Philadelphia Fire by John Edgar Wideman
Henry Holt and Company 1990
LJ’s Rating: 4 **** for Excellence
Philadelphia Fire retells the story of the infamous fire which occurred on May 13, 1985 in West Philadelphia. Eleven people (five of them children) all members of an organization call MOVE, are literally bombed out of their house on Osage Avenue on that fateful day. Cudjoe, the primary and composite character, learns of the fire while watching CNN on a Greek Island, 5,000 miles away from West Philadelphia.
He immediately flees from his self-imposed 10 year exile on this Aegean Island and travels back to West Philadelphia, to his old neighborhood on Osage Avenue to get the true story. His journey becomes an obsession with the sole survivor, a boy seen fleeing the house the night of the fire. Cudjoe’s mourning for the child compels him to piece together the puzzle of his life and come to terms with his own solitary existence.
To facilitate this process, he seeks the counsel of his old neighborhood buddies and those who witnessed the fateful bombing. However, disturbing images of a former life he escaped, a life shared with a wife and two sons, come back to haunt him. His sons, now grown and one behind bars, and wife, happily remarried, reawaken his own sense of failure as a man, a husband and especially, a father. Of his incarcerated son Cudjoe writes, “I’ve learned the hard way that I’ve always known next to nothing about him. Except I do know the danger of the place where he’s incarcerated, the depth of the trouble he’s in, the innocence and terror and guilt he must cope with day after day and little on the horizon, but more of the same.”
Cudjoe is a troubled man who attempts to ease the pain and sorrow of his life by writing about the fire and finally, about himself.
Philadelphia Fire earns 4 **** for excellence because it is written in such poetic, descriptive verse and allows the mature reader to look at the grey areas of life with a sense of compassion, sensitivity and understanding.