‘Writing to Save a Life,’ by John Edgar Wideman

“Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File” is John Edgar Wideman’s meditation on the life and death of Emmett Till’s father. Wideman’s corpus, this book included, is a haunted one. The past and present coexist in his literary imagination. Here, Emmett and Louis Till, and many more, are enlisted to help us understand a particular dimension of American racism: the persistent theft of black fathers and sons, murders without remedy, and unceasing loss.

A fact that few of us know, even those of us who know Emmett’s story intimately, is laid bare; Louis Till, nicknamed Saint, was executed by the U.S. Army for the rape of an Italian woman during World War II. Years later, in 1955, his 14-year-old son’s murder for a mythological wolf whistle at a white woman was a harrowing repetition. We remember Emmett’s mother, Mamie, in all of her dignity, courage and grace; Louis has largely been resigned to newspaper archives.

Wideman describes how he acquired Louis Till’s Army file. And he details his unsettled relationship to it. It is an archive of an inglorious event, filled with more questions than answers. It sends him across the pond, and down South. And yet we still can’t be sure what happened, or who did what, or precisely why Louis died.

Though we certainly know how. As he searches, Wideman reminds us that amid the myriad stories that are told about events, powerful people are the ones who choose the official story. Truth demands something more. But even that is unsettled. Wideman begins the book with a quote from the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe: “All stories are true.”

This grants him space to tell a story that is as much his as it is Till’s. He imagines Louis Till’s life from the fragments. Wideman writes that this book was supposed to be a novel, and at that he has failed. But the collage of criticism, fiction and history offered in its stead is remarkable for its insight and power.

Neither Louis Till nor Wideman’s own father, who makes his way into the storytelling, are ideal types. Their wounded masculinity causes them to lash out at their beloveds. Wideman sees that, and sees the women left in their wake, with some shame of his own. These fathers are men of their generation in attitude and disposition. And yet they are also gingerly treated in Wideman’s hands.

Till’s is an American story. And Wideman crafts it as such. The Western literary canon is invoked wherever useful, most poignantly in his contemplation of the poetry Ezra Pound wrote while imprisoned in the same military prison as Louis Till.

Pound left verses behind; Wideman fills Louis’ life with his prose. He turns to Shakespeare’s Caliban to depict a disabled black man who cleans up the barbershop of his youth; this man, Clement, is also vested with the symbolism of the Yoruba god of the crossroads, more powerful than he seems.

Wideman unself-consciously intersperses these classical traditions with black English. The visual landscape of black American life is also finely wrought, from glistening limbs and Bermuda shorts to the oversize cars of the ’50s and the machinery of the Argo corn company where Mamie Till labored.

Each detail is part of a layered web of connection. Case in point: That migrants from Mississippi spent Northern days laboring in a factory that provided staple corn meal and laundry starch for Southerners is not incidentally thrown in. It is a sign of how carefully Wideman probes and prods history.

Wideman is a master of quiet meditation, a sort that can turn into brooding at the most pointed moments. Here, he broods with cool and sometimes terrifying landscapes: vast bodies of water, robbed graves, mounds of hair, books. This is a history that is not past; it is all around us and immediate. It asks us: For whom is justice real and whose stories do we believe? In response to his own question, Wideman suggests that the racial logic of this country is genocidal.

Although this book is about a figure long dead, it is dedicated to prisoners. Wideman frames the book with a present concern; His own son is serving a life sentence, his brother, too, and millions more. On his pages, those who have been convicted are remembered, just as those who have been executed in prison chambers or on city streets. And it is an argument about the national shame of so much black loss, one unburdened by stories about which one is innocent and which one is guilty. Regardless, the shame persists. For Wideman to write to save a life is to preserve a history that is not up for debate, a long looming story we know to be true.

Writing to Save a Life

The Louis Till File

By John Edgar Wideman

(Scribner; 193 pages; $25)