Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman

First published: 1990

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social criticism

Time of work: 1960’s and 1980’s

Locale: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Principal Characters:

• Cudjoe, a would-be writer working as a barman on the Greek island of Mykonos; he returns to Philadelphia
• Simba (Simmie) Mintu, a young boy orphaned as a result of the police attack on the MOVE compound
• Margaret Jones, Cudjoe’s sole direct link to the fire and therefore to Simba
• John Africa (James Brown), the charismatic leader of the MOVE organization, the “dirtiest man” Margaret Jones ever saw
• John Edgar Wideman, the novelist and, in the second of the book’s three parts, the narrator
• J. B., a strange figure who plays a prominent but decidedly ambiguous part in the novel’s final section

The Novel

After learning of the 1985 police attack on the Philadelphia headquarters of John Africa’s MOVE organization, an attack that destroyed fifty-three houses and killed eleven people, Cudjoe, a once-promising black novelist, leaves the Greek island where he has been living since his divorce and returns to Philadelphia. There he hopes to find some explanation for this seemingly senseless tragedy, and then, like Wideman, to write about it. First he must locate Simba, the child who escaped the fire at the MOVE compound. Simba, orphaned as a result of the fire, stands for all the novel’s lost children, including Cudjoe’s biracial children now living with their mother; Wideman’s imprisoned son, who along with Wideman figures prominently in the second of the novel’s three parts; the inner-city youths whom Cudjoe taught before abandoning them in order to pursue his own higher education; and finally the younger Cudjoe, who sought to escape both his identity and his responsibility as an African American.

At the sparsely attended funeral service for the eleven victims of the fire, “White college kids riff and scat an elegy for four voices.” Philadelphia Fire is itself an elegy for multiple voices written by an author who, although not himself white, has, like Cudjoe, gained entrance to the white world and enjoyed the “Power Money Things” coveted by Kaliban’s Kiddie Korps (KKK), the youths whom Cudjoe had taught earlier in his life and who now communicate through graffiti and violence. The novel mourns the eleven direct victims of the fire along with the child Simba, living but lost, for all practical purposes one of the KKK; Wideman’s son; Cudjoe’s children; and more generally the idealism of the 1960’s that resulted in so few changes in the lives of so many black Americans. Bringing a “riff and scat” style to bear on so conservative and conventional a literary form as the elegy poses considerable difficulties for both the writer and especially his readers, who may well assume that elegy, social criticism, and narrative innovation should remain separate. Formidable as these difficulties may be, they are central to the novel’s purpose.

Divided into three progressively shorter parts, Philadelphia Fire is written in a prose that is at once elliptical and densely packed, filled with social detail and mythic resonance. There is little plot as such and even less linear development. The novel’s multiple narratives probe the interior lives of its characters, dropping them and readers into a nightmarish reality vaguely reminiscent of that earliest (and most gothic) of Philadelphia fictions, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn: Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (part 1, 1799; part 2, 1800), set, like Wideman’s short story “Fever,” during the scarlet fever epidemic of 1793. Ultimately, Philadelphia Fire is no more gothic than it is conventionally elegiac. “Maybe this is a detective story,” Cudjoe wonders at one point. If it is, then it is a convoluted one, one that even in its final paragraph chooses to compound the mystery rather than resolve it:

Cudjoe hears footsteps behind him. A mob howling his name. Screaming for blood. Words come to him, cool him, stop him in his tracks. He’d known them all his life. Never again. Never again. He turns to face whatever it is rumbling over the stones of Independence Square.

Whatever Cudjoe is about to discover is left unclear, as unclear as the identity of the enigmatic J. B., who figures prominently yet ambiguously in the novel’s concluding section. The only certainty is that Cudjoe has stopped running. He is now willing to face all that he once sought to evade and that, since he heard of the fire and returned to Philadelphia, has evaded him, especially as a novelist. “Words fail me,” Wideman writes midway through the novel, “because there are no words for what’s happening. I am a witness.” He is witness chiefly to his own perplexity, which also belongs to Cudjoe and even to readers, who must negotiate a novel the form of which is complex and vehemently nontraditional. Philadelphia Fire recounts several parallel stories, each reflecting the others as if in some surreal funhouse.

