Brothers and Keepers. John Edgar Wideman

of the new life, linked forever by my brother’s words.

      Robby took the baby in his arms. Coochy-cooed and gently rocked her, still marveling at the resemblance.

      Lookit those big, pretty brown eyes. Don’t you see Mommy’s eyes?

      Time continues to loosen my grasp on the events of Robby’s last free night. I’ve attempted to write about my brother’s visit numerous times since. One version was called “Running”; I conceived of it as fiction and submitted it to a magazine. The interplay between fiction and fact in the piece was too intense, too impacted, finally too obscure to control. Reading it must have been like sitting down at a bar beside a stranger deeply involved in an intimate conversation with himself. That version I’d thought of as a story was shortened and sent to Robby in prison. Though it didn’t quite make it as a story, the letter was filled with stories on which I would subsequently draw for two novels and a book of short fiction.

      Even as I manufactured fiction from the events of my brother’s life, from the history of the family that had nurtured us both, I knew something of a different order remained to be extricated. The fiction writer was also a man with a real brother behind real bars. I continued to feel caged by my bewilderment, by my inability to see clearly, accurately, not only the last visit with my brother, but the whole long skein of our lives together and apart. So this book. This attempt to break out, to knock down the walls.

      At a hearing in Colorado Johnny-Boy testified that Robby had re-counted to him a plot to rob a fence, a killing, the flight from Pittsburgh. After his performance as a cooperative witness for the state, a performance he would repeat in Pittsburgh at Robby’s trial, Johnny-Boy was carted away to Michigan, where he was wanted for murder. Robby and Michael were extradited to Pittsburgh, charged with armed robbery and murder, and held for trial. In separate trials both were convicted and given the mandatory sentence for felony murder: life imprisonment without possibility of probation or parole. The only way either man will ever be released is through commutation of his sentence. Pennsylvania’s governor is empowered to commute prison sentences, and a state board of commutations exists to make recommendations to him; but since the current governor almost never grants commutations, men in Pennsylvania’s prisons must face their life sentences with minimal hope of being set free.

      Robby remained in custody six months before going on trial. Not until July 1978, after a two-year lockup in a county jail with no facilities for long-term prisoners, was Robby sentenced. Though his constitutional rights to a speedy trial and speedy sentencing had clearly been violated, neither those wrongs nor any others—including a prejudiced charge to the jury by the trial judge—which were brought to the attention of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, moved that august body to intercede on Robert Wideman’s behalf. The last legal action in Robby’s case, the denial of his appeal by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, did not occur until September 1981. By that time Robby had already been remanded to Western State Penitentiary to begin serving a life sentence.

      You never know exactly when something begins. The more you delve and backtrack and think, the more clear it becomes that nothing has a discrete, independent history; people and events take shape not in orderly, chronological sequence but in relation to other forces and events, tangled skeins of necessity and interdependence and chance that after all could have produced only one result: what is. The intertwining strands of DNA that determine a creature’s genetic predispositions might serve as a model for this complexity, but the double helix, bristling with myriad possibilities, is not mysterious enough. The usual notion of time, of one thing happening first and opening the way for another and another, becomes useless pretty quickly when I try to isolate the shape of your life from the rest of us, when I try to retrace your steps and discover precisely where and when you started to go bad.

      When you were a chubby-cheeked baby and I stood you upright, supporting most of your weight with my hands but freeing you just enough to let you feel the spring and bounce of strength in your new, rubbery thighs, when you toddled those first few bowlegged, pigeon-toed steps across the kitchen, did the trouble start then? Twenty-odd years later, when you shuffled through the polished corridor of the Fort Collins, Colorado, courthouse dragging the weight of iron chains and fetters, I wanted to give you my hands again, help you make it across the floor again; I shot out a clenched fist, a black power sign, which caught your eye and made you smile in that citadel of whiteness. You made me realize I was tottering on the edge, leaning on you. You, in your baggy jumpsuit, three days’ scraggly growth on your face because they didn’t trust you with a razor, manacled hand and foot so you were theatrically displayed as their pawn, absolutely under their domination; you were the one clinging fast, taking the weight, and your dignity held me up. I was reaching for your strength.

      Always there. The bad seed, the good seed. Mommy’s been saying for as long as I can remember: That Robby . . . he wakes up in the morning looking for the party. She’s right, ain’t she? Mom’s nearly always right in her way, the special way she has of putting words together to take things apart. Every day God sends here Robby thinks is a party. Still up there on the third floor under his covers and he’s thinking, Where’s it at today? What’s it gonna be today? Where’s the fun? And that’s how he’s been since the day the Good Lord put him on this earth. That’s your brother, Robert Douglas Wideman.

      The Hindu god Venpadigedera returned to earth and sang to the people: Behold, the light shineth in all things. Birds, trees, the eyes of men, all giveth forth the light. Behold and be glad. Gifts wait for any who choose to see. Cover the earth with flowers. Shower flowers to the four corners. Rejoice in the bounty of the light.

      The last time we were all together, cousin Kip took a family portrait. Mom and Daddy in a line with their children. The third generation of kids, a nappy-headed row in front. Five of us grown-up brothers and sisters hanging on one another’s shoulders. Our first picture together since I don’t remember when. We’re all standing on Mom’s about-to-buckle porch with cousin Kip down in the weeds of the little front yard pointing his camera up at us. I was half-scared those rickety boards would crack and we’d sink, arms still entwined, like some brown Titanic, beneath the rippling porch floor.

      Before I saw the picture I had guessed how we’d look frozen in shades of black and white. I wasn’t too far off. Tish is grinning ear to ear—the proud girl child in the middle who’s survived the teasing and protections of her four brothers. Even though he isn’t, Gene seems the tallest because of the way he holds that narrow, perfect head of his balanced high and dignified on his long neck. Dave’s eyes challenge the camera, meet it halfway and dare it to come any closer, and the camera understands and keeps its distance from the smoldering eyes. No matter what Dave’s face seems to be saying—the curl of the lip that could be read as smile or sneer, as warning or invitation—his face also projects another level of ambiguity, the underground history of interracial love, sex, and hate, what a light-eyed, brown-skinned man like David embodies when he confronts other people. I’m grinning too (it’s obvious Tish is my sister) because our momentary togetherness was a reprieve, a possibility I believed I’d forfeited by my selfishness and hunger for more. Giddy almost, I felt like a rescued prince ringed by his strong, handsome people, my royal brothers and sister who’d paid my ransom. Tickled even by the swell and pitch of the rotting porch boards under my sandals.

      You. You are mugging. Your best side dramatically displayed. The profile shot you’d have demanded on your first album, the platinum million seller you’d never cut but knew you could because you had talent and brains and you could sing and mimic anybody and that long body of yours and those huge hands were instruments more flexible and expressive than most people’s faces. You knew what you were capable of doing and knew you’d never get a chance to do it, but none of that defeat for the camera, no, only the star’s three-quarter profile. Billy Eckstineing your eyes, the Duke of Earl tilting the slim oval of your face forward to emphasize the pout of your full lips, the clean lines of your temples and cheekbones tapering down from the Afro’s soft explosion. Your stage would be the poolroom, the Saturday-night basement social, the hangout corner, the next chick’s pad you swept into with all the elegance of Smokey Robinson and the Count of Monte Cristo, slowly unbuttoning your cape, inching off your kid gloves, everything pantomimed with gesture and eye flutters till your rap begins and your words sing that much sweeter, purer for the quiet