Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir 
by 

John Edgar Wideman (Goodreads Author)

 

We Supposed to Die

Complicated family history can be wretched. If the complicated family history is that of a black American, it can well be unendurably tragic. John Edgar Wideman has such a family history: a brother sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1977; a son sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in 1986 (recently paroled); an uncle shot and killed in his own house. Being black in America exaggerates and accelerates all the typical problems of family life. And then adds a whole lot more.

Wideman writes as a man sitting on a knife-edge. How easily history could have been different. The slightest mis-calculation or mis-step or chance event and he could have been his brother locked up with no chance of release. While his brother broods continuously about what brought him to such a hopeless place, Wideman can only do the same and wonder at the consummate randomness of life in which there is no protection only the threat of the system.

His personal success in the system has produced, "A self no more or less in control than the countless other selves who each, for a time, seem to be running things."And even this tentative status is undermined in his conversations with his brother during the writing of the book. Not even his memories are secure. He is a man without a determinate history at all: " ...if his version of the past is real, then what's mine?" How honest is he really about his own life? How much of it has been wasted in not giving attention to that most important in it?

But Wideman is an artist. Every ounce of suffering and confusion and dissociation is used to produce something beautiful. He is a man, for example, who lives uneasily in two worlds. As a celebrated teacher and writer he has made it. But his siblings and extended family are where they always have been – largely struggling to maintain recognition of themselves as human beings. Wideman captures part of this state in his alternation between standard English and dialect. His prose in both is mesmerising. Each sets the other off as valuable and uniquely expressive.

This is a memoir which is hard to take. Not just because of its existential punch. The scenes of disintegration of the black community in Pittsburgh, of the rise of a compensatory drug culture, of the persistent and deep racism in the United States, of the expensive and counter-productive vindictiveness of the entire penal system were written forty years ago. 

The events themselves occurred twenty years before that. Yet they could have been written last week. Even after eight years of a black man as president, arguably the most intelligent and articulate in its history, America appears even more violently intent on maintaining the subjugation of its black population. 

Wideman's makes his purpose in writing clear, "I was trying to discover words to explain what was happening to black people." That he succeeds in this is beyond doubt. Only the effects of the words he has found are in question. They may not have been enough. His brother’s desperation in prison may sum the situation, "We see what's going down. We supposed to die."