The Characters

The visual metaphor of the novel as a hall of mirrors has its verbal equivalent in Wideman’s relay of narrative voices. Cudjoe, for example, plays the part of the Pied Piper. Magician and musician, he is also the one who writes and the one about whom is written. “Why this Cudjoe, then?” Wideman (now as narrator) asks. “This airy other floating into the shape of my story. Why am I him when I tell certain parts? Why am I hiding from myself? Is he mirror or black hole?” The novel serves as both mirror and black hole, reflecting and devouring, shedding light (wisdom) and preventing its escape, its real subject being an absence (Simba, for example) detectable only by virtue of the bodies (planetary or human) caught in its gravitational pull. Wideman’s characters are similarly constructed. They are mirrors and voids rather than stable subjects: shifting, shapeless, voiceless (insofar as they have no voice of their own), and disembodied. Having no (one) voice of its own, the novel, like its characters, speaks in an amazing multiplicity of ventriloquized voices and interpolated styles and forms: nursery rhymes, biblical echoes, the radio monologue of a rapper, a dialogue between two mayors (one black, one white), and passages from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623) and other texts. It also uses more conventional narrative devices such as dialogue, description, indirect discourse, letters, and a notebook passage. Cudjoe’s thinking and remembering often takes the form of editing, and much of Margaret Jones’s story takes the highly mediated form of a tape recording that Cudjoe plays and fast forwards at will. The narrative discontinuity reflects and echoes the discontinuity of the characters’ (especially Cudjoe’s and Wideman’s) lives as well as a postmodern conception of the human subject and the part narrative plays in its formation.

The second part of the novel, for example, begins by forgoing even the minimal continuity evident in the novel’s opening section, intruding a second narrative presence that both merges with and diverges from Cudjoe. It opens with a brief objective description of the May 13, 1985, police attack on the MOVE headquarters in West Philadelphia. The next paragraph begins, “Pretend for a moment that none of this happened. . . . Pretend we can imagine our events into existence. . . . Imagine our fictions imagining us.” A later paragraph quotes from the Annals of Philadelphia for 1850, while the next section quotes in part from, and retrospectively comments on, a telephone conversation that Wideman has with his imprisoned son. The next section, longer still, recounts how Wideman and his wife watched live television coverage of the Philadelphia fire, an account made strange by the fact that it starts out in the second person (“push button scanning of all available channels, flipping, clicking, twenty-nine cable options and none satisfactory so you choose them all and choose none, cut and paste images, you are the director, driver, pilot, boss hoss, captain, the switch is in your hand”) only itself to “switch” in mid-paragraph to first person.

Wideman develops, or structures, his characters in much the same way that he structures the novel’s plot and establishes its setting, the city that is virtually a character in its own right. Nowhere is this mode of characterization more apparent than in Wideman’s handling of the enigmatic J. B., who figures prominently in the novel’s concluding section. J. B. seems less a character than a composite sketch, the “Everyman” of medieval allegories. J. B. is, however, an Everyman who has no hope of reaching the Celestial City, for he finds himself not in an allegory but in a labyrinth of race and poverty, in the city of brotherly love transmogrified into the inner city of “brothelly” love. Literally a black derelict, J. B. is also John Africa, born James Brown, escaped (like Simba) from the Osage Street fire. He is a version of Simba but also one of Hitler escaped from his bunker, Christ risen from his tomb, and the legendary phoenix reborn from its own ashes. Among other things, J. B. is a Caribbean trying to find work in order to buy the freedom of his wife and children who are being held hostage (although they may already be dead), perhaps in the Dominican Republic or neighboring Haiti, where Cudjoe’s former wife, now remarried, lives with her and Cudjoe’s children. J. B. is also someone who, like Cudjoe but unlike many inner-city African American men, did not fight in Vietnam. That appears to be the only suffering that this black version of Archibald MacLeish’s J. B. from J. B.: A Play in Verse (1958), a rendering of the biblical Job, has been spared. Wideman’s J. B. is both Job and a God weary of having to tame the light every morning and of “playing father son and holocaust to the kids running wild in the streets and vacant lots,” presumably the same KKK that sets the sleeping J. B. on fire one morning. J. B. is also singer James Brown, singer of the blues that reflect the lives of African Americans, whose fate is to be both anonymous and demonized.

