Early in “Slaveroad,” John Edgar Wideman observes that one of the book’s main figures, William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians turned Presbyterian missionary, arrived in the Belgian Congo in 1890 around the same time that Joseph Conrad did.
“A simple historical fact on one hand, but it struck me as an uncanny coincidence, arousing my curiosity, igniting a sense of wonder,” Wideman writes. “The sort of hardheaded, unsatisfiable curiosity Sheppard shares with Marlow, the fictional sailor who narrates ‘Heart of Darkness.’”
Thereafter, Wideman imagines Sheppard and Marlow confronting grim rumors and then stark evidence of the slave trade and its cruelty. The author works this out for a few beguiling paragraphs before moving on to other reflections — about Conrad’s motives; Chinua Achebe’s famous response to Conrad; Wideman’s meeting Achebe; his sister’s religious faith; and the relationships between nature and the imagination, and between art- and profit-making for writers and imperialists alike.
A different writer might have created a full Borgesian fable about Marlow and Sheppard, or perhaps concentrated on Sheppard’s morally fraught story as he moves between America and Africa, evangelizing for God and agitating against the Belgian slavery system, while also cheating on his wife and facing discrimination back home.
Writing about such a life could rival Edward P. Jones’s treatment of the Black slaveholder Henry Townsend in “The Known World.” Great fiction could lend Sheppard a fullness and complexity not possible in proper biographies or in histories like Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost.” But this isn’t Wideman’s way. The hardheaded, unsatisfiable curiosity he assigns to Sheppard and Marlow is really his own.
Wideman has published an array of highly self-conscious and genre-bending works of fiction, memoir and cultural commentary over the past six decades. His books include two novels and a story collection about Black life in Pittsburgh, compiled in “The Homewood Trilogy,” and the searing “Brothers and Keepers,” about the braided lives of Wideman and his brother, a convict imprisoned for murder.
The title of his latest book affords its governing premise. Rather than the “whale-road” sung of by Anglo-Saxon bards, or the “Black Atlantic” researched and taught by academics, the ocean that carried the enslaved from Africa to the United States should be understood as a transhistorical, permanent “slaveroad,” whose forced travelers and accidental sojourners Wideman evokes on the page:
I stare, listen, study, bear witness to witnesses surrounding me who bear witness here and there on this slaveroad, this miry clay, this long, long road of bloody flesh, this unthinkable, unsinkable confusion that buoys and drowns me, my breath and bleeding thereupon.
Help me, Jesus: my mom’s better way of expressing all of the above.
In short chapters marked by riverine sentences and blunt self-reproach (“Stay in your lane”), both of which are compelled by his imaginative trespass into other people’s experiences, Wideman reveals the slaveroad’s presence in his own life and in the world. He returns repeatedly to Sheppard and his wife, Lucy Gantt, whose loyalty to her husband and shared religious zeal led to the death of two of their children, in Africa, and to her humiliation by the open secret of his infidelities while on mission.
Wideman conjures their situations in tandem with reflections on the moral, artistic and personal stakes of doing so. He acknowledges his debt to Sheppard and Lucy, frequently addressing them together about what he calls his “highhanded, one-sided manner of exploiting your stories in order to make sense of mine.” Elsewhere, he draws on the stories of several others, like his brother, released from prison and making his way through the vastness of Penn Station.
Wideman also ponders a failed effort at bonding with the poet Natasha Trethewey — unnamed, but he makes her identity Wiki-obvious — while she was his creative writing student in the 1990s. Even when well-intended and duly qualified, lines like “Each of us might have been the special friend the other yearned for/needed,” written by an older male professor about a younger female student, still land terribly in 2024.
“Conclusions,” a late chapter, is far stronger if uneven. Here, Wideman imagines from a variety of perspectives his son Jacob’s ongoing imprisonment for murdering a fellow teenage camper in 1986. The story is raw, affecting and unsettling in the main, but ends with a graphic sexualized fantasy that comes across as inchoately performative. Indeed, when Wideman doesn’t indulge in showy provocation or hyper self-consciousness, he tells and retells powerful, miry tales in “Slaveroad” that are incantatory, transporting and incendiary.
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