The Homewood Trilogy

In THE HOMEWOOD TRILOGY are the voices that recount and remember and bear witness to Homewood, an American ghetto, and the generations of an American family, powerful in their endurance. In their talk, dreams, and memories, John Wideman uses the cadences of black speech to make poetry of everyday gains and losses... to tell the passion of ordinary lives, the contradictions, perils, pain, and love which are the blood and bone of everybody’s America. DAMBALLAH is not only an unsparing, unsentimental portrait of a family and the Black experience; it is a vision of all families, each a single, unending story told by many voices—from Damballah, the sacred ancient Father, to big-hat John French, the gambling man, to Freeda who waits silent and angry for Death and Chinaman. HIDING PLACE tells of Mother Bess, a crazy old lady hiding from the world that had taken her man and their son. And Tommy, hiding out from the police and from failure. In anger and fear, in taunts and dreams, Tommy and Mother Bess recall what they have lost...and find the courage to come out of hiding. In SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Albert Wilkes returns to Homewood on the run from the law and is gunned down by police. But even his death cannot stop the restless freight-train rhythms that had flowed from his piano-playing hands. In Wilkes’s music is the history of Homewood, truths that must be preserved. It falls to Carl and Lucy, inheritors with Brother Tate of the music, stories, rituals, and legends of Homewood’s past, to struggle to save what they can. ► John Wideman can make the blues an ordinary scene sing like nobody’s business ◄ The New York Times