The Cattle Killing: National Book Award Finalist – A Haunting Alternate History of Love and Resistance

by John Edgar Wideman

In plague-ridden eighteenth-century Philadelphia, a young itinerant black preacher searches for a mysterious, endangered African woman. His struggle to find her and save them both plummets them both into the nightmare of a society violently splitting itself into white and black. Spiraling outward from the core image of a cattle killing--the Xhosa people's ritual destruction of their herd in a vain attempt to resist European domination--the novel expands its narrator's search for meaning and love into the America, Europe and South Africa of yesterday and today.

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, African American Literature, African American

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

A widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice: in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 2000 he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Weight", published in The Callaloo Journal.

In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu.com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award.

His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction.

He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University, and he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.

Reviews

[Carl R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometime in the eighteenth century, the Xhosa people of South Africa followed the advice of an early-day intelligence report--an oracle--and began destroying their cattle in the belief that the slaughter would help them avoid European domination. The killing of their number one means of sustenance proved even more self-destructive than our own flocking to follow pied pipers Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush. At least so far.
Richard Wideman’s The Cattle Killing uses this historical event as a metaphor for the centuries of destruction and self-destruction of culture and identity that have characterized the collision of blacks and whites unto our own times.
The protagonist is a young itinerant preacher who, in the 1790’s Philadelphia countryside, attracts a small following of rural blacks who are religious but weary of the dry, negative sermons of the local white Methodist preacher. The narrator is highly spiritual and also, significantly, epileptic. His preaching is part of his search for meaning in a world where kindly benefactors are also rapists, where God saves parentless children by guiding them to an orphanage, then allows them to be burned to death, where a black man and a white woman cannot hope for a fulfilling marriage no matter how devoted they are to one another.
For all the racial strife in the book, The Cattle Killing is not in the vein of a Richard Wright civil rights protest. It probes much deeper than that. One of the real historic personages in the book is Bishop Richard Allen, a black Episcopalian who split off from the church and later founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church. (Wideman goes into none of that. I just happen to know it.) In a crisis of the soul that has nothing, however, to do with race, the narrator stands in the ashes of the orphanage deathtrap and declares to Allen his loss of faith. He seeks to hurt the Bishop, he says, with his renunciation of God and religion. The Bishop gives him a smile (“or a look that passes for a smile”) and says the sad event is a chance to renew faith and redouble efforts to do Christ’s work in the world.
Another historical character is Dr. Benjamin Thrush, modeled after Benjamin Rush, one of our founding fathers. I don’t know why Wideman changes Rush’s name. Certainly no fear of slander charges after all this time. It is Thrush who initiates the American equivalent of the cattle killing when he rapes and impregnates a servant who in turn becomes both love interest and symbol for the narrator in his spiritual and romantic quest.
The narrator’s story is framed by the story of the writing and reading of the story by at least two authors. Thus, the echoes of the tale of creativity, oppression, and self-destruction gain both dimension and depth by treatment of parallel themes over several centuries.
Wideman’s prose is cryptic, elliptical, poetic. No quotation marks, slippery tense and pov shifts. I found it sometimes difficult to remain grounded in time and space. However, the effort is more than worth it. This is one major writer who deserves more recognition than he’s received and who should not be pigeonholed as a black author. Based on The Cattle Killing, I don’t think there’s a better writer in the country today.

[Ryan]

I discovered a whole cache of this guy's books at Caliban Books (amazing book store) in Pittsburgh. He's from there. I kept reading the descriptions on the books and knew instantly I had found a new beloved author. I wanted to buy all of the books, but I only bought one, for both financial purposes and because I hadn't actually read any of his work yet.

Turns out this book was infuriating. People love him, so I can only chalk up my misery while reading this book to being dumb. I didn't understand a single word of it, and I couldn't tell you anything that it's about. He's the only writer I've ever read that I can say is truly "Faulknerian." But not, to me, in a good way. The whole thing is in first person, but the speaker shifts throughout the story (I think) without designating that it's changing. Like, within a paragraph the speaker will change. No one is every fully identified, and the time period also jumps around without being clear when.

For a short book, it took me FOREVER to read it. The last 50 or 60 pages were a slog. I really wanted to like this guy's stuff. He sounds amazing (look him up). Maybe I'll give one more of his books the ole college try and see if maybe it was just this one I couldn't get into.

[Qiana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Okay, I give up. I can't get through Wideman's novel. All the right ingredients are here - the stream of consciousness writing, the postmodern narrative within a narrative, black suffering and religious faith, slavery and an African past... But I'm not hooked. Plus I owe so many overdue fines on the novel at this point...

[Christopher Trader · Rating 3 out of 5]

An amazing story at it's core, but sadly and pretentiously overly written.

[Alice Deligny · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've rarely read a book as good in my life. Story, style, emotions, themes, everything is on point. Wideman is a real master of his craft.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is another one of those novels that seems to require two readings in order for me to truly appreciate the richness in the text. My first read through, I was lost. I recognized the prose's beauty, but like a subject dislocated by the effects of the diaspora, I found myself experiencing blips of disjointed scenes that ebb in the wake of the slave ship. Wideman's work is a critique of White Christianity, a testimony on the queer nature of time as it relates to narrative and post-colonialism, and the self-destructive potentiality for rootlessness. The symbolism is rich, and although the chronology is disjointed, there is a high reward in this text for those willing to take the time to wade through the text.

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book made me realize I really haven't seen the 18th century USA represented much in literature and some of the unfamiliarity of that time period and its brand of violence and contradictions gave me a lot to think about. The narrative structure and switching of narrators is done a little weird but it ultimately all came together and added a dimension of "how is history (or stories in general) told and by who" that was complementary to the experience of reading about a less familiar time in history, where I don't have as many presuppositions to begin with. Definitely recommend.

[Dylan Groves · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not particularly smart, so its very possible that this was just way over my head. But I was lost for about 60 - 70% of this book.

Certain 5-10 page stretches were extremely evocative and powerful.

[Fenner Dreyfuss-Wells · Rating 4 out of 5]

super cool, you can never tell exactly who is talking, when and where, about what. instead of being confused i choose to be amazed!

[Jeremiah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would someone who gave this book 4 or 5 stars please explain it -- or why -- to me? I feel like I'm missing something, but not really. I don't ever expect to understand Wideman's work completely when I read it, but what I have been so moved by in the past was the intensely personal way he writes. I mean, I loved Philadelphia Fire mainly because of the parts where it seemed to be Wideman talking. It is as though the backdrops of his novels -- the house firebombing, the Xhosa cattle killing, the yellow fever -- bring swells of memories and confusion and personal hurt that he is trying to work out in his head. There is less of that in The Cattle Killing . As the narrative is so fragmented, changing not only characters but also from first- to second- to third- person even within one character's narrative, that this left me unable to identify with any character. The clipped sentences create a problem of tone for me, too. I saw flashes of brilliance in this novel, but in the end it wasn't enough.

[Bill Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nobody writes like Wideman. He's a master. If I had to compare him to another writer it would probably be Cormac McCarthy but even that's a stretch. If you want to read something mind-expanding then read either "The Cattle Killing" or "Philadelphia Fire," the two Wideman I've read. He's completely unique and very compelling.

[Chrystal Hays · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine book, which reminds me of the style of Henry Miller in some ways...shifting, flowing, not keenly organized. It's almost poetry in places, and it touches and lays bare some festering wounds in our society.

It's a good read, but one has to rise above the complete and total lack of the use of question marks and other stylistic liberties.

[henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

first read this in college and have come back to it several times. one of the greatest pieces of fiction i've ever read.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

i didn't really "get" it....