662 The American Century: Literature since 1945of race,” Wideman sees himself as a “seer/writer” who uses his narrative powers to
access racial memories, to struggle against forgetting, to “break out, to knock down
the walls” that separate African-Americans from their past. And that project has led
him into nonfiction, notably meditations on grave family tragedies involving his
brother and son (Brothers and Keepers (1981), Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers
and Sons (1994)), as well as into documentary fiction in Philadelphia Fire (1990) –
his novel concerning the bombing by the city of Philadelphia of a house occupied by
a militant African-American organization in 1985. For Charles R. Johnson (1948–),
by contrast, the racial paradigm has always been there in his complex, allusive work.
In each of his novels, an educated African-American male comes to the discovery of
himself through an understanding of the nature and definition of freedom. In each
novel, also, Johnson explores and subverts traditional genres as he investigates the
relationship between meaning and being, history and knowledge. So, in Middle
Passage (1990), Johnson draws on such diverse sources as the sea story and the slave
narrative, Moby-Dick, Arthur Gordon Pym, and Invisible Man, to tell the story of a
newly freed slave, Rutherford Calhoun. To escape debts and an impending marriage,
Rutherford jumps aboard the first ship leaving New Orleans, the Republic, a slave
ship en route to collect members of a legendary tribe. What follows, told in the form
of a ship’s log, fluctuates between historical naturalism, magic, and myth, as
Rutherford tells how he came to mediate between the tribe and his shipmates, and
to learn a new paradigm – a new prism through which to look at himself and his
relation to the world.
The determining influence of race on a writer like Johnson is suggested by the fact
that his first novel, Oxherding Tale (1982), draws on the Narrative of Frederick
Douglass, while his third, Dreamer (1999), draws on the life of Martin Luther King.
For James Alan McPherson (1943–), race is less of a determinant, however; or, at
least, race in exclusive, oppositional terms. In his short story collections Hue and Cry
(1969) and Elbow Room (1977) McPherson has explored his vision of an America
whose citizens would be, as he has put it, “a synthesis of high and low, black and
white, city and country, provincial and universal.” Racially inflected though the
stories are – dealing, that is, with specific problems of racial prejudice and injustice –
their bias is toward more general issues of diversity and identity: how the complex
character of any community or identity can be denied by any failure of the
imagination. With Leon Forrest (1937–1997) and David Bradley (1950–), the canvas
is wider in a formal sense and more targeted thematically. Forrest, for instance,
created his own sprawling fictional world of Forest County, based on his homeplace
of Cook County, Illinois, in his trilogy: There is a Tree More Ancient then Eden (1973),
The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), Two Wings Veil My Face (1984). Stylistically dense
and innovative, the three novels are linked not just by their shared location, but by
interlocking genealogies and the developing consciousness of a protagonist who
grows to maturity during the course of them. Not only that, they are connected by
their common concern with orphanhood. Like Hughes, Ellison, Baldwin, and so
many other African-American writers, Forrest sees his race as the orphans of the
nation: seeking the place, the parentage they have been consistently denied. A senseGGray_c05.indd 662ray_c 05 .indd 662 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM