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SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY
Reimagining the black neighborhood of his youth Homewood, Pittsburgh -Wideman creates a dazzling and evocative milieu. From the wild and uninhibited 1920s to the narcotized 1970s, "he establishes a mythological and symbolic link between character and landscape, language and plot, that in the hands of a less visionary writer might be little more than stale sociology" (New York Times Book Review).
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
About the author
John Edgar Wideman
79 books384 followersA widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice: in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 2000 he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Weight", published in The Callaloo Journal.
In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu.com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award.
His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction.
He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University, and he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu.com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award.
His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction.
He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University, and he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
August 24, 2022
I began this novel with some trepidation, having previously read and not enjoyed Philadelphia Fire, but reading this turned out to be a very different and very enjoyable experience.
Set in Philadelphia and the Homewood neighborhood where Wideman grew up, you can tell he is in his element writing about this locale and its residents. Three generations of friends and family populate this novel, beginning with the narrator Doot, reaching back to his grandparents John and Freeda French, and focusing primarily on Carl French, Doot's uncle, Brother Tate, Carl's best friend, and Lucy Tate, Carl's on-again, off-again lover who was raised in the Tate house with Brother Tate. Brother Tate is an albino and and his experience along with that of his son, Junebug, who is also an albino, growing up in a black neighborhood are central to the story. I thoroughly enjoyed how the relationships, the timeline and how events fit into the timeline were slowly revealed as the story progressed. The writing has a lyrical quality that is the one aspect of Philadelphia Fire that I remembered liking. Race, family, friendship and surviving are constants. I would have liked to have met many of the characters, but certainly John and Freeda French. You can see how the neighborhood and the people change over the three generations, but also they are all tied tightly to one another.
Set in Philadelphia and the Homewood neighborhood where Wideman grew up, you can tell he is in his element writing about this locale and its residents. Three generations of friends and family populate this novel, beginning with the narrator Doot, reaching back to his grandparents John and Freeda French, and focusing primarily on Carl French, Doot's uncle, Brother Tate, Carl's best friend, and Lucy Tate, Carl's on-again, off-again lover who was raised in the Tate house with Brother Tate. Brother Tate is an albino and and his experience along with that of his son, Junebug, who is also an albino, growing up in a black neighborhood are central to the story. I thoroughly enjoyed how the relationships, the timeline and how events fit into the timeline were slowly revealed as the story progressed. The writing has a lyrical quality that is the one aspect of Philadelphia Fire that I remembered liking. Race, family, friendship and surviving are constants. I would have liked to have met many of the characters, but certainly John and Freeda French. You can see how the neighborhood and the people change over the three generations, but also they are all tied tightly to one another.
April 21, 2013
This is a beautifully written novel and the final book in Wideman's Homewood Trilogy. I read it without having read the others (Damballah and Hiding Place); it can stand alone, if you don't yet have the others. That said, I plan to hunt the other books down and read the entire set.
The most outstanding feature of this book is the fluidity of point-of-view: Doot narrates in first person, it might slide into Carl's internal point-of-view, or maybe it's third person and close to Lucy. This and the time shifts are a challange only for so long as it takes the reader to discover that the echoes in characters' lives, particularly between Albert Wilkes and Brother, suggest that others' lives live in all of the characters in Homewood, and, by extension, in us. The voice is lovely and modulates, depending on who's point of view is telling the section.
If you have enjoyed Faulkner's layers of thought in Light and August or Morrison's dextrous shifts in point of view in The Bluest Eye or Sula, you'll most definitely enjoy Sent for You Yesterday.
The most outstanding feature of this book is the fluidity of point-of-view: Doot narrates in first person, it might slide into Carl's internal point-of-view, or maybe it's third person and close to Lucy. This and the time shifts are a challange only for so long as it takes the reader to discover that the echoes in characters' lives, particularly between Albert Wilkes and Brother, suggest that others' lives live in all of the characters in Homewood, and, by extension, in us. The voice is lovely and modulates, depending on who's point of view is telling the section.
