Philadelphia Fire isn’t so much about the 1985 bombing (by the police) of the MOVE house on Osage Avenue (though that did happen, and does figure in the plot) as it is about struggles and failures and failings, and maybe especially failed ideals. The book’s epigraph is a quote from William Penn saying that each house in the city should sit “in the middle of its platt” so that the city “may be a green Country Towne, wch will never be burnt, and always be wholsome.” Yeah, so much for that. Meanwhile, at the start of the novel, we meet Cudjoe, a writer who grew up in West Philly but has been living in Europe, who’s come home to write about the fire. We see him interviewing a woman who had been part of MOVE but had left before the bombing happened; we hear her talk about a child who is the sole survivor of the fire in the MOVE house but has gone missing. (In real life, one adult and one child survived; neither went missing.) Cudjoe wants to find the missing kid, and he wants to write about the fire, and he doesn’t actually do either. He reflects on his failed marriage, on his kids (who aren’t in his life at all), on a production of The Tempest he was going to put on with Black kids from a West Philly public school that didn’t end up happening, because it was meant to be outdoors but got rained out. He has lunch with a college friend who’s now cultural attaché to Philly’s first Black mayor, and they talk about gentrification and the changing city and how maybe if Cudjoe hadn’t left, he “could have told the mayor what to do” about MOVE and its members. “Sooner or later, one way or another, them and their dreadlocks had to go,” says Cudjoe’s friend, Timbo. So much for ideals of tolerance and getting along.
The three parts of Philadelphia Fire don’t entirely cohere, but that may be intentional: the struggle to tell the overlapping stories of a city, maybe. The first part focuses on Cudjoe and his story; the second part feels like a diary or commonplace book, with quotes and notes and musings (though Cudjoe does appear, when that production of The Tempest is discussed); the third part features a homeless man named J.B. (though Cudjoe appears again as well, and I was glad when the story returned to him).
Wideman’s writing in this book is really vivid and often gorgeous: there are so many striking images and passages and descriptions, like Cudjoe thinking of memory as like a snow-globe you pick up, a self-contained thing that sits on a shelf, or Cudjoe joining a pickup basketball game in Clark Park and narrating the rhythm of the game, the feel of it in his body. And I’m such a sucker for passages like this, describing Cudjoe looking at Philly from the steps of the art museum:
“This is how the city was meant to be viewed. Broad avenues bright spokes of a wheel radiating from a glowing center. No buildings higher than Billy Penn’s hat atop City Hall. Scale and pattern fixed forever. Clarity, balance, a perfect understanding between the parts. Night air thick and bad but he’s standing where he should and the city hums this dream of itself into his ear and he doesn’t believe in it for an instant but wonders how he managed to stay away so long.”
Or this, about how the city is created each day by its inhabitants, which made me think of my recent re-read of Mrs. Dalloway, where Woolf talks about people creating life “at every moment afresh:
“Didn’t you need a million windows opening, framing views of the city every morning in order for a city to come to life? Wasn’t a city millions of eyes that are windows opening on scenes invisible till the eyes construct them, till the eyes remember and set out in meticulous detail the city that was there before they closed for sleep?”
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