BOOK REVIEW : Farming Fertile Ground of the City

Fever by John Edgar Wideman (Henry Holt: $15.95; 161 pages)

John Edgar Wideman writes about city streets as if he farmed or fished them. There is the defining and specific sense of place that writers so often command when their subject is climbing mountains, angling in streams, plowing fields, hunting in the woods or hauling on a boat in choppy waters.

Rarely are cities written about that way nowadays; not much since the ‘30s, maybe not much since Dickens. The city for most of our writers is a setting, a flavor, a plot or a symbol.

The people in Wideman’s black ghettos, on the other hand, come to their clouded fifth-floor walk-up windows to sniff the city morning--gritty, with a stew of chemical smells and decay--in order to psych out the day. They watch their fellows on the street--walking, lounging, gesturing--with a purpose. Each has a potential significance, useful or menacing. They listen to sirens, a snatch of music or a shouted phrase for the messages coded in them.

The streets are the state of nature, more Hobbes’ than Rousseau’s. It is only the very poor and the marginal who live in our cities fully. The rest of us live in our lives, which may or may not be set there. Slum dwellers cannot afford to distinguish life from the streets where it takes place.

In “Doc’s Story,” the first piece in this new collection, it is the streets, as much as anything, that are the principal figure. They belong to the narrator; they are all he has. For a while, a woman made them more promising and highly colored. She was a white woman--small, delicate, with blue veins showing in her transparent hands--and she was intrigued by the black narrator’s voice, his stories, his love of legend. She listened and moved on.

“He”--a third-person narrator increases the dolefulness--mopes indoors and waits for the summer when he can go to the dilapidated park and hang out, among derelicts, students and lovers, with his friends. They shoot baskets, wait for time to pass, and tell stories.

The story he wants to tell and hear again is about Doc. For a while, Doc taught at the university and lived as the only black man on a white street. He went blind, but he came down to the park every day to display his extraordinary skill in shooting baskets. Art and desire can perform miracles. And once, goaded by missing a shot, Doc insisted on playing a full game, played it, and played it well.

The narrator wishes he had told the story to the woman. “If Doc could do that anything’s possible, we’re possible.” Art is the prisoner’s wings.

Perhaps it sounds pat in summary. But “Doc’s Story,” in a few pages, is a lament that sets the slum park in a kind of golden frame. Wideman’s voice, at its best, is an intoxicating chanted music. Here is his narrator, raising an angel from the pavement:

“Doc always be hanging at the court. Blind as wood but you couldn’t fool Doc. Eyes in his ears. Know you by your walk. He could tell if you be wearing new sneaks, tell you if your old ones is laced or not. Know you by your breath. The holes you make in the air when you jump.”

“Doc’s Story” is one of two outstanding pieces in this collection. There are several interesting ones, in particular, a story told by an old Jewish man to his black cleaning woman. He had been in a concentration camp as a boy. One day, the guards beat him and he was about to be killed when a black prisoner stepped in. She was a jazz musician who was touring Europe when the war broke out.

The old man seeks a moment of communion. But the cleaning woman declares the gulf that separates them. “Always thought it was just you people over there doing those terrible things to each other,” she says. He was a victim once, but today, she is still cleaning white people’s toilets.

A number of other pieces are the slightest of vignettes. There is an amusing but effortful parody of contemporary literary theory. An academic tries to write a story but deconstructs it so thoroughly that it disintegrates. One or two pieces are too murky to succeed.

The last and title piece shows Wideman at the top of his power. It uses a yellow-fever epidemic that occurred in Philadelphia in the late 18th Century. The city’s blacks were blamed for it, yet many of them worked heroically to nurse the ill and bury the dead.

“Fever” is a complex but stunning interplay of three voices. One is that of Allen, a black minister and former slave who leaves his wife and child alone at home to work around the clock with Dr. Rush, a white physician. The second is that of an old Jew who is one of the victims. The third is that of a young black attendant in a present-day nursing home.

Both challenge Allen for his devotion and self-sacrifice. Be a Moses, the Jew says, lead your people out of captivity. The young black is hip and contemptuous:

“Talking all the time bout niggers got BO. Well, white folks got the stink and gone, man. Don’t be putting my hands on them, neither. Never. Huh uh. If I touch them, be wit gloves.”

Allen’s grave voice is searching and heartbreaking. He is fully aware of the degrading status he holds but he cannot escape his vocation of service. The three voices stay with us. Wideman’s passion is even-handed: all three are both right and deluded, but finally it is Allen, condemned to love, who holds our own love.