American Histories. John Edgar Wideman

paid for. Rules. Words. And we’d probably agree. You’re right, Mrs. Cosa. Yes. Yes, a pipey chorus of kid voices.

      Reading a story or writing one, I hope the world will be different at the point the story ends. Same wish that motivates me some mornings to sit in the bathroom and listen for sounds, for silences telling me I am not the silence that surrounds me. Signs that assure me I possess a shape that belongs to me, and it can poke its way through silence, get on with a life. A different life I can’t imagine. Except as difference. Except as unknowable.

      World I want to be different is not like fictions stirred up by words on a page, not one that starts where its words start and finishes with the last word like any story I can choose to read or not or stop reading or stop writing and do my time elsewhere. The different world I long to inhabit is the one inhabiting me, no beginning or end. This world where I’m stuck forever, however long that might be. Me and everything else and nothing. Same space, same shape, same thing I am.

      So I wait. And wait and listen and wait while the unknown drips somewhere, drop by drop like a leaky faucet in a bathroom I almost can hear from mine. Dripping drops of it accumulating in a sink until the sink overflows, and a flood faster than the speed of light takes everything with it wherever it goes to vanish. No mess left behind for anybody to clean up, no stories with a person inside waiting.

      MY DEAD

      Edgar Lawson Wideman: sept 2, 1918–dec 14, 2001

      Bette Alfreda French Wideman: may 15, 1921–feb 7, 2008

      Otis Eugene Wideman: march 6, 1945–jan 11, 2009

      David Lawson Wideman: may 7, 1949–oct 19, 2014

      Monique Renee Walters: nov 21, 1966–feb 6, 2015

      I list my dead. Father. Mother. Brother. Brother. Sister’s daughter. For some reason their funeral programs share a manila folder. During a bad ten months I had lost a brother, a niece, and they joined the rest of my dead. The dead remembered, forgotten, adrift. The dead in a folder. There and not here. Dead whose names never change. The dead who return secretly, anonymously, hidden within other names until they vanish, appear again.

      March 6, the date I noted in my journal after I had compiled a list and returned the programs to their folder, happens to be my brother Otis Eugene’s birthday, a date like others in the list, I tend to forget, as he is often forgotten when I revisit family memories. My younger brother Otis who survived our unforgettable mother barely a year. My quiet, forgettable brother, his birth separated from mine by four years, by twins, a boy and girl, neither living longer than a week.

      Their deaths, of course, a terrible blow for our mother. She never spoke of those lost babies, and late in her life denied to my sister that the births had occurred. No dead twins in the four-year interval between me, her eldest, and my next brother, Otis. Other siblings arrived after the empty four years. New lives, two years separating each birth from the next, regular as rain, until five of us, four boys, one girl in the middle. With her hands full, heart full of caring for the ones alive, why would my mother allow herself to sink back into that abyss of watching two infants, so perfectly formed, so freshly dropped from inside her, leave the world and disappear as if her womb harbored death as naturally as life.

      My brother was named Otis for our mother’s brother and Eugene for our father’s brother. Uncle Otis was very much alive, but Uncle Eugene dead already or soon to die on Guam, when my brother born. Uncle Eugene dying needlessly, or, you could say, ironically, since war with Japan officially declared over, a truce in force the sniper who shot Eugene didn’t know about or perhaps refused to honor because too much killing, too many comrades dead. Why not shoot one more American soldier beachcombing for souvenirs where he had no right to trespass, no palpable reason to continue to live in the mind of an enemy whose duty was to repel invaders, to follow in his rifle’s scope their movements. Not exactly easy targets, but almost a sure thing for a practiced marksman, even a sniper very weary, beat-up from no sleep, constant harassment of enemy planes, tanks, flamethrowers, a shooter trained to take his time, forget hunger, thirst, his dead, his home islands far too close to this doomed Guam as he gauges, tracks his prey, picks out a brown man who will surely, fatally fall before the others scatter for cover, before he, himself, is observed or snipered on this day he’s not aware the war’s over or is aware and doesn’t care as he chooses someone to kill, freezes the rifle’s swing, stops breathing, squeezes the trigger.

      Uncle Otis, like our father and our father’s brother, Eugene, served in World War II. Uncle Otis returned home to become a part of family life, always around until I was grown up with kids and my youngest sibling a teenager. We all still remember him fondly, Big Ote to distinguish him from Little Ote, my brother, who also carried the name of the uncle none of us in my generation had ever seen. Except I claimed to recall my uncle Eugene, even though my mother insistently objected, no-no-no you were way too young, just a baby when he left for the war. I persisted in my claim, wrote my first published story to bear witness to his living presence within me, my closeness with a long-dead man more intimate, continuous, and attested, I’m almost ashamed to admit, than recollections I have of his namesake, my brother. A brother who, for reasons never shared with me, preferred to be called Gene once he became an adult.

      Gene, the name everybody I met in Atlanta called him when I traveled there for his funeral. Over the years I had taught myself to say Gene when I addressed my brother in groups not family or introduced him to strangers or on those rare occasions when just the two of us were conversing and I wanted to show him I treated his wish to be called Gene seriously, how once, anyway, in this specific case I would make an effort to forget I was his elder, oldest of the siblings, and follow his lead. Act as if his right to name himself might really matter to me, and for once he could set the rules. My little brother Gene in charge, and me behaving as if he has escaped the box, the traps I spent so much evil time elaborately, indefatigably laying for him during our childhood. Not much use for a younger brother when we were growing up. Except when he served as temporary or potential victim and I was, yes, yes, like some goddamned sniper drawing a bead on an enemy soldier totally unaware his life dangled at the end of a thread in my fingers.

      Gene. In Atlanta the name didn’t sound like the affectation I had once considered it, my brother’s rather late in the day, thus partly funny, partly irrelevant and futile striking out for independence. An attempt perhaps to wipe the slate clean by rebaptizing himself and answering only to a name he had chosen. A not-too-subtle effort to cancel prerogatives and status other members of the family had earned over the long haul of growing up intertwined, separate and unequal. Like the privilege I had granted myself, no blame or guilt attached, to seldom phone him. To not recall or acknowledge him whatsoever for long stretches of time if I chose. My forgettable brother.

      Now I concede it was less a matter of qualities he possessed or didn’t possess that caused him to be forgettable, but my presumptions, my bottomless unease. Wasn’t I the most worthy, important brother in the family, the world. The one who, therefore, must occupy all space available, even if no space left for anyone else. Forgetting a brother a convenient tactic to ensure I never found him in my way. An annoyance. A barrier. A ghost.

      I went to Atlanta to bury a brother and found Gene. Not Otis or Little Ote. Not Otis Eugene. Once my brother chose Gene as his new name, I stopped associating that name with the uncle who had died in the Pacific war. Eugene whose big sneakers I believed I remembered seeing on live feet. People in Atlanta who knew my brother had probably never heard of Eugene, our dead uncle. When they talked about a Gene, the name transformed me into a stranger, an intruder. I recalled names I had made up to keep my brother in his place, tease him to tears in ugly games while we were kids stuck in the same small house. Names I’d forgotten after we both left home. Then for years and years almost no name necessary for him. Few occasions arose to speak of a brother or speak to him or summon him into my thoughts.

      I could have let him be Gene in Atlanta. Isn’t that what he asked. Wasn’t that one reason for his long, self-imposed exile. No trips back home unless someone very sick, dying, dead. Another city, another state, another start with another name he had picked. A new family, not necessarily to replace the old but to fill emptiness where maybe he’d always