If you have enjoyed Faulkner's layers of thought in Light and August or Morrison's dextrous shifts in point of view in The Bluest Eye or Sula, you'll most definitely enjoy Sent for You Yesterday.
May 13, 2011
This book is amazing. like, "how do people get these things in their heads??" style of writing. Just the way he describes and links things...And, it was like The Known World in a way where Wideman could make certain commentary through an unconventional situation with Brother Tate and his being an albino and what that meant to his community and family. It was hard to follow at first but once i got the hang of it, I could appreciate it so much more. Though, I did have to re-read a lot of paragraphs still. Anyway, excited to read the others in the Homewood series. I think this was my favorite novel we had to read for this lit class.
May 12, 2008
Years ago in Inman Square there was a bookstore called House of Sarah. I liked it because the cheap mass market paperback wall was well stocked with literary titles, so if you were broke you could still pick up something good to read. I often will read the first page of something to see if I really want to spend some time with the book. SFYY begins with a prologue where two characters in heaven talk about a dream. I read it, thought 'hmm,' and as I was putting it back on the shelf, froze because I suddenly *got* the historical event to which the dream indirectly refers. It was like some interior alarm bell saying 'Middle Passage' went off, and this brief bit of fiction brought it home to me deeply. Fine writing.
April 27, 2018
Here's the best way I can describe "Sent for You Yesterday." While most books try to draw you in to a world by telling you about events, people, places, etc., this one keeps you at a distance. In this book, you never feel as if you could join the community or even find out what really happened, because you didn't live there during the time when the events occurred. You are forever an outsider.
Interestingly, to the extent that the book has a narrator -- and it doesn't, really -- it's "Doot." Doot is the nickname for a 30-year-old African American man who grew up in a Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh called Homewood. He's come back in the 1980s (I think) and is visiting with older relatives and their friends, and they tell him stories of the old days. Those stories are the heart of the book. But this conventional-sounding formula makes the book seem much more accessible than it is. Doot is a totally minor character who's briefly noted in the beginning because another person named "Brother" is mentioned as the person who gave Doot his name; and then Doot is in the last one-fifth of the book in the role of the pitcher into which these stories are poured by the older generation in a mixed-up flow of reminisce, rumor, and drunken daydreams and nightmares.
People are saying this boy reminds them of James Joyce. It reminds me of Faulkner. First, it's a hermetically sealed area -- in this case the African-American neighborhood of Homewood, on the edge of Pittsburgh, which is an entire universe in a maybe 10 square blocks. You've got people telling the same stories over and over for decades, but from slightly different perspectives until the full story emerges. You have people who are outcasts even within their little society, such as the Albino brother. You have a ton of repetition, a ton of slang, a healthy dose of the Bible but also of sinning. It's Faulkneresque, but in a Black community in the North.
Now, it is it good? Well, it's impressive, but it's not pleasurable to read. It's funny, angry, imaginative, full of riffs on life and with creative descriptions that beautifully reflect what must have been the things that people in that world saw and did. For example, two young skinny boys with pot-bellies in the way boys have them are described as having "watermelon" stomachs, with ribs as fingers reaching down to hold the watermelons in place. Or games of chicken at the railroad tracks are described with such intensity that they bring back my own much-less daredevil kid days, and the feeling of power when you conquered a fear.
But it's really hard to work through the language of the book. The language flows like a stream of consciousness, or often actually the subconscious mind in which ideas meld together, some real and some imagined. Much of it is choppy phrases stuck together into impressions, rather than complete thoughts. It's hard to know what's real and what's imagined. Many times, people are talking but quotes aren't used, so you have to read it a few times to realize it's banter in a bar or on a porch. You're told something happened, usually something tragic, but you're not sure it really happened, and you don't find out until later how it happened.
And while the language is impressive in a jazzy, impressionistic way, I find that its difficulties actually pull me away from the characters at times. You want to feel for the people in this story, the generations from about 1920 through the 1970s living in Homewood. Life was hard and was limited by prejudice. They deserved better than they got, and you are reminded of their essential goodness to each other, their humanity as shown by their humor and occasional visions of beauty in a sunset, their need to keep their community alive by telling and retelling stories.
