November 4, 1984
Of One Blood, Two Men By ISHMAEL REED
BROTHERS AND KEEPERS
By John Edgar Wideman.
hile the Puritans sometimes executed their children in order to teach obedience, we today - with somewhat the same mistaken approach to correction - send criminals to prison, only to teach them to become better criminals. As Robert Wideman - the younger brother of the Rhodes Scholar and award- winning novelist, John Edgar Wideman - says in ''Brothers and Keepers,'' ''By the time a dude gets out of here, most likely he's a stone criminal, or thinks he is. They got professors and Ph.D.'s in crime giving crime lessons in here. . . . You learn how to go for the big time.''
''Brothers and Keepers'' is John Edgar Wideman's gripping account of the the events, social pressures and individual psychological responses that led his brother Robert to prison for murder and him to a middle-class life as a professor of English at the University of Wyoming in Laramie. By combining his own literary skill with the candor and vitality of his brother's street style, Mr. Wideman gives added power and dimension to this book about the contrary values and goals of two brothers. It is a rare triumph in its use of diverse linguistic styles; the result is a book that has the impact of reading Claude Brown's powerful ''Manchild in the Promised Land'' and James Weldon Johnson's elegant ''The Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man'' in alternating paragraphs.
John Edgar Wideman and Robert Wideman, who is 10 years John's junior, were born to the same Pittsburgh family, but that's about all they have in common. John has become the author of six novels (including ''Sent For You Yesterday,'' which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1983) and is a college professor with an attractive family and a Volvo station wagon. Robert Wideman is serving a life sentence at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. Much of the book deals with how the two men arrived at such different destinies, or as the line from the Sly Stone song, ''A Family Affair,'' quoted in the book, says: ''One child grows up to be somebody / who just loves to learn / And the other child grows up to be / Somebody who just loves to burn.''
John Wideman's thoughts about the question are more complex. ''People and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence,'' he writes, ''but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is. The intertwining strands of DNA that determine a creature's genetic predispositions might serve as a model for this complexity, but the double helix, bristling with myriad possibilities, is not mysterious enough.'' The Widemans' dedicated mother, Betty, is more to the point in explaining Robert's ''wildness'': ''That's how he's been since the day the Good Lord put him on His earth.'' Pittsburgh's seedy Homewood district provided Robert's destructive characteristics with the perfect feeding ground. He wanted to be a ''player,'' a ''rebel,'' to ''party hearty.'' He mocked the ''straight square'' goals of his brothers and sisters who received good grades and did right. ''No way Ima be like the rest of them niggers scuffling . . . to get by. Scuffling . . . till the day they die and the shame is they ain't even getting by. They crawling. They stepped on.'' He would have none of this. He wanted to be ''stone Hollywood . . . stone sharp. . . . We the show people. The glamour people. Come on the set with the finest car, the finest woman, the finest vines . . . What else a dude gon do. . . . You make something out of nothing.''
DESIRING to make something out of nothing, Robert and his friends pool their money and buy heroin for re-sale to addicts, but instead of becoming the ghetto Superflies of their ambitions, they have the luck of the Three Stooges in a farcical but deadly tragedy. The heroin they buy goes bad. Robert gets sick from it. He and his friends lose their jobs. As a way of raising cash to buy more heroin, they try to run a variation of the Murphy game on a fence, only this time, instead of using nonexistent prostitutes as the bait, they promise the fence, who is white, nonexistent, hot television sets.
The scam works if you take the fence's money and run, leaving him in the lurch, stranded in a hostile neighborhood. Instead, the scam backfires and in the resulting confusion the fleeing fence is shot in the shoulder after one of Wideman's companions mistakenly believes that the fence was harboring a weapon. The shoulder wound turns out to be fatal, and Robert is informed the next day by the partner who actually did the shooting, ''We bought one.''
What happens next is as old as the oldest slave narrative. Three black con men who have been involved in the murder of a crooked white man take flight. In Nebraska, Robert notices a sign and ruminates, ''When I saw the sign saying Lincoln I remembered school and the lesson on states and capitals. Maybe it was something about Lincoln freeing the slaves. . . . I was happy I seen that Lincoln sign.''
John Wideman's flight is of a different nature. Like Toni Morrison's memorable New Woman, Jadine, he is in flight from his background and from his ''community.'' He is alienated from his roots and from the ''jitterbug'' styles that embarrass him. He constructs a shell around himself. He hides his inner feelings. ''I'd come west to escape the demons Robby personified. I didn't need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly the world still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life on the Laramie plains.''
On Feb. 13, 1976, the day after the three fugitives take refuge in John Wideman's home in Laramie, they are arrested in Fort Collins, Colo. John reports that one detective described the captives as ''Niggers wanted for Murder One back East.'' What happened to Robert Wideman after his arrest is all too familiar in a country where one finds a disproportionate number of black males in jail, in the army or in the morgue as homicide victims. He spent six months in jail before going to trial, and two years in a county jail before receiving a sentence. According to John, the jury was given a ''prejudiced charge'' by the trial judge; despite that, Robert's appeal was denied by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
Although ''Brothers and Keepers'' is, above all, a sensitive and intimate portrayal of the lives and divergent paths taken by two brothers, John Wideman's visits to prison are the source of some powerfully written scenes in which he conveys his impressions of American prisons. He never allows his narrative to become merely a sociological tract on prison reform, but he does share his insights concerning a society that would allow the abominable conditions existing inside prisons. Particularly vivid are his experiences with the guards, ''the Keepers,'' who humiliate the prisoners and degrade their guests with lurid-minded strip searches: ''You say it's a wire in your bra, lady. Well, I'm sorry but you gotta take it off.''
Occasionally, the guards promote or carry out death sentences against prisoners they consider to be ''trouble makers.'' Mr. Wideman refers to one guard as a ''Nazi Gestapo Frankenstein robot,'' a characterization that might disappoint those who saw the author as merely another bland, genteel, malleable and mumbling token writer and professor. The guards aren't the only ones who receive Mr. Wideman's verbal hornet-stings. Here is his description of the prison waiting room: ''The room made me feel like a bug in the bottom of a jar. I remembered all the butterflies, grasshoppers, praying mantises, and beetles I had captured on the hillside below the tracks. At least the insects could see through the glass walls, at least they could flutter or hop or fly, and they always had enough air until I unscrewed the perforated top and dumped them out.''
MR. WIDEMAN remembers times in his life when he wanted to punch or to murder someone instead of tolerating the insults. In ''Black Like Me,'' John Howard Griffin, the white journalist who ''passed'' for black in order to see how it felt, wrote that the rudeness and hostility that black men faced in everyday life were what surprised him the most. Mr. Wideman was almost thrown in jail himself for being an accomplice to the crime committed by his brother and his friends, and he was questioned about his possible involvement in another robbery that his brother was suspected of. ''I was black. My brother was a suspect. So perhaps I was the fourth perpetrator. No matter that I lived four hundred miles from the scene of the crime. No matter that I wrote books and taught literature and creative writing at the university. I was black. Robby was my brother. Those unalterable facts would always incriminate me.''
Having toured a number of American jails, including Attica and San Quentin, as a writing instructor for inmates, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Wideman's estimate of American prisons. Indeed, one could say that his precocious daughter is too polite when she compares the jail where she visits her Uncle Robby to a cage where animals are kept. Mr. Wideman may be off- target, however, when he suggests that the conditions in jails are solely the fault of the keepers. Ultimately, the guards do not set policy. Underpaid and ill-trained, they are merely sullen gray knights who carry out the policies of others. During the uprising at Attica, both prisoner and guard were slaughtered, achieving in death a kind of ironic camaraderie. But when Mr. Wideman compares the situation of the inmates in prison to that of ''civil death,'' he will find little disagreement from those who have actually taken time to visit a prison, a trip I recommend to some of our intellectual arm-chair experts who believe that human rights violations are what happen only in ''backward'' parts of the world. For Mr. Wideman, visiting his brother is like ''going to a funeral parlor. Both situations demand unnatural responses, impose a peculiar discipline on the visitor. . . . You are mourning, bereaved, but you pretend the shell in the coffin is somehow connected with the vital, breathing person you once knew.''
