Philadelphia Fire: Analysis of Major Characters
"Philadelphia Fire: Analysis of Major Characters" explores the complex tapestry of relationships and identities surrounding the 1985 police attack on the MOVE organization in Philadelphia. Central to the narrative is Cudjoe, an aspiring writer grappling with personal failures and a quest for redemption, as he seeks to locate Simba Mintu, the sole survivor of the tragic event. Simba, who symbolizes resilience and the struggle against systemic injustice, navigates the challenges of being orphaned and marginalized in a society that has failed him.
The story also introduces Margaret Jones, who connects Cudjoe to the MOVE community, and John Africa, the charismatic leader whose teachings inspire self-empowerment among his followers. Cudjoe's mentor, Sam, embodies the conflicting aspirations of those who have tried to create meaningful lives amidst personal and societal turmoil. Timbo, a friend from the past, reflects on disillusionment within the Black community and the political landscape of Philadelphia, while the KKK (Kid's Krusade) represents a new generation seeking agency and recognition. The narrative is further enriched by John Edgar Wideman's reflections on his own family struggles, particularly his son's incarceration, adding layers of familial and societal complexity to the overarching themes of loss, identity, and the search for meaning in the aftermath of tragedy.
Philadelphia Fire: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: John Edgar Wideman
First published: 1990
Genre: Novel
Locale: Primarily Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Plot: Social morality
Time: The 1960's and the 1980's
Cudjoe, an aspiring writer. Having failed his first (white) wife and children and having not yet succeeded as a writer, he leaves Philadelphia to live abroad, primarily on the Greek island of Mykonos, working as a barman and dating attractive female tourists. Upon learning of the May, 1985, police attack on the MOVE headquarters that destroyed fifty-three houses and killed eleven people, he returns home, not so much hoping as needing to find the sole survivor, Simba Mintu. He needs to find the boy in part to understand the irrationality of an attack ordered by the city's black mayor and in part to atone for his own past derelictions.
Simba (Simmie) Mintu, the young boy orphaned by the police attack. His adopted African name means “Lion Man.” Simba is pushed to safety by his mother, Clara/Nkisa, who dies in the conflagration. In a play on the Christian hymn “Amazing Grace,” Simba first is lost, then is found (saved), but now is lost again—he has disappeared but also is condemned, socially, politically, and economically. He symbolizes “kid power” in a double sense: literally the power to survive but figuratively the power to avenge past wrongs. Significantly, Cudjoe has no idea what he will say to Simba if he finds him.
Margaret Jones, Cudjoe's sole direct link to the fire and therefore to Simba. She met MOVE's leader, John Africa, one year earlier; three months after that, she moved into the MOVE compound, leaving behind her two children. John Africa, she says, did not brainwash her; he did not need to. He only told her what she knew: that all she had to show for all her hard work were the same sore feet that her mother had after fifty years of cleaning for white people. Although she talks reservedly to Cudjoe, she is skeptical of both his motives and his commitment.
John Africa, formerly James Brown and also known as King, MOVE's charismatic leader and the dirtiest man Margaret Jones ever saw. He taught the members of his MOVE “family” to love and respect themselves. Repelled at first by his foul smell and appearance, Margaret Jones comes to understand that his purpose is not so much to offend others as to assert himself, to lay claim to his own body in much the same way he laid claim to the abandoned row houses that the police later attack and destroy, killing him in the process.
Sam, a successful writer and editor who is Cudjoe's mentor and surrogate father. He is also Cudjoe's double, trying to live a second and better life on an island with his long-suffering wife, Rachel. In much the same way that Cudjoe stakes everything on finding Simba, Sam stakes everything, emotionally and financially, on his island home. Also like Cudjoe, Sam has failed as a father. Stricken with a fatal heart attack, his last words are “Teach me.”
Timbo, a friend of Cudjoe from the 1960's, when both were part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society “experiment.” Among the best and brightest of young African Americans, they idealistically believed that change was possible. Now the cultural attaché to Philadelphia's black mayor, Timbo wonders why he, Cudjoe, and others like them ever believed things would get better. The mayor's plan for turning Philadelphia into a modern Athens would benefit only a fortunate few from the black community. Asked about the fire, Timbo offers a five-minute explanation based on the mayor's pragmatism; King is portrayed as an embarrassment to the city's black mayor and an obstacle to the city's progress. Timbo advised Cudjoe to forget about the fire and write about the 1960's instead.
KKK, not the Ku Klux Klan but the Kid's Krusade, Kaliban's Kiddie Korps, a new generation of disaffected black youths who communicate via graffiti and violence. Figuratively and perhaps even literally, they are the inner-city students Cudjoe taught before abandoning them to pursue his own higher education. Grown now, these children of Caliban, the monster in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, want their share of “Money Power Things.”
John Edgar Wideman, a novelist and, in the second of the book's three parts, the narrator struggling with the telling of Cudjoe's story, that of his own writing of Simba's story. Wideman struggles to understand and support his son, Jacob Wideman, who is in prison for murder and held in solitary confinement. Jacob is caught in a judicial limbo while the courts slowly decide whether he is to be tried as a juvenile or as an adult.
J. B., a strange figure who plays a prominent but decidedly ambiguous part in the novel's final section. He is a derelict compared at one point to Frankenstein's monster.