Slaveroad

John Edgar Wideman’s genre-bending autobiography chronicles not only his life, but also those of African men and women who made their way to the U.S. through the trans–Atlantic slave trade. A poignant mix of memoir, autofiction, history, and poetry, Slaveroad begins by tracing the journeys of people like William Henry Sheppard, a descendant of enslaved Virginians who returned to Africa in 1890 to become one of the first African Americans to work as a missionary for the Presbyterian Church. Sheppard is one of many whose lives intersected with the author’s own along the “slaveroad,” a term Wideman coined for the ocean that carried the enslaved from Africa to the U.S., a metaphorical bridge between past and present generations of freedmen and women. The parallels become evidently clear in a later chapter in which Wideman writes unsparingly of his son’s incarceration for a 1986 murder. Somber and searching, Slaveroad is an impassioned meditation on slavery’s enduring effects.

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