Brothers and Keepers

Brothers and Keepers (1984), a memoir by John Edgar Wideman, charts the wildly divergent paths taken by two African-American brothers despite similar upbringings. Hailing from a family of modest means in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the author, John, grows up to become a Rhodes Scholar, a college professor, and a successful writer. Meanwhile, his brother, Robby, is a heroin addict who receives a life sentence for his role in a botched robbery and confidence scheme that turn deadly. Through personal recollections and lengthy interviews conducted through prison glass, Wideman compares the trajectory of his own life to that of his brother’s and, in the process, tells a story that grapples with race, identity, prison conditions, and the American Dream.

The book begins in February 1976 in Laramie, Wyoming, a town Wideman says is as white demographically as it is white with snow from the region’s brutal winters. Wideman, who at the time teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Wyoming, awaits the arrival of Robby, a fugitive wanted for murder in the wake of a robbery three months earlier that goes wrong in every possible way. Along with two black accomplices, Robby—unemployed and desperate for cash to fund his heroin addiction—had planned to rob a white man to whom they had promised a batch of stolen television sets. When the fence flees, he is shot by one of the accomplices who mistakenly sees the fence reach for a non-existent gun.

Wideman reflects on how the two men’s lives have taken such dramatically different turns. In high school, Wideman and his sister are both stars, academically and athletically. Ten years younger than John and eager to carve out his own separate identity, Robby vies for stardom on the street, falling in with a rough crowd of drinkers, drug users, and petty criminals. Despite their differences, Wideman concludes that both he and Robby are chasing a different aspect of the American Dream—the former through “white” notions of family and stability, the latter through the path of the outlaw which, to Robby and many other African-Americans, feels like the more viable option considering the racism black men and women face in America. For example, when the police show up to arrest Robby the day after he arrives at his brother’s home in Laramie, Wideman describes almost being arrested himself: “I was black. My brother was a suspect. So perhaps I was the fourth perpetrator. No matter that I lived four hundred miles from the scene of the crime. No matter that I wrote books and taught literature and creative writing at the university. I was black. Robby was my brother. Those unalterable facts would always incriminate me.”



Wideman also reflects on the sacrifices both men make in pursuit of their goals—for Robby, this means freedom and comfort, and for John, it means his identity and sense of community as a black man lost in his assimilation into white society. “I’d come west to escape the demons Robby personified,” Wideman writes. “I didn’t need outlaw brothers reminding me how much had been lost, how much compromised, how terribly the world still raged beyond the charmed circle of my life on the Laramie plains.” For Wideman, life as a law-abiding citizen means swallowing his rage instead of acting out against the individuals and institutions out to destroy him as a black man.

After his brother’s arrest, the book shifts gears to examine the harsh conditions of American prisons—conditions which plague black men like Robby to a disproportionate degree. Wideman describes the corrupt and sadistic tendencies of the guards—the “keepers” of the book’s title—who go so far as to murder prisoners they label “troublemakers.” Even prisoners like Robby, who manage to avoid these unofficial “death sentences,” suffer what Wideman calls “civil death”; he compares his prison visits to attending the funeral of a loved one, but with less closure.

As the book progresses, Wideman supplements the narrative with poems, letters, and first-person accounts written from Robby’s perspective, allowing the reader to better understand the younger brother’s motivations and how what began as youthful rebellion, common among teens of all backgrounds, spiraled out-of-control in no small part because of the razor-thin margin of error faced by black Americans. By the end of the book, Robby has earned a college degree from prison, adopting some of his brothers’ character traits in the process and finally, to some extent at least, coming to terms with the duality of the black experience in America—which, more than anything else, is Wideman’s guiding preoccupation in writing Brothers and Keepers.



Perhaps, ironically, it is Wideman—imprisoned within metaphorical penitentiary walls of his own making—who never quite reconciles this duality within himself, writing, “I had no feelings apart from the series of roles and masquerades I found myself playing. And my greatest concern at the time had nothing to do with re-establishing an authentic core. What I feared most and spent most of my energy avoiding, was being unmasked.” This pessimistic mood pervades much of the book and is only worsened near the end when the reader discovers that the prison program Robby used to obtain a college degree has been discontinued.

While happy endings and easy answers largely elude the Wideman brothers, they obtain a level of understanding of themselves and, more broadly, what it means to be black in America—an understanding that is shared with the reader. As Ishmael Reed writes in a review for The New York Times, “By combining his own literary skill with the candor and vitality of his brother's street style, Mr. Wideman gives added power and dimension to this book about the contrary values and goals of two brothers.”