The Silent Man's Voice in "The Statue of Liberty"

“Stories are like onions. You peel one skin and another grins up at you.”

John Edgar Wideman, Fatheralong (61)

“The Statue of Liberty” is a programmatic title. Give the reader only that to go by and an icon of America’s self-congratulation may offer itself. Add the author’s name or, if you are first approaching his work, his picture on the back cover and that initial program may be redirected into the consciousness that the statue’s torch also casts shadows onto this ideal world, perhaps, to some extent, points them out.

But such a program is only in the mind, and a different strain rises from the page as the story creates its own path away from prefabricated guesses. Put in a few words, “The Statue of Liberty” deals with American fantasies of interracial sex. John Wideman does not treat this theme in the hilarious manner of Cecil D. Brown’s The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger. Nor is there any sardonic signifying such as in Hal Bennett’s Lord of the Dark Places or Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Those fictions bear the stamp of the Blaxploitation era. “The Statue of Liberty” is more intemporal. There is humor in it but contained by the grave and sedate tone it assumes to present its concern for the black man’s status. This essay will try to delve into the textual strategy of a story that opens like a bland narration and builds its way to an unwritten question, yet one repeated three times (perhaps once for each shadow of a character) in the shape of the “Y” pattern the three chairs have been disposed in on the unfinished patio.

The Statue of Liberty is an infrequent visitor in John Wideman’s fiction. However, it does come up in Philadelphia Fire as “the bitch wit the torch” (80) and much more signally in a passage of Hurry Home ¹ that must be brought up here if only because it happens to associate the statue with sex. Cecil Braithwaite’s departure for Europe tests the reader’s need to cast anchor in the referential world while a merciless poetic logic sweeps his mind out to sea, the way Cecil is put afloat when the land leaves the ship. The young traveler’s qualms (“do all journeys commence with such questioning, such tumult and confusion”), the text’s teeming “formless profusion” and the taunting “significance to be deciphered” come together in a passage that globally offers itself as a trope for Cecil’s existential anguish. The text erases punctuation, plays upon the signified and the signifier, jumbles the metaphorical and the metonymic, blurs the realistic bearings that stabilize reading such as when “Handle with care, with fragility. Made in Japan. Maid in Germany. Union maid” leads, through an allusion to Wallace Stevens twenty lines or so further down, to “the tall lady with an upraised ice cream cone toasting the emperor.” Hurry Home’s derision of the symbolic torch lighting the way to the gate of freedom happens to be ushered in by the embrace, the passionate-sex-on-the-deck-before-departure (but who knows, as the liner already is on its way to the open sea?) of an anonymous couple.

Cecil is confused, out of place, whatever he may think to the contrary. He is an educated young man whose head has been crammed full of literary knowledge (even some Old English) not necessarily relevant to the life opening before him as a black lawyer. T.S. Eliot’s foggy dangerous world of “The Dry Salvages” is present through the tolling harbor buoys defining the navigable channel. But so is Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” through the allusion to geological times. As Jacqueline Berben suggests in her unpublished dissertation (221–23), there are other leads to grasp at to reconstruct the racial overtones Cecil’s existential anguish carries. The rusty knell of the buoys doubles into bell boys, and the horn’s shriek “Bee Ohh” suggests B.O., the 1950s body odor advertisement for...