And, like it or not, a black man, unless he becomes irretrievably white-minded, responds with an additional dimension of his being to the articulated experience of another black--in spite of the universality of human experience (E. Cleaver, Soul On Ice, 96).
In his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) John Edgar Wideman unquestionably places the overall perspective of his work within the black cultural experience. He accomplishes this by utilizing African-American folklore and traditions in ways that are not mitigated by tropes from the European literary tradition like modernism and existentialism and by embracing the Black English Vernacular. In this collection of stories, Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981), and Sent for You Yesterday (1983), he begins to write fiction which is able to withstand the criticism that his previous work did not reflect 'authentic' portrayals of African-American characters and cultural nuances.
In his series of interconnected stories about the Homewood, Pennsylvania ghetto where he grew up, Wideman's African-American characters speaking primarily in the Black English Vernacular regularly utilize their folklore and traditions as a dominating and sustaining force. In these stories African-American folklore and traditions begin to take center stage in his literary universe, and he continues their dominant role in all of his successive works. After his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) all of Wideman's novels utilize the Black English Vernacular to express African-American folklore and traditions which are not mediate by modernism or existentialism.
Existentialism and modernism still have significant roles in Wideman's Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983), but they begin to be overshadowed by the addition of Afrocentrism and Postmodernism to his literary repertoire. By utilizing Afrocentrism he is acknowledging that persons of African descent have made significant contributions to postmodern history and connecting the African-American folklore and traditions of his family to Africa (Asante, Afrocentricity 1). By embracing postmodernism he is rejecting canonicity, master narratives, and the hierarchy in American literature between the written tradition of Standard Received English and the Black English Vernacular (Giroux 347). Matthew Wilson says that Wideman's Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) reflects a symbiotic fusion of multiple traditions both European and African-American (244). In his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) Wideman begins to tap the imaginative potential of diverse literary philosophies.
By the time Wideman completes his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) he is skillfully mixing existentialism, modernism, postmodernism, Afrocentrism, and the Black English Vernacular in his fiction in a manner which serves his eclectic intellectual tastes.
Despite indulging his eclectic intellectual tastes, Wideman begins to write fiction in Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981), and Sent For You Yesterday that is first and foremost based on African-American folklore and traditions. According to James Coleman in Blackness and Modernism (1989) this diverse mix of literary tropes satisfied his previous critics who had questioned his credentials as a black writer in his first three novels (Blackness and Modernism 98).
In Damballah (1981), Hiding Place (1981), and Sent For You Yesterday (1983) Wideman places his African-American characters in an imaginative, mythical environment. In this magical mythical environment their world-view is not shaped predominantly by fantasies from European literary traditions. Their worldview is shaped and developed within their own extended family circle in the fabled community of Homewood. Wideman explains the poetic license he utilizes with the people, places, and geography of the mythical community he creates for his African-American characters in his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) in an interview with Jessica Lustwig which appears in African-American Review:
There is a neighborhood in Pittsburgh called Homewood. It was there before I was born, and probably when I'm dead it will still be called that. It's considered a number of streets; houses, and population changes--people get old and die. It's a real place in that sense. The distinction I want to make is that once I started to write about Homewood, I was creating a place based partly on memories of the actual place I lived in, and partly on the exigencies or needs of the fiction I was creating. (Lustig 453)
Nevertheless, James Coleman says in his article, "Going Back Home: The Literary Development of John Edgar Wideman," that in The Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983):
Wideman told the story of his family he had culled from their storytelling rituals, created the myth of their 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. (330)
