Words on Race: <i>Slaveroad</i>

SLAVEROAD. By John Edgar Wideman. New York: Scribner, 2024. Pp. 224. Paper, $28.99. In one of John Edgar Wideman's shorter stories, collected in his 2021 volume Look for Me and I'll be Gone, the reader is led through a discussion of language and its “confusing” nature. Wideman unspools a vernacular contemplation of etymology: “Figment a funny word . . . A fig a fruit and I can almost see one when I read the word fig. But ment. What's meant by ment” (2021, 231). Consideration of the way ment veers meaning in a direction quite different from the meaning of the initial pig or fig builds for three long paragraphs. Wideman uses such examples to advance an argument that “Language a predicament. Creates as many impediments as inducements when one tries to understand what words mean.” Wideman raises the specter, too, of “the entitlements language grants a word,” the power of figment to be something distinct from—to eclipse, erase any reference to—fig. Having established, then, an arbitrariness and a real power to language, Wideman's discussion culminates in a statement about race and racism: “Consider how in our society a figment of pigment segregates and fragments a society” (2021, 232). This line reads like a punchline, one that has been slowly building. It is a masterstroke, a magician's trick. Wideman, to be sure, is a writer obsessed with the magic of language, returning again and again to the image of Prospero (and captive Caliban, who has learned the colonizer's language well enough to curse). Wideman is also a writer obsessed with race, with race as a trap, with race as an example of language's power to determine reality, “the entitlements” of language. Perhaps language never makes sense. We just get used to it and used to pretending that it does. Used to pretending we are content, whether contentment does or does not make sense. Because who, afterall, doesn't desire what I desire. Someone to watch over me. (2021, 232) What kind of figment of consciousness is this? How did we get, in the story “Someone to Watch Over Me,” from musings about the suffix ment to the dreamy desperation of this song? And what is it that Wideman wants, anyway? Romantic love? The sort of attentive engagement he gives, in the previous paragraphs, to everyday words? Is it a reader he longs for, a relationship over the page? If his reveal about how pigment segregates was a skillful sleight of hand, here at the end, Wideman reveals that he is holding cards, their faces concealed, over his heart. He establishes his discontent, the pangs and pull of his desire, but he does not unpack these more than that, offering only enough of the autobiographical to emphasize a mystery, an unknowable core. “Someone to Watch for Me” characterizes all of Wideman's oeuvre, radically compressed. The language games, the play of associations and sounds, the weaving in of music, the attention to race, the vague presence of autobiography, the frustration and loneliness and the desire, the desire that cannot be fully stated—or, perhaps, desire the parameters of which can never be fully known, even by the author, who is at once a sorcerer with advanced control over his craft and, at the same time, a novice, puzzled by the basic elements from which he built a life's work. I don't believe I am repeating myself, nor copying myself, same ole shit all over again, in this text. My goal is to revisit and reify moments of my life that haunt and form me. Form all of us. Saving stories, characters, scenes, and my reactions to them—repurposing, renovating, editing, reordering, fine-tuning, to give them another chance, another existence. New life for readers, and for me, accessible maybe in this muddle of blood and time and change we inhabit until we've forgotten it. Though it never forgets us/I claim as a practitioner of the art of fiction the absolute prerogative to repeat myself. To practice what all other arts practice and preach. I claim this privilege because my writing belongs to me. I own it. It's me striving to salvage my story from a darker-than-dark slaveroad, from a history of floating words, floating bodies. My writing is totally mine. Me. Mine to cut up and paste, and re-paste and cut up again, performing and re-forming, representing it in as many fashions as I choose. (44) Slaveroad features much meta-level discussion of the perils and possibilities of autobiography, but in this quote, we have an argument for a ubiquity of autobiography—all Wideman's writing is, somehow, Wideman—as well as the introduction of a fraught recognition of ownership. That writing can be owned and sold—property, like all other forms of property, including human chattel—tortures Wideman throughout this book. The clash between his fame and reasonable economic success (his life in Brittany as an award-winning American expat) and so much of his subject matter (his brothers' time in prison, his son in prison, state-sponsored violence against African Americans, including the bombing of the MOVE religious community in Philadelphia in 1985, not to mention the slave trade and its consequences on both sides of the Atlantic) is highlighted in this book more than in Wideman's previous work.1 A writer who often expresses guilt, albeit often inchoate, here Wideman expresses anxiety about