Critical Context

Robert Bone, author of the seminal study The Negro Novel in America (1958), has called Wideman “perhaps the most gifted black novelist of his generation.” Wideman began his writing career showing little interest in the African American tradition. He seemed more interested in and aware of the tradition that began with the eighteenth century English novel, which was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Wideman has cited Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, and Laurence Sterne as major influences on his work. His dense style, stream-of-consciousness technique, and formal experimentation, all of which derive from that tradition as transformed by writers such as James Joyce, set him apart still further from his African American heritage and more particularly the influential Black Arts movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The black literary movement has come to exert a powerful, if belated, influence on Wideman’s writing, particularly after his agreement, after some initial reluctance, to establish a black studies program at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1970’s, shortly after his years in England as a Rhodes scholar. Beginning with The Lynchers (1973) and, after an eight-year “silence,” continuing with his highly acclaimed The Homewood Trilogy (1985: includes Damballah, 1981; Hiding Place, 1981; and Sent for You Yesterday, 1983), Wideman’s work began to show the results of his immersion in a literary tradition that was at once foreign to him and yet his own. His books have also been increasingly personal. They include his thoughts on his return to the Homewood section of Pittsburgh where he grew up; a nonfiction account of himself and his brother, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without parole (Brothers and Keepers, 1984); and Philadelphia Fire.

“In America, especially if you’re black,” Wideman has said, “there is a temptation to buy a kind of upward mobility. One of the requirements is to forget. Eventually I felt impoverished by that act.” Forgetfulness and impoverishment are the twin themes upon which Philadelphia Fire plays its disturbing variations. Combining trenchant social criticism and postmodern narrative techniques, Philadelphia Fire is, like Cudjoe’s planned production of The Tempest, a work of great daring, impassioned artistry, and exceptional courage. It is also a novel that, in risking so much, risks being misread. The same year that Middle Passage (1990)—another densely (but playfully) intertextual novel about racial divisions—won the National Book Award, its author, Charles Johnson, summed up Philadelphia Fire, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, this way: “And there you have it: a novel in which we learn nothing new about the MOVE incident, a book brimming over with brutal, emotional honesty and moments of beautiful prose lyricism . . . but by no means a page turner.” In a novel that combines so many literary traditions and covers so much ground, encouraging the turning of pages no longer seems quite the virtue in a novel that Johnson believes it to be.

Bibliography

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. An excellent, although brief, introduction to Wideman’s writing through The Homewood Trilogy. Bell’s discussion of Wideman’s shift from a Eurocentric to an African American tradition is particularly good.

Coleman, James W. Blackness and Modernism: The Career of John Edgar Wideman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. This highly sympathetic study traces Wideman’s movement “from an uncritical acceptance of the forms and themes of mainstream modernism as practiced by white literary masters to a black voicing of modernism and postmodernism that is consistent with Afro-American perspectives and reflects a commitment to the needs of the black community.” Concludes with an interview of Wideman conducted in 1988.

O’Brien, John. Interviews with Black Writers. New York: Liveright, 1973. In an early but important interview, Wideman discusses the modernist influence on his first three novels and the importance of myths and “racial memories,” particularly in The Lynchers.

Pinckney, Darryl. “’Cos I’m a So-o-oul Man: The Back-Country Blues of John Edgar Wideman.” Times Literary Supplement, August 23, 1991, 19-20. Pinckney reviews Fever (1989) and Philadelphia Fire in the contexts of Wideman’s career and the larger cultural shift that has made Wideman’s return to his African American roots both explicable and predictable. Although he praises Fever for its range of characters and “carefully realized” situations, Pinckney finds Philadelphia Fire to be marred by Wideman’s penchant for profundity. Overall, “Wideman suffers from a wish to prove that he can be both poetic and funky.”

Rowell, Charles H. “An Interview with John Edgar Wideman.” Callaloo 13 (Winter, 1990): 47-61. Wideman discusses his background, his earliest interest in writing, the impact of his return to the United States in 1967 following his Rhodes scholarship, and use of “public history” in The Lynchers, Fever, and Philadelphia Fire.