Homewood was about as middle class as African-Americans could get at the time, and they were relegated to manual labor at rates about half of the rates for whites. John French, for example, was acknowledged as a great hanger of wallpaper, but he couldn't get steady work from whites, just scrap jobs when they needed an extra hand. He mostly spent his time drinking cheap wine and looking for stuff to steal from white homes. John was married and had several children, including Carl, a rambunctious kid who played on the train tracks, sneaked peaks at naked girls and had no ambitions (because society wouldn't let him have them). Carl's best friend is an albino boy named Brother, who mostly sings, whistles, and shucks-and jives. Brother is even less disciplined than Carl because he's got no parents and lives with an elderly couple, the Tates, who can't track him very much. Brother and Carl are lifelong friends who mostly spend their time drunk or on drugs, when the latter came to Homewood in the 1970s. They form a trio with Lucy Tate, also not the Tate's child but also taken in by them, and she and Carl have a romance that starts with sex at age 13 and remains for their entire lives, though they never marry nor have any kids. Also moving through the story is Albert, a gifted jazz and blues piano player, who is killed for sleeping with white women, a killing that Lucy witnesses and never forgets, and which serves to remind Carl and Brother that they will never get equal treatment.
So, on the one hand, you're sympathetic to the injustices of job discrimination, corrupt police, inadequate housing and resources, bad schools, and so on. Even when someone does something that makes no sense, there's sense in the person's head about it. Samantha has a kid per year for a dozen years and with an endless array of men. On the surface, she's a sex-crazed slut, basically. But then you get inside her head and learn that she has visions about an apocalyptic battle of the races, so she's trying to make as many African-Americans as possible for the crisis. It's not how I'd run my life, but it's certainly one way to see the world.
But on the other hand, everyone in the book sits around drinking most of the time. There's no sense of building for tomorrow, for coming up with a plan, for working collectively on anything except the day-to-day. A few people are obliquely referred to as successful, but this is because they got out of Homewood and moved elsewhere, sending back a Christmas card or (in the case of one woman) coming to visit her daughter a couple of times a year in her glamorous clothing. Carl goes into service in WWII and does well, and then he comes home and starts taking art classes using the GI Bill. But he quits when one teacher tells him that, though he's talented, there's no place in art or in graphics work for a Black man. Rather than trying to find out if that man is right, Carl quits the next day.
There's no such thing as success within Homewood, and that's why you have so much trouble feeling like you can be a part of this book. You'd never want to live there, and if you did it would be very hard to feel the affection for it that the characters do, unless, like them, you lived their your entire life.
Interestingly, to the extent that the book has a narrator -- and it doesn't, really -- it's "Doot." Doot is the nickname for a 30-year-old African American man who grew up in a Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh called Homewood. He's come back in the 1980s (I think) and is visiting with older relatives and their friends, and they tell him stories of the old days. Those stories are the heart of the book. But this conventional-sounding formula makes the book seem much more accessible than it is. Doot is a totally minor character who's briefly noted in the beginning because another person named "Brother" is mentioned as the person who gave Doot his name; and then Doot is in the last one-fifth of the book in the role of the pitcher into which these stories are poured by the older generation in a mixed-up flow of reminisce, rumor, and drunken daydreams and nightmares.
People are saying this boy reminds them of James Joyce. It reminds me of Faulkner. First, it's a hermetically sealed area -- in this case the African-American neighborhood of Homewood, on the edge of Pittsburgh, which is an entire universe in a maybe 10 square blocks. You've got people telling the same stories over and over for decades, but from slightly different perspectives until the full story emerges. You have people who are outcasts even within their little society, such as the Albino brother. You have a ton of repetition, a ton of slang, a healthy dose of the Bible but also of sinning. It's Faulkneresque, but in a Black community in the North.
Now, it is it good? Well, it's impressive, but it's not pleasurable to read. It's funny, angry, imaginative, full of riffs on life and with creative descriptions that beautifully reflect what must have been the things that people in that world saw and did. For example, two young skinny boys with pot-bellies in the way boys have them are described as having "watermelon" stomachs, with ribs as fingers reaching down to hold the watermelons in place. Or games of chicken at the railroad tracks are described with such intensity that they bring back my own much-less daredevil kid days, and the feeling of power when you conquered a fear.
