John Edgar Wideman, Rhodes Scholar, novelist, essayist, and social critic was born in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 1941, but spent the better part of his formative years in Homewood, Pennsylvania one of Pittsburgh's black ghettos. Both of his parents' families had deep roots in this community founded by Wideman's great grandmother Sylbela Owens, who was a slave, and her owner's son Charlie Bell (Canby 885). Charlie had run away with Sylbela because his father suspected a romantic relationship between the beautiful slave woman and his son and planned to sell her away to another plantation. Charlie foiled his father's plans by running away to the North with his slave mistress and helping to establish the Homewood community.
John was the oldest of five children born to Edgar Wideman and Betty French. Edgar was a bright young man who at one time had planned on attending dental school. However, the color of his skin combined with a lack of funds foiled this plan. Instead he became determined to make the American Dream a reality for his five children.
Sometimes Edgar held three jobs simultaneously as a paperhanger, waiter, and sanitation worker for the city of Pittsburgh. For a little while he was able to provide his family with a small piece of the American dream. When John was about ten years old his father was able to move his family into the predominantly European-American suburb of Pittsburgh called Shadyside. He made this move for the express purpose of giving his family the best educational opportunities possible. It was a bold move made prior to the Civil Rights movement by a man determined his children's reach should exceed his grasp.
Despite a certain discomfort at being one of a few African-American students in a predominantly European-American school young John prospered educationally, athletically, and socially. It was the beginning of a familiar pattern in his life where he would mask his discomfort about being one of only a few African-Americans in a predominantly European-American environment by compiling academic and athletic achievements at a record pace. These achievements eventually garnered him a Benjamin Franklin Scholarship to The University of Pennsylvania in 1959, a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in 1963, and a Kent Fellowship to The University of Iowa's Writers Workshop in 1966.
"The Amazing John Edgar Wideman," as he became known during his illustrious career as an English major and star athlete at the University of Pennsylvania, became only the second African-American in the twentieth century to win a Rhodes Scholarship. The first African-American Rhodes Scholarship winner had been Alain Locke of Harvard in 1907, editor of the seminal text of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro (1902).
John Edgar Wideman was the ideal "Negro" candidate for integration into the social and academic life of the Ivy League of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Tall, athletic, handsome, and artistically gifted his calm outward demeanor belied the fact that he was angry and confused about being separated from his family and the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Pittsburgh's Homewood community.
To Wideman the University of Pennsylvania was a strange place for a sensitive young man, and often he toiled with the idea of returning to the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood for good. He felt as though everyone European-American of some importance encouraged him to turn his back on his family and the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood in order to be successful in their world. Although he didn't have the words to explain this phenomena he was undergoing he would say later in his autobiography Brothers and Keepers (1984) that he had survived the university emotionally by wrapping himself deep within a very hard, brightly polished emotional shell (32).
During 1959-1963 he could not comprehend that despite compiling an impressive list of academic and athletic accomplishments he remained a victim of the history of race relations in America. Although in the early 1960s The University of Pennsylvania was willing to integrate its classrooms, playing fields, and gymnasiums with a "Negro" who was willing to attempt to assimilate into its lily white Ivy League culture, it was not ready to integrate him with his Homewood identity grounded in the traditional African-American ethnic culture.
In order for Wideman to achieve he had to suppress and marginalize his ethnic identity and assimilate into a larger European-American world of privilege that often sought reasons for rejecting him. An incident which illustrated this constant threat of rejection happened during his freshman year. He made the mistake of wearing his tie 'ghetto style' hanging below his waist and was berated by a European-American student who felt compelled to remind him, "We don't wear our ties that way at Penn, John."
In 1954 the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. The Board of Education decision struck down the principle of separate but equal educational institutions and assured African-Americans of Wideman's generation opportunities such as attending the nation's best institutions of higher education like the University of Pennsylvania. However, this was not an opportunity that could be taken advantage of without emotional sacrifices on their part.
John Wideman and other young "Negroes" of his generation who took the first bold steps into the exclusive institutions of the Ivy League had to become what the white world expected them to be on their terms. They had to act happy to be accepted into these schools and attempt to assimilate into an European-American world designed to reject them.
For John Edgar Wideman being at The University of Pennsylvania meant turning his back on his family and friends back home in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ghetto, called Homewood. He had to turn his back on rhythm and blues and Homewood Zion A.M.E. Church. He had to turn his back on all the people, places, and institutions in the traditional African-American ethnic culture that made him who he was and become what The University of Pennsylvania expected him to be. Undergoing this transformation to meet the university's expectations he lost himself.
The transformation which he had subjected himself to was typical for young African-Americans of his generation. The African-American social and cultural revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s had not happened yet and things "Negro," especially music, dance, art, literature, and religion, were considered primitive and inferior. To be an achiever in the larger European-American world a young African-American had to aspire to participate in the higher, i.e., "Whiter" aspects of culture.
Most importantly a young "Negro's" speech had to be Standard Received English (SRE) and contain none of the double negatives, dangling participles, or any other characteristics of Black American Dialectical English (BADE). And no matter how angered they became by insults and slights they could never display the "black rage" psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs identified in their 1968 book, Black Rage. When Wideman got involved in an unfriendly confrontation about the blues and wanted to strike out physically he resisted: "All I had sensed was his power, the raw, crude force mocking me, diminishing me. I should have smacked him. I should have affirmed another piece of the truth he knew about me, the nigger violence" (Brothers and Keepers 32).
In Wideman's defense, the decision to assimilate and submerge his ethnic identity in 1959 was one made without reservation by many young "Negroes" of his generation who wanted to get ahead by making it in the "man's" world of the early 1960s. In order to be successful they knew they had to become as European-American as possible while simultaneously being imprisoned in African-American black skins. Franz Fanon speaks to this situation in his text, Black Skins, White Masks (1967): "For the black man there is only one destiny and it is white" (10).
