Writing to Save a Life

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John Edgar Wideman. Writing to Save a Life

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John Edgar Wideman’s books include American Histories, Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots and Sent for You Yesterday. He is a MacArthur Fellow and has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. He divides his time between New York and France.

Fanon: A Novel

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I accompany her, moving slowly up and down the slight slope, between the rows, because when you stand still, Plot E’s quiet is too enveloping, too heavy, too sad. I need to animate my limbs, stop holding my breath in this almost forgotten site where ninety-six white squares mark the remains of men, eighty-three of them colored men. What color are the eighty-three colored men now. What color are the thirteen other men beneath their gray numbers. I think of numbers I wore on basketball and football jerseys. Numbers on license plates. Numbers tattooed on forearms. My phone number, social security number.

On page 173 in chapter 27, the final chapter of Kaplan’s book, she narrates in a footnote how she reaches number 73, the corner grave in row four that belongs to Louis Till. His story has such tragic historical resonance, she writes, then informs the reader of Private Louis Till’s execution by the army in 1945 for crimes of murder and rape in Italy, and that ten years later in 1955, Till’s fourteen-year-old son Emmett was beaten, shot, and thrown in a river in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman.

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