But it's really hard to work through the language of the book. The language flows like a stream of consciousness, or often actually the subconscious mind in which ideas meld together, some real and some imagined. Much of it is choppy phrases stuck together into impressions, rather than complete thoughts. It's hard to know what's real and what's imagined. Many times, people are talking but quotes aren't used, so you have to read it a few times to realize it's banter in a bar or on a porch. You're told something happened, usually something tragic, but you're not sure it really happened, and you don't find out until later how it happened.
And while the language is impressive in a jazzy, impressionistic way, I find that its difficulties actually pull me away from the characters at times. You want to feel for the people in this story, the generations from about 1920 through the 1970s living in Homewood. Life was hard and was limited by prejudice. They deserved better than they got, and you are reminded of their essential goodness to each other, their humanity as shown by their humor and occasional visions of beauty in a sunset, their need to keep their community alive by telling and retelling stories.
Homewood was about as middle class as African-Americans could get at the time, and they were relegated to manual labor at rates about half of the rates for whites. John French, for example, was acknowledged as a great hanger of wallpaper, but he couldn't get steady work from whites, just scrap jobs when they needed an extra hand. He mostly spent his time drinking cheap wine and looking for stuff to steal from white homes. John was married and had several children, including Carl, a rambunctious kid who played on the train tracks, sneaked peaks at naked girls and had no ambitions (because society wouldn't let him have them). Carl's best friend is an albino boy named Brother, who mostly sings, whistles, and shucks-and jives. Brother is even less disciplined than Carl because he's got no parents and lives with an elderly couple, the Tates, who can't track him very much. Brother and Carl are lifelong friends who mostly spend their time drunk or on drugs, when the latter came to Homewood in the 1970s. They form a trio with Lucy Tate, also not the Tate's child but also taken in by them, and she and Carl have a romance that starts with sex at age 13 and remains for their entire lives, though they never marry nor have any kids. Also moving through the story is Albert, a gifted jazz and blues piano player, who is killed for sleeping with white women, a killing that Lucy witnesses and never forgets, and which serves to remind Carl and Brother that they will never get equal treatment.
So, on the one hand, you're sympathetic to the injustices of job discrimination, corrupt police, inadequate housing and resources, bad schools, and so on. Even when someone does something that makes no sense, there's sense in the person's head about it. Samantha has a kid per year for a dozen years and with an endless array of men. On the surface, she's a sex-crazed slut, basically. But then you get inside her head and learn that she has visions about an apocalyptic battle of the races, so she's trying to make as many African-Americans as possible for the crisis. It's not how I'd run my life, but it's certainly one way to see the world.
But on the other hand, everyone in the book sits around drinking most of the time. There's no sense of building for tomorrow, for coming up with a plan, for working collectively on anything except the day-to-day. A few people are obliquely referred to as successful, but this is because they got out of Homewood and moved elsewhere, sending back a Christmas card or (in the case of one woman) coming to visit her daughter a couple of times a year in her glamorous clothing. Carl goes into service in WWII and does well, and then he comes home and starts taking art classes using the GI Bill. But he quits when one teacher tells him that, though he's talented, there's no place in art or in graphics work for a Black man. Rather than trying to find out if that man is right, Carl quits the next day.
There's no such thing as success within Homewood, and that's why you have so much trouble feeling like you can be a part of this book. You'd never want to live there, and if you did it would be very hard to feel the affection for it that the characters do, unless, like them, you lived their your entire life.
March 21, 2008
I really enjoyed this book, even though some parts of it seemed to drag on. The writing style was quite different as there were no " for dialog and often it was unclear who was speaking unless I paid close attention to context.
June 2, 2022
The greatest discovery of my college career was John Edgar Wideman.
"As long as I am, there’s you. As long as there’s you, I am. It never stops. Nothing stops." (171)
This is an absolute masterpiece.
