Sent for You Yesterday

Sent for You Yesterday is the third of John Edgar Wideman's books about Homewood, the Black neighborhood in the East End of Pittsburgh where he grew up, after Damballah and Hiding Place. It stands on its own. The narrator, Doot, comes back to Homewood to hear his Uncle Carl French and Lucy Tate tell the stories of their lives, and the novel runs from the migrations north in the 1930s to 1970.

At its center is Albert Wilkes, a jazz pianist who kills a white policeman and flees. Seven years later, still before the Second World War, he comes home, and he is betrayed and killed. His memory shapes everyone who grew up in his shadow, above all the trio at the heart of the book: Lucy, Carl, her lover of many years, and Lucy's adoptive brother, known only as Brother Tate. Brother is an albino, a gifted musician and artist who speaks less and less. When his son Junebug dies in a fire on the Fourth of July, Brother stops talking altogether, and sixteen years later he dies under an oncoming train. Lucy tells Doot why she has never married Carl: he lacks the strength she saw in the older generation, in John and Freeda French and even in Albert Wilkes.

The telling does not run in order. Voices overlap, stories break off and resume from another angle, and the book feels at times like a set of linked stories, which asks work of the reader. Kirkus heard too much Faulkner in it and found it talky, but granted that the novel is "ambitious, earnest, and passionate" and that readers willing to work would be moved. The music of the talk, and the sense of a whole neighborhood remembering together, are what stay with you. It suits readers of Toni Morrison, and anyone who wants the history of a Black neighborhood told from inside it.