of it. Every invisible iota. No beginning. No end. Whole load. Whole wad. All mine the moment I let go. Serene, copious, seamless time.” And I get it: serenity and peace as he’s about to die at his own hand.
Even his conversations between people with similar goals but opposite methodologies, Frederick Douglass and John Brown, Romare Beardon and Basquiat, Nat Turner and historical revisionism, all echo the inner voices of Wideman. Not just the conflicting ideas but the similarities that crisscross centuries and continue to haunt our psyches and inform our lives. “Bearden’s collages remind Basquiat of how his mother used to talk. Still talks on her good days. Her stories flatten perspective. Cram in everything, everyone, from everywhere she’s been. Spanish, her native language, and her English flow seamlessly, intimately when she’s telling tales. Like the mix of materials Bearden combines to construct collage. Her words may be foreign, her accent unfamiliar, but listeners able to follow. Anecdotes she relates fill space to the brim without exhausting it. Moments she has experienced become large enough, thank goodness, to include everybody. Nobody feels left out.”
This may not describe his mother, or my mother, but it illuminates art-making, story-making, and Wideman’s own inclusivity. In “Writing Teacher,” his narrator’s musings become a fictionalized essay on how to write and even more important how to empathize. Having an upcoming appointment with his student, the narrator thinks: “Which game are you playing, I could ask Teresa McConnell. Are readers supposed to pretend you exist or don’t exist inside your story. Both. Neither. Are good writers able to help readers negotiate such issues. Does compassion trump technique or technique trump compassion. Is it okay to borrow another’s identity in order to perpetrate a good deed. If you don’t obtain the other’s permission, are you an identity thief:”
Wideman’s investigations into underlying issues such as appropriation and compassion make his writing particularly necessary today, when so many have forgotten how to question or look for the truth. Scenes from his own life appear in his narrators’ lives. He’s a child wondering about the “Shape of the World,” he’s an older married man in “My Dead,” he’s telling the story of a woman holding on, not giving birth till midnight when the date changes. In “Maps and Ledgers” he’s a Black university professor getting a call that his father killed a man, taken from real life in which Wideman’s son and his brother are both in prison for murder. These are truly American Histories. But ultimately, no matter the persona, we’re hearing our own lives, our own existential questions.
Then these words from his fictional character, a grandson of Frederick Douglas named after John Brown who is visiting France, transported me so far inside myself that I was no longer distinct from Wideman or his narrator. Or trees. “Powerful sea winds have shaped trees I stand next to on the bluff, winds that would shape me, too, no doubt, if I stood here very long. Trees with thick, ancient-looking gray trunks, bark deeply furrowed as old John Brown’s skin, multiple trunks entwined, branches big as trunks, twisted, tortured, though a few trees shoot more or less straight up to vast crowns that form a layered green canopy of feathery needles high overhead. A row of maybe seven, eight survivors of probably hundreds of years of battering wind, and spaced among them another four or five cut down to stumps a couple yards across you could sit on and stare out at endless water beyond the edge of land, beyond the seawall and Roman ruins below. Next to trees, still standing and fallen, I forget who I am, who I’m supposed to be, and it is perfection. Doesn’t matter who I am or believed I was or all the shitty jobs performed to get to France—I listen for the voices of Frederick Douglass and John Brown sealed within the silence of those huge trees. Trees I don’t know a name for, thinking maybe pine or fir or conifer, and I never will need to look up the name because for a small instant I’m inside them, and it lasts forever.”
Wideman’s riffs wash over me like light, sometimes somber light, as paragraphs like these cause me to pause, put the book down, gaze out the window. Not page turners, but the opposite: his stories invite me to slow down, let the words sink in. While his language meanders, strikes a chord, and swerves back on itself, his rhythms work me like ancient drums. Gotta tell ya, John Edgar Wideman put a spell on me.
And he’s a master at suspending the reader’s disbelief. In “Williamsburg Bridge” Wideman’s narrator sits on the outer railing and muses about hearing Sonny Rollins play the trumpet on the bridge and compares the “rust-acned rails” and “crimson barrier of heavy-gauge steel” to the Rollins tenor sax colors, “midnight blue” and the “grudging color of a colored soldier’s wound.” Nat Turner talks to us from the platform where he is about to be hanged. The implausibility of either of them being able to write or otherwise speak to us from those positions matters not at all. What really matters is Wideman’s ability to bust it all down to the white meat, exposing the truth, which turns out to be beauty, as Keats so famously taught us.
