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@ 149 3 Modern and Contemporary African American Vernacular and Literary Voices I The Blues Voices in John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities An invitation from the editors of the American Book Review for a review of John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities was the primary occasion for “The Blues Voices in John Edgar Wideman’s Two Cities.” Because the editors were receptive to my writing style of long, interdisciplinary critical articles, and because I was preparing a reevaluation of Wideman’s novels for revision and update of my 1987 study of the African American novel, I was delighted to accept the invitation. As readers will discover, this article reveals my efforts to develop a more distinctive blues voice in my own style and structure of critical writing. If trouble was money, to borrow a line from bluesman Albert Collins, the black folks in John Edgar Wideman’s latest novel would be millionaires. Two Cities is a compelling culmination of the theme of contemporary black urban male double consciousness developed in Wideman’s thirteen previous critically acclaimed books. It interweaves a legendary political tragedy of Philadelphia with a blues love story of Pittsburgh. It is a novel that thematically and stylistically explores the boundaries and bridges that paradoxically separate and connect fact and fiction, past and present, places and people, black and white, men and women, young and old. It is an experimental novel that linguistically celebrates the resourcefulness and resiliency of the African American blues voice. That voice, in the words of Ralph Ellison, keeps “the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend 150 @ Chapter 3 it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (Shadow and Act 78). Like the Homewood trilogy, Two Cities is grounded in the authority and authenticity of the sights and sounds of Wideman ’s remembrances of his youth in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Wideman artistically transforms the memories of his “hood” into the agony and ecstasy, the desperation and hope of personal and communal love and loss. He achieves this through the alchemy of his literary imagination, political ideology, and the African American vernacular tradition that he shares with his narrators, characters, and primary audience. Similar to Philadelphia Fire, Two Cities is a meditation and lamentation on African American history and communities, especially the 1985 incendiary deaths of at least eleven black MOVE members, including children, in their fortified home and headquarters. Despite black neighbors’ protests of this quasi-military assault with machine guns, antitank weapons, explosives, and a helicopter-dropped bomb, the Osage (middle-class) neighborhood that Wideman also at one time called home was destroyed by fire. Ironically, this tragic, destructive assault was executed by predominantly white policemen under the orders of a liberal black politician, Mayor Wilson Goode. The novel also invokes the spirit of John Africa, the radical Afrocentric leader of MOVE, a back-to-nature, black primitivist sociocultural organization , to represent Wideman’s vision of the conflicting passions and purposes of contemporary black urban America. Wideman also uses John Africa as a symbol to challenge the implied author, main narrator, and audience to acknowledge the perversities and paradoxes that separate and connect time, place, and people in contemporary urban America. Wideman’s tale of two cities is, as the book jacket notes, essentially a “redemptive , healing love story” between Robert Jones and Kassima, a young black reclusive widow and mother in mourning for the deaths of her husband, from AIDS in prison, and two sons, from gang violence in the streets of Pittsburgh. After the loss of her husband and sons within the brief period of ten months had driven her into months of emotional and physical withdrawal, Kassima yields one night to her sexual urge for a man. She goes to Edgar’s bar and is picked up by Jones for a one-night stand. Having prayed “for a tallish, not too much belly, brown-skinned, slow-smiling man with big hands and clean, neat fingernails [. . .] who wouldn’t argue about wearing a johnny,” Kassima not only found her a “nice man” but she and Jones also had “a balling good time and started seeing each other regular” (50). Jones is a fifty-year-old former family man whose onenight stand turns into a crying, singing day of ecstatic lovemaking, redemptive [3.129.13.201] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 14:49 GMT...

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