Wideman knew in order to succeed in the European-Americans world he had to suppress instincts developed in the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood. As he piled impressive success on top of impressive success at the University of Pennsylvania, culminating in a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and a Kent Fellowship to the University of Iowa, he came to believe his background in the traditional African-American ethnic culture was a liability in the larger European-American world based on the Western Cultural Aesthetic.
In the August 1989 edition of Esquire Chip Brown's article, "Blood Circle" describes Wideman's efforts to suppress his instincts from the traditional African-American ethnic culture as symbolic of a whole generation of young African-American men:
Men of Wideman's generation twisted themselves into knots trying to conform to white standards, to avoid feeding white stereotypes. As expressed later in his writings Wideman became so ashamed of his ethnic heritage he couldn't enjoy a piece of watermelon. While he was growing up, his seventh sense had marked the racial partitions of Pittsburgh. His paper route toured the stately homes atop Negley Hill, a gilded precinct that was set apart, he saw, by language. He never forgot the confounded look on the face of the white woman who overheard him use the word 'exorbitant.' It would be years later before he could make fun of himself for what he was determined to become: a snotty dicty-talking nigger. (Brown 124)
Attending Pittsburgh's predominantly European-American Peabody High School in the late 1950s Wideman skillfully began his process of assimilating into the European-American world. Later during his freshman year and throughout the time he was matriculating at The University of Pennsylvania he shielded himself from his ethnicity grounded in the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood by cloaking himself in the music, manners, speech, dress, customs, athletics, and attitudes of the European-American world. At The University of Pennsylvania far away from family and friends and familiar ethnic rituals like the Homewood Zion A.M.E. church, street corner harmonizing, and playground basketball, he began to literally and figuratively to exist in a different world.
He never allowed his outward behavior, speech, or dress to project his membership in the traditional African-American ethnic culture. Matriculating at the University of Pennsylvania while he was still learning to master the art of suppressing his ethnicity he also began to develop the tragic realization of how difficult a task it would be to suppress his emotional attachment to the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood which had nurtured him from birth.
Although he had put Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on his application his psychic address had been in the predominantly African-American ghetto called Homewood. Throughout his undergraduate and graduate education and well into his dual careers as novelist and distinguished college professor he kept his affiliation with Homewood and its rituals buried deep within his sensitive psyche. He had no one to share the memories of these rituals, no one who could appreciate gospel, rhythm and blues, plantation humor, fish-fries, juke joints, and fist, knife and gun fights.
At one point during his freshman year at Penn his incessant longing for his former way of life became so obsessive that he decided to return to Homewood for good, but he was persuaded by his basketball coach to stay at the University. Eventually he became an All Ivy League basketball player and competed successfully on the track team. As a freshmen basketball player he set a scoring record for the season, as a sophomore he averaged 11 points a game on the Penn varsity, as a junior while playing outstanding defense he led the varsity team in rebounding and tied for top scoring honors with his roommate Bob Purdie. The team also finished the season that year undefeated. Because of his outstanding athletic prowess and leadership skills he was named captain of the team his senior season.
However, in order to stay at Penn he had transformed himself into more than one person, and underwent what Harold Cruse labeled, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. He carried with him at all times two distinct identities. One of his identities was 'Spanky' Wideman ghetto homeboy, playground basketball legend and street fighter, but the other was 'The Amazing John Edgar Wideman' treasurer of The University of Pennsylvania's Men's Honor Society, Rhodes Scholar, Captain of the Men's Basketball team and star of the track team, Number One Ladies Man, and a published short story writer and a produced playwright. Years later in the midst of a highly successful professional life as a writer and college professor, he looked back on his years at the university and realized the high emotional price of his accomplishments there. He was quoted in Brown's article "Blood Circle"reflecting on those times with certain misgivings:
The price I paid for those successes was self-induced schizophrenia, of being severed from my own history. Teachers, coaches, nearly everyone in the white university environment, urged me to bury my past. I learned to stake too much of who I was on what I would become. (124)
Often in search of a traditional African-American ethnic culture like his beloved Homewood he took long bus rides into the ghettos of Philadelphia attempting to escape his feelings of loneliness and isolation at Penn. Later in his autobiography, Brothers and Keepers (1984) he wrote:
Darryl (One of Wideman's few black friends at Penn) and I would ride buses across Philly searching for places like home. Like the corner of Frankstown and Bruston in Homewood. A pool room, barbershop, rib joint, record store strip with bloods in peacock colors strolling up and down and hanging out on the corner. After a number of long unsuccessful expeditions (how could you ask directions ? Who in this island of University would know what you were asking, let alone be able how to tell you how to get there ?), we found South Street. Just over the bridge, walking distance if you weren't in a hurry, but as far from school, as close to home as one could get. Another country. (32)
In the end, though, the need to abandon his traditional African-American ethnic culture in order to be successful in the larger European-American world proved to be an insurmountable lure. How does a young African-American man from such humble beginnings resist the golden ring of success ? Gene Shalit interviewed Wideman during his senior year at Penn for a story about being only the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship in the twentieth century and Wideman said about his family, "We've never had much money, but we've always been a close family."
When his father was able to find work it was often with the city of Pittsburgh's sanitation department. At other times like when John was in high school Edgar Wideman held three jobs simultaneously as a paper hanger, welder, and waiter at Kaufman's department store. It was the only way the Wideman family could live in Shadyside, a predominantly European-American neighborhood outside of Pittsburgh, with one of the state's best high schools, Peabody. Edgar and Bette Wideman made tremendous economic sacrifices during John's three years at Peabody, and he rewarded them by graduating as class valedictorian in 1959.