Wideman's Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent For You Yesterday (1983) provide the sustaining myth he had been searching for during his hiatus from publishing and systematically facilitates the continued growth and development of his fiction and his own self identity. This series of works marks his coming of age as an African-American intellectual who plays a constructive role in the black community and garners him even wider recognition than he had gained from his previous novels A Glance Away (1967), Hurry Home (1970), and The Lynchers (1973). In (Being and Race 1970) Charles Johnson says:
Much of black writing in the last ten years or so is a meditation or remembrance. Praise songs from writers who feel they are keepers--transmitters of the past for the sake, as with Wideman, of future generations. Readers of black fiction produced in the last few years sooner or later come to realize the quasi-biographical intention of many African-American writers who believe that one service they can--in fact must--perform is telling stories about black people who have been written out of history. Their hope, as is the case with John Edgar Wideman, is to honor their predecessors in stories that break stereotypes and portray pieces of their lives. It is an effort, on Wideman's part, to keep them alive, perhaps even to enshrine the meaning of their lives in the theater of a story or novel. (74)
Although Wideman did not publish any fiction during the eight year period preceding the publication of his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) he told Wilfred Samuels that he had spent his time doing his homework on the African-American literary tradition. He says a big part of that homework was attempting to remember and become even more familiar with the folklore and traditions of his family in Homewood. The other major part of this homework he said was reading and studying historical, sociological, and literary texts by various black authors. He explained to Samuels that although he did not publish a piece of fiction during his hiatus he had been constantly [woodshedding] or experimenting. He says that throughout this eight-year period of self-imposed exile he had been trying to identify and apply the voice of the Black English Vernacular in his fiction projects:
I was trying to learn a different voice; I was doing a lot of studying and catching up. I was constantly writing and I produced a lot of manuscripts, none of which were satisfactory. Some of them were sent out, and people either didn't like them or wanted more, or liked them and didn't want to publish them. I was engaged in that kind of business constantly, but as far as having a finished manuscript, for about six or seven years, I did not. Just bits and pieces. I was learning a new language to talk about my experience and my blackness. (Samuels Interview 45)
Wideman told Kay Bonetti in an interview for the Missouri Review that during this period of initial experimentation with the Black English Vernacular he was forced into a painful self-admission:
By 1973 I'd published three critically acclaimed novels. It was hard to admit to myself that I was just learning how to write, that whole regions of my experience, the core of the language and culture that nurtured me had barely been touched by my writing up to that point. (84)
He also told Wilfred Samuels that after his first three books he was also beginning to attempt to write for an African-American reading audience:
I wanted to write books my brother; aunts, uncles, sisters, cousins, mother, and father would read. It became quite clear to me in writing these types of books that I would not be writing down to a black audience, because my people have had the full range of human experience. Their feelings, thoughts, intelligence--all have been tested and refined--so it wasn't a question of writing down to a less educated set of readers but rather to expand my own frame of reference. (44)
Ironically, by focusing specifically on African-American folklore and traditions and black reading audiences, Wideman became able to give his fiction even more of the universal appeal of great classical literature he had been seeking in his first three novels. He shared his realization with Kay Bonetti by telling her:
There is a universality that comes from focusing on the specific by focusing on one place from the inside. The notion of being grounded is a very important one in all traditional cultures. Everything flows from that ancestral bargain. And I came to believe that in order for my art, anybody's art, to flourish it has to be rooted, it has to be grounded, in that sense. Particularity is very important the unique and very real ground you fought and bled for and created as a people. In my case that is Homewood. (91)
Before coming upon the ideas and voices that would eventually become his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983), Wideman continuously scanned the African-American literary tradition. He looked at the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Langston Hughes and the antebellum fiction of Charles Chestnutt and Jean Toomer. He read the slave narratives and the stories of contemporary fiction writers like Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Gayle Jones, and Gloria Naylor. He began publishing scholarly articles on the African-American literary tradition concentrating especially on the theoretical concept of the utilization of the Black English Vernacular in American literature.
