The Walls Of Our Cage: Reading John Edgar Wideman

He stared at me, waiting for an answer. At home we didn't get in other people's faces like that. You talked towards a space and the other person had a choice of entering or not entering ...
I was today years old a few months ago when I first heard of the great American author John Edgar Wideman. A friend from Pittsburgh invited me to participate in the #WidemanChallenge, in which a few literary critics, bloggers and journalists spend the end of 2020 calling attention to a writer that too few people know about - an important voice from the Rust Belt whose works are keenly relevant in the year of George Floyd.
I agreed to join this challenge and dove into a recent book by John Edgar Wideman, a volume of short stories called American Histories, which fascinated me with spinning fantasies of conversations with the pre-Civil-War abolitionist John Brown, brushes with Sonny Rollins and Jean-Michel Basquiat and fractured scenes of family life, campus life, city life, trouble life, conflicts and confrontations. But I could tell I was reading a late career book, because the sophisticated complexity of the intellectual journeys in this book made me feel like I had walked into the last act of a Philip Glass opera. I couldn't quite piece together who this author was from American HIstories, so I turned to a key early book by this author, Brothers and Keepers, originally published in 1984. With this book I began to understand the mission John Edgar Wideman is on, and the reason his growing readership is so enthusiastic about him.
