Davalyn Powell's Research

John Edgar Wideman's memoir as an African American road narrative

John Edgar Wideman's memoir, Brothers and Keepers, is a story that focuses on two brothers, John and Robby, who grow up in the all-black section of Homewood in Pittsburgh. Despite their similar backgrounds, the brothers grow in opposite directions. John goes to college, eventually becoming a writer and professor at the University of Wyoming, while Robby turns to a life of drugs and crime, and ends up serving a life sentence in jail. Wideman's book uses the road as a means to escape an old way of life and attain a new, better way of life, paralleling the historical African American construction of the road through epic movements such as the Great Migration.

Sources

Bayor, Ronald H. “The Second Ghetto: Then and Now.” Journal of Urban History 29.3 (2003): 238-42.

Fast, Robin Riley. “Brothers and Keepers and the Tradition of the Slave Narrative.” MELUS 22.4 (1997): 3-20.

Maloney, Thomas N. “African American Migration to the North: New Evidence for the 1910s.” Economic Inquiry 40.1 (January 2002): 1-11.

Shannon, Sandra G. “A Transplant That Did Not Take: August Wilson’s views on the Great Migration.” African American Review 31.4 (1997): 659-667.

Wideman, John Edgar. Brothers and Keepers. New York: Random House, Inc., 1984.

Ethnic Minority