Author’s skill shines brightly through dark, probing tales

The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, By John Edgar Wideman

Reviewed by Stephanie Abbajay

Though there is magic in “The Stories of John Edgar Wideman” – here streets sing, the wind makes promises, fingers have eyes, plants have feet and ghosts are everywhere – these short stories are, by and large, devastating tales of love and hate, racism and rejection, murder and loss.

This collection by Mr. Wideman – twice recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award – is the largely autobiographical account of his life and the lives of his ancestors, from the days of slavery to their settling in the black section of Pittsburgh known as Homewood. It is a tale told with lyrical intensity.

In the section “Damballah,” originally published in 1981, the writer introduces us to his family. He tells of his great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens who escaped slavery and settled in Pittsburgh (“The Beginnings of Homewood”). He recounts his earliest memories of his father (“Across the Wide Missouri”), his mother’s spiritual angst (“Solitary”) and his brother’s crime and punishment (“Tommy”).

Where “Damballah” is sad but light, the section “Fever” (1989) is broadly dark, full of anger and wonder over the horrors of this world. The three standouts are “Valaida,” the story of a Holocaust survivor who, in his old age, remembers the black woman – remarkably enough – who gave her life to save him from a deadly beating by the guards; “Rock River,” about a friend’s suicide and the shattering effect his death has on the family; and “Fever,” a brilliant, sprawling tale of the courage and dedication of blacks during the plague that swept Philadelphia in the 18th century and the racism they encountered.

But it is in “All Stories Are True,” the one section of new fiction in the book, that Mr. Wideman is most affecting. These stories are tougher, more insistent. The first two, “All Stories Are True” and “Casa Grande,” are about the writer’s visit to his brother in prison (for murder) and his ruminations on his sons’ imprisonment (also for murder).
Mr. Wideman cannot make sense of either his brother’s or his son’s crime, or of their incarceration. He realizes the only way to connect with his brother is to tell stories, so in “All Stories Are True,” they sit together in the prison yard, telling stories and trying desperately to find common ground.

In “Signs,” Mr. Wideman plumbs the psychological depths of racism. A young black graduate student is tormented by malevolent and pornographic signs that appear everywhere she goes. Despite appeals to the administration, she becomes so unnerved by her tormentor that she concludes the only way to end the horror is to blame the victim.

So she delivers a passionless and fallacious mea culpa: “Dear Diary. In the end it doesn’t matter. Let them believe I did it to myself. Everybody’s off the hook. A plausible explanation.” She tells the college it was her all along. It’s easier that way, isn’t it?

Mr. Wideman is driven to tell the stories of those who would otherwise be forgotten, be they members of his family or people from the pages of the New York Times. In “A Voice Foretold,” he pieces together the life of a man wrongly murdered by the police in a Harlem tenement. There is nothing left of this man’s life, only blood stains, a ransacked apartment, a ripped mattress. Will anyone know this man was in love? That he was a good man? Only because Mr. Wideman has written it down.

One of the most brilliant and disturbing stories is “Newborn Thrown In Trash and Dies,” in which Mr. Wideman creates the voice of a newborn girl calmly speculating about her life and future as she hurtles down a trash chute, thrown away by her 19-year-old mother.

As she passes successive floors, the baby wonders what her life would be like if she lived on each of them. As in “A Voice Foretold,” Mr. Wideman feels a need to tell this story, to let her tell her story: “Many readers must have shaken their heads in dismay or sighed or blurted Jesus Christ, did you see this, handing the Metro Section across the breakfast table…As grateful as I am to have my story made public you should understand why I feel cheated, why the newspaper account is not enough, why I want my voice to be part of the record.”

In “Welcome,” the last story in the section, It is Christmastime, and though the family is remembering the death of a daughter, the sickness of the mother and the waywardness of a brother, the whole family is together and they realize that there is hope, that there is importance in remembering what’s left – that the family, however ransacked by tragedy, is life-affirming.

Mr. Wideman’s short stories are not to be taken lightly. Many are technically demanding (“Everybody Knew Bubba Riff” is a 10-page sentence), all are demanding emotionally. These are missives from the writer’s heart and soul. It is as if the only way for him to make sense of his life was to get it down on paper, as if the one means by which he could find a common thread, connect with his ancestors, with his brother and son in prison, was not only to tell them stories, but to tell their stories.

We are eavesdropping, but Mr. Wideman wouldn’t have it any other way. As he puts it in the introduction to “Damballah,” “Stories are letters. Letters sent to anybody or everybody. But the best kind are meant to be read by a specific somebody. When you read that kind you know you are eavesdropping. You know a real person somewhere will read the same words you are reading and the story is that person’s business and you are a ghost listening in.”

Stephanie Abbajay is managing editor of the National Interest.