THOUGH his life is in constant danger, Robert Wideman refuses to be entombed - for him the prison becomes a monastery. While in prison, he has earned a college degree. John begins to admire his brother and discovers that the same characteristics that landed him in jail help him to survive.
There have been a slew of prison books, especially in the 1960's. Most were written to address the conscience of those in a position to eradicate the ugly, medieval conditions that exist in many American jails. Mr. Wideman says his purpose in writing ''Brothers and Keepers'' is not to reach the nation's conscience but to reach out to his brother, to ''salvage'' something ''from grief and waste.'' Still, he is aware of the ''political mood of the country.'' ''Keep these misfits away from me'' is society's attitude, an attitude that demands more jails, stiffer penalties and no plea bargaining.
Mr. Wideman uses an impressive array of literary skills in ''Brothers and Keepers.'' In one passage, he convincingly mimes the rhythms and style of the Depression writings of Carl Sandburg and Margaret Walker: ''Wagons once upon a time in the streets of Pittsburgh. Delivering ice and milk and coal. Sinking in the mud, trundling over cobblestones, echoing in the sleep of a man who works all day in the mouth of a fiery furnace, who dreams of green fish gliding along the clear, stony bottom of a creek in South Carolina. In the twenty years between 1910 and 1930, the black population of Pittsburgh increased by nearly fifty thousand. Black music, blues and jazz, came to town in places like the Pythian Temple, the Ritz, the Savoy, the Showboat. In the bars on the North Side, Homewood, and the Hill you could get whatever you thought you wanted. Gambling, women, a good pork chop.''
Judging from ''Brothers and Keepers,'' Robert Wideman is a changed man; he has been rehabilitated. And in his speech printed toward the end of the book, on the occasion of his getting his college degree while in prison, he says: ''My education helped me to realize . . . that nothing worth having comes without hard work and concrete effort. But being shaped by the world through this 'quick-get-over' concept and seeing that this concept was folly, it is now time to take our lives and our world in our own hands and shape it for the better.'' A reason for optimism but, in the last depressing letter from Robert Wideman to his brother, we learn that the program that allowed him to receive his degree has been terminated.
Robert Wideman knows who he is. But John Wideman isn't sure about himself, and his ''identity crisis'' is the source of the intense, brooding and brilliant monologues appearing throughout the bo ok as he probes his motives and feelings. ''I have a lot to hide,'' he acknowledges. Like most middle-class ethnic novelists who are partly assimilated Yankee, Mr. Wideman occasionally rebukes himself with harsh and self-deprecating remorse. But one could argue that only from his vantage point, a hazy area between two worlds, is he able to discover original and profound truths about both worlds. W. E. B. Du Bois's ''double consciousness'' (or even ''triple consciousness'') is not a dilemma but constitutes a further step in man's intellectual evolution. The terrifying crises of our time have been brought about by the inability of people to put themselves in the other guy's shoes.
Mr. Wideman has succeeded brilliantly in both understanding his brother's life and coming to terms with his own. He has no reason for remorse.
Ishmael Reed's latest books are ''The Terrible Twos,'' a novel, and ''God Made Alaska for the Indians.''
LEARNING TO LISTEN TO HIS BROTHER
The hardest habit to break, since it was a habit of a lifetime, would be listening to myself listening to him. That habit would destroy any chance of seeing my brother on his terms; and seeing him in his terms, learning his terms, seemed the whole point of learning his story. However numerous and comforting the similarities, we were different. The world had seized on the difference, allowed me room to thrive, while he'd been forced into a cage. Why did it work that way? What was the nature of the difference? Why did it haunt me? Temporarily at least, to answer these questions, I had to root my fiction-writing self out of our exchanges. I had to teach myself to listen. Start fresh, clear the pipes, resist too facile an identification, tame the urge to take off with Robby's story and make it my own. I understood that, but could I break the habit? And even if I did learn to listen, wouldn't there be a point at which I'd have to take over the telling? Wasn't there something fundamental in my writing, in my capacity to function, that depended on flight, on escape? Wasn't another person's skin a hiding place, a place to work out anxiety, to face threats too intimidating to handle in any other fashion? Wasn't writing about people a way of exploiting them?