The opportunity that Edgar and Bette Wideman had afforded John through their joint sacrifices was an opportunity they were unable to provide for the rest of the Wideman clan. Despite all of Edgar's doubling and tripling up on jobs he was never able to permanently break the invisible barriers of class, race, and economics for the rest of his family. They were the same three barriers that had earlier forced him to abandon his own plans of becoming a dentist shortly before World War II.
By the time John's younger brother Robert started high school Edgar and Bette Wideman were forced to move their family back into the Pittsburgh ghetto of Homewood. Perhaps this is what sealed Robert's fate of life in prison convicted of armed robbery and murder. Much of Wideman's autobiographical, Brothers and Keepers (1984), is addressed to his younger brother Robert, in an attempt to figure out how two brothers raised in the same family could end up taking such radically divergent paths in life.
He also spends much of Brothers and Keepers (1984) justifying his decision to leave Robert and his family behind to search for success:
If ever I doubted how good I had it away at school in that world of books, exams, pretty rich white girls, and a roommate from Long Island who unpacked more pairs of jockey shorts and tee shirts than they had at Kaufman's department store you all were back home in the ghetto to remind me how lucky I was. Just two choices as far as I could tell: either or. Rich or poor. White or black. Win or lose. I figured which side I wanted to be on when the saints came marching in...... I didn't want to be caught looking back. To succeed you had to be like the man, and the man did not claim any bunch of poor nigger relatives back home in Pittsburgh. (Brothers and Keepers 27)
As John enjoyed his academic and athletic success the gap widened between him and his family. He was on the Dean's List semester after semester and eventually earned a Phi Beta Kappa Key. He won Phi Sigma's Creative Writing Prize for the best creative work in his class, a play which foreshadowed his literary prowess, and it was good enough to be produced on campus by the Penn Players.
At the time the play was produced Wideman said about his work, "It is a domestic one act play about a disillusioned woman, and her struggle between good and evil. She is married to a seemingly pious preacher who in reality turns out to be a force of evil. The wife finds this out from her half witted son to whom she is greatly attached" (Daily Pennsylvanian 5).
As he floated on the wings of his multiple successes and accomplishments he kept himself distanced from the "Negro Problem" as it was politely referred to in those days before Martin Luther King identified racism as a national problem. When he was being interviewed for a Life magazine feature praising his combination of athletic and academic achievements in the spring of 1963, he told Gene Shalit:
If there was something I wanted very badly that being Negro prevented me from doing, then I would be driven to do something about it. I'm sure I would. But so far the things that I've wanted to do haven't been held back from me because I am a Negro. So, the problem is not my own problem, not something I feel like I have to cope with or resolve. (36)
After his graduation from The University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1963 while he was waiting to leave for Oxford University he wrote an article called "What It Means To Be A Negro" for the Philadelphia Bulletin. It provides insight into a young African-American scholar who believed that his race was not a factor that affected him during his time at Penn:
When I had time to socialize, it was usually with teammates or other fellows who had the same obligations and tight schedules that are part of a college career. My circle of friends was restricted by circumstances rather than choice. Having much in common with people is a good beginning for friendship, good enough so that many external differences such as race or religion are overlooked....As an athlete I had even less awareness of the fact I was a Negro.....The danger of the college experience is that it tends to make one forget. After playing ball, socializing, living with men as equals during four years, it is natural to project this ideal situation as the rule not the exception......When I was elected a Rhodes Scholar, I was forcefully reminded of some cold hard facts. All the news releases seemed directed to the fact that a Negro had won a Rhodes Scholarship. Not John Wideman, Penn student and basketball player, but John Wideman, Negro and representative of his race. (2)
Shalit's feature, "The Astonishing John Edgar Wideman" and Wideman's opinion editorial, "What It Means To Be A Negro" which both appeared shortly after Wideman won the Rhodes Scholarship in 1963 on the surface seems to portray the ideal life of the scholar athlete at one of America's premier universities. Wideman did not truly begin to reexamine his time at Penn and his feelings of cultural marginalization in order to acquire success in a public forum until the publication of his soul baring autobiography, Brothers and Keepers (1984).
Shalit's article quotes Wideman as saying that during his time at Penn that he did not have any problems because of his race:
I've never been confronted with any problems as far as race prejudice goes. I can't say I'm completely unconscious of the problem, because, to me, being Negro is only a physical fact. Being Negro has actually provided me with some advantages. If I'm the only Negro in my discussion group, and they want to find out a few things, I automatically have a certain focus, and I might command the floor sooner than others, just because I'm different in a sense......I used to feel relaxed with Negroes, but now I feel the same with whites. (32)
Dr. Mark Longaker, who counseled Wideman through the Rhodes Scholarship application process, says about Wideman in Shalit's article, "John Wideman seems not to be race conscious. Although he is certainly aware of the complex problems that beset Negroes, he himself seems to be an eminence looking down" (36). As you read Shalit's feature and look at the photographs of Wideman going through his athletic and academic paces the only hint of Wideman's conflict over his 'psychic duality' is a sign over the door of his dormitory room which read, "No Exit" (31).
There is ample evidence in his later fiction and non-fiction essays that he was aware of existentialism's unique application to his personal circumstances. He had become a symbol of "Negro achievement" but at what price ? What Shalit's article does not mention is that Wideman often found it difficult negotiating the social graces of the Ivy League school. He says now more than thirty years later he can still remember the anger and embarrassment he felt after being ragged by one of his classmates for wearing his tie below his belt, the way that people did back in his Homewood neighborhood. Wanting badly to fit in at Penn he retied the tie, turned his back on his friends and family in the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood and began to absorb Camus, Sartre, and the dramatist Eugene O'Neil.
