American Histories

Wideman writes a short story collection featuring the real and the imagined, of family, loss and history that is deeply compelling. The stories range from a mere wisp to the more substantial, often reading like a treatise on race in the US. It begins with a prefatory note to the President, imploring him to eradicate slavery, not just words found in the constitution, but the actual realities of black Americans facing this scenario today. However, it is acknowledged that it just may not be in his power to address this. What follows are a diverse range of scenarios featuring Wideman's family and characters such as John Brown, Frederick Douglass and Basquiat.

Frederick Douglass sees a different path for himself in tackling slavery from the more direct action route taken by John Brown, willing to lay down his life and places his family directly amidst the fight against slavery. There are dinner conversations on Putin, health, failure of the public schools to educate coloured boys and white cops killing unarmed black boys in Dark Matter. There is what shape the world is in, how it shapes the beginning and end of lives. The dead claimed by the war, a woman intent on keeping her baby from being born on Friday 13 June so as not to doom it further than it already will be. In Maps and Ledgers, Wideman's father kills a man, his Auntie C gets him a lawyer and his plea of self defense in successful. However, this is merely a prelude to a family avalanche of the worst to come, mapped by the author in ledgers. A botched surgery has the hospital held unaccountable. Wideman wonders how to help a writing student in her tale of race and slavery to push her out of the stereotype of powerless black women, instead hoping perhaps for her to break bad and have the racist system remorselessly challenged. There are thoughts on suicide, jazz and Williamsburg Bridge, mobs with their hands red from days of wasting black children, women and men in draft riots. Wideman celebrates those scholars who uncovered and preserved evidence of those who resisted slavery and bondage, such as Nat Turner, dying like so many, for the sin of his colour.

Wideman gives us multiple aspects, experiences and thoughts on race that define his uncompromising stance on slavery and the black experience of life in American history and its present. He is radical in his perspective, with a wealth of evidence to back up his stance. Many may well find his thinking unsettling, disturbing and uncomfortable. I see him as philosophical, profound, moving, energising, amidst a history of an unforgiving, ruthless, divide and conquer, and exploitative world experienced by black Americans. The present state of the US offers little in the way of a promising future. A hard hitting and thought provoking selection of short stories from Wideman which I recommend highly. Many thanks to Canongate for an ARC.