Reading and analyzing the diverse authors of the African-American literary tradition more and more systematically Wideman became preoccupied with defining the black voice in American literature. He sought to identify how African-American writers expressed this black voice in their fiction. Part of his scholarly investigations resulted in published articles entitled "Frame and Dialect: The Evolution of the Black Voice in American Literature" and "Defining the Black Voice in Fiction." He concludes in these articles that the Black English Vernacular had historically been incorporated into the literary or written frame of American literature as a substandard dialect. Wideman says he always found a hierarchical relationship between the Black English Vernacular and Standard Received English in American literature dating from pre-colonial times:
The Black English Vernacular expressed as Negro dialect in the frame of American literature always announces and signifies the presence of an entire value system--white superiority and black inferiority. Against this background one can view the evolution of the black voice in American literature as the attempts of various writers to free themselves from a frame which devalued black speech. (Wideman "Frame And Dialect" 45)
He continues his analysis in "Charles Chestnutt and the WPA Narratives" and "Charles Chestnutt: The Marrow of Tradition" by looking at the ways that Chestnutt tries to invert the traditional chain of command in American literature between the frame of Standard Received English and the dialect of the Black English Vernacular. Wideman says that as a fiction writer Chestnutt's greatest accomplishment is placing the Black English Vernacular on equal intellectual footing with Standard Received English in American literature:
Chestnutt used a strategy in his fiction for which he is seldom given credit. Employing a tale within a tale technique he framed black speech so that in his best stories he blends the literary and oral traditions without implying that the black storyteller's mode of perceiving and recreating reality is any less valid than the written word. Black speech in the form of Negro dialect entered American literature as a curiosity, a comic interlude, shorthand for perpetuating myths and prejudices about black people. Chestnutt's frame displays the written and spoken word on equal terms or at least as legitimate contenders for the reader's sympathy. (Wideman, "Chestnutt and the WPA Narratives" 60)
Wideman says in Chestnutt's fiction the Black English Vernacular contains in the oral histories of his African-American characters a powerful vehicle for reconstructing the past so that the lies and misrepresentations of the master class became part of the written record. He argues that Chestnutt allows the Black English Vernacular to come full circle. Rather than being a tool in the hand of the oppressor, it is turned against the oppressor (68).
Wideman points out that before Chestnutt equalizes the power of the Black English Vernacular:
A kind of emasculation of the Black English Vernacular occurred; it was streamlined, censored so it appeared infantile beside Standard Received English. Specifically the oral tradition lost its spontaneity of improvisation, gesture, intonation, song, dance, mime effects, metrical, and rhythmic structures. Oral literature in the printed literary frame of American literature lost its depth in time, the link with its West African ancestors and sources of vitality. Black speech was reduced in the printed literary frame of American literature to the arbitrary shorthand of African-American dialect. (Wideman "Defining the Black Voice" 79)
Wideman continues to investigate this relationship in another article called "Stomping the Blues: Rituals in Black Music and Speech" which is an extensive review of Albert Murray's text Stomping the Blues (1976). Murray, like Baraka, Baker, and Gates, uses the blues as the central metaphor of the African-American Oral Tradition. Wideman notes how Murray employs the complex linguistic codes of the blues which are embedded in the Black English Vernacular and he studied ways they could be employed in the construction of the new voice he was seeking in his own fiction:
According to Lawrence W. Levine in Black Culture and Consciousness (1977) Harold Courtlander argues that blues and African-American religious songs get their point across through innuendo, repetition, hints, and allusion rather than telling of explicit, chronological developed stories. Bruce Jackson asserts that the structural units of folk songs are typically metaphor and line rather than plot and that the songs don't weave narrative elements together to create a story but instead accumulate images to create a feeling. Murray's central metaphor in Stomping the Blues (1976) is language. When he talks repeatedly about vernacular, idiom, accent, speech, phrase, and fluency he is not only extending the metaphorical relationship between language and music, but he is establishing a continuity along which language and music are two rather arbitrary signposts. (Wideman, "Rituals in Black Music and Speech" 43)
Through his reading of Murray's text Wideman comes to realize what Houston Baker proclaims in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature (1984):
African-American culture is a complex, reflexive enterprise which finds its proper figuration in blues conceived as a matrixAfrican-American blues constitute such a vibrant network. As a metaphorical language it is a constantly evolving synthesis of African-American vernacular language that combines work songs, group seculars, field hollers, sacred harmonies, proverbial wisdom, folk philosophy, political commentary, ribald humor, elegiac lament and much more. They constitute an amalgam that seems to have always been in motion in America--always becoming, shaping, transforming, and displacing peculiar experiences of Africans in the New World. (4-5)
Later on when Wideman writes of "Love and Dust: A Reconsideration" he discovers how Ernest Gaines and other African-American writers are able to use the complex linguistic codes of the Black English Vernacular like the blues and signifying to communicate complex messages. He also comes to realize they are also able to select specific audiences; even to the point of selecting audiences within audiences. In Blues, Ideology, and African-American Literature (1984) Baker says that one way of describing the blues is to claim their mixture of different elements as a code radically conditioning African-American cultural signifying (5). Signifying is a trope that allows the encoding of message or meaning which involves skillful indirection.
