"Do not go gentle into that good night," wrote
Dylan Thomas in his famous
villanelle. Now 76-year-old John
Edgar Wideman echoes that sentiment in
American Histories, a
powerful assemblage of short stories exploring late-in-life angst through
personal myth, cultural memory, and riffs on an empire scorched by its own
hubris.
As Wideman does in his memoirs and essays, his fictional
characters frequently brood on race, with hushed ferocity: "My color also
produces in many people of other colors an adverse reaction as hardwired as a
worker ant's love for the nest's queen." Some stories recast historical
figures in a transmogrifying light, with, say, the radical abolitionist John
Brown discussing the evils of slavery with Frederick Douglass, or African
American artists Romare Bearden and Jean-Michel Basquiat debating collage as a
technique. From his scaffold, Nat Turner narrates his tortured journey to
rebellion and mass murder, spurred on by white oppression. Other tales, such as
the haunting "Williamsburg Bridge"—about an elderly writer on the
verge of suicide, clinging to the structure's railing, his thoughts rushing wildly
like the East River below—show Wideman's singular ability to magnify interior
struggle.
His prose, its twisting syntax, is a kind of stylish jazz of
his own making. Alongside bleakness, Wideman also finds pearls in the everyday,
such as this robin in a French garden: "Hop-hopping, hip-hop it comes and
goes or stops to profile, body slightly tilted towards me, a single black eye
fixed on me. Dot ending a sentence."
