LANGUAGES OF HOME

A gathering of sharply focused essays by the distinguished novelist.

“The peculiar and perhaps fatal American violence is the refusal to connect,” writes Wideman. One aspect of that refusal gives this collection its title, as the author recounts gazing, as a youngster, into a confectioner’s shop in his native Pittsburgh, his pockets full from the proceeds of his paper route, and pronouncing the prices “exorbitant,” infuriating a white passerby. Wideman knows why: “I’d stolen a piece of their language. Not only was it in my possession, I also had the nerve to flaunt it in a public place, in their righteous faces.” Another source for the title is the author’s close attention to language: the blending of “literate and oral traditions” in Gayl Jones’ novel Corregidora, the use of dialect in 19th-century literature, and the contrary refusal of the poet Phillis Wheatley to use anything but “the eighteenth-century literary code of English, a code doubly foreign, a tradition in which her achievements seem both miraculous and pedestrian.” One of several tours de force here is Wideman’s long meditation on, among other things, the unhappy fate that befell Louis Till, estranged father of Emmett, who was executed for allegedly committing rape in Italy during World War II; the author has long been attuned to issues of justice and injustice, with an early essay on white police in Black communities carrying a blunt message: “Whatever else the policeman is, he is also a further validation of the cage.” Wideman’s serious considerations of history and culture are punctuated by several perceptive pieces on hoops, writing in one that “playground basketball is the most democratic of games” and celebrating the sui generis style of Dennis Rodman, whom, in a fine literary turn, he groups alongside Caliban and Frankenstein’s monster as “neither one thing or another.”

Brittle and brilliant, a welcome record of Black life and thought in an often unwelcoming nation.