Title:
Slaveroad
Author:
Summary:
John Edgar Wideman’s “slaveroad” is a palimpsest of physical, social, and psychological terrain, the great expanse to which he writes in this groundbreaking work that unsettles the boundaries of memoir, history, and fiction. The slaveroad begins with the Atlantic Ocean, across which enslaved Africans were carried, but the term comes to encompass the journeys and experiences of Black Americans since then and the many insidious ways that slavery separates, wounds, and persists. In a section of “Slaveroad,” called “Sheppard”, William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians, travels back to Africa where he works as a missionary, converting Africans to Christianity alongside his Southern white colleague. Wideman imagines drinking afternoon tea with Lucy Gant Sheppard, William’s wife, who was on her own slaveroad, as she experienced her husband’s adultery with the African women he was trying to convert. In “Penn Station,” Wideman’s brother, after being confined forty-four years in prison, travels from Pittsburgh to New York. As Wideman awaits his brother, he asks, “How will I distinguish my brother from the dead. Dead passengers on the slaveroad.”-- Publisher
Edition:
First Scribner hardcover edition.
Physical Description:
x, 212 pages ; 22 cm
Personal Subject:
Geographic Term:
Publisher:
Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC,
Publication Date:
2024
ISBN:
9781668057216
9781668057223
Publication Information:
New York, NY : Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC, 2024.
©2024
Call Number:
813.54 WIDEMAN