Eventually Wideman became so adept at hiding his insecurities while picking up award after award that he came to epitomize the Ivy League man. He displayed a cerebral wit that made him popular and well liked at Penn. He moved easily in the company of the university's jocks, the rich Jewish students from Long Island, and the emerging Beatnik subculture. "He was tall, witty, athletic and handsome, and women often called him up for dates" (Brown 124).
In his personal drive for success Wideman had become the lottery winner the European-American world could hold up to keep "Negroes" buying tickets when they had no chance to win the prize. Another one of his professors at Penn said about Wideman, "John has apparently come to grips with the color of his skin and with all the hideous foolishness about Negroes. But skin color is nothing he can hide, so in everything John ever does, he is going to be a symbol" (Shalit 32).
When this same professor told him to be careful now that he had become a symbol did not his words contain a veiled threat: "We're giving you the Ivy League opportunity, but you screw up you'll make us look bad, and the shit will come down twice as hard" (Brown 125) ? Wideman's outward demeanor at this time revealed no hint of the inner turmoil he was undergoing as one of only six African-American students at Penn in the class of 1963.
In one of Wideman's most recent works of fiction, Philadelphia Fire (1990) one of the novel's African-American characters offers a light on his time at Penn different than that of light of the esteemed professor's. Two African-American characters who had attended Penn in the early sixties, one a writer and the other a political emissary for the African-American mayor of Philadelphia, are now mired in the nineties work force. As they lunch in a trendy upscale restaurant they their experiences at the university. The writer says, "Way I look at it now they were testing us. Put a handful of niggers in this test tube and shook it up and watched it bubble......maybe the whole idea was to see if we would come out white" (Philadelphia Fire 76).
This professor who gave Wideman the 'don't blow it and make us look bad' warning had no idea that Wideman had been burying his inner turmoil over carrying dual identities under an avalanche of personal achievements. Why ? Wideman had received so many academic and athletic awards at Penn that by the time he was a senior he couldn't recall them all. Most of the other students and Wideman's professors stood in awe of his academic performances and athletic feats and seemed to reason that since a so-called "Negro" was doing so exceptionally well at Penn he must be happy.
Professor Maurice Johnson, chairman of graduate English while Wideman was at Penn, taught an undergraduate class where Wideman was one of his thirty-five students. When Gene Shalit came to campus to interview Professor Johnson about Wideman winning the Rhodes Scholarship, Johnson offered him this Wideman anecdote. "I sprang a surprise quiz on them the other day. I can confess that, if I had been confronted by this quiz without warning, I couldn't have answered all of the questions correctly. And all but one of my students didn't either. John Wideman got 100 percent. He not only knew all the right answers, he knew all the right reasons.....he understood. It was an astonishing performance" (32).
However Wideman says about his time at Penn:
I was running away from Pittsburgh, from poverty, from blackness. To get ahead, to make something of myself, college had seemed a logical, necessary step; my exile, my flight from home began with good grades, with good English, with setting myself apart long before I'd earned a scholarship and a train ticket over the mountain to Philadelphia. (Wideman Brothers and Keepers 27)
In another section of Brothers and Keepers (1984) Wideman offers us even deeper insight into his dualistic experience during his years at Penn:
If I wanted to stay in one piece and stay in school, I was forced to pull my punches. To maintain any semblance of dignity and confidence I had to learn to construct a shell around myself. Be cool. Work on appearing dignified and confident. Fool people with appearances, surfaces, live my real life underground in a region where no one else could touch me. The trouble with this survival mechanism was the time and energy expended on the upkeep of the shell. The brighter, harder, more convincing and impenetrable the shell became, the more I lost touch with the inner sanctuary where I was supposed to be hiding. It was no more accessible to me than it was for the people I intended to keep out. Inside me was a breeding ground for rage, hate, dreams of vengeance. Nothing original in my tactics. I'd adopted the same strategy as slaves, the oppressed,the powerless. I thought I was running, but I was fashioning a cage. Working hand in hand with my enemies. Knowledge of my racial past,of the worldwide struggle of oppressed people of color against the domination of Europeans could have been a tool, a support in the day-to-day confrontations I experienced in the alien university environment. History could have taught me that I was not alone, my situation was not unique. Believing I was alone made me dangerous, to myself and others. (32)
Although Wideman's gifts and talents opened formerly restricted social and academic areas at Penn, there was one door he would not enter at least not publicly. That door was the door to interracial dating. He knew even at Peabody High School in Shadyside in the late 1950s that this was forbidden turf, and the consequences could derail many of his long term plans by affirming one of the stereotypes he worked so hard at avoiding. Betsy Ward, a classmate of his at Peabody, offered Gene Shalit this observation about him:
I think I knew him very well. We sat next to each other during homeroom, and we talked a lot. But we never talked about what it meant to him to be a Negro. Once when we were working on a play together, he said he wouldn't want to be seen on the street alone with a white girl. Another time when we accidentally met on the street, he said, 'Lets go somewhere else to talk'.....(Shalit 37)
As one of only a handful of African-Americans in a virtually all European-American high school he skillfully avoided the unspoken expectations of his classmates. Although he had European-American friends he took care not to appear with them in public and instead spent his time with his African-American friends (Current Biography 1991 614). Ms. Ward gives us another picture of an insecure Wideman at Peabody before he had fully molded the well developed shell he utilized to protect his inner feelings of insecurity at Penn. "When class breaks came, John would seldom walk to the next class with the white students. Instead, he would go off to talk to the other Negroes in the corridor. Then just as the bell rang signaling the start of the next class, he'd slip into his seat" (Shalit 36).
