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• W2000770219 abstract "From Slavers to Drunken Boats: A Thirty-Year Palimpsest in John Edgar Wideman’s Fiction Jean-Pierre Richard (bio) Hurry Home was published in 1970, the second of three novels marking the initial phase of John Edgar Wideman’s literary career, from 1967 to 1973. Only in 1981 did new fiction appear under his name with the first two books in the Homewood Trilogy. While there is no gainsaying the 1981 switch in influence from “Great Tradition” literate models to oral frequencies of eloquence (Coleman), equal emphasis can be put on continuity of inspiration over the last thirty years. The “drunken boat” first met in Hurry Home (254) is a case in point. What emerged as theme in 1970 was to develop from 1981 onward into full-fledged narrative, ever rocking to the same “gentle rhythm” (255). Gradually Arthur Rimbaud’s nautical metaphor was to displace persistent images of the slave trade. “The narrow ship plies backward and forward relentlessly”: repetition of the sentence in Hurry Home (238, 306) is a direct reminder of the transatlantic shuttle and, beyond that, an emblem of racial thinking at large. Yet, the phrase also suggests just the opposite, the eurhythmics of love-making, the “skipping backwards / And forwards” of the author’s dedication “For Judy.” The whole novel is presented as love’s shuttle in words. The story line does move back and forth but themes still upstage narrative rhythms. Only in later works are those foregrounded. They become operative with the Homewood Trilogy, according to a key formula best phrased in The Cattle Killing (54): “stories go backward to go forward. Forward to go back.” Storytelling has the potential of erasing the slavers’ shuttle. Will the craft of fiction eventually displace the “narrow ship” of racial history? The superb “drunken boat” episode in Hurry Home (242–60) will be our seamark as we try and chart out of the “drunken boat” metaphor first the emergence of “back and forth” storytelling, and then its expansion as palimpsest for the Middle Passage. Hurry Home introduces ships in John E. Wideman’s fiction and, along with them, the rocking time that was to characterize the author’s storytelling in the Homewood books and later works, a “gentle rhythm” that had to build up and prevail if painful memories of the slavers’ own destructive “rocking” across the Atlantic were to be countered. [End Page 656] The main protagonist Cecil Braithwaite has left his home and his wife in the United States; he is now on his own in Madrid. Coming out of the Prado, he meets a Californian of Dutch extraction named Albert, a racist who has a “Hemingway beard” and calls a whore a whore. Accompanied by one such named Estrella, the two men embark on night-long bar crawling. Cecil gets drunk, dances with the girls, and fights with the boys. For him the night ends as it began, in heroics: first he was “Cecil conqueroo,” “El Moro,” come to Spain seeking the “black kings” of the Arab conquest. He identifies with them, as evidenced by his italicized vision (248–49). Yet, as he “mounts” a rock with a European girl, “as high as [he] had ever been,” memories of the ocean’s “thousand deaths” soon shatter the heroic/erotic dream, the print switches back to roman lettering, and “sweet booze looseness ease[s] the conqueroo.” Next comes the portrait of Albert as a has-been (250–53). Indeed the “Dutchman”‘s braggadocio fares no better than El Moro’s. A few old pictures of him “very young posing with heroes” in South America is about all the miles gloriosus has left to show: “Oh, the good old days. Blood. Spirit of the revolution! Gone.” His “heroic” face is clearly “stamped on deflated currency.” From mixing with Albert, Cecil turns quixotic: “but first my armor . . . from my charger I leapt down” (258).1 As home both to truly heroic “black kings” and to the heroics of knight errant and Caudillo, Spain provides an ideal setting. Then, in sails Rimbaud’s “drunken boat.” “Swayed” by brandy and the “wail of flamenco,” Cecil starts “rocking” “either inwardly or with his body”: Not the sickening lurch of..." @default.
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• W2000770219 date "1999-01-01" @default.
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• W2000770219 title "From Slavers to Drunken Boats: A Thirty-Year Palimpsest in John Edgar Wideman's Fiction" @default.
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• W2000770219 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.1999.0129" @default.
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