writing being a business. The afterword to this book reads like a short story, in which an editor “offers what this story might be worth in dollars for me and for the publisher she represents,” and an agent seeks to suss out whether the text should be marketed as fiction or non-fiction (212). Concerns about the industry of literature segue to concerns that writing, even if “motivated by good intentions,” can nonetheless abet “crimes.” Stories, Wideman muses, can “become cover-ups.” He gives the example of Marlowe not telling Kurtz's “Intended” (his fiancé back in Europe) the whole truth about the man, but already Wideman is talking about at least two things at once, discussing scenes in literature while giving his readers hints about scenes in his own life (58). The Wideman we see in Slaveroad is a man alone, pained by the absence of his lover, discussing, at an elusive remove, his own responsibility for this absence. He is both a writer and a man, he tells us, who tends to “disguise myself from others, divide myself from others and from myself, have perpetuated unforgivable, grievously damaging acts that have injured uncountable strangers as well as the very few individuals whom I process to live,” though he adds that in these ways he is simply a human, part of the species that invented the slave trade (5). The spirals back to slavery, as happens not infrequently in Wideman's works, feel like non-sequiturs. At the end of a story about his son, “Arizona,” Wideman mentions slave chains, and there are ways such history links to the story—prison is involved, after all—but also ways in which it feels like a distraction, a MacGuffin, like the magician pulled the wrong card, or like the author has opened up enough and now wants to shut his heart away with recourse to the old and familiar. Whatever “crimes” Wideman has committed, none of them are dealing in the enslaved. Moreover, however, slavery's history has and continues to shadow and structure his life; this does not offer an explanation or excuse for how he finds himself alone. In Slaveroad, we see Wideman recognizing his own aloneness as he takes clothes down off the line in Brittany before the evening dew sets in. “I will take my stuff down as I used to take down our stuff,” he writes, describing a routine wherein the clothing of an unnamed female partner was always taken down first, neatly stacked, set aside, then placed on top of the rest of the laundry after the hamper was full (95). “Her presence and her absence” weigh heavily on Wideman, a sense of “where oh where now,” and he goes back to his “writing table, wine, aperitif” with “no words to tell the story, and even if I found some” they would do nothing to bring her back (96). Whatever the “entitlements” and power of language, it can't help here, can't do what Wideman desires. Slaveroad is ostensibly about slavery. The title is a kenning, Wideman tells us, a poetic device that “changes the meaning of words which constitute it . . .” (10) One central contention here (as throughout Wideman's oeuvre) is that “Slavery's consequences resonate in our daily lives, our personal and cultural memories.” The “curses of slavery” are ingrained in our language, “our social and governmental institutions,” and in “the idea that color . . . signifies an intrinsic, unchanging difference in worth between some lives and others” (6). As he puts it later, the idea that color separates is a decree from “the ones in charge,” an act of “Magic” through language: “color forever, they decree. Color and separation understood as a single word. You can't say one without saying the other” (9). The sense of movement built into the term slaveroad speaks to a transatlantic interest and, in particular, to Wideman's fascination with freed blacks journeying to Africa to spread the colonizer's religion. The complications of encountering Africa again for the first time, of returning to a homeland that is not your home, intrigues Wideman, as does complicity—not just in language or culture but in the missionary project of “civilization.” As part of his contemplation of race, in Slaveroad, Wideman returns to a character he has written about previously, William Henry Sheppard, a missionary to Africa and a descendant, himself, of enslaved people. Sheppard arrived in the Belgian Congo in 1890, the same year Joseph Conrad did, a coincidence that allows Wideman to speak of both figures and to imagine encounters that did not, could not, have happened. Wideman imagines meeting Sheppard, for instance, and relays his own actual first meeting with Chinua Achebe (with a twinge of embarrassment). Against Achebe, he defends his attachment to Conrad, who he describes as a writer through whom he first came to know some kind of “Africa.”2 Sheppard's blackness and journey to the so-called Dark Continent gives Wideman access to a range of associations related to race but Sheppard's story links to another of Wideman's preoccupations as well: sex. Sheppard did more than spread the gospel in the Belgian Congo. As one speaker puts it in Slaveroad, “Sheppard steady humping African honeys and making babies over there. What's worse, brother let his wife and them cracker missionaries catch him red-handed” (107). Here, Wideman sees some echo of himself—his own desire and his own guilt. recovering, discovering, and