John Edgar Wideman on the Road We All Must Travel

‘Slaveroad’By John Edgar WidemanScribner, 224 PagesEvery biography is also an autobiography, Paul Murray Kendall declares in “The Art of Biography.” How the story of someone else’s life is told depends very much on who the biographer is, as well as what that biographer finds significant. John Edgar Wideman turns that declaration around to, in effect, say: Every autobiography is a biography. Mr. Wideman turns himself into a biographical subject, as he ponders what his family, students, other writers, and his characters see in him. He can never get outside of himself to say what they see, but he keeps trying to do so on the slaveroad, that imprisoning set of conditions no one can escape. As an African American, Mr. Wideman cannot decamp from color and how American and African history have used color to define people. Because the metaphor of slaveroad is all encompassing, the result is that white Americans are also enslaved to their conception of color and what it signifies.“Slaveroad” is by no means an indictment of any group but rather an exposure of how impossible it is for anyone not to travel the slaveroad. Mr. Wideman makes the effort, again and again, to liberate himself from his own experiences so that he can write about them. Yet he realizes he is just too implicated in what he wants to write about to be certain that his writing is getting him anywhere.“Slaveroad” can seem a frustrating, even annoying book, but it’s also a courageous one because Mr. Wideman is never willing to exalt himself as some kind of authority over what happened in his own life, let alone over what the experience of others might signify. Taken to its ultimate extreme, Mr. Wideman’s epistemological approach would seem nugatory, but the truth of his quest to know himself by writing about himself and others is what matters, even if, in his own estimation, he continually fails to measure up. “Slaveroad” is actually, at times, about slavery and its legacy, and about those who tried to end it. A case in point is William Henry Sheppard (1865-1927). You can look him up and learn about his efforts in the Congo. As an African American Presbyterian missionary, he exposed the atrocities of Belgium’s King Leopold II. Yet that’s not the way Mr. Wideman introduces what is, in effect, not merely a historical figure but the novelist’s character: “If asked to tell his story, what would William Henry Sheppard say. Dead now all these years. Nothing. He says nothing and I listen. Words begin. Pages turn.”In “Slaveroad,” Sheppard is no different from Mr. Wideman, from any of us, insofar as he has a destination and is going he knows not where: “Sheppard stares at the sea saying nothing day after day. Cold, cold ocean is what he sees. One more river to cross. Or a boundless expanse. Africans chained deep in the ship’s deep, black belly. If he asked them to tell their story, what would they say. Dead so long. And soon he, too, will be dead. Nothing then. Crying in the building soon be over, soon be over.”The last phrase, “Crying in the building,” is arresting because it takes us out of the ship and to anywhere, really, which is Mr. Wideman’s point about the slaveroad. We are never off it — the slaves or the so-called free people — because the ship is really a state of mind: “Color separates, the ones in charge decree. Now and forever after, they decree. Color, they decree, separates cargo from passengers. Magic, they decree. Now you see color, now you don’t, but color forever, they decree. Color and separation understood as a single word. You can’t say one without saying the other. You cannot see, cannot mean one without meaning the other. Color and separation as inseparable as cold and sea.”Later we learn more about Sheppard, including the scandal of his sexual affairs with the natives that brought him home in disgrace, making him, Mr. Wideman wryly explains, not exactly a role model — one he is told cannot be celebrated when he proposes memorializing Sheppard.Mr. Wideman has written a difficult, ambitious book that is sure to irritate some and exhilarate others.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”

John Edgar Wideman on the Road We All Must Travel

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