Part I: Two Homewoods

Some people believe that there are no accidents. I don't know. But when I fetched the Sunday paper, the front wrapper section was about Homewood. What are the chances that a randomly-selected weekend for a visit would just happen to coincide with a front-page spread on the very neighborhood which is a major component of the visit?

And how much more of a coincidence is this because of the many factors conspiring to make this visit happen on some other weekend?

The spread was all about the more privileged residents of Homewood being upset that the only press Homewood seems to get is bad press. People only hear about shootings or about any of the other things that one associates with bad neighborhoods. In these residents' Homewood, a lot of good things are happening. There are nice houses, good families, and plenty of programs and resources in service of the community at large.

The photos showed pleasant homes, a nuclear family, kids playing football, and all those things that every good neighborhood has.

That Homewood is not the Homewood about which John Edgar Wideman writes. Wideman's Homewood certainly does not lack a sense of family or community. But it most certainly lacks the resources and opportunities of the Homewood described in the newspaper spread. Wideman's Homewood offers its young men several possible futures - prison, violent death, or at best, a life of struggling to get nowhere and build nothing.

Before I had seen the positive write-up in the newspaper, I had realized that I should not visit Homewood with an assumption that Wideman is any kind of local hero. After all, he's the guy that made it, got away, and stayed away. His books might be intimately involved with the history of Homewood and the lives of its inhabitants. But he did not raise his family in Homewood. He lives in Massachusetts.

In his book "Hiding Place", one of his scenes paints a picture of how he himself might look through the eyes of a simple-minded boy observing a scene between Wideman and an uncle who has always lived in Homewood. This insightful writing makes it clear that despite Wideman's history in and connection to Homewood, someone who did not already know him would think him to be an outsider.

I am sure that Wideman is a local hero to some in Homewood. But the newspaper spread suggested to me an additional reason why he might not be a hero to others. Would the people in this article be pleased about a small library of novels portraying the underbelly of Homewood?

Not all of Wideman's writing concerns the more painful aspects of Homewood's history. Much of it bursts with pride in the stories which belong uniquely to Homewood. Many of his stories seem to belong to his own family's long proud history in Homewood.

However, there is little doubt that the environment which Wideman portrays makes it difficult, if not impossible, for men and women to reach anything close to their full potential. The community provides a sort of buffer between individuals and a society largely designed by a race of people with very little love for the Black man. However, families struggle to remain whole. Women lose sons and husbands, children lose their fathers, and men lose their lives, their freedom, and their souls.