In “Williamsburg Bridge,” his narrator says: “. . . so today I’m certain and determined to jump, though not in any hurry. Why should I be. All the time in the world at my disposal. All of it. Every invisible iota. No beginning. No end. Whole load. Whole wad. All mine the moment I let go. Serene, copious, seamless time.” And I get it: serenity and peace as he’s about to die at his own hand.
Even his conversations between people with similar goals but opposite methodologies, Frederick Douglass and John Brown, Romare Beardon and Basquiat, Nat Turner and historical revisionism, all echo the inner voices of Wideman. Not just the conflicting ideas but the similarities that crisscross centuries and continue to haunt our psyches and inform our lives. “Bearden’s collages remind Basquiat of how his mother used to talk. Still talks on her good days. Her stories flatten perspective. Cram in everything, everyone, from everywhere she’s been. Spanish, her native language, and her English flow seamlessly, intimately when she’s telling tales. Like the mix of materials Bearden combines to construct collage. Her words may be foreign, her accent unfamiliar, but listeners able to follow. Anecdotes she relates fill space to the brim without exhausting it. Moments she has experienced become large enough, thank goodness, to include everybody. Nobody feels left out.”
This may not describe his mother, or my mother, but it illuminates art-making, story-making, and Wideman’s own inclusivity. In “Writing Teacher,” his narrator’s musings become a fictionalized essay on how to write and even more important how to empathize. Having an upcoming appointment with his student, the narrator thinks: “Which game are you playing, I could ask Teresa McConnell. Are readers supposed to pretend you exist or don’t exist inside your story. Both. Neither. Are good writers able to help readers negotiate such issues. Does compassion trump technique or technique trump compassion. Is it okay to borrow another’s identity in order to perpetrate a good deed. If you don’t obtain the other’s permission, are you an identity thief:”
Wideman’s investigations into underlying issues such as appropriation and compassion make his writing particularly necessary today, when so many have forgotten how to question or look for the truth. Scenes from his own life appear in his narrators’ lives. He’s a child wondering about the “Shape of the World,” he’s an older married man in “My Dead,” he’s telling the story of a woman holding on, not giving birth till midnight when the date changes. In “Maps and Ledgers” he’s a Black university professor getting a call that his father killed a man, taken from real life in which Wideman’s son and his brother are both in prison for murder. These are truly American Histories. But ultimately, no matter the persona, we’re hearing our own lives, our own existential questions.
Then these words from his fictional character, a grandson of Frederick Douglas named after John Brown who is visiting France, transported me so far inside myself that I was no longer distinct from Wideman or his narrator. Or trees. “Powerful sea winds have shaped trees I stand next to on the bluff, winds that would shape me, too, no doubt, if I stood here very long. Trees with thick, ancient-looking gray trunks, bark deeply furrowed as old John Brown’s skin, multiple trunks entwined, branches big as trunks, twisted, tortured, though a few trees shoot more or less straight up to vast crowns that form a layered green canopy of feathery needles high overhead. A row of maybe seven, eight survivors of probably hundreds of years of battering wind, and spaced among them another four or five cut down to stumps a couple yards across you could sit on and stare out at endless water beyond the edge of land, beyond the seawall and Roman ruins below. Next to trees, still standing and fallen, I forget who I am, who I’m supposed to be, and it is perfection. Doesn’t matter who I am or believed I was or all the shitty jobs performed to get to France—I listen for the voices of Frederick Douglass and John Brown sealed within the silence of those huge trees. Trees I don’t know a name for, thinking maybe pine or fir or conifer, and I never will need to look up the name because for a small instant I’m inside them, and it lasts forever.”
Wideman’s riffs wash over me like light, sometimes somber light, as paragraphs like these cause me to pause, put the book down, gaze out the window. Not page turners, but the opposite: his stories invite me to slow down, let the words sink in. While his language meanders, strikes a chord, and swerves back on itself, his rhythms work me like ancient drums. Gotta tell ya, John Edgar Wideman put a spell on me.
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