Volume 44, Number 5 · March 27, 1997
Troubles I've Seen
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Cattle Killing
by John Edgar Wideman
Houghton Mifflin, 212 pp., $22.95
In a probate-office storage vault in Abbeville, South Carolina, an elderly white ex-history professor is showing a black writer from Massachusetts, whose slave ancestors lived in the Abbeville region, itemized documents relating to the sale and possession of slaves. The black writer is grateful for the historian's generous assistance (though the historian has never met the writer before, he has volunteered to spend several days with him), and so it comes as a considerable shock to the writer that, as he gazes down at the back of the historian's head, he feels an 'ice-cold wave of anger [at him],…at the back of his thin, freckled bald skull,' and an impulse to do injury.
Review, 2892 words
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