Hurry Home by John Edgar Wideman

First published: 1970

Type of plot: Stream of consciousness

Time of work: The middle and late 1960’s, during the wave of school integrations and equal opportunity legislation

Locale: Washington, D.C., Europe (particularly Spain and France), and the waters off Africa

Principal Characters:

• Cecil Otis Braithwaite, the protagonist, a black law school graduate turned janitor and barber
• Esther Brown Braithwaite, his devoted wife
• Charles Webb, a guilt-ridden writer fancying Cecil as his son
• Albert, an American expatriate, mercenary, and drifter, Cecil’s drinking buddy in Spain

The Novel

As Hurry Home begins, Cecil Otis Braithwaite, the janitor of an apartment complex, dreamily crushes a Carnation milk can and drops it five flights into Dantesque murk. Staring deep into the darkness, he recalls “how they run movies backward, how the can could leap up from the floor, return to his hand and unfold there, a flower opening.” This thought suggests the novel’s structure: As in one convoluted instant replay, all the characters relate events that occurred months and years earlier, dovetailing past and present through letters, diaries, dialogues, and random thoughts.

The novel’s mainstays are Cecil’s stream-of-consciousness reminiscences. He has supported his law studies through earnings from janitoring, a scholarship in his final year, and his girlfriend Esther Brown’s hard work. His relationship with Esther has been soured by the stillborn birth of their son Simon, which he finally attributes to Esther’s being “just too tired to carry him any longer.” Nevertheless, he marries her on his graduation day, ostensibly to provide a comfortable life in return for her love and loyalty. Anguished that he cannot return her affection, he deserts her that same night.

Cecil then drifts for three years, mainly on the European continent. He haunts museums, old parks, and libraries as if the past can imbue him with purpose and fearlessness. Often he seesaws to the other extreme, carousing in bars and initiating liaisons with whores, compensating for his losses by plumbing the present all he can.

Unifying Cecil’s rovings are significant events that occur during April. This month of spring and Easter—with its contradictory evocations of both hope and despair, forgiveness and bitterness, rebirth and death—embodies Cecil’s confusion about his roots. During one April he declares himself “a stranger” to the European past. In another he skims the African coast by boat, hoping to find “where it all came from,” a past he truly shares, in its vast lands echoing with kings’ boasts and slaves’ wails— but this search, too, fizzles. Never setting foot on Africa’s soil, Cecil only glances at its shores.

Despite its blossoms and buds, spring itself, Cecil observes, often bears “false, cruel omens not of summer and life but of that unrequited yearning in men’s souls that leaves them shivering on street corners in thin clothes at the mercy of sudden arctic winds.” Thus, April moments emphasize Cecil’s angst because the very season is so uncertain, so reminiscent of and revertible to the dying that has preceded it. While spring blooms in Spain, for example, his own longings are underscored by his encounters with Charles Webb, a man estranged from his son, and Albert, a Hemingway type in Webb’s employ who has likewise abandoned his wife. Fittingly, then, another spring finds Cecil back in Washington, processing men’s hair in Constance’s Beauty, his promising legal career never undertaken.

As if to mock Cecil’s fruitless desires, the novel itself, flashing backwards in time from the hairdresser’s, ends in the same dark building where it began. In the opening scene it is morning and Cecil is outside his apartment. Here it is midnight as Cecil enters his home for the first time since his nuptials. To emphasize his unproductiveness, nothing seems changed; even the gloom is familiar. In fact, he and Esther end in the same poses they had assumed on their wedding night—she spread-eagled on the bed, he humped and staring blankly in a chair, both dreaming separate dreams.

The Characters

Cecil’s initials, when reversed (B.O.C.), recall the name of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, whose work Cecil admires in the Prado. Indeed, Cecil imagines himself with the damned figures in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, reveling in “greediness and absurdity rather than an orderly, calm progress toward salvation.” His instability results from his anxiousness to find a heritage. He is at once an upwardly mobile black fast becoming isolated from the neighborhood where he grew up, a son of Africa severed from the motherland, and an American vaguely aware of a European birthright. Wideman thus sets him in a Prufrockan world pressed by time’s passage and unanswered questions, inhabited by people as catlike and ragged-claw red as the images in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem.

Esther differs from Cecil in that she is grounded unwaveringly by her belief in God. Yet she is a sick saint whose self-negation is repulsive instead of awe-inspiring. She views her troubled marriage as a divine mission: Cecil is the saint while she is the unsteady sinner being tested for her patience and humility. She has married Cecil knowing that he does not love her, hoping that real union will soon come to pass. She bears his scorn and physical abuse as if the blows were thunderclaps from the hand of God Himself. In this way Wideman succeeds in depicting her as a reversal of the biblical Esther who saved the Jews from annihilation by the Persians. Esther Brown is a martyr without the vengeance and action of Esther the Queen. With typically succinct, yet loaded, description, Wideman portrays her as a sad lump in blue corduroy, a victim of sick headaches.