Wideman eventually came to realize how African-American writers like Murray, Gaines, Hurston, and Chestnutt could also utilize the blues and signifying to construct mythic archetypes. Claudia Mitchell-Kiernan says in Alan Dundes' Mother Wit: From the Laughing Barrel (1990) that signifying is an alternative message contained in the Black English Vernacular which has been carefully selected for its artistic message (311). In African-American Literature in the Twentieth Century (1984) Michael Cooke says that signifying is important in the Black English Vernacular because it typically takes place between an underdog and an authority figure (26).
Wideman says later in "Charles Chestnutt and the WPA Narratives" that Mitchell-Kiernan succinctly describes the dynamics of signifying:
The apparent meaning of an utterance is canceled by the introduction of the 'key' which signals to those who recognize the key that the utterance should not be taken straight. The speaker who is signifying depends upon a body of experience he shares with the audience to whom the signifying is addressed. The signifier expects his audience to process his utterance metaphorically, because their shared experience allows them to recognize the key and supplies the material for reinterpreting the utterance. Manipulation of key, employed as a rhetorical device in fiction, permits the writer to address several audiences simultaneously by appealing to pools of knowledge only segments of his readers share with him. In effect the writer can profit from the diversity among his readers rather than be limited by it. (66)
Wideman discovers that in their fiction writing African-American writers like Murray, Gaines, Jones, Hurston, and Chestnutt are able to use the blues as a metaphorical language, an enabling script to construct the story of a people who seemed like underdogs but were ultimately able to emerge victorious. These writers are able to utilize other African-American folklore and traditions like storytelling, gospel and spirituals, myths, sermons, worksongs, and the dozens to create African-American characters who although they exist in a racist, oppressive world are able to draw upon their cultural folklore and traditions as a sustaining force (Wideman, "Of Love and Dust" 77).
This mythic archetype 'the victorious underdog' which Wideman discovers in the fiction of African-American writers and the way they employ other tropes and topoi from the African-American literary tradition are at the core of his own mythic construction of his family's folklore and traditions in his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983). As important as these scholarly articles about Chestnutt and Murray and various others are in helping him understand the Black English Vernacular and develop a new voice in his fiction, they were equally important in facilitating a strenuous process of self-examination. Before his publication of Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent For You Yesterday (1983) Wideman had not resolved his estranged relationship with his family and the Homewood community.
His distance from his family is symbolized by his estranged relationship with his younger brother Robert. In Brothers and Keepers (1984), Wideman reveals this estrangement by reflecting on his younger brother's cross-country flight from armed robbery and murder charges in Pittsburgh, and how this impacted his own 'charmed' life:
Because I was living in Laramie, Wyoming, I could shake loose from the sense of urgency, of impending disaster dogging my people in Pittsburgh. Never a question of forgetting Robby, more a matter of how I remembered him that distinguished my feelings from theirs. Sudden flashes of fear, anger, and remorse could spoil a class party, cause me to retreat into silence, lose whole days to gloominess and distance. But I had the luxury of dealing with my pain intermittently. I had been angry, hurt, and afraid, but I'd had plenty of practice cutting myself off from those types of feelings. Denying disruptive emotions was a survival mechanism I'd been forced to learn early in life. Robby's troubles could drive me crazy if I'd let them. It had been better to keep my feelings at a distance. Let the miles and years protect me. Robby had been my brother, but that was once upon a time in another country. My life was relatively comfortable, pleasant, safe. I'd come West to escape the demons Robby personified. I didn't need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly life still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life on the Laramie plains. (11)
Even in Laramie, Wyoming Wideman is unable to escape the demons that haunt him; he continued to feel an overwhelming guilt about abandoning his family. It was a guilt he determines to resolve and he begins to try to interpret the crisis of self-identity he is experiencing. He begins to contemplate his life as an African-American intellectual in white academic society and what this means in relation to his first three novels and his alienation from his family:
The time at Wyoming was spent going over and over my life before and after the University of Pennsylvania and trying to put those two pieces back together. One piece is the life of the black kid growing up in a predominantly black neighborhood called Homewood in Pittsburgh, and the other piece is the life of the middle-class academic in a white world. I was trying to make sense of the conflicts, contradictions and possible resolutions all this entailed. (Rowell 52)
His scholarly articles and fiction writing experiments during this period of self- discovery and reevaluation would lay important psychological groundwork for him. In his article, "Defining the Black Voice in American Fiction," which appears in Black American Literature Forum he says:
From the point of view of American literature, the Black English Vernacular (the oral roots of a distinct literary tradition--ultimately the tradition itself) exists only when it is properly 'framed' within works that have status in the dominant European literary system. For the Black English Vernacular the frame was the means of entering the literate culture and the frame also defines the purposes or ends for which black vernacular speech could be employed. The frame confers reality on black vernacular speech; the literary frame was a mediator, a legitimizer. What was outside the frame chaotic, marginal, not worthy of the reader's attention becomes, once inside, conventionalized into respectability. (81)
Wideman comes to realize that in his earlier novels he is consciously employing the mainstream literary frame in a position of dominance over his interpretations of African-American folklore and traditions. In A Glance Away (1970), Hurry Home (1970), and The Lynchers (1973) he is trying to give his interpretations of African-American folklore and traditions the authenticity of the European intellectual tradition. He says to Kay Bonetti that in his early works, "A quote from T.S.Eliot would authenticate a quote from my grandmother. The quote from my grandmother wasn't enough. I felt I had to legitimize it with a Joycean allusion to buttress it" (89). He says later after grounding himself in African-American folklore and traditions through his reading of black authors and writing his scholarly articles about the Black English Vernacular, he came to realize that black vernacular speech could do everything any other variety of literary languages could do:
There is no privileged position from which to view this fictional world, no terms into which it asks to be translated, its rawness is not incidental, not local color or exoticism from which other, more familiar voices will relieve you. The Black English Vernacular creates the only valid terms for its world; the authority of its language is not subordinated to other codes; the literary frame is not visible African-American writers have created their own code of discourse from the resources of their oral tradition and the models of American literature. African-American vernacular speech like any other variety of languages defines reality for its users. In American literature it could not perform this function until it divested itself of the frame [mainstream American literature] those elements in a literary tradition which resolve in favor of the literate, conflicting versions of reality codified into written and oral modes of expression. (Wideman,"Defining the Black Voice in Fiction" (81-82)
Wideman says his studies of the Black English Vernacular made him aware that it cannot entirely escape the frame of the so-called standard written language of American literature:
As long as the depiction of African-American reality was dependent for its verification on the conventions of another code [mainstream American literature] and the conventions of that code aren't examined the African-American voice in American fiction can never become a distinct, independent index to reality. In their fiction African-American novelists have to explode a dependence on pictorial conventions to deprive the traditionalists' realism of its authority. (82)
His scholarly articles and experiments with the Black English Vernacular in his own fiction establish the theoretical groundwork for his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983). This series of stories is also impacted dramatically by two tragic events in his family: the incarceration of his younger brother Robert for life without the possibility of parole in the Western Penitentiary outside Pittsburgh and the death of his maternal grandmother Freeda French. These two events provide Wideman opportunities to reintegrate himself into his family in meaningful ways.
