language to talk about my experience.” With the
publication of his Homewood Trilogy: Damballah
(1981), Hiding Place (1981), and Sent for You Yester-
day (1983), Wideman emerged from his personal
exile to reclaim with pride his history and heritage
as Sybela Owens’s great-great-great-grandson. He
concluded, “if you’ve read T. S. Eliot, James Joyce,
or William Faulkner,... those are not the only
‘keys to the kingdom.’ If you have grown up Black,
you also have some ‘keys.’ ” (Samuels, 85).
In his more recent works, Wideman blurs the
distinction between fiction, history, and autobiog-
raphy to validate the intricate relationship between
the past and the present. In Damballah (1981),
Hiding Place (1981), and Sent for You Yesterday
(1984), Wideman uses fiction to explore his family
history by looking at the beginning of Homewood,
where Sybela Owens settled with her children and
her lover, the son of her slave master. However, to
gain insights into the African past that is also his
legacy, in Damballah Wideman tells the story of
an uncontrollable African whose resistance leads
to his lynching but whose only desire is to return
spiritually to Africa after his physical death. The
stories in Damballah bear the names of individual
family members, “Tommy,” “Rashad” and “The
Song of Reba Love Jackson.” “Tommy,” for exam-
ple, explores through fiction the incredible pain a
family, particularly the mother, is made to suffer
when her son, like Wideman’s brother Robby, (sen-
tenced to life in prison for murder) is incarcerated
for robbery and murder. The title, Damballah, is
the name of an African god who has the respon-
sibility of restoring the family. Wideman begins
each text in the trilogy with the image of his family
tree, suggesting that, like Damballah, he, as writer,
is able to restore his personal family and by exten-
sion all families that have known fragmentation.
Wideman’s other collections of short stories,
Reuben (1987), Fever (1989), and All Stories Are
Tr u e (1992), as well as his later novels, Philadelphia
Fire (1990), The Cattle Killing (1996), and Tw o
Cities (1998), are grounded in historical events,
namely, plague-ridden 18th-century Philadelphia,
the brutal bombing of the MOVE members in
Philadelphia in 1985, and the domination of black
gang activities in Philadelphia during the 1990s. By
taking on these themes and subjects in these works,
Wideman seems to reconfirm his commitment to
exploring cultural collapse, as a central theme in
his work much in the way that Eliot did in The
Waste Land. This focus is also found in Wideman’s
autobiographical text, Brothers and Keepers (1984),
in Father/Along (1994), and in Hoop Roots: Basket-
ball, Race and Love (2001).
In Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race and Love, Wide-
man compares his two loves: basketball and writ-
ing. He explains, “Though the writer seems to be
in charge, he’s more like a coach who can’t insert
himself in the lineup. The closest he can come to
the action is sending in a substitutive for himself
and reflecting the action from the sub’s point of
view. He can lend the sub his uniform, name,
number, but the writer remains stuck on the pine”
(11). Wideman concludes, “hoops frees you to play
by putting you into a real cage, Writing cages the
writer with the illusion of freedom.... Writing lets
you imagine you’re outside time, freely generating
rules and choices” (12).
Thus, in his collected work, Wideman becomes a
coach, a writer as seer prophet. He continues to use
his work as a vehicle, a conduit through which the
hauntingly human experience of African-Ameri-
can history and culture are accessed, assessed, re-
corded, restored and celebrated. Through them he
attempts to “break out, to knock down the walls”
(Brothers and Keepers, 18) of the imprisoning cages
known by African Americans, whether the cage of
self-hate—such as the one that led him to become
fugitive from his own culture and identity in his
first works—or the pervasive cage, the Panopticon
of racism. In Wideman’s works, the protagonists
struggle with memory versus forgetting. They as-
siduously work to create spaces to redeem and
(re)create their past. He continues this theme in
The Island: Martinique (2003), a travel memoir.
Wideman has received two PEN/Faulkner
Awards for Fiction and the American Book Award
for Fiction. He received the Lannan Literary Fel-
lowship for Fiction in 1991 and has been a finalist
for both the National Book Critics Circle Award
and the National Book Award. He won the REA
Award for short story. In 1993, he received a Mac-
Arthur Prize Fellowship.Wideman, John Edgar 551