John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life : Only Connect

Family and racial history are the sap of John Wideman’s 21-volume corpus. Fatheralong’s subtitle, A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society offers a key to Wideman’s works, memoirs as well as fictions. Writing to Save a Life starts from memories of Emmett Till’s 1955 lynching and exoneration of the perpetrators ; then moves on to Louis Till’s execution (Emmett’s father) after a dubiously fair 1945 court martial trial in Italy. Writing to save a Life reopens the court martial file, pinpoints inconsistencies and offers a not unlikely version that fills in the blanks left by official army records. The book finds a peace of sorts, closing on a well known African American folk tale affirming the need to struggle against racial oppression : puny bees resist Brother Bear’s greed.