After his maternal grandmother's funeral in Homewood, while his family assembled for food and drinks, they revealed to him how their collective folk memory could be employed in his fiction. At this gathering his relatives began telling and retelling old family stories spanning his family's history from Africa, slavery in the American South, and eventually resettlement in the urban North:
Aunt May was drinking a lot of Wild Turkey. She is a little old lady and she sits in a chair and her feet don't touch the floor--and she began to tell stories. Everybody was telling stories but sooner or later she just took center stage and told the story of Sybela Owens and how my family came to Pittsburgh--I listened. I'd heard these stories before but it was the first time I had heard them in a way that made them special. I couldn't let these stories whither away. I had to write them down. It became clear to me that I need not look any further than the place I was born and the people who loved me to find what was significant and lasting in literature. (Bonetti 86)
This experience enables Wideman to remake a familial connection that would dissipate his physical, psychological, and artistic distance from his family. He begins to realize how he could make his family's voice the dominant literary voice in his fiction by combining their folklore and traditions with the Black English Vernacular and what he had learned in his scholarly research. Through this storytelling experience he is also able to realize that his family could provide him with the mythic archetypes and other tropes and topoi which were the basis of not only the literary sensibilities of the Black Nationalistic Aesthetic Theory of the late 1960's and early 1970's, but also the entire African-American literary tradition.
Wideman began to listen carefully to the remembered experiences of his family members' folk culture for the first time since his childhood. This listening would bring him an insight remarkably close to the realization that Larry Neal came to while formulating the theoretical underpinnings of the Black Nationalistic Aesthetic Theory in the late 1960's. In "The Social Background of the Black Arts Movement," Neal argues that, "the authenticity of black culture was rooted in African-American folklore and traditions" (Neal 21), and in his article "The Architectonics of Fiction," Wideman states:
Folk culture preserves and expresses an identity, a history; a self-evaluation apart from those destructive incarcerating images proliferated by the mainline culture. Consciously and unconsciously, we've integrated these non-standard forms into our art. Our stories, songs, dreams, dances, social forms, styles of walk, talk and dressing, cooking, sport, our heroes and heroines provide a record of how a particular group has lived in the world--in it, but not of it. (43)
Following his grandmother's funeral Wideman begins to see his family's storytelling as a form of potent resistance. He begins to realize that their storytelling is a literary language that is just as capable of communicating the complexities of the universal human experience as any other literary language:
Storytelling in the Black English Vernacular can do everything any other variety of literary languages can do. The message comes through loud and clear to the listener. There is no privileged position from which to view their construction of the world, no terms into which it asks to be translated, its rawness is not incidental, not local color or exoticism from which other more familiar voices will relieve you. A black woman's voice creates the only valid terms for this world, and the authority of her language is not subordinated to other codes; the written literary frame of American literature is not visible. (Wideman "Frame & Dialect" 36)
In "Frame and Dialect: The Evolution of The Black Voice In American Fiction" Wideman goes on to say that his family's storytelling is African-American literature. It is African-American literature because it reinforces social, ethical, and aesthetic values to construct a world on their own terms; a world where black people have a measure of power and dignity (35):
African-American literature among other things is a record of survival, the story of how a captive, oppressed racial minority maintains a sense of dignity and worth in spite of the active hostility of a nation which is growing to be one of the most powerful forces in the world. African-American writers [storytellers] define and redefine the nature of the struggle, and being a black American is inextricably tied to struggle. (34)
Wideman's combination of his family's folk memory with his reading of texts by African-American writers informs his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) with an irrefutable context of African-American folklore and traditions. In Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and Culture (1972) Houston Baker describes "the folk" as consisting of all African-Americans living as an unsophisticated homogenous group in a politically-bounded advanced culture but isolated from it by such factors as topography, geography, religion, dialect, economics, and race. Baker says of all of these factors which can impact the development of a folk culture for African-Americans, the three most important are dialect, economics, and race (19).
