TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/100190/1001472.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.9 KB | 89 lines

                                                                              BOOKS, Page 90

Lion Man Among the Ruins


By R.Z. SHEPPARD

PHILADELPHIA FIRE
by John Edgar Wideman
Henry Holt; 199 pages; $18.95

    Limelight suited John Edgar Wideman, a former University of
Pennsylvania basketball star and Rhodes scholar who became a
novelist once heralded as the "black Faulkner." But in 1976 the
light began to darken. Wideman's younger brother Robert was
convicted as an accomplice to a murder and subsequently
sentenced to life imprisonment. Ten years later, the writer's
16-year-old son Jacob stabbed a camping companion to death and,
like his uncle, was given a life term.

    How the golden writer and the convict brother could come
from the same Pittsburgh family was the burden of Wideman's
nonfictional Brothers and Keepers (1984). The theme of the lost
son pervades Philadelphia Fire, a novel that, like the earlier
book, pits the author's refined literary sensibility against
the crudity and violence of racism around him.

    Wideman's narrator, known as Cudjoe, is a mask for the
49-year-old author. Fiction and fact are freely blended; the
style is a mix of directness and allusion reminiscent of Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man. Cudjoe, in fact, is invisible to
himself. He has been an expatriate, living on a Greek island
where he tended bar by day and tried to write at night.

    Cudjoe/Wideman is a man in search of a myth that will unify
his conflicting selves: the ghetto kid and the man of letters.
The central images are not to be found among the classical
ruins and blinding light of Greece but in the ashes of Osage
Avenue in West Philadelphia. There, on May 13, 1985, readers
may remember, a police helicopter dropped a bomb on 6221 Osage
after its occupants, members of a black organization called
Move, resisted orders to vacate. Six adults and five children
were killed. The blast also started a fire that destroyed 60
other houses.

    The assault was one of the most boneheaded decisions ever
made by a municipal authority -- Keystone Kops reinventing
Vietnam as a minifarce in which a neighborhood is destroyed in
order to save it. For Cudjoe, the big bang represents creation
in the form of a mysterious survivor, a boy known as Simba
Muntu (Lion Man) seen walking away from the burning wreckage.
The search for Simba provides the novel with an open-ended
structure that allows Wideman to display his talents.

    He can play it hot or sweet, highbrow or low-down. Wideman
takes risks that do not always pay off. Writing in dialect is
dangerous, and there are labored passages of multicultural rap
that combine Shakespeare's Tempest and Third World politics:
"Today's lesson is this immortal play about colonialism,
imperialism, recidivism, the royal f------- over of weak by
strong, colored by white, many by few, or, if you will, the
birth of the nation's blues seen through the fish-eye lens of
a fee fi foe englishmon."

    Wideman is best when he is most personal: a description of
a schoolyard basketball game, a grieving meditation after a
telephone call from a son in prison. Or this bitter college
recollection about feeling as if he were in a test tube from
an uncertain liberal experiment: "I was walking down the street
with this cute little white coed, thinking we're minding our
business, strolling to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, and
blam. Run right dead into the glass wall." To Wideman, the
stares seemed to say "Wait a minute, boy . . . You still in the
tube, nigger, and don't you forget it."

    By turns brilliant and murky, seamless and ragged,
Philadelphia Fire is on to something big. Wideman's vision of
racism in the U.S. suggests nothing less than a genetic
disorder present at the birth of the nation. Impervious to
cure, it can only be controlled, and in this Wideman is more
fortunate than most. Through his art, he has the power to turn
curses into blessings.