SOURCE: Coleman, James W. “Damballah: The Intellectual and the Folk Voice.” In Blackness and Modernism: The Literary Career of John Edgar Wideman, pp. 79-96. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

In the following essay, Coleman provides a stylistic and thematic overview of Damballah, asserting that the major themes of the short story collection “center on the folk characters' use of black cultural tradition and around the black intellectual's integration into the black community.”

In Damballah (1981), the second book of the Homewood Trilogy,Wideman presents a wide range of black folk characters who draw on various aspects of the black cultural tradition—including stories, folk beliefs and rituals, religious songs