Black Urban Utopia in Wideman’s Later Fiction

1 Editions cited include Brothers and Keepers (1984, New York, Vintage, 1995); The Cattle Killing (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Fatheralong: a meditation on fathers and sons, race and society (New York, Pantheon, 1994); Hoop Roots: basketball, race, and love (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 2001); Philadelphia Fire (1990, New York, Vintage, 1991); Sent for You Yesterday (1983, New York, Vintage, 1988); The Stories of John Edgar Wideman (New York, Pantheon, 1992); and Two Cities (1998, Boston, Mariner, 1999). Page references to quotations are given in the text.

2 For a short account of the MOVE history, see Margot Henry , ‘Attention MOVE! This is America!’ , Race & Class (Vol. 28, no. 4, 1987), pp. 5–28 . For analysis of the failed attempts at negotiation or resolution, see Hizkias Assefa and Paul Wahrhaftig, The MOVE Crisis: extremist groups and conflict resolution (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990).

3 Wideman’s complex responses to Philadelphia are analysed by J. P. Richard , ‘ Philadelphia Fire, or the shape of a city’ , Callaloo (Vol. 22, no. 3, 1999), pp. 603–613 .

4 For the most thorough analysis of Wideman’s modernist beginnings, see J. W. Coleman , Blackness and Modernism: the literary career of John Edgar Wideman ( Jackson, University Press of Mississippi , 1989). D. D. Mbalia rejects Wideman’s modernist literariness, but grants that he acquires a more African ideology in her John Edgar Wideman: reclaiming the African personality (Selinsgrove, PA, Susquehanna University Press, 1995).

5 Malcolm X had urged people to go ‘back to Africa culturally, philosophically, and psychologically, while remaining here physically’, quoted in W. J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: social and literary manipulations of a religious myth (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982), p. 211. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, groups like the Republic of New Africa (RNA) tried to establish black nations within the United States or considered emigration to Africa. See I. A. Obadele I, ‘Republic of New Africa: the struggle for land in Mississippi’, Black World (February, 1973), pp. 66–73, and W. L. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon: the Black Power movement and American culture, 1965–1975 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 144–52. MOVE was in some ways a belated 1960s movement, but was also part of the new nationalism that grew in the 1980s. For a summary of such intellectual trends, see Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: black women and the search for justice (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 155–67; see ‘Caliban’s Utopia’, in W. J. Moses, Afrotopia: the roots of African American popular history (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 193– 209 for an analysis of the connections between primitivism of the sort romanticised by MOVE and modernism.

6 The ‘cult’ side of MOVE helped determine the fiery end. J. Varsava points out ‘a tradition of violent overreaction on the part of American authorities when dealing with incidents of antinomianism, as demonstrated not only by the events on Osage Avenue but also by, for example, the attacks at Ruby Ridge and Waco’. ‘ “Woven of many strands”: multiple subjectivity in John Edgar Wideman’s Philadelphia Fire’, Critique (Vol. 41, no. 4, 2000), pp. 425–44, quotation p. 433.

7 M. Dubey notes that Richard Corey, at least in his role as co-author of the Book of Life, is based on Professor Donald Glassey (see below). She notes the way that this book manuscript moves through society by being stolen and how it ‘wreaks havoc as it travels through the city’, the Kaliban Kiddie Korps being one of its manifestations; see ‘Literature and urban crisis: John Edgar Wideman’s Philadephia Fire’, African American Review (Vol. 3, no. 4, 1998), pp. 579–95, esp. 587–8. Corey is, of course, given the suicide’s name in E. A. Robinson’s much anthologised poem ‘Richard Corey’. Corey, a ‘gentleman from sole to crown’, who ‘glittered when he walked’, is an object of envy and curiosity to the ‘people of the pavement’: ‘So on we worked, and waited for the light,/And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;/And Richard Corey, one calm summer night,/Went home and put a bullet through his head.’