Wideman realized at a young age that even though he was Peabody's president of the senior class, a member of National Honor Society, and the star of the football, basketball, and track teams, because he was a 'Negro,' he still had to be very careful about his public associations with his European-American classmates especially the females. It didn't matter that he had twice been named the outstanding high school basketball player in the city, or that he was the most popular student at Peabody High School. He knew what the ramifications for his success would be should he become romantically and publicly involved with a European-American female. He carried this knowledge with him throughout his undergraduate years at Penn and decided to keep a special romantic relationship with Judith Goldman a well guarded secret.
After winning the Rhodes Scholarship and being cast into the role as a national spokesperson for his race, a more mature Wideman discussing interracial dating said a few months before his graduation from Penn:
I've often wondered if things would've gone along the same way if I'd had a white girlfriend on campus. There is a fine line there, a line that is a kind of a threat, something that even in the most liberal circles is not talked about, and that is the idea of sex. The actual fact of a Negro-white relationship--an interracial or interreligious marriage--is always the last thing to go. Because then there is complete equality, and there is nothing that would separate the races anymore. Anything that goes in that direction creates a tension. And that is a psychological situation that can't be remedied by any amount of constitutional reform. (Shalit 36)
This statement was enigmatic and as usual during his days at Penn masked Wideman's true feelings about controversial issues of the day like interracial or interfaith dating or marriage. In Shalit's article he was photographed with an African-American girlfriend, Barbara Summers, but shortly after he returned to the U.S. from Oxford University in 1966, he married Judith Goldman of Virginia. He had decided to enter an interracial and interfaith marriage and obviously had been seeing Ms. Goldman for some time even while they were both matriculating as undergraduates at Penn.
He told Chip Brown who was writing an article for Esquire called "Blood Circle" on the strained relationships between Wideman and his younger brother Robert and Wideman and his youngest son Jacob that Ms. Goldman was "...one of those pretty, affluent white girls that made Penn such a dreamy place. She was slim-waisted and high strung, with brown hair and a deep devotion to ideals. We were both demanding, volatile, and passionate. We honeymooned in Greece (125).
In an article written by Nancy Haas, "The Private Inferno of John Edgar Wideman," which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on September 30, 1990, he readily admitted that Ms. Goldman had been his 'real' college sweetheart (17-24). In all the ways that Wideman had rewritten history at Penn through his academic, athletic, and artistic accomplishments he was afraid to allow the university community to know that he was romantically involved with and intended to marry a European-American woman.
After leaving Penn, Wideman studied eighteenth century literature at Oxford University's New College for three years, obtained a bachelor's of arts degree, and was player coach on an All England championship basketball team. He and his roommate Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey were the best players on the team. Bradley would return to a lucrative professional basketball contract with the New York Knicks in the NBA, but Wideman was voted the Most Valuable Player of their team in England.
Becoming an NBA player had been Wideman's primary reason for going to college. On May 12, 1984, he told Curt Supple of the Washington Post during an interview, "I always wanted to play professional basketball ever since I saw a basketball and learned you could make money at it" (Moritz 614). He told Kay Bonetti, an interviewer for the Missouri Review, "I thought I wanted to play pro basketball, and I knew in order to play pro basketball you had to play college basketball and to play college basketball you had to get a scholarship, so things kind of dovetailed and it was a lockstep type of future I had figured out for myself" (Bonetti 79).
Wideman's first love was the city game basketball, and often in his fiction he uses analogies where the ebb and flow and multiple challenges of the game are compared to life's challenges and decisions. He loved the game so much as a youngster that he often shoveled the snow off the courts during the biting Pittsburgh winters to practice. There is some suspicion that his first love is still basketball because the courts are the first place he heads when he is taking a break from his writing or teaching and administrative duties at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
He had decided while he was still at Penn that although he had been named to the all Ivy League team more than once, he would abandon any hope of playing professionally. He told an interviewer for The Daily Pennsylvanian, late in his senior season, "I don't intend to pursue high pressure competitive athletics. I have other interests like listening to music or drawing a picture or two. I hope to apply for a teaching appointment in the United States after Oxford" (Nagler 4). "I'm as interested as anyone in writing" he told Nagler, "but I also have my practical side--everyone needs a profession. The academic world puts you closest to the things a writer should be familiar with---books mostly, and ideas" (4)
Wideman had developed an intense interest in creative writing at Penn and won a prize for his imaginative writing. His writing showed enough promise to have drawn praise from well known and respected literary figures like the poet Archibald McLeish. As a prelude to his pursuit of his new goal of being a writer Wideman headed for Oxford University in the fall of 1963. In 1986 he told Kay Bonetti during a Missouri Review interview:
By the time I got to England I was fairly serious. I began to see myself as a writer and I saw the whole experience of getting out of the country as something which would forward a career in writing. I thought that was one way to get the kind of seriousness that I needed in my work. All of us grow up very confused and I thought writing was something connected to Europe. I didn't want to be a good American writer, let alone a black writer. I wanted to be world class, man, and to be world class you had to be Thomas Mann and you had to be Marcel Proust and you had to walk along the Champs Elysees and you had to know about bullfights. Those were the kinds of things which were stirring around in my head. I wanted to go where the action was, and going to Europe was a very conscious attempt to become part of that tradition. (80)
Naively he equated success as a writer with aligning himself with the European literary tradition based on the Western Cultural Aesthetic and minimizing his knowledge of and involvement with the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood. At this time he was totally ignorant of the African-American literary tradition. He had convinced himself that African-American writers and the traditional African-American ethnic culture had not made any significant contributions to literary study. His blueprint for success, denying any connection to the African-American literary tradition and the African-American traditional ethnic culture, dictated that his writing emulate European and European-American role models like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway.
