Everything Moving
Quote of the week: from John Edgar Wideman's, Brothers and Keepers
They are riding in the dark going over their plans. It’s fall. Days are shorter, nights longer and colder. The rental truck chugs and rattles over bad streets, roars so loud in the Liberty tunnels they give up trying to talk. When they arrive and drive past once, all the lights in the used car lot are out. No lights in the office either. Just one hooded bulb burning in front of the garage…Robby’s thinking something’s funny. Thinking, this don’t make no sense. Why this cat sitting round in the dark? See, the wind’s bucking up, too…Good and dark now and the wind blowing got everything moving. Little noises you can’t see and things moving behind your back and them flags popping. Kind of spooky. Maybe the dude got tired of waiting. Maybe he gone home to bed.
This is from John Edgar Wideman’s chilling memoir, Brothers and Keepers, in which he writes about how his youngest brother, Robby*, ended up a convicted criminal while John became a star basketball player at Penn, the first black Rhodes Scholar, and a celebrated writer and professor.
I had the great privilege to have John serve as my thesis director while getting my M.F.A. in fiction writing at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. While there, John’s own son was convicted of murder, as hardships continued to mount—even as his own stature as a writer and scholar grew. I remember John as a remarkably kind teacher who worked to illuminate for us the things that were working in our writing (unlike many a grad-school teacher who preferred to point to all the things that weren’t working). I’ll also remember John as a member of our UMass. M.F.A. intramural basketball team, and how, though in his late 50s at the time, he’d still dominate on the court; just as with his writing and wisdom, he was always many steps ahead of us.
In the passage above, as with all of his writing, I’m struck with the power of John’s voice, how effortlessly he can move in and out of perspectives and voices, how all the details jump off the page and take hold. All of John’s tenderness and talent are on display here. In a piece for the New York Times, “The Black Writer and the Magic of the Word,” John writes about his “bilingualism,”—how he speaks/writes both the language of the Oxford scholar and the language of the black, inner-city boy who grew up in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I would add that John’s voice is multi-vocal, that he finds ways to let his writing go where it needs to go to best tell a story, moving in and out of perspectives, vocabularies, approaches. In his novel Philadelphia Fire, what begins as a fictionalization of the 1985 fire-bombing of a whole city block in a black neighborhood in Philadelphia to ostensibly attack the radical MOVE group, transforms into a nonfiction essay where he questions where his characters end and he begins. John taught his students to take risks, to be honest, to get intimate with their writing, and write with deep courage and intensity.
*Robert Wideman was released from prison in 2019 after serving 44 years for acting as an accomplice in a murder and robbery.
You can read a long interview I did with John in this book, also available for purchase:
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I appreciate learning about this individual and plan on looking him up and do a good read.
Thank you