Refusing to be invisible
a moment in her story when an emergency room clerk assumes that a young woman of color doesn’t have health insurance. As the professor tries to get his student to focus on this moment, the forces that make the moment possible — the “hundreds of years of history, of pillage, blood, suffering” — multiply and then spill out of the story into the professor’s life and our own, washing away the possibility of a stable perspective.
Mr. Wideman includes several “microstories” in “American Histories,” the shortest of which has fewer than 100 words. The form works well for Mr. Wideman, highlighting his interest in modernist collage and emphasizing the incredible range of material in his fiction. In “Music,” the narrator understands his sister’s description of her dream in a way that depends on the history between them. In “Snow,” a new snowfall prompts an unidentified narrator to ruminate on the unavoidable human practice of imposing explanations on the world. Both stories explore the way that people construct meaning in the world, but they approach this issue in vastly different ways.
“American Histories” also features several pieces that reconstruct lives for historical figures such as John Brown, Frederick Douglass and Nat Turner. As in his recent books “Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File” and “Fanon,” Mr. Wideman alternates between imagining lives for these characters and reflecting on his own imagination in these stories, an approach that allows him to explore the ongoing and damaging presence of racism in America without pretending he’s capable of being a neutral observer. Pittsburgh readers should take particular note of “Collage,” in which Mr. Wideman imagines a meeting between Romare Bearden (his fellow Peabody High School alum) and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Part of Mr. Wideman’s appreciation for Bearden involves a quote from August Wilson, reminding us of the extraordinary contributions that this city’s African-American artists and writers have made to American culture since the 1960s.
Mr. Wideman begins his 1994 memoir “Fatheralong” by writing that the pieces in the volume are an attempt “to break out, replace, displace the paradigm of race. Teach me who I might be, who you might be — without it.”
He includes a similar introduction to “American Histories” asking a future American president to eradicate slavery. The similarity between these two openings reminds us that the problem of racism in America remains as deep and as urgent as ever. It also reminds us of the inextricable connection between John Edgar Wideman’s fiction and the destructive social conditions from which it arises.
Like all fiction, Mr. Wideman’s work can’t redeem or overcome these conditions. But maybe it can suggest something about who we might be without them.