8 Louise James, sister of Vincent Leaphart and former member of MOVE, makes a curious distinction between Vincent Leaphart and John Africa as leader: ‘John Africa is the founder of the MOVE organization and... succeeded her brother, Vincent Leaphart, who is a person of limited educational abilities... Professor Glassey wrote the concepts and beliefs of John Africa as he obtained them from Vincent Leaphart.’ (J. Anderson and H. Hevenor, Burning Down the House: MOVE and the tragedy of Philadelphia (New York, W. W. Norton, 1987), p. 5). In addition, James states: ‘My blood brother, Vincent Leaphart, became John Africa, and he no longer exists.’ However, she also says that John Africa will ‘never die but will live on as the truth’ (p. 5).

9 In ‘Towards a black realization of the Hegelian ideal: John Edgar Wideman’s “Homewood”’, Cycnos (Vol. 4, 1988), pp. 43–8, J. Berben argues that Wideman’s first two Homewood books embody ‘the modern American transposition of Hegel’s ideal city of antiquity’ (p. 43) and, in that sense, they provide a partial background for any utopian elements in his latest work.

10 P. Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993) comments on the utopian strain in African-American music, with its ‘politics of transfiguration’, its emphasis on ‘new desires, social relations, and modes of association’. He points out that in shifting from slavery to citizenship, blacks in America have frequently enquired ‘into what the best possible forms of social and political existence might be’ (p. 39).

11 Wideman elaborately draws on the Medusa myth for both Cudjoe and Martin Mallory; for an analysis of its ramifications, see K. Hume , ‘ “Dimensions” and John Edgar Wideman’s mental cosmology’, Contemporary Literature (forthcoming).

12 Wideman comments on Emmett Till’s presence in his nightmares in ‘The killing of black boys’, Essence (November 1997), pp. 122–6 et seq.; online version via Pro-Quest. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who, in 1955, went to stay with relatives in Mississippi. A few days after buying sweets in a local store and saying ‘Bye, baby’ to the white wife of the owner, he was taken away in the night. His body was found three days later in the river, one eye gouged out, his head crushed in and with a bullet in it.

13 Gilroy points out that ‘in the critical thought of blacks in the West, social selfcreation through labor is not the center-piece of emancipatory hopes. For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery, and subordination. Artistic expression... becomes the means towards both individual self-fashioning and communal liberation’ (op. cit., p. 40). Artistic expression includes performance and self-expression and, for Wideman, that self-expression is central to basketball, to his writing, to his sense of the sort of fulfilment a culture has to give its participants. Wideman also urges the importance of expressive activities in the interview with W. D. Samuels, ‘Going home: a conversation with John Edgar Wideman’, Callaloo (Vol. 6, no. 1, 1983), pp. 40–59. Likewise, Ishmael Reed notes the need to put enjoyment at the centre of society in his novel Mumbo Jumbo. For him, dancing, eating, making music and enjoying the body form an approach to life as ancient and as coherent as its rival, self-denying monotheism.

14 New York, Ballantine, 1999.

15 Despite seeing the desirability of local organisation, Wideman does not seem to feel personally drawn to such actions. As he remarks in an interview with C. H. Rowell in Callaloo (Vol. 13, no. 1, 1990), pp. 47–61, he is not a joiner and has no ‘af.nity for groups’ (p. 50). To J. Berben-Masi, he points out, ‘Giving up a job in order to go to the barricades... Most of us aren’t prepared to do that, most of us don’t even think of that.’ See ‘From Brothers and Keepers to Two Cities: social and cultural consciousness, art and imagination: an interview with John Edgar Wideman’, Callaloo (Vol. 22, no. 3, 1999), pp. 568–84, quotation p. 573.

16 See ‘From Brothers and Keepers to Two Cities... an interview, op. cit., p. 574. William S. Burroughs, in his novel Cities of the Red Night, makes pertinent observations: ‘In England, Western Europe, and America, the overpopulation made possibly by the Industrial Revolution leaves scant room for communes, which are commonly subject to state and federal law and frequently harassed by the local inhabitants. There is simply no room left for “freedom from the tyranny of government” since city dwellers depend on it for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and welfare’ (1981, New York, Owl Books, 1982), p. xv.

17 I would like to thank Philip Jenkins and Howard Rambsy II for contextual information about MOVE and related groups.