American Histories

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John Edgar Wideman. American Histories

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Fanon: A Novel

Briefs: Stories

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John Brown remembers the wonder in Frederick’s voice, how softly, reverently his son spoke, so many stars overhead in the black sky, remembers the wagon wheels’ jolt, yield, bounce had spun a seemingly unending length of rough fabric from the road’s coarse thread, then a seamless, silky ride for John Brown lasting until Frederick’s words returned him to an invisible chaos of slippery mud, rocks, craters that snatch them, tumble them, rattle their bones. Any moment a sudden, unavoidable accident might pitch both men overboard or smash the wagon to splinters as it traverses this broken section of road between Cleveland and Kansas, and there is no other road except the one spun for a few minutes during John Brown’s forgiving sleep, his forgetful sleep.

How many minutes, hours, how much unbroken silence of sleep before he awakened abruptly to hear his son Frederick’s voice asking how many miles covered, how many more miles to go to Kansas, Father. His poor, half-mad, feeble-brained son, the one of all his children, people agree, who resembles him most in face and figure, Fred, loyal and uncomplaining as a shoe. Tall, sturdy Frederick, who will die in a few weeks in Kansas. Dead once before as an infant, then reborn, rebaptized Frederick in remembrance of his lost little brother. Frederick’s second chance to live cut short by ruffians in a border war, my second perished Frederick. Then a third chance, a dark son or dark father or mysteriously both, bearing the same Christian name my sons bore, Frederick, and John Brown trembles after his sleeping eyes pop open when he hears his son’s declaration, Frederick’s soft blasphemy revealing his wonder at a thought he had brewed all by himself while he drove the wagon transporting father and son to the killing fields of Missouri and Kansas, driving through this great holy world, this conundrum, John Brown thinks, far too perplexing, too fearful for a father to grasp or explicate.

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