by John Edgar Wideman
Vintage Books, $12 paper
The night before I finished
reading John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, my one-year-old Honda
Civic was vandalized in an East Austin neighborhood.
It’s more than likely that the perpetrators were African-American, as am I. I
was stunned, at first, but a feeling of cynical resignation soon replaced that
emotion. After all, I have worked in East Austin (I don’t live there,
thankfully) for the past 12 years and my vehicles have been vandalized before
— I mean, what did I expect, anyway? The installation ceremony for my East
Austin Rotary Club had brought me to the Conley-Guerrero Senior Center that
evening. Since I seem to have been appointed the club’s official “Song-leader
for Life,” the retiring president had explicitly requested my presence. I would
have been there anyway since our regular noon meeting was canceled for the
occasion and I’m something of a compulsive concerning such things. We had just
finished celebrating the diversity of our club (it has more women, people of
color, and people under 50 years of age than any Rotary Club in the city) and
our high hopes for our neighborhood during the new Rotary year. Imagine my
disappointment when I returned to my car!
Many African-Americans struggle with this kind of ambivalence every day. On
the one hand we are proud of our heritage as a people, of our institutions, of
our neighborhoods and of our individual accomplishments. On the other hand,
amidst a barrage of negative media images and discrimination, we are driven
sometimes to near self-hatred by black-on-black violence and victimization. It
is this near schizophrenic duality with which Wideman struggles in his book.
Completed in 1984, Brothers and Keepers is, in many ways, the
autobiography of John Edgar Wideman, then a black professor of English at a
college in Laramie, Wyoming, and his younger brother Robert, who is currently
serving a life sentence for armed robbery and murder. At the same time, the
book is an allegory of the life-experience of countless numbers of
African-American men who grew up in stable families of modest means. It
attempts to discover how two boys from the same close-knit, loving household,
can mature into such radically different adults — one a P.E.N./Faulkner
Award-winning writer and respected educator, the other a down-and-out loser
from the ‘hood.
We learn from an alternating series of meticulously drawn vignettes that John
Edgar Wideman worked hard in school and on the basketball court and earned a
scholarship to a major university in Philadelphia. At the same time, we witness
the transformation Robert Douglas Wideman, or Robby as he was called, from
charming, sensitive child to troubled, but by no means “unique” adolescent —
“[Robby] was the rebel. He was always testing our parents, seeing how much he
could get away with… he hit the streets earlier, harder than the rest of us,
partied on weekends, stretched his curfew past midnight. He was grounded
countless times, but he ignored the groundings just as he’d ignored the house
rules that he’d broken to get himself in trouble in the first place.” This is
followed by Robby’s ever-downward spiral to small-time heroin addict, pusher,
perpetrator of a botched bait-and-switch scheme, and, ultimately, federal
prison inmate.
The Freudian diagnosis of “reaction formation” (exaggeration of the opposite
tendency) or “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” as it is defined in psychology
du jour, is no doubt too facile. However, Robert Wideman’s behavior, as
observed by his brother in the book, takes much from the school of “If I can’t
be a good student and a good athlete like `Big Bruh,’ I’ll skip school and run
drugs ‘n’ hustles, instead.” Furthermore, as he recounts the events leading up
to the robbery/murder and his subsequent flight during his brother’s visits to
the penitentiary, one becomes disturbingly aware of Robby’s inability to forsee
the consequences of his own actions. Jinxes, appallingly na�ve
superstitions, and luck direct his life, and he speaks constantly of his
“inability” to live his life as his other family members did. Robby found the
strictures of his family’s “work-ethic” particularly irksome. In his eyes,
working a “straight job” and practicing the virtues of patience, reason and
lawfulness, made one a “chump,” at best, and, in his twisted logic, a
“race-traitor” at worst. Robby had tragically convinced himself that achieving
the good things in life by honest means is possible only for European-Americans
(whites) and those who “foolishly” attempt to emulate them.
I finished reading Brothers and Keepers on June 19 or Juneteenth, the
anniversary of the freeing of Texas slaves. This book evoked powerful emotions
in me, some with which I had believed I had come to terms. It’s often said that
truth in art ennobles and empowers us. I feel neither ennobled nor empowered by
this work. The face that greets me each morning as I brush my teeth is reminder
enough of my ties to “Mother Africa.” I have enough memories of
nigger-callings, subtle “exclusions,” spittings, and unrequited loves to keep a
dozen therapists in Volvos for the rest of their lives, not to mention the
indignities I’ve suffered at the hands of my own people. I just want to pay my
bills and get on with my own life. I don’t have time to contemplate the
pathological idiocy that produced Robert Wideman and is now glorified in
gangsta rap, adolescent attire, and the “kulture of kool.”
I recommend the brilliantly written Brothers and Keepers for anyone
who has ever accused a person of color of “playing the race card.” The deck
is stacked, but I’m going to play the hand I was dealt by
the rules. See ya.
— Don Palmer
This article appears in July 19 • 1996 and July 19 • 1996 (Cover).