(1981), published three years before Brothers and
Keepers appeared. Brothers and Keepers develops
some of the same themes of Damballah but further
extends Wideman’s critique of America, especially
his claim that the numbers of African-American
males incarcerated reveals the connection between
the past and the present: Slavery is the historical
equivalent of Robby’s prison life. Wideman reaches
this conclusion in his short story “The Beginning
of Homewood” in Damballah, when he imagines
the life of an ancestor, a slave, who committed a
crime by running away, juxtaposed with that of
Tommy (the fictional persona of Robby). Both the
slave and the prisoner are chained like outlaws, but
they are really the victims in a larger economic, so-
cial, and racial drama.
As Wideman traces the historical, cultural, and
personal forces that led to Robby’s downfall, he
reconciles himself to his own troubled past and to
the family and community that he fled as a young
writer and academic. This flight away from home
and racial identity marks Wideman’s own double-
consciousness in the work. And though Robby is
acknowledged by the society as being the “crimi-
nal,” Wideman discovers that he himself has been
the one that has acted like a “fugitive.” Turning his
back on his African-American community has
alienated Wideman from himself. John and Robby
both suffer from the limitations imposed on them
by a racist America. While it appears that Wideman
has beaten the system, he has sacrificed his per-
sonal history to do so. The promise of American
middle-class success has seduced him away from
his family and the Homewood neighborhood of
his youth. Robby stayed behind, a statistic of urban
desolation, impoverishment, drug use, and crime,
though Brothers and Keepers shows that this was
not always the life that Robby saw before him. Like
his brother, Robby had dreams, talent, and intelli-
gence—all ravaged by a society that refused to see
beyond the color of his skin.
While Wideman recognizes Robby’s own re-
sponsibility in the direction that his life ulti-
mately took, he cannot overlook the “keepers”
who resolutely refuse to acknowledge Robby’s
humanity. The keepers include the guards who
control Robby’s movements, but the keepers are
also the guardians of American institutions who
control the perceptions that this society holds of
black men and women. On a visit to the prison,
Wideman marks the way that the guards treat his
children, his wife, and his mother. Treated like
prisoners themselves, Wideman realizes his in-
ability to make the world see beyond race. His
mother also remembers Robby’s friend, Garth,
who died after a long illness. Unable to get ad-
equate health care because he was poor and black,
Garth lingers through terrible pain. Little is done
to comfort him, and the system seems to aban-
don him. It is the loss of young, black male lives
to a world that ignores them that embitters Wide-
man’s mother most.
The structure of the work embodies Wideman’s
commitment to the communal voice, to the no-
tion that “all stories are true”—the title of one of
his short story collections. The work is divided
into three sections; the voices of Wideman, his
mother, and Robby moderate the different sec-
tions. The three distinct points of view offer a
more complete observation of the circumstances
that brought Robby to prison. But the different
voices also remind us that there is no one singular
African-American experience, and until America
understands and accepts the humanity of African
Americans, the past will continue to haunt the
present.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Wideman, John Edgar. Brothers and Keepers. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984.
———. Damballah. London: Allison & Busby, 1984.
Tracie Church GuzzioBrother to Brother: New Writings by Black
Gay Men Essex Hemphill, ed. (1991)
Brother to Brother is an emotive journey of discov-
ery on what it means to be black and gay. In his
introduction, ESSEX HEMPHILL states that if there
had been a book about black gay men available
to him during his own youth, such as In the Life:
A Black Gay Anthology (1986), he would not have
had to create still another mask. The historicalBrother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men 75