Fatheralong by John Edgar Wideman

First published: 1994

Type of work: Memoir/essays

Form and Content

The five essays that constitute Fatheralong are prefaced by “Common Ground,” an introductory essay that defines the terms and assumptions about race and society John Edgar Wideman will use throughout the remainder of his memoir. The common ground that African Americans share as survivors of slavery, Wideman argues, covers a continent, a gene pool, and a history, but African Americans also share the higher ground, both physical and spiritual, that they aspire to reach. What often stands in the way of African American progress, however, is the notion of race itself—the idea that not all people are created equal and that some are born with the right to exploit others. Race not only reduces the complexity of African American cultural history but also confuses and cripples people of any color. If people listen, however, Wideman insists that they can also hear stories of African Americans trying to work out ways to transcend race, such as the stories told in Fatheralong. One antidote to the distorting notion of race, then, is the book itself. The stories here may help African Americans, Wideman hopes, in their struggle to reinvent themselves by giving them a better understanding of what they share as human beings.

The memoir itself is less theoretical and much more personal. In essence, the five essays of Fatheralong that follow “Common Ground”—“Promised Land,” “Fatheralong,” “Littleman,” “Picking Up My Father at the Springfield Station,” and “Father Stories”—describe trips that Wideman takes with his father. Some trips are short, as when his father drives him to the Pittsburgh airport after a family visit; some are longer, as when the two men fly to South Carolina to find their Wideman roots. Some are celebratory journeys, as when the whole family converges on Amherst, Massachusetts, for the wedding of one of Wideman’s sons. The trips in Fatheralong are not only geographical and historical but emotional and psychological as well. They describe Wideman’s attempts to understand his father, their roots, and Wideman’s relationship to his own sons. (Appropriately, Fatheralong is dedicated both to Wideman’s father and to his sons.) The book is a memoir of fathers and sons, a geography of growing up African American, and a history of one family’s struggle to come to grips with itself and its society.

Wideman’s father, Edgar Lawson Wideman, abandoned his family when his children were still in various stages of youth. The son does not give all the reasons for this breakup, but readers witness its consequences. On occasions when John Edgar and his own family return to Homewood, the African American section of Pittsburgh where he grew up, the visits with family members are difficult, involving complex maneuvering to see everyone in turn. Afterward, Wideman feels guilty that he has not spent enough time with his father during these visits. This guilt is one impetus for Wideman’s suggestion to his father that they take a trip together to Promised Land, the crossroads near Greenwood, South Carolina, where Wideman’s grandfather was born. The longest sections of Fatheralong concern that trip and its successful conclusions: the friends they make, the history they uncover, and the relationship they reestablish.

Fatheralong is filled with wonderful family detail: It tells of the Reverend T. W. Wideman, who died with his mouth open; the memorable residents of South Carolina whom Wideman and his father meet, such as James “Littleman” Harris and Bowie Lomax; and the cemetery they visit where other Widemans rest. Readers share Wideman’s memories of his Pittsburgh childhood and see him visiting his father at work or sitting on his shoulders at a snowy Thanksgiving Day parade. They also feel the conflict between his parents, the pull of loyalty and betrayal, the tension between competing parental philosophies of life. Wideman’s father stresses self-reliance, while his mother’s emphasizes love. As is the case in his fiction, Wideman’s writing style is well suited to convey this personal story. His prose is full of long, rich sentences that wind around the complex, convoluted family history they relate. His use of repetition—lists of people and places encountered—brings readers closer to the family history. His voice is lyrical throughout, even when it is angry.

Critical Context

Like Richard Wright (in the autobiography Black Boy, 1945) and James Baldwin (in the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son, 1955, and Nobody Knows My Name, 1961) before him, John Edgar Wideman issues a wake-up call to America about race and racism. Wideman also writes about the sons who have been abandoned along the road of American progress and emphasizes both the responsibilities of fathers for their children and the responsibility of the culture for the deterioration of paternal relationships. Wideman’s book contains important messages about fathers and sons, identity, and relationships.

In many ways, Wideman may remind readers of other contemporary African American writers, such as Alice Walker or Toni Morrison. Walker’s rendering of the South The Color Purple (1982) resemble’s Wideman’s representation, and Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) portrays a son searching for his father’s roots in Virginia. Fatheralong also rings with the reverberations of works by male writers, including Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991), Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation:An Argument with My Mexican Father (1992), and Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men (1990). All are part of an emergent literary consciousness of male roles and gender history. Like Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), finally, Fatheralong is about African Americans reclaiming their history and, by telling it, gaining the higher ground above the shackles of racial ideology.

Bibliography

Berben-Masi, Jacqueline. “Prodigal and Prodigy: Fathers and Sons in Wideman’s Work.” Callaloo: A Journal of African-American and African Arts and Letters 22, no. 3 (Summer, 1999): 677-84. Draws on French theorists Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault and finds the parable of the prodigal son in Wideman’s text. Part of an issue of Callaloo devoted to the European response to Wideman’s work.

Byerman, Keith. “Reviews.” African American Review 30, no. 2 (Summer, 1996): 292-93. Good overview of Fatheralong; finds that Wideman has compounded the problem he discusses by not fully addressing issues with his own sons.

Hoem, Sheri I. “Recontextualizing Fathers: Wideman, Foucault, and African American Genealogy.” Textual Practice 14, no. 2 (Summer, 2000): 235-251. Deconstructionist study that uses Wideman’s text as the opportunity to talk about the values and limits of genealogical analysis.

Pinsker, Sanford. “The Moose on the Family Dinner Table.” Virginia Quarterly Review 71, no. 2 (Spring, 1995): 369-372. Pinsker, like Byerman, points out the issues of race and family Wideman fails to grapple with fully in his memoir.

TuSmith, Bonnie, ed. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Reprints interviews with the author by Gene Shalit, Ishmael Reed, and seventeen other writers; includes Michael Silverblatt’s 1995 “Interview with John Edgar Wideman about Fatheralong,” which provides Wideman’s own summary of his book.

TuSmith, Bonnie, and Keith E. Byerman, eds. Critical Essays on John Edgar Wideman. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. Collection of essays addressing both Wideman’s fiction and his nonfiction, from 1967 forward, in a comprehensive study of his career.