sampling stories [of] about S. by S and by others, me rearranging, subtracting, adding bit after bit, writing words, paragraphs, pages, passages, story after story I wrote once and maybe even once published, but rewritten now, part of this old/new S story, autobiography, slaveroad story—you should have guessed by now that the point is, I don't really want it to stop. I want to paddle downstream, upstream, and back and down and up and more and more, searching, seeking a place of refuge, of welcome where I can start to construct more story. Like S in his memoir, like anybody spinning threads of story, of fiction to protect, replace, rehearse, conceal, or repeat what I cannot forget. (93) the gaze, the stare, as writers imagine things they wish, things they imagine and wish for readers to imagine, things writers hope are coming to life larger than life, better, worse, more, less, more false, more true than life, yet so lively, so unblushingly, intimidatingly real and unreal and unavoidable that they could be or, on the other hand, must be true—untrustworthy, believable, unbelievable, acceptable, unacceptable—crushing and possible/impossible as life itself. (39) I could have, should have taken my student's hand and said, but a people with our collective understanding of a history we have suffered and endured, stories that belong to us, we have earned them, learned from them, keep them alive in our minds and bodies, and if we share them with each other, with the world, no one can unsay them, take them away from a person, from a people, though murdered one by one or all exterminated. (136) Storytelling, then, represents survivance and the only kind of freedom we will ever have. Literature might not change anything in terms of the course of history or the structures of society. “Nothing unhappens,” Wideman writes, “Hitler doesn't unhappen. No matter how vociferously we may disclaim him or deny or condemn or excoriate or cry never again, never again.” (162). But literature can make us less lonely—all this talk about enduring suffering, after all, is imagined as a kind of pick-up line from a professor to a student. Wideman is mixing registers again, speaking on the one hand about Hitler and the emptiness of the mantra “never again” while reaching out with the other hand for a younger woman. This expression of desire is also pure Wideman, a theme to which he returns again and again: Wideman the voyeur, Wideman distracted by fantasies and lust, Wideman talking about oppression while objectifying women, Wideman lamenting inescapable structures of power while seemingly unable to recognize his own power in certain positions and situations. Sexual desire is Wideman's great distraction, used so often in his fiction as a way to deflect, to turn away from the weight of the horrors he's exploring. Slaveroad turns to historical personages linked to the long history of the slave trade, but Sheppard (“S”) and Rebekah (as she is called here, by her first name, a conceit of enslavement) offer the author parallels for his own philandering, his own desire. writing, like all art, is doomed to fail, isn't it. Though art persists. Each art, through its own particular, recurring, stubborn medium and idioms, endeavors to create experience. To express moments experienced by an artist that have in fact vanished instantly. Unrepeatable, no longer available to be experienced again. Maybe moments never experienced, only invented or imagined. Art imitates what's missing, lost. A work of art delivers a momentary, unique bundle of sensations that may or may not be anything like what was originally perceived or expressed once upon a time by the artist. No more than superficial resemblance to an artist's experience is apprehendable by the work's audience because, as always, moments rush together, rush past, rush away. Like unrequited love, the mystery, unattainability of art does not end its attraction, but sustains our pursuit of it. (46) Wideman is eighty-three years old, and since his late fifties, the perspective of late life has pervaded his books, from the bittersweet surrender of playground basketball in 2001s Hoop Dreams to the pointed musing on retirement and death in Look For Me and I'll Be Gone and now Slaveroad. Here in Slaveroad, Wideman revisits well-trod territory, blending reflections on race and language with memoir and self-examination via the “fictive gaze,” the temporary, felt freedom that comes with it. Wideman, returning again and again to his lifelong concerns, does so with the subtly and skill of a seasoned magician. Nothing here will change the history or presence of racialization, its hierarchies and consequences, but it is unlikely any reader will make it to the end of Slaveroad without new perspectives on language, literature, autobiography, fiction, and memory. This, too, is where Wideman's work resonates with broader studies in and of religion—an immersion in and trip down the process of selfhood and subjectivity. “My writing is totally . . . Me,” Wideman both decrees and demonstrates, though both claim and instantiation aimed at and dependent upon some external audience, someone granting recognition to the story and its form, someone “watching over” Wideman as he performs his rough magic. Afterall, isn't that what we all desire?