The sense of place in Wideman’s Sent For You Yesterday, Gay’s Provinces of Night, and Chute’s The Beans of Egypt Maine transcends physical boundaries and is “seen heard, smelled, imagined, love, hated, feared, revered, enjoyed or avoided.” In Sent For You Yesterday, generations of Homewood inhabitants unconsciously become products of their landscape. The novel 's characters—Brother Tate, Doot Carl, Albert Wilkes (among others)—become manifestations of the history and experiences of Homewood, as long as they remain within the confines of this rural place. Bernice Murphy, in her book The Rural Gothic in American Pop Culture, writes that “the otherness of the region is dramatized in ways which graphically reaffirm the sense…that the rural poor
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Ryden helps us understand this connection between place and space. Ryden suggests that modern “space” is universal and abstract, whereas “place” is concrete and particular. The rural poor folk depicted in Gay’s, Chute’s and Wideman’s novels are mere products of their low socioeconomic environment. Chute’s “Beans” and Gay’s “Bloodworth’s,” except (perhaps) Fleming, live stagnant, unprogressive lives. Place and character become intertwined and the two can no longer be mutually exclusive; Brady and Boyd, individually, represent "these folk from Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, [who] did not seem to melt into the common culture of the city…they were who they were…unassimilated, unrepentant, unreconstructed. All these folk seemed to have more past than future” (Gay 166). The Bloodworth’s appear to be confined to the dimensions of the past, while, for some of the characters in Sent For You Yesterday, the past is in front of them. They can see it, but they can’t grab hold or do anything with it. In this sense, the central characters have no agency over the past, but the memories they have to allow them to exist in a sea of past, present and future. In Sent For You Yesterday, Doot comments, "so I 'm linked to Brother Tate by stories, by his memories of his dead son, by my own memories of a silent, scat-singing albino man who was my uncle 's best friend" (Wideman 17). A web of interlinked memories and experiences within the place that is Homewood define Doot’s …show more content…
Wideman goes a step further by highlighting the destructive effects of racism amidst this rural black community. Unlike Chute’s and Gay’s novels, however, Wideman’s text is the only novel that addresses issues of race and the African American experience within the economically deprived rural landscape. In Sent For You Yesterday, the stereotypical “savage” is humanized. Racial violence is prevalent in Homewood. The death of June Bug and Brother Tate are both racially charged casualties. The white versus black binary is also magnified through the violence and heavily emphasized when Brother cradles his dead son, sorrowfully singing about the heinous barbarism that is slavery and the dehumanization of the black man through imperialism. Brother uses a collective “I” when he recounts the African American struggle: “I had crossed the ocean in a minute. That I had browned in rivers and dangled like rotten from trees" (Wideman 171). Brother’s use of the collective “I” represents this notion of one struggle—the struggle of the marginally disenfranchised. Brother exists in a world of white and black; his albino skin tone
Ryden helps us understand this connection between place and space. Ryden suggests that modern “space” is universal and abstract, whereas “place” is concrete and particular. The rural poor folk depicted in Gay’s, Chute’s and Wideman’s novels are mere products of their low socioeconomic environment. Chute’s “Beans” and Gay’s “Bloodworth’s,” except (perhaps) Fleming, live stagnant, unprogressive lives. Place and character become intertwined and the two can no longer be mutually exclusive; Brady and Boyd, individually, represent "these folk from Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, [who] did not seem to melt into the common culture of the city…they were who they were…unassimilated, unrepentant, unreconstructed. All these folk seemed to have more past than future” (Gay 166). The Bloodworth’s appear to be confined to the dimensions of the past, while, for some of the characters in Sent For You Yesterday, the past is in front of them. They can see it, but they can’t grab hold or do anything with it. In this sense, the central characters have no agency over the past, but the memories they have to allow them to exist in a sea of past, present and future. In Sent For You Yesterday, Doot comments, "so I 'm linked to Brother Tate by stories, by his memories of his dead son, by my own memories of a silent, scat-singing albino man who was my uncle 's best friend" (Wideman 17). A web of interlinked memories and experiences within the place that is Homewood define Doot’s …show more content…
Wideman goes a step further by highlighting the destructive effects of racism amidst this rural black community. Unlike Chute’s and Gay’s novels, however, Wideman’s text is the only novel that addresses issues of race and the African American experience within the economically deprived rural landscape. In Sent For You Yesterday, the stereotypical “savage” is humanized. Racial violence is prevalent in Homewood. The death of June Bug and Brother Tate are both racially charged casualties. The white versus black binary is also magnified through the violence and heavily emphasized when Brother cradles his dead son, sorrowfully singing about the heinous barbarism that is slavery and the dehumanization of the black man through imperialism. Brother uses a collective “I” when he recounts the African American struggle: “I had crossed the ocean in a minute. That I had browned in rivers and dangled like rotten from trees" (Wideman 171). Brother’s use of the collective “I” represents this notion of one struggle—the struggle of the marginally disenfranchised. Brother exists in a world of white and black; his albino skin tone