Baker maintains, isolated as they were from the rest of Pittsburgh by dialect, economics, and race, Wideman's family's existence in the Homewood community represents the ideal folk community. He says the customs, practices, and beliefs that have been handed down by them from generation to generation are folklore. He says in order for Wideman to completely understand his scholarly studies of the African-American literary tradition he had to first realize that the foundation of that tradition was black folklore (18). He says that folklore has a special importance for the African-American writer searching for the 'authentic' black experience, and this importance is magnified by the fact that the most contemporary African-American writer is only 300 years removed from the earliest folk expression of his culture. This culture which is only 300 years old has evolved out of a conglomerate of diverse cultural contacts to become a singular body of folk expression (21).
According to Melvin Dixon's article, "The Black Writer's Use of Memory" Wideman's new insight into his family's collective folk memory, which is open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, informs his reading about the African-American literary tradition. Reading history and literature is reconstructing what no longer exists, but his family's memory is life itself, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time, containing nourished recollections (18). Wideman is exposed as an insider to the treasure chest of his family's folklore and traditions to which an outsider, a collector, could not have ever had access. Zora Neale Hurston says in Mules and Men (1935) that, "Folklore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best sources are where there are the least outside influences and these people, usually being underprivileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which their soul lives by" (2). Wideman though was welcomed with open arms into the intoxicating circle of his family's history through their storytelling. He told Kay Bonetti that the storytelling session that followed his grandmother's funeral was the first time he felt accepted in his family as a full-grown adult (84):
I was hearing my grandmother's life. That was what was done at these wakes. You talk about the person who died; it is almost like a voodoo ritual where you talk down a departed spirit. You draw strength and direction from that spirit. As Aunt May talked about the old days I saw my grandmother as a little girl and courting and I saw John French coming to steal her away from Aunt Aida and Uncle Bill. And I saw Uncle Bill sitting there with a shotgun waiting for John French. I knew I couldn't allow these stories to whither away. I had to write them down. (86)
As each of Wideman's family members took turns narrating family stories their recollections were individual stories but they were sometimes told collectively. Their stories were told in a call and response fashion rooted in Western Africa in an extended metaphorical blues language replete with complex linguistic codes like signifying and the dozens, bits of spirituals and gospel songs, and sophisticated non-verbal keys. Their storytelling histrionics epitomized the Black English Vernacular when it was not mediated or interpreted by the frame of Standard Received English. Typically a single narrator would hold the floor but often other family members who remembered significant parts of a story, which were sometimes forgotten or purposely omitted by individual narrators, provided vital details to the running commentary on important family history. Wideman says the way that individual storytellers connected to the family and the Homewood community was by their storytelling. It was through their storytelling that they were able to maintain their place in the grand narrative.
Wideman comments about the histories that were revealed to him in his family's storytelling rituals in Fatheralong: A Mediation on Fathers and Sons, Race, and Society (1994):
Their search for our ancestral fathers became a search for identity and for a meaningful history. History is not something given a fixed chronological, linear outline with blank spots waiting to be filled with newly unearthed facts. It is the activity over time of all the minds comprising it, the sum of these parts that comprise the great ecological world. It is this notion of history that makes for self, community, and group identity: Conscious articulation of common goals, common stakes, in a common struggle to survive is one's means of acknowledging and also building upon the past, asserting a sense of belongingness to something greater than ourselves. (101)
This telling and retelling of Wideman's family's stories would eventually become his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983), which restores his personal sense of belonging to his family and the Homewood community. He maintains that all of the individual narrators of his family's histories told one story, and they did not call their individual historical narratives stories. Wideman says his family members gave their individual stories highly imaginative names calling them "letters from home," "watermelons," and "onions." He reaffirms one of the colorful names of their individual narratives in his own writing by saying:
Stories are like onions. You peel one skin and another grins up at you. Which raises other questions. Peeling onions can make grown men cry. Or you might say an onion is the light and the truth, or at least as much truth and light as you're ever going to receive on this earth, source and finished product all rolled into one. Each skin and each layer is a different story, connected to the particular, actual onion you once held whole in your hand as the onion is connected to the dinosaurs, bicycles, a loon's cry, to the seed it sprouted from, the earth where the seed rotted and died and slept until it began dreaming of being an onion again, dreamed the steps it would have to climb, the skins it would have to shed and grow to let its light shine again in the world. (Wideman Fatheralong 61-62)
The Wideman family's folklore and traditions were a sacred 'memory vault' of one continuous story or 'onion' through which Wideman filtered his readings about the African-American literary tradition and his research on the development of the Black English Vernacular in American Literature. For the first time he had been able to listen to these family stories and realize that his classical education had led him to not appreciate the literary power of the folk culture of his own family. In his article, "Defining the Black Voice in Fiction" Wideman explains how what eventually became important to him was understanding his family's historical construction of voice:
The literary frame, in which African-American dialect appeared was a natural extension of the colonial relationship, assuring that the interface of the oral and literary cultures would always be rendered in terms of the literary culture. These terms led to an undervaluing of the oral culture and its subordination in the literary culture because much of what was an oral performance did not translate into writing. The oral culture lost its audience and spontaneity in the printed frame of American literature. (79)
This connection with his family's folklore and traditions enables him to personalize the experience of his own blackness and rediscover his self-identity as an African-American intellectual. His family's folk memory became an important tool by which he could reconstruct his past selves in the Homewood community, in the American South and finally in Africa. Through his family's collective folk memory which is expressed in his Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983) Wideman is able to reconstruct these past selves and incorporate them into the writing voice of a culturally distinct African-American intellectual who is able to resolve, at least to some degree, his previous discomfort with the phenomenon of DuBois' double consciousness.
In Sent For You Yesterday (1983) Wideman acknowledges his newfound relationship with his family by saying, "Past lives live in us and through us. Each of us harbors the spirits of people who walked the earth before we did, and those spirits depend on us for the continuing existence, just as we depend on their presence to live our lives to the fullest" (Preface). For Wideman his family's storytelling and retelling enables his rediscovery of a kinship and geographic connection made with Africa and the American South. He is finally able to relate to the old 'blacker than black' African Harry Wideman who migrates from Promised Land, South Carolina, to work in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and marry Wideman's 'high yella' grandmother Freeda. Wideman begins to see Promised Land, South Carolina as the mythic precursor of the Homewood community where his family eventually settles and begins their collective story:
Promised Land isn't to be found on any map. It is both a historical and mythic place. What Promised Land provides is a complex narrative that suggests some elements of such a history, but also a sense of all the stories that have been lost. Moreover the stories that did reveal themselves suggested the master narrative of 'race' in all its coercive yet banal reality; the documents and stories of Promised Land show the everydayness, the systemization of the evil of slavery, the harshness of slavery, and the false promise of integration. (Byerman 293)
Wideman maintains Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent For You Yesterday (1983) are not singular works but one continuous story, one onion or one watermelon, or one long letter home (Wilson 242). In an open letter to Robert, Wideman combines two of his family's analogies and says in the preface to Damballah (1981):
Stories are letters. Letters sent to anybody or everybody. But the best kind is 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. Remember. I think it was Geral I first heard call a watermelon a letter from home. After all these years I understand a little better what she meant. She was saying the melon is a letter addressed to us. A story for us from down home. Down Home being everywhere we've never been, the rural South, the old days, slavery Africa. That juicy striped message with red meat and seeds, which always looked like roaches to me, was blackness as cross and celebration, a history we could taste and chew. And it was meant for us. Addressed to us. We were meant to slit it open and take care of business. Consider all these stories as letters from home. (Preface)
In Hiding Place (1981), Damballah (1981), and Sent For You Yesterday (1983) Wideman makes extensive use of his family's folkloric history to create an African-American literary community which many scholars have compared favorably to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. Wideman's Homewood artistically functions well beyond the myopic racial restrictions of the Black Nationalistic Aesthetic and supersedes the mainstream modernist and existentialist views that dominated his overall literary view in his previous novels A Glance Away (1967), Hurry Home (1970), and The Lynchers (1973).
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Copyright
-By-
Raymond E. Janifer, Ph.D.
1999