The Homewood Trilogy by John Edgar Wideman

First published: 1985 (includes Damballah, 1981; Hiding Place, 1981; Sent for You Yesterday, 1983)

The Work

In The Homewood Trilogy, which comprises the short-story collection Damballah and the novels Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday, John Edgar Wideman re-creates Homewood, the black section of Pittsburgh, and describes the myriad relationships among ancestors and a living African American family in the hundred years since slavery. Damballah is an African voodoo god, “the good serpent of the sky.” The hero of the trilogy is John French, who specializes in a kind of benevolent fatherhood. Wideman’s return to Homewood through these novels convinces readers of his determination to find and understand his identity through tracing his roots as deep as he can. In Damballah and Hiding Place, Wideman furnishes a family tree. Readers are told of his great-great-great grandmother, who fled through the Underground Railroad with a white man to safety in Pittsburgh. Biological roots traced, the job of understanding begins.

One sour apple on the family tree is Tommy. The character Tommy is actually Robby, Wideman’s brother. Tommy and Wideman are complex dimensions in finding the identity that Wideman seeks. The main character in Hiding Place, Tommy, is a fugitive from history as well as the law. He is taken in by Mama Bess, who is family and who represents what family does. Family tries to put together the “scars” and the “stories” that give young people their identities. Essentially, Hiding Place is the story of two lost souls, Mama Bess and Tommy. Mama Bess is lost because she has lost her husband and her son; she becomes a recluse, a fugitive living on a hill overlooking Pittsburgh, away from the family. Tommy is lost because he is too headstrong to listen and finds himself on the run after a scheme to rob a ghetto hoodlum ends in murder. Tommy does not want to hear the stories and learn about the scars; he is too absorbed in preservation.

Sent for You Yesterday, through the characters of Doot and Albert Wilkes, the outspoken blues pianist, suggests that creativity and imagination are important means of transcending despair. Creativity also strengthens the common bonds of race, culture, and class. Homewood Trilogy is a monumental work of investigating and understanding the origins of self and identity.

Bibliography

Bennion, John. “The Shape of Memory in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for You Yesterday.” Black American Literature Forum 20 (Spring/Summer, 1986): 143-150. Observes that the nontraditional form of this concluding volume in the Homewood trilogy involves “a structuring of reality which balances past and present, consciousness and subconsciousness, memory and actuality, life and death.”

Berben, Jacqueline. “Beyond Discourse: The Unspoken Versus Words in the Fiction of John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 8 (Fall, 1985): 525-534. Looks at the differences between the deliberately misleading dialogue in Hiding Place and the truer expressions of feeling in the characters’ nonverbal communications, dreams, and fantasies. An excellent analysis of Wideman’s technique.

Birkerts, Sven. “The Art of Memory.” The New Republic 207 (July 13, 1992): 42-49. Argues that Wideman, on the basis of his short fiction and The Homewood Trilogy, is the preeminent male African American writer of his generation. Praises his skill in moving through time and in and out of memory, in order to chronicle the history of a family, a place, and a people.

Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. A major book-length study that includes three chapters on The Homewood Trilogy, a good summary of Wideman’s literary career, a 1988 interview with the author, and a helpful bibliography.

Coleman, James W. “Going Back Home: The Literary Development of John Edgar Wideman.” College Language Association Journal 28 (March, 1985): 326-343. Finds in the Homewood trilogy the creation of a myth of family history and the history of the community that Coleman believes will sustain both Wideman and his characters.

Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview with John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 13 (Winter, 1990): 47-61. Focuses on Wideman’s perception of the influences that have shaped his literary development. Also contains revealing information about Wideman’s themes and about the central importance of the South in African American culture.

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy.” Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall, 1991): 312-345. A detailed analysis of the process by which Wideman’s narrator in the Homewood trilogy achieves a “blues voice” that allows him to depict the complex interconnections among community, family, and the individual, particularly between brothers.

Saunders, James Robert. “Exorcising the Demons: John Edgar Wideman’s Literary Response.” The Hollins Critic 29 (December, 1992): 1-10. Contends that Wideman’s fiction reveals his growing understanding that, however fully he is accepted in the white world, a black intellectual must maintain his connection with his own people. Also comments sympathetically on how violence has affected Wideman’s life and influenced his thinking.