Wideman’s skill, particularly in Hurry Home, is his use of other characters to illuminate Cecil’s turmoil. Charles Webb, a white man remorseful because he has never acknowledged his half-black, bastard son, holds many attractions for Cecil. While his surname implies that he, too, is trapped in emotional entanglements, he tantalizes rootless Cecil because he possesses a tangible, European past, a “continent of archives and documents.” Further, his discomfort at being an affluent white among poor Spaniards mirrors Cecil’s own alienation as the only black in his law class. Perhaps to show again the deceptive path to stability which Cecil rejects, he dresses in blue corduroy like Esther, applying the same myopic zeal to finding his son that she does to enduring her spouse.

Similarly, Albert is an unlikely companion for Cecil who proves to have more in common at second glance. Halfheartedly searching for Webb’s son, flabby Albert seems not to care whether he has a heritage or not. He is referring to material objects when he says, “I’m not the sort to keep things,” but he could be indicating his transient lifestyle as well. Of Dutch ancestry like Bosch, he portrays a chaotic world of fear and violence with words instead of paints. Once he is drunk enough, though, he laments the demise of days when there were revolutions and brawny, self-serving men to orchestrate them. He says of younger men, “No background, no roots. Saucy and fresh, ready to throw mud, smear disdain. Tear everything down.” Likewise, he clings, leechlike, to Webb, urging Cecil to forsake the man so that he can remain on the payroll. He does value the past—albeit a personal, bloody, mercenary one—and herein lies his appeal to Cecil.

Critical Context

Hurry Home, Wideman’s second novel, received from critics the favorable comments that had greeted his first major work, A Glance Away (1967). Though both treat black families and share themes, Hurry Home employs a more experimental style. In fact, many of its reviewers did not know what to make of Wideman’s allusory technique, declaring it to be either stronger than his insights or alternately overwhelming and obscure. Also, its muted racial theme has been disconcerting to readers who have expected an intense exploration of black Americans, given the dramatic Civil Rights movement that antedated it.

This novel is the gymnasium of Wideman’s canon, where he flexes his linguistic techniques in preparation for more controlled, integrated works like The Lynchers (1973) and the Homewood Trilogy (1981-1983). He has since received the Faulkner Award for one of the Homewood books, Sent for You Yesterday (1983), from PEN (the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists). Even if Hurry Home stands as a minor work next to these luminaries, it is proof of Wideman’s potential to create rich, memorable fiction.

Bibliography

Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Of the seven chapters in this book, one is devoted to Hurry Home and is subtitled “The Black Intellectual Uncertain and Confused.” The black intellectual’s alienation is stressed, and much is made—though not to much point—of the modernist narrative method. An interview recorded in 1988 makes an excellent appendix.

Coleman, James W. “John Edgar Wideman.” In African American Writers, edited by Valerie Smith. New York: Scribner’s, 1991. A useful survey of Wideman’s career, but only brief comments on Hurry Home.

Draper, James P., ed. Black Literature Criticism, Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992. Provides a biographical profile, as well as excerpts from criticism of many of Wideman’s works.

Mbalia, Doreatha Drummond. John Edgar Wideman: Reclaiming the African Personality. Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1995. Mbalia examines a number of Wideman’s works while exploring themes such as the African personality in Wideman’s writings, the way Wideman portrays women, and the place of the intellectual in the community.

Mumia, Abu-Jamal. “The Fictive Realism of John Edgar Wideman.” Black Scholar 28 (Spring, 1998): 75-79. Examines the intellectual, social, and racial contexts of Wideman’s writings. Discusses the influence of the black liberation movement on Wideman as well as on the family. Concludes that Wideman’s novels “speak to that pervasive sense of estrangement, and the restorative power of the family” and calls Wideman’s work “a literature of love.”

Rushdy, Ashraf H. A. “Fraternal Blues: John Edgar Wideman’s Homewood Trilogy.” Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall, 1991): 312-345. No discussion of Hurry Home, but Rushdy’s detailed commentary on Wideman’s themes and subjects is excellent. Perhaps the most perceptive analysis of Wideman’s work. Excellent bibliography.

Samuels, Wilfred D. “Going Home: A Conversation with John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 6 (February, 1983): 40-59. An interview that elicits some interesting insights from Wideman. Should be read along with Coleman’s interview.

Samuels, Wilfred D. “John Edgar Wideman.” In Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955. Vol. 33 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris. Detroit: Gale, 1984. Although published seven years before the similar piece by Coleman listed above, this is still a useful introduction to Wideman’s career prior to the 1980’s.

Wideman, John Edgar. “Home: An Interview with John Edgar Wideman.” Interview by Jessica Lustig. African American Review 26 (Fall, 1992): 453-457. Explores the influence of Homewood, Pennsylvania in Wideman’s writings. Wideman talks about the quality of life there, the effect urban renewal can have on a close neighborhood, and the incorporation of the memories of other places he has lived into his portrayal of Homewood. A good resource for background information.

Wideman, John Edgar, and Bonnie Tusmith. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998. This collection of interviews by various people, including Ishmael Reed, Kay Bonetti, and Gene Shalit, presents an in-depth portrait of Wideman. Wideman’s discussion of his works is informative and revealing.