When Kay Bonetti asked him if James Baldwin was a role model for him as a writer because he too had gone abroad to explore and hone his craft as a writer he replied:
Not at all. I came through school with a standard English literature curriculum. I knew there was a man named Baldwin, because he made the newspapers, but he was not taught in any of my classes and I did not know his work. I'm not sure whether or not I read any Ellison in college but if I did , it would have been the only piece of writing by a black writer. (Bonetti 81)
So, Wideman graduated from Penn and spent his three years at Oxford oblivious of the African-American literary tradition and the traditional African-American ethnic culture determined to become a writer in the European tradition of the Western Cultural Aesthetic. He missed the African-American social protest movement of the 1960s with its pained cries of, 'Black is beautiful.' He missed the African-American cultural revolution which sparked a renewed interests in African-American writers and the traditional African-American ethnic culture which stimulated their imaginations.
At Oxford he was safe once again in an environment where he could ignore his own emotional connections to the traditional African-American ethnic culture of Homewood, Pennsylvania. After returning to the United States he spent academic year 1966-67 at the University of Iowa's prestigious Writer's Workshop as a Kent Fellow. He used his time to complete his first novel. (Current Biography Yearbook 1991 614).
That same year he joined the faculty at The University of Pennsylvania as an assistant professor and fulfilled a plan he had laid out for himself during his undergraduate years. Eventually he became the university's first tenured African-American professor, advanced to the rank of associate professor and founder and first director of the university's African-American Studies Program.
Having chosen writing as his vocation he had chosen teaching as a means to earn a living while pursuing his writing. While on the trail of personal success, he was unaware that he was going to be involved in two surprising confrontations early in his teaching career. These confrontations were initiated by African-American students. The first group of African-American students wanted to know if he primarily addressed an African-American audience when he wrote his fiction, and the second group of students wanted Penn to offer its first African-American literature course. They expected Wideman, the only African-American professor in the English department, to teach its first course in African-American literature. These questions posed by two separate groups of African-American students at Penn would affect Wideman's personal views about his ethnicity and the limited role he had allowed it to play in his artistic vision.
In early 1968 after beginning his teaching career at Penn he was addressing a group of largely African-American Upward Bound students sponsored by his old mentor, Dr. Howard Mitchell's Project Exploration and Discovery group. At one point during his talk he said to them, "As I entered high school I thought I might become an archaeologist, a writer, or a thief. In other words, I wanted to be a writer among other things. But what can the writer do ? In the face of Martin Luther King one feels very shaky going up into the attic with the piece of paper and the pen."
The students struck deep into Wideman's comfort zone because they wanted to know if Wideman, who had given each of them a copy of his first novel A Glance Away (1967), had written it just for African-Americans. He replied, "No, I guess if everybody turned green tomorrow I'd still want my book to be around. I want to write for black people, but if only they understood me it would be less of a book. Now though we are talking about the split. The one foot here and the other there" (Bonetti 82). After confessing to the students that he did not have an answer to their question he tried to answer them by analyzing two statements by two African-American writers Maulana Karenga, who wrote the definitive text Introduction to Black Studies (1982), and Ralph Ellison, who wrote Invisible Man (1947) and Shadow and Act (1953).
Wideman quoted Karenga's black nationalistic aesthetician's view that, Any art that does not contribute to the Black revolution is invalid. He said that this remark presented him with serious conflicts because, "If I'm creating art I can't accept a manifesto or a law." He said that he preferred Ralph Ellison's view of art because Ellison said, A Negro writer exists with a foot over there and a foot over here. It can split you up the middle....the white versus the black, revolution or tradition. The black writer must have a foot in both worlds.
Wideman continued his analysis saying, "You must become acquainted with a tradition, and it's not an Irish tradition, it's not an English tradition. It's all men; you sample the best from all over the world." Besides he said to them, "I became a writer because books were important to me and I wanted to be important...the other reason was that I couldn't find anything else to do that felt the same as writing felt. I felt I had a story to tell, or rather, it told itself; it forced its way out. After awhile, the story takes control. As a black writer in America you write about an American experience because you are a black American, and it is different" (Gaines 1-2).
Wideman didn't bother telling this particular group of students that his writing at this point in his career was designed to address an European-American intellectual audience; designed to show he knew and could apply the Western Cultural Aesthetic as well or better than anyone who was European-American. He had recently come under attack by leaders of the Black Arts Movement like Baraka and Karenga for A Glance Away (1967) because they maintained it was a novel which was steeped in the Western Cultural Aesthetic.
The following year 1968, Wideman underwent a second experience at Penn while meeting with a group of African-American students which served as a catalyst for him to change the way he viewed his own ethnicity, his worldview of literary theories and the traditional African-American ethnic culture. It would eventually have a profound impact on his own writing (Coleman African-American Writers 494).
By the time this second meeting occurred he had become Penn's first tenured African-American faculty member, and these African-American students asked him to teach a course in African-American literature. Now he recalls his reply to them with a great deal of embarrassment:
I gave them the jive reply that it wasn't my field...I was one of the few black faculty members at Penn; they came to me for all sorts of soulful reasons, and I gave them the stock academic reply, which was true. But I felt so ashamed that I got back in touch with them and agreed to teach the course---and began my second education. (493)
The African-American students had once again struck deeply into Wideman's comfort zone and later during an interview he told Kay Bonetti:
I didn't know anything about black literature and I had my own writing to do and I didn't want to get involved in the work to put together a decent class and I didn't' want to do it in an off handed manner either. But it was their eye contact, it was the sense of myself sitting out there in the audience listening to me, that did it. I had sounded like such a punk. Sounded like the very voice that had turned so many people back. That was a very important moment for me, and I think my reading of African-American literature began to get quite serious at that point. (Bonetti 81-82)
Up until this meeting Wideman's only encounter with African-American literature had been a quick reading of Ellison's Invisible Man (1947) and some Richard Wright. After this meeting he began to read widely in the field of African-American literature and the course was a success. By preparing to teach the African-American literature course and working with W.W. Norton to integrate its Norton's Anthology of American Literature, Wideman immersed himself in the African-American literary tradition (Samuels 45).
