The Homewood Books

Edgar Wideman’s The Homewood Books  is so named because they share characters, events, and locales, these two novels— Hiding Place and Sent for You Yesterday — and one collection of short stories —Damballah— are set in the Homewood section of Pittsburgh, where Wideman was raised.As Wideman writes in his introduction to this edition, the three books “offer a continuous investigation, from many angles, not so much of a physical location, Homewood, … but of a culture, a way of seeing and being seen.”  Three voices and three perspectives dominate the story narrated in Hiding Place: Bess, who has lost a son to the war, living a hermetic existence of Bruston Hill; tommy, who is fleeing the police for a murder charge he is not guilty of; and Clement, a simple boy who makes deliveries to Bess’s house.Damballah is a powerful collection of interrelated stories spanning a century in Homewood.  The tales celebrate a community of people who, in the face of crisis, need, and fear, uphold each other through grace, courage, and dignity.Winner of the 1984 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and named as one of the fifteen best books of 1983 by the New York Times Book Review, Sent for You Yesterday traces, through its narrator, Doot, the intertwining lives through time of the inhabitants of Homewood— Lucy, Brother Tate, Albert Wilkes, Carl French, and their ancestors and offspring—- from the blues-oriented 1920s to the drug-influenced 1970s.