Other stories cut so close you can tell them only in shards. Try taking on the whole thing directly and it only breaks apart on the page. You can’t talk about it. You’ve got to talk about it. You can’t talk about it.
A few years ago I was away from my daughter for five weeks. She was about two and a half at the time, and I remember sitting in a little coffee shop in upstate New York feeling rested, and guilty for all the time I was spending by myself. I took out John Edgar Wideman’s All Stories Are True. I often carry this collection around with me. The energy of Wideman’s prose is like a shot of epinephrine. And his work always reminds me to get my head out of my own sand and look around. I began to reread the last story in the collection, “Welcome.” By the first sentence of the second paragraph—“She would be twelve now”—I realized I wasn’t going to be able to finish it this time. My family would be surprised to hear that I cry. They’ve never seen me do it. I do it down in the garage, tearlessly. There’s this welling up and I have to gulp air because I feel like I’m suffocating. I hide my face (from myself) in a book.
I think of the first line of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard.
Out of many contenders, the saddest story I have ever heard (and reading, I believe, is a way of listening) is, by a wide margin, Wideman’s “Welcome.” That day in Essex, New York, in a coffee shop called the Pink Pig, I picked up a People instead. No big deal. How many greater challenges have I shirked? But I remember my cowardice. I couldn’t endure someone else’s losses on the page because I was too busy missing my own people. What does this say about my ability to endure my own losses when those losses inevitably come? As they have, as they will again. This morning, as an act of private penance, my family asleep, I returned to “Welcome” and wept. All-out wept for a change. For two lost children in a story, Njeri and Will.
It’s the end of December, Christmastime—Homewood, Pittsburgh. The streets are covered with the rags and tags of snow, and the wind, known as “the hawk,” blows under your clothes the moment you step outside—but still the carolers sing. And one family is grieving for its missing children. Sis lost her daughter—Njeri—at just over a year old. It happened a few Decembers back, but the pain is ever-present, especially this time of year. Tom has lost a teenage son to prison—a life sentence. Both losses are unassuageable and infinite.
You could lose a child like that, once and for always in an instant and walk around forever with a lump in your throat, with the question of what might have been weighing you down every time you measure the happiness in someone else’s face. Or you could lose a child and have him at the same time and how did this other way of losing a child in prison for life change her brother.
Separate calamities, yet in this family grief merges. The story is told mostly from the point of view of Sis. Here she is talking on the phone with her mother about Tom before he arrives home. Her mother begins: “After all that’s happened these past few years, it’s a wonder he’s not crazy.”
Wonder we’re not all stone crazy.
Sometimes I believe we’re being tested.
Well, I wish whoever’s conducting the damned test would get it the hell over with. Enough’s enough.
You sound like him now.
He’s my brother.
As Sis walks the winter sidewalks on her way to buy groceries, the faces and voices of her family—the living, the dead, the gone—flood her mind. The story moves forward deep inside Sis’s consciousness, with few intrusive transitions. For Wideman, thought and time refuse to be linear. They bob and flow like the unpredictable current of memory itself. The story captures, as few I know, the crazy ebb and flow of an ordinary day: as we carry our groceries, as we lug our devastations.
Doctor said there’s nothing else we can do, Mrs. Crawford. I’m sorry, Mrs. Crawford. And he was. A sorry-ass bringer of bad news and nothing else he could do. Nobody to blame. Just that sorry moment when he said Njeri had to die and nobody’s fault nobody could do anything more and because he was sorry there in front of her bringing the sorry news why shouldn’t she strike him down tear up his sorry white ass just because there was nothing else she could do nobody could do nobody to blame just knock him down and stomp on his chest and grind those coke bottle glasses into his soft sorry face.
At its starkest “Welcome” is about how we survive the unsurvivable. Tom arrives in Pittsburgh for Christmas Eve. The family is reunited for a brief time, and all the love and absence crowd together. Nothing aches more at a gathering of family than when someone who should be there—isn’t. It’s like there’s a gaping hole in the room. Everybody has to step around it. And when Sis does manage to talk to Tom alone, he tells her how hard it is to come home, to face these familiar streets. On the one hand, it’s rejuvenating, but at the same time, given what he’s going through, it’s a kind of living hell.
Like the world is washed fresh after rain, right, and when you step out in the sunshine everything is different, Sis, anything seems possible, well, think of just the opposite.
And then—and here’s the part I anticipated not being able to take that day in the coffee shop—this story takes a sharp and magnificent swerve outward into other people. “Welcome” is told, as I said, from mostly the perspective of Sis, but Wideman won’t be constrained by any conventional notion about point of view. As the grief merges, so do the voices of these two siblings. Sis and Tom become one as Tom recounts how the night before, after his flight arrived, he drove over to his old favorite place, the Woodside Barbeque, for some chicken wings. “You know how I love them salty and greasy as they are I slap on extra sauce and pop a cold Iron City.” On the way, Tom tells Sis, who tells us, he sees a young father and his little boy waiting for a bus in the cold. The bus isn’t coming for hours, if at all, this late on a weekend.
... and I think Damn why are they out there in this arctic-ass weather, the kid shivering and crying in a skimpy K Mart snowsuit, the man not dressed for winter either, a hooded sweatshirt under his shiny baseball jacket and I see a woman somewhere, the mother, another kid really, already split from this young guy, a broken home, the guy’s returning the boy to his mother, or her mother or his and this is the only way, the best he can do and the wind howls the night gets blacker and blacker . . .
What follows in the story is a moment of such rare grace it hurts. I’ve returned to it many times just to watch it happen again. I don’t want to get into what it might have taken John Edgar Wideman, the man, the father of a son in prison, to write this story, to create such music. This is the gift of fiction. Out of his own agony, Wideman grants his fictional father, Tom, his fictional mother, Sis—and the rest of us—deliverance from our pain.
On my way back past that same corner I see the father lift his son and hug him. No bus in sight and it’s still blue cold but the kid’s not fidgeting and crying anymore he’s up in his daddy’s arms and I think Fuck it. They’ll make it. Or if they don’t somebody else will come along and try. Or somebody else try. To make kids. A home. A life. That’s all we can do. Any of us.
Because all our losses are collective. If they’re not, we’re truly doomed. If we can’t overcome them ourselves, the very least we can do is recognize that we aren’t the only ones out here trying to get by.