He was pained to discover through his studies in the African-American literary tradition how far he had drifted away from the experience of the traditional African-American ethnic culture and especially from his family back in Homewood. Part of his efforts to bridge this cultural gap led him to study the African-American literary tradition more extensively broadening his inquiries to include African and Caribbean literatures and to eventually chair Penn's first African-American Studies Program in 1972 and 1973.
By 1970 Wideman had published his second novel Hurry Home which was a lot like his first novel. It was in the modernist and existential modes. Once again the central character was an African-American, Cecil Otis Braithwaite. However, just like the first novel the second was met with the disapproval of the black nationalistic aestheticians who leveled the criticism that like Wideman his protagonist Cecil Otis Braithwaite was saddled with a lot of firsts like the first Negro to attend and graduate from an important law school, but he was estranged from the traditional African-American ethnic culture and unsure of his relationships with other African-Americans.
By the time he published his third novel The Lynchers (1973), his writing style had began to evolve from modeling the master texts and writers of the Western Cultural Aesthetic to experimenting with the African-American literary tradition and the Black oral vernacular. In The Lynchers (1973) all of his major characters are African-Americans who do not look outside the traditional African-American ethnic culture for inspiration or guidance.
For his own reasons, which had to do with his recent submergence and protracted studies of the African-American literary tradition, he opened The Lynchers (1973) with a detailed historical account of lynchings compiled by the noted historian Herbert Apthecker. Some European-American critics complained about an emerging anger in Wideman's writing, but what they missed was The Lynchers (1973) was a transitional work for Wideman marking a bridge between his utilization of an Eurocentric artistic vision and an Afrocentric artistic vision.
He would not publish another novel for eight years, and when he did his writing had changed dramatically because he was now integrating in his writing European literary theory and traditions, African-American literary theory and traditions, and his family's and the Homewood community's folklore in order to forge a new literary voice which was uniquely his own.
During this eight year period when he was not publishing any of his fiction, two dramatic events occurred which altered how he viewed himself and his relationship to the traditional African-American ethnic culture: his maternal grandmother died and his baby brother was incarcerated in prison for life without possibility of parole. These two events caused him to take a closer, more informed look at the traditional African-American ethnic culture and develop a renewed appreciation for his family.
This new informed look emerged as his Homewood Trilogy [Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981), and Sent For You Yesterday (1983)]. When these books were published Wideman was emerging from a self-imposed exile in Laramie, Wyoming, where he had been teaching African-American literature and creative writing at the University of Wyoming. While teaching at the University of Wyoming, he had began to write critical theory about the various African-American literary traditions and concepts he studied, especially the oral tradition of the Black vernacular.
He told Wilfred D. Samuels, an interviewer for Callaloo, that, "I was exploring voice; I was trying to learn to use a different voice; I was doing a lot of studying. I was woodshedding as the musicians say--I was catching up" (45). While turning out scholarly articles like "Stompin' the Blues: Rituals in Black Music and Speech" and "Frame and Dialect in African-American Literature" in The American Poetry Review and "Defining the Black Voice in Fiction" in Black American Literature Forum, he studied and experimented with various African-American literary traditions and devices. He was attempting to give himself a different voice in his fiction writing. That different voice he was seeking was the oral tradition of the Black vernacular which ironically was the basis of the Black Nationalistic Aesthetic.
After nine years of immersion in various aspects of the African-American literary tradition he published the first two books of his Homewood Trilogy: Damballah (1981) and Hiding Place (1981). These novels revealed a writer who had become comfortable paying literary homage to various aspects of the African-American literary tradition and to the folklore of his family and the Homewood community in the traditional African-American ethnic culture. He was now including the folklore and characters of his family and the Homewood community in his writing and using a variety of other literary devices from the traditional African-American ethnic culture.
He had become especially proficient in the oral tradition of the Black vernacular in combination with the Western Cultural Aesthetic. When his grandmother died during his exile to Wyoming he returned to Pittsburgh for the funeral. After the services, during the obligatory socializing and drinking, he had heard many of the stories that made up much of his family's folklore. He made a conscious decision at that time that these were the stories he wanted to tell in his own writing.
By the time his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) was published he had combined his family's folklore with various literary traditions including the Western Cultural Aesthetic and key aspects of the Black Nationalistic Aesthetic. He had facilitated a change in his writing voice. He had begun making extensive use of the oral tradition of the Black vernacular and consciously reached out to audiences, especially the reading audiences of the traditional African-American ethnic culture that would include the family members he had left behind.
It was almost as though he were remodeling his fiction so that it would be acceptable to the black nationalistic aestheticians. They demanded that African-American writers utilize the oral tradition of the Black vernacular and write so as to be understood by the diverse reading audiences of the traditional African-American ethnic culture. After his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) Wideman was no longer concentrating on writing his fiction to be read exclusively by a predominantly European-American intellectual audience. He said when he was writing his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) he was concentrating on "writing books that my brother, sister, aunts, cousins, mother and father could read" (Samuels 43). His intended reading audience had changed to include an audience in the traditional African-American ethnic culture.
The stories of The Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) were Wideman's way of reintegrating himself into his family and taking pride in them rather than being ashamed of their humble beginnings in the traditional African-American ethnic culture. He celebrated their legacy in the traditional African-American ethnic culture which steeled their will to make a way out of no way. To help us through this labyrinth of reoccurring characters and scenarios, the preface of Hiding Place (1981) the first novel in the trilogy, contains an extensive maternal family tree; there is also a testimonial before the text of Sent for You Yesterday (1983) declaring, "Past lives live in us, through us. Each of us harbors the spirits of people who walked the earth before we did, and those spirits depend on us for continuing existence, just as we depend on their presence to live our lives to the fullest" (Epilogue).
