Brothers and Keepers. John Edgar Wideman

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      John Edgar Wideman’s books include Writing to Save a Life, Philadelphia Fire, American Histories, 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. In 2017, he won the Prix Femina Étranger for Writing to Save a Life. He divides his time between New York and France.

       ALSO BY JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

       Fanon: A Novel

       Briefs: Stories

       God’s Gym: Stories

       The Island: Martinique

       Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love

       Two Cities: A Novel

       The Cattle Killing: A Novel

       Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society

       All Stories Are True

       The Stories of John Edgar Wideman

       Philadelphia Fire: A Novel

       Fever: Stories

       Reuben: A Novel

       Sent for You Yesterday: A Novel

       Damballah: Stories

       Hiding Place: A Novel

       The Lynchers: A Novel

       Hurry Home: A Novel

       A Glance Away: A Novel

       Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File

       American Histories: Stories

      Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

      canongate.co.uk

      This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © John Edgar Wideman, 1984

      Preface copyright © John Edgar Wideman, 2005

      First published in 1984 in the United States by Henry Holt and Company

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78689 204 1

      eISBN 978 1 78689 206 5

       To Bette WidemanWhose love, whose sweet dream of freedomblesses all her children

       CONTENTS

       Preface

       Author’s Note

       VISITS

       OUR TIME

       DOING TIME

       PREFACE

      Since Brothers and Keepers’s original publication in 1984, hundreds of well-meaning strangers, people who know me and my brother only from the pages of a book, have approached me and asked, How’s your brother doing? Here’s a quick update of an impossible answer. Robert Wideman’s health is reasonably good, his spirit is strong, and he persists in believing he’ll soon be released from the penitentiary. Robby remains a determined, thoughtful, amiable, optimistic man, and, like my son Jake, creates inside the walls of prison a life fuller than the lives lots of us manage in the so-called free world. This in spite of the fact he is intensely aware of the limits and dangers imposed by confinement, and regrets each day the mistakes he committed that landed him in jail and cost the life of another human being. My brother speaks to me often about the greatest burden he believes he bears: being a source of immeasurable grief to his family and the family of the man killed in a crime this book describes. Robby has married again. As far as he’s able from behind prison bars, he endeavors to support his former wife and their son, Chance, born February 13, 1990, two days after Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison.

      Robby’s legal situation requires a slightly longer summary. Four years ago, after a hearing in his courtroom revealed new, compelling evidence that medical malpractice contributed to the victim’s death, Judge James R. McGregor ordered that my brother was entitled to a new trial and immediately eligible for bail. The afternoon of the verdict, while my family gathered in my sister’s home to welcome Robby back after twenty-five years in prison, I stood in the downtown Pittsburgh office of the Allegheny County district attorney Stephen A. Zappala, Jr., and listened as the DA informed my brother’s attorney, Mark Schwartz, that he’d decided not to appeal Judge McGregor’s findings. The DA’s unambiguous statement of his intentions was crucial, since it permitted Robby’s lawyer to begin arranging bail rather than to go down to County Court, where it would have been his duty to be on hand to oppose any state motion challenging Judge McGregor’s order.

      I was elated. The possibility that the state would choose to conduct another trial was highly unlikely. A new trial would be expensive, the verdict quite uncertain given the new evidence, and finally, even if the state conducted a trial and won its case, my brother had probably served more time than any guilty verdict would mandate. No new trial meant the state would be forced to let my brother go. The unwieldy scales of justice at last seemed tilting in his favor. Then, without apprising us, DA Zappala changed his mind. In other words, he broke the commitment he’d declared to my brother’s counsel. About a half-hour before County Court closed, he filed a motion to stay Judge McGregor’s order. Unopposed by any legal representative of Robert Wideman, the stay was granted. Subsequently the DA filed an appeal that asked the court, in effect, to reverse Judge McGregor’s decision. That appeal was upheld as it crawled through Pennsylvania’s appellate courts; all challenges to it mounted by Robert Wideman’s defense lawyers were denied, with little or no legal reasoning offered, until it reached the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, where it became the final word. My brother never received the new trial nor the chance for bail he’d been granted, and he continues to serve a life sentence in prison.

      I believe that in addition to breaking his word, the DA set in motion a chain of events that resulted in an illegal detainment of my brother. The afternoon following Judge McGregor’s decision, shortly after Robby’s lawyer and I met with the DA, apparently, a call was placed from the DA’s office to the State Correction Institute at Pittsburgh (SCIP), a call requesting that the prison not release Robert Wideman because a motion to stay the judge’s decision was on its way to County Court. It seems to me that the call was inappropriate