on Slaveroad, a cross-genre narrative by John Edgar Wideman
I read John Edgar Wideman’s The Homewood Trilogy 40 years ago but its stories and effects have never ended for me. One reason for this persistence is Wideman’s recursive habit — he returns to his foundational materials, book after book, disinterested in and even disavowing the common notion of the maturation of the writer. He has been telling us that our losses are communal and protracted, but so are our transgressions and flaws. Each of us owns it all, so therefore, time is both an instant and an eternity, but it isn’t a line. And a human life isn’t linear. Same with story: each word must be re-encountered in its instant of speaking, and there will be countless repetitions, clarifications and becloudings. One’s story doesn’t obviate the need to hover over the irresolvable substances of memory. He says, “All of us equal heirs of confusion, of arbitrary divisions. Pretending invented words might invent proof.” It would be a mistake to hear this as an abdication of testimony, of failing to name the guilty ones, of refusing to assess oneself.
Wideman’s most recent collection of stories, Look For Me and I’ll Be Gone (2021), includes “Whose Teeth/Whose Story,” told from the perspective of the black American missionary William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927). In his new book, Slaveroad, Wideman resumes his obsession with Sheppard without adding a single new episode or fact. It doesn’t matter: “Lives of others impenetrable, and the past unrecoverable. Not reproducible. Beyond comprehension. Except as wishful thinking, magical thinking. What counts is each moment. What matters is the story in which I momentarily reside, the person’s story momentarily residing in me.” Strangely, Wideman’s restless, propulsive, idiosyncratic prose makes it all seem new, unheard until the moment of reading.
In the opening chapter, Wideman recalls, “I considered titling this book Slaveroad: An Autobiography. I still sometimes think that should be the title.” This is why he says about his Sheppard-based chapters, “I want to write a story that sails across the Atlantic, resides in Africa for two decades, returns to America. But not a story content just to dog’s Sheppard’s footsteps faithfully. I need a story that includes mine.” That last line tells us that Wideman’s memoir-instinct isn’t of the “I want to matter to you” type; the shape of his life as a story quite intentionally never comes into focus. “If you reach my advanced age,” he says, “you will understand what I mean when I say I am weary, weary beyond words, weary of making up a life for myself.”
[left — Johann Valentin Haidt’s portrait of Christian Protten and his wife Rebecca, an ex-slave. Moravian archives]
In Slaveroad, we hear him at 81-years old, writing from Brittany. “Slaveroad” is like one of Paul Celan’s Nomenkompositums – a compound-word neologism created to indicate an incipient awareness of something in our culture not yet named. It registers in me, through Wideman’s prose, as a tidal stream, impelled by an unmitigatable power in us. This torrent sweeps up Wideman’s younger brother, released from prison after a 44 year term for second degree murder – and Wideman’s son, now serving a life sentence for a murder he committed as a teenager. He collects the histories of Rebekah Protten (1718-1780), born into slavery in St. Thomas, then serving and sexually abused by “Master Boehm, a gentle patron of African suffering,” and later traveling abroad as a Moravian missionary. Wideman asks – was she complicit in tolerating Boehm’s repeated actions? He gives her a voice: “To overcome the fear of loneliness and failure I was sure I’d face again if I lost my place in Master B’s service. Fear of suffering I would endure if I forwarded my self-interest in a direct, enlightened fashion.” And then, as an evangelist, was she complicit in supporting the prejudices of the Presbyterians? As for Sheppard, the same – in taking African women as lovers and destroying the trust of his wife, Lucy Gantt Sheppard, what did he reveal about himself?
Outraged, mystified, agonized – Wideman leaps about, mocking time as a unit of telling, moving downstream the Congo River with Sheppard, then situating himself back in Homewood, his childhood neighborhood in Pittsburgh: “… in this imagined country where I reside no one can be anything, not even an immigrant, unless they understand that first they are black or white, are colored or not, despite whatever else a person goes on to claim or doesn’t claim.” Encountering Slaveroad, even as one is struck by Wideman’s compulsive originality and freshness of expression, he won’t let the reader settle into the comfort of morally-charged epiphanies. He wants us to question everything: “I worry that fiction – mine- anybody’s – too self-consuming. Fiction can’t create lives or save lives. Does not change or sort out memories and intimacies of our sharded histories, longings, our captivity, the machinations of our ancient enemies.” Yet a few pages later, he warns us not to forget or retreat “because we will have forfeited power we once seized.” He describes freedom as when we have no choice but choose anyway.
Towards the end of the narrative, Wideman recalls walking toward the Williamsburg Bridge and seeing a graffito – “RIP Omar.” Omar is the name of his late nephew, “shot and killed twenty years ago in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 8, 1993.” The writing on the bridge, however, noted the death of Omar, a character in the HBO drama “The Wire,” played by Michael Kenneth Williams who died in Brooklyn on September 6, 2021 from an overdose. All Omars cast down the “Slaveroad teeming and empty as time always is. A slaveroad always. Capturing us, owning us once we are discarded and launched and floating and drowning, and on our way. Where. Here. Who we are. Then not.”