By the time he released Philadelphia Fire (1990) and his non-fiction essay, "Dead Black Men And Other Fallout of the American Dream," Wideman had added the Academy of the Street and Hip-Hop culture to his literary voices. He had found a way to fuse his 'psychic duality' into a powerful literary voice which was eclectic. He had begun to utilize many of the techniques of the modernist and postmodernists, like multiple narrators, stories within stories, stream of consciousness, non-linear time schemes, reverse syntax, and unorthodox spellings, and the absence of a distinction between high and low art, combined with Afrocentrism and the African-American literary tradition.
Afrocentrism or placing Africa and African ideals at the center of any analysis that involves African or African-American behavior was particularly important in the evolution of his artistic vision and his personal identity as an African-American (Asante, The Afrocentric Idea 6). For Wideman embracing Afrocentrism and combining it with the folklore of the traditional African-American ethnic culture afforded him the opportunity to resolve his 'psychic duality' complex. He could function in the European-American Academy and work with the Western Cultural Aesthetic tradition in his writing but also have a strong sense of his own ethnic identity and take pride in the contributions to the Academy which had been made by Africa and the traditional African-American ethnic culture.
In Afrocentricity, The Theory of Social Change (1980) Asante says that the African-American who is not Afrocentric does not see the world from their own center (self-identity) and looks upon the world and sees images, symbols, lifestyles, and manners which are contradictory to himself and destructive to his personal growth and development. Since they are unable to call upon the power of their ancestors, because they are unaware of them, they have no ideology about their heritage (4).
Embracing Afrocentrism and the folklore of the traditional African-American ethnic culture as aesthetic philosophies gave Wideman a strong sense of his origins in Africa and the traditional African-American ethnic culture. This helped him to be more comfortable with his own ethnicity. Wideman continues to be open to other cultures and aesthetic philosophies and has not allowed Afrocentrism or the folklore of the traditional African-American ethnic culture, or the Black Nationalistic Aesthetic to close out the Western Cultural Aesthetic in his artistic vision.
He says he prefers to see himself as part of a writing community: "I like to feel that we are all in the same ballgame. I like the sense of respect, mutual respect, that you get when you go to the playground" (Rowell 59). Wideman sees various cultural influences like Afrocentrism, modernism, and postmodernism as "a house of cards" where the parts are more tangible than the whole:
A house of cards is dependent on the relationship among the cards. Its existence depends on the individual cards. The sort of shape and form that you arrive at when you pile the cards together is interesting, and you can talk about it; you can analyze it; but if you pull one of those cards out, the whole thing collapses. The parts are bigger than the whole. (Samuels 49)
He has produced seven novels, two short story collections, an autobiography, and a non-fiction book about the relationships of African-American men to their fathers. It is fascinating though that after all his academic accomplishments and world travels almost all of his stories have something to do with the people and places of the Homewood community where he grew up. In this sense he is very much like Faulkner using a variety of literary devices writing about people he knew in his community sometimes disguising them through poetic license and sometimes not disguising them.
May 4, 1993, Wideman was presented with the governor of Pennsylvania's Award for excellence in the Arts. He has taken his place alongside Pennsylvania's other famous literary sons, James Michner and John Updike. An extended study of the work and life of John Wideman is an important part of Pennsylvania's literary legacy, and is especially important to this writer who is a faculty member at Shippensburg University which is part of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.
WORKS CITED
Asante, Molefi Kete. The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
---. Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change. Trenton: Africa World Press, 1988.
Bonetti, Kay. "An Interview With John Edgar Wideman." The Missouri Review 9.2 (1986): 75-103.
Brown, Chip. "Blood Circle." Esquire August 1989: 122-132.
Coleman, James. Blackness and Modernism. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989.
---. "John Edgar Wideman." In African American Writers. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1991.
---. "Going Back Home: The Literary Development of John Edgar Wideman." College Language Association Journal 28.3 (March 1985): 326-343.
Daily Pennsylvanian 21 February 1963: 5.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Haas, Nancy. "The Private Inferno of John Edgar Wideman." The Philadelphia Inquirer 30 September 1990: 17-24.
Moritz, Charles, ed. Current Biography Yearbook. New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1991.
Nagle, Betsy. "Calendar Close Up: John Wideman." The Daily Pennsylvanian 31 March 1992.
---. "Oxford Bound." The Daily Pennsylvanian 16 January 1963:10.
Rowell, Charles. "An Interview With John Edgar Wideman." Callaloo 13.1 (winter 1990): 47-61.
Samuels, Wilfred. "Going Home: A Conversation With John Edgar Wideman." Callaloo 6.1 (1983): 40-59.
Shalit, Gene. "The Astonishing John Edgar Wideman. Life 21 May 1963: 31-36.
Sanoff, Alvin P. "The Cadences of Black America." US News and World Reports 15 October 1990: 92-93.
Wideman, John. "Frame and Dialect: The Evolution of the Black Voice in American Literature." The American Poetry Review: 34-36.
---. "Stomping the Blues: Ritual in Black Music and Speech." The American Poetry Review 7: 42-45.
---. A Glance Away. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967.
---. Hurry Home. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.
---. The Lynchers. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1973.
---. Damballah. New York: Vintage, 1981.
---. Hiding Place. New York: Vintage, 1981.
---. Sent For You Yesterday. New York: Vintage, 1983.
---. Brothers and Keepers. New York: Penquin, 1984.
---. Philadelphia Fire. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990.
Copyright by
Dr. Raymond E. Janifer, Sr.
1997