Injustice for father and son alike: John Edgar Wideman on his intimate biography of Emmett Till's father

Novelist John Edgar Wideman (Philadelphia Fire, Sent for You Yesterday) this week will release his first work of nonfiction in 15 years with Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File, a genre-defying mix of history, biography, and memoir that explores the role of race in the 1945 court-martial of Louis Till, a 23-year-old soldier who was executed for rape and murder while serving in Italy. Till died three weeks before his son Emmett's fourth birthday. A decade later, Emmett was brutally lynched in Mississippi, reportedly for whistling at a white woman.

Wideman, 75, will speak at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Central Library of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Here is a video interview with John Edgar Wideman:

As you establish, Louis Till wasn't exactly a good guy. He may well have been guilty, so why write about him?

You could say he's very much the stereotypical bad black dude. But I'm not using that to label all black males as irresponsible and violent. . . . I'm looking at one human being and trying to show that one characteristic about him, his skin color, meant that he was deprived of any chance, prima facie, before trial, of any real investigation into his guilt. . . . He was prejudged.

You were 14 when you first read about Emmett Till and saw a gruesome photo of his body. His story has a very personal dimension for you.

I needed the kind of long look at Till that the book takes for my own benefit, to help me understand or come to terms with some of the men I have lost in my own life for various reasons, and to see the parallels between Emmett and Louis Till's lives to my own.

I imagine Louis Till's story also hits home because of your family history. Your younger brother Robert and your son Jake are serving life sentences for two different murders.

My brother is an extraordinary person. He told me on the phone he could really hear the voice of our family when he read [Writing to Save a Life]. . . . He heard our mother's voice, our sister's voice. And it was really meaningful to hear him say it. Yes, the book really is very intimate.

The theme of fathers and sons, of paternity and of familial origins, keeps cropping up in your books. It's an obsession?

If anyone who has the good luck - or the bad luck - to sit down and think about their life and the lives of those around them, what he's doing is to work out a history or a story: Who the hell am I? Where did I come from? What kind of person am I? . . .

So, yes, that has been an underlying concern, I think, of all my work.

And part of that is working out how race affects one's story? Say, in the way racism perverts and twists the very idea of fatherhood for African Americans?

You mention race, which is a word I don't like because I think it's a loaded term. . . . On the other hand, how can you talk about America and American history or how can I talk about my life without it? Given our country's history, going back long before the English or Spanish came here, people of African descent have been treated as orphans. Think of the classic human family in literature, in art, in politics going back through the history of Europe. It's a white family. Going all the way back. Ask a kid to draw Adam and Eve, and it's always been people of no color. Today, maybe it's different.

In all this history and art, where are the people of color? Where do they come in?

In a real sense we have no father. How could God, who [is white], be responsible for dark-skinned descendants? We are almost by definition without a father because the only people who have ever counted as fathers were white people.

We are talking about the history of art and literature, yes? Of how people of color have cropped up in European art only in the margins, as barbarian enemies to be conquered or barbarian children to be educated?

Yes, of course. I'm talking about our mythical [heritage]. But that's what shapes our presuppositions and assumptions. I am talking about the assumptions people make when they use these words.

People create order by using classification systems. And they get anxious when the system is tested - say, when an interracial couple have kids. There's all this anxiety that the children won't be real people because they'd be neither white nor black.

Yes, exactly. And exploding those categories might be the best possible thing to do. These categories are false, they hinder us. It's the same with gender classifications. The more people want to force somebody to be either male or female, the more we move in the other direction. Those words were useful once, but not anymore.

Anger and resentment built up once people of color began creating their own art, their own myths, and wrote stories which portrayed the dad, the ruler, the god, as a black man or woman. Or, more threatening still, if they elected black leaders.

Obviously, some part of Mississippi had a black majority, and if the vote was given to them, there would be some really big changes. And alongside that, inextricably intertwined with it, was the fear that once black people had the right to vote, they would start messing around with white women and the purity of the white race would be threatened.

I've always been disturbed by the central role sexual anxiety plays in racist discourse. Why is it such a focal point?

It goes back to how we classify and organize a society. If we organize it in a hierarchy with a white father - a god - sitting on top of everything.

Right, so if that's been the symbolic system for organizing human life for 2,000 years, then putting a black face on the throne might upset the system a bit. That's it in a nutshell, right?

It's a big question. We could spend the next six hours talking about it. If we could answer it in a way that would satisfy most Americans, we wouldn't have a race problem.

tirdad@phillynews.com

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