Because The Cattle Killing, John Edgar Wideman’s first work of
fiction in six years, is about loss – loss of life, loss of faith, loss
of hope, innocence and direction – it seems only fitting that this
review should begin like the book, with a metaphorical slaughtering.
The final determination – what might have been hoped for at the
outset of this novel, what might have become of all its potential and
power – is virtually D.O.A. The narration, though intermittently
brilliant, is frequently oblique and clumsily passed from speaker to
speaker. Add to this the author’s confusion of tense and person, and
you have a work of fiction that is consummately frustrating and doomed
to self-destruct.
Nevertheless, The Cattle Killing is a chillingly pretty corpse – a
poetic, gutsy, and penetrating piece of prose that, like one of the
characters who chimerically passes through it, drowns itself. But
before disposing of the carcass, let’s examine it.
To say that book is not illuminating, intriguing fiction would be a
lie. Set primarily in the Philadelphia area of both the present and
eighteenth centuries, this multifaceted tale includes recollections
from lives spent in Africa and Europe.
The first voice shared is that of a middle-aged African American, a
successful novelist revisiting the Philadelphia ghetto of his youth.
While trekking through the still-mean city streets to visit his
estranged father and share with him his latest novel, this author’s
somber reflections center on the sad state of affairs that have caused
inner-city Black youth to wreak havoc on each other though one brutal,
futile killing after another. This opening coupled with the book’s
title suggest that whatever comes next, some allusion will be drawn to
connect the senselessness of Black-on-Black crime to the carnage of
animal butchery:
“Shoot. Chute. Black boys shoot each other. Murder themselves.
Shoot. Chute. Panicked cattle funneled down the killing chute, nose
pressed into the drippy ass of the one ahead. Shitting and pissing all
over themselves because finally, too late, they understand. Understand
whose skull is split by the ax at the end of the tunnel.”
The torch immediately passes from these contemporary musings to
plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia. There, a young Black
itinerant preacher – a former slave given to fits, fainting spells, and
visions – is reduced to vagrancy after his congregation of freed
Africans is decimated by a racist mob. Narrating his tale to an
unidentified listener, he speaks of the terrible destruction wrought by
the plague – apparently yellow fever, common to that era – and of his
vain efforts to save victims and souls alike in its wake.
