December 12–19, 1996

book quarterly|fiction

The Cattle Killing

By John Edgar Wideman, Houghton Mifflin, 212 p., $22.95

Philadelphia, 1793: A fever is gripping the city, killing indiscriminately. As white civic leaders begin blaming the outbreak on black residents, a journeyman Negro minister settles in at St. Matthew's Church in rural Radnor. One afternoon he witnesses a black mother and her child walking in the woods to the banks of a lake:

Her feet print a second trail, paralleling then joining the first. She drops to one knee again. Gathers the child in her arms. Mutters indistinguishable sounds to it as she strides into the water. Slowly, deeper and deeper, stirring ripples behind and before her as one leg then the other pushes through the water. Water rises to her thighs, her waist, covers her breasts, the baby in her arms, water finally closing over the dark glisten of her skull... She strolled to the middle of the lake — disappeared — and you watched.

John Edgar Wideman's 1990 novel Philadelphia Fire focused on the sole survivor of the 1985 MOVE bombing, a young boy running from the flames on Osage Avenue. The haunting image in Fatheralong (1994), his memoir on black manhood, is of John's learning of his teen son's probable involvement in a murder, then kneeling before a tree, clawing at the earth in primal grief. Despite the bucolic setting of his new novel The Cattle Killing, once again John Wideman writes of lost children.

The novel, an expansion of the title story from Wideman's 1989 collection Fever, is a parable on race relations, using the actual "plague" as a launching pad to study how blacks and whites attempted to connect to each other and to God. The title refers to a ritual African tribes would perform to exorcise plagues ("The people must kill their cattle now if they wish to live forever in peace and harmony when the ancestors return"). In Wideman's account, however, "when we slaughtered our herds, we doomed our children."

The black preacher, an ex-slave, recalls serving George Stubbs, an actual Colonial-era artist who would examine the innards of corpses, "recording at every stage what his unblinking eye perceived. As much a record of disappearances as a portrait of what was present, the tangible blood and flesh and bone hanging there, perpetually giving way to what was next and next and next." Wideman himself brings this same sort of observation to his writing, resurrecting 18th-century Philadelphia.

I don't know if this is Wideman's best novel, but it is clearly his most confident, as he writes of 18th-century race relations with the same precision he brings to his work on modern urban life. It's heartbreaking to realize how little we've progressed in black-white affairs over 200 years. But Wideman preaches not collective guilt but rather collective responsibility, of whites and blacks to themselves and each other. And the unmistakable conclusion of The Cattle Killing is that we have an equal obligation to understand and learn from the past.

— Andrew Milner