[Published by Scribner on October 8, 2024, 208 pages, $26.99 US/$35.99 CAN]
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on Blood Test: A Comedy, a novel by Charles Baxter
The titular essay of Charles Baxter’s Wonderland (2022) describes “a small but important subcontinent of Literature” called Wonderland – a zone of strangeness and disquietude in which “things are out of proportion. Every location you enter is soaked in a particular kind of subjectivity. In the distance, barely visible, is some kind of violent horror in which you may be implicated.” In Blood Test, Charles Baxter’s thirteenth work of fiction, Wonderland is Kingsboro, Ohio, and the amiable Brock Hobson is our guide through a destabilized world. He runs an insurance agency, teaches Sunday school (where he met his girlfriend Trey, also a teacher), says grace silently before meals, and prays before going to bed. But he is not naïve. He knows that he and his family – two teenage children, Joe (15, gay) and Lena (17, her boyfriend, Pete, a fixture both in her bed and at their dinner table for meatloaf) – live in a fallen world. His ex-wife Cheryl lives with the dullard Burt (“If you were to ask him where Italy is located on the globe, he wouldn’t know but would despise you for asking”). How come there are so many “near-dead people in these parts”?
Brock says, “It’s probably the postindustrial air we breathe here, or maybe the nitrate-scented water we drink out of the tap. Could be herbicides we spray on everything or the fact that a third of the town has a drinking problem, and another third is on meth and/or Oxy.”
One day, “because I’d been having this pain in my side,” Brock takes himself to a medical clinic where a nurse introduces him to a new diagnostic process that, she says, “predicts behavior, tells you what you’re going to do before you do it, based on the … arrangements in your genetic structure, your psychology, and your past and your what-have-you. Plus your faith history. Plus how you fill out the questionnaire.” Brock agrees to have his blood drawn for the Generomics Associates test, and thus begins Baxter’s heartland comedy on free will versus dark determinants. The situation gets complicated and the prospects look sinister, but Brock says to us, “I’m not asking for sympathy. This is not that kind of story. I’m just telling you what happened.”
So, what kind of a story is this? Brock speaks to us companionably; he expects us to understand his situation and he’s right about that – we get comfortable – and identify with – his lucid mystification. On page 172, he tells us that he is a participant at the Blueberry Hill Writing Workshop – and like most memoirists in training, his aim is to make his life sound as if it matters. (Brock had been schooled by the Jesuits, which accounts for his impeccable grammar.) But its mattering doesn’t spring from trauma or even ordinary mistreatment. In “Against Epiphanies,” a chapter in his earlier book of essays, Burning Down the House (1997), Baxter observed, “Now that the production of epiphanies has become a business, the unenlightened are treated with sad pity, and with the little grace notes of contempt.” By design, Brock Hobson never inspires our pity, even as we think – maybe he should stop paying for his ex-wife’s roof repairs (Burt is recuperating from a tumble off said roof). “They’re just criminally lazy,” Brock says of Cheryl and Burt. “The world owes them a living, they feel, taking the side of the grasshopper versus the ant.”
The blood test results arrive. The doctor explains, “It’s predicting criminal behavior on your part. Also drug taking and possible anti-social tendencies. But the criminal activity is the one to keep in mind. This suggests felony-level misbehavior.” When Brock’s family and girlfriend hear about this prediction, they can only laugh, since Brock is the most boringly predictable person they know; as he says, “In our high school yearbook, I was voted the one most likely to become a parole officer.” But the genomic forecast sets something in motion: “I feel something I haven’t felt in a long timer. Freedom. I can do anything I want to. I can go wild. I have a perfect alibi. The mainframe said so.” Will he actually shoplift a pair of pruning shears? “But generally speaking, people don’t get too excited about shoplifting from a giant multinational retail outlet owned by a New York City hedge fund and operating by a cartel of international slime.” (Baxter understands that the main audience for a “literary” novel, regardless of his novel’s Midwest church-going provenance, is comprised of anti-capitalist social warriors with lots of grievances. Therefore, he makes it clear that Brock will not allow his gay son Joe to be disrespected by Burt.)
The commandment says Do Not Steal. But Brock says, “I’m more a New Testament guy myself: love and forgiveness are more up my alley. I try to do the right thing. A problem: it has made me predictable. In the spectrum where my friends and children live, predictable is next to contemptible.” But there’s nothing predictable about his sentences, his story. Baxter has given us a pitch-perfect narrative that peers at the commonplace quandaries of conscience and responsibility. In the earlier essay, Baxter wrote, “A belief that one is a victim will lead inevitably to an obsession with insight. There is really nothing wrong with any of this except for the conventions it is capable of fostering.” By spurning those conventions, Blood Test constitutes a critique of them. It’s a comedy, so the hero will survive the moves he makes, however inadvertent or intentional. Yet I felt changed – maybe “readjusted” is more apt – by Blood Test, having been nudged back to the middle of the road.
[Published by Pantheon on October 22, 2024, 224 pages, $28.00 US/$37.99 CAN]
To read Heather Scott Partington’s review (2020) of Charles Baxter’s novel The Sun Collective, click here.