“Rip Van Winkle Meets
Caliban”
Leonard’s commentary on the interaction of whites with
blacks in urban America…by way of a retelling of the Yusef Hawkins murder in
Brooklyn in 1989, a recap of personal experiences, and a short review of John
Edgar Wideman’s very personal novel Philadelphia
Fire about the 1985 fire-bombing of the MOVE HQ. In reference to the Yusef Hawkins
demonstrations, he calls Mayor Ed Koch “a demagogic Chicken Little Big Foot”
who “seemed more upset about by the marches in Bensonhurst than by the murder
in Bensonhrust.”
Leonard has a beautiful passage about Wideman’s protagonist and
alter ego Cudjoe who, after years of self exile in Greece, wants to return home
to write a book about the police bombing
of the MOVE headquarters on Osage Ave. and put on an all black production of
The Tempest, with Caliban as the hero:
Cudjoe, a graduate of Penn, hopes to write a book
about Osage Avenue, and to find a child, ‘a naked boy, a forked stick,’ a
creature of ash and wind who escaped the fire and vanished into the city to
become a hero, Simba. Meanwhile Wideman, the creator of Cudjoe, is worried
about his son in prison. Together, Wideman and Cudjoe will write another sort
of book, Philadelphia Fire, about the
politics and history of Indian ghosts with flame colored bodies, about adults
left out of western culture and children lost to drugs and rage, about failed
marriages, exile, basketball and The
Tempest, a play by Earl the Pearl Shakespeare.”
The reference to Wideman being worried about his
son is to Jacob Wideman who is serving a prison term of life without parole for
the killing of a friend on a summer camp trip when he was 16. This is
particularly ironic as Wideman’s brother was also serving a life sentence for
murder as chronicled in the JE Wideman’s memoir Brothers and Keepers from 1985. Wideman’s daughter Jamila, is
famous for playing point guard for the Amherst High School basketball team
profiled on Madeleine Blais’ In These
Girls Hope is a Muscle. She went on to become a star at Stanford and one of
the original players in the WNBA. Leonard doesn’t mention any of this, but it
seems important to the backstory of his review.
Link to a good 20th aniversary stroy on NPR about the MOVE bombing:
...and a great SI article by Gary Smith about the Widemans:
New word: NYPNS = “Neat Young People living in Neat Situations”
New learning: “The whole point of the L.A. freeway
system is to avoid places like South Central, as if it were Soweto.”
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