"As long as I am, there’s you. As long as there’s you, I am. It never stops. Nothing stops." (171)
This is an absolute masterpiece.
March 29, 2021
The book is almost a collection of connected short stories rather than a novel. It follows several different characters and has shifting perspectives. The main characters were Albert Wilkes or Doot as he was called a jazz pianist who returned to the neighborhood after having been away for seven years while hiding from the law for killing a cop, John French his friend who is now a married man with children and Brother who is an albino and has been mute ever since his son died. The book goes into each of the characters stories going back into the past and back to the present. The writing style was difficult to read because there was no punctuation to separate the dialog from the narration and no designation on who was speaking.
March 12, 2022
Taking the vernacular out of scare quotes can be both an aesthetic and political act. In Wideman's case it certainly is. He makes a collage out of stylized everyday speech and the high modernist until there is no distinction between the two--each enriches each. Proof that there's nothing the vernacular can't do, no thought it can't contain. Through the prism of a writer who knows how to listen, the spoken may communicate the unsayable.
June 15, 2012
Didn't move me as much as I wanted it to--probably because the prose is so abstract, almost poetry. Still, lovely use of language and a compelling structure...
September 15, 2014
I've never read anything like this. the closest is Edward P. Jones. It's all description and dialogue. perspective and tone. beautiful and surreal yet down home.
February 9, 2020
One of the most beautiful, poetic, heartbreaking novels I’ve ever read.
February 17, 2023
"...like Faulkner's, Wideman's prose is vivid and demanding..."
"...any reader who admires ambitious fiction..."
So says the back of the book, and this time the press is spot on. This is demanding reading, pages, paragraphs, sentences are written not to be read but to be chewed on, read and then reread. Because besides being demanding, Wideman's writing is rich, and alive and poetic. It's bebop in print; smokey, syncopated. And, if you can keep reading it is richly rewarding.
This is was a rare find for me. I hope to get to another of Wideman's works.
"...any reader who admires ambitious fiction..."
So says the back of the book, and this time the press is spot on. This is demanding reading, pages, paragraphs, sentences are written not to be read but to be chewed on, read and then reread. Because besides being demanding, Wideman's writing is rich, and alive and poetic. It's bebop in print; smokey, syncopated. And, if you can keep reading it is richly rewarding.
This is was a rare find for me. I hope to get to another of Wideman's works.
August 27, 2020
This book is not that long but it took me some time to finish it. Sometimes it was hard to follow (not a big fan of lack of punctuation), and I wish some characters had more spotlight. It is however very well written, very raw and I enjoyed the atmosphere overall. I would read a real story with a plot in the same neighbourhood, with the same characters.
June 5, 2021
A short novel, full of storytelling about the French family and "those old Homewood people." Stories within stories, jumping voices and decades, weaving memories, dreams, song lyrics. Time to go back and reread Damballah, the first Homewood book, all over again.
December 10, 2018
wanted to like it more but found the writing style overwrought
July 31, 2019
Beautiful, dreamy book. Non-linear.
June 7, 2010
An excellent novel. This story is the first novel in the Homewood Series. Homewood is the ghetto of Pittsburgh. It's about three friends growning up in Homewood. Contains some great characters: Brother, an albino black kid, and John French
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June 8, 2018Fall 2000 Bryant
December 17, 2008
A challenging read. I should have a go at it again. Takes place in Pittsburgh.
September 4, 2010
sublime magical realism. so good.
March 21, 2013
Very meditative, takes concentration to read.
April 28, 2013
This was a quick read, with beautiful prose, but I couldn't connect to the story or it's characters.
October 31, 2013
This book made me cry three or four times.
August 7, 2016
Slow-moving but poignant, and Wideman's prose is beautiful.
May 7, 2023
Multiple voices and overlapping storylines describe the sorrows and joys of a Pittsburgh neighborhood over decades. Mostly sorrows. An emotional and impressionistic journey.
Currently reading
August 29, 2008Love the vernacular - alienating, yet at the same time oddly compelling.
Read
August 7, 2011Mind altering.
July 19, 2012
A quiet little book that drew me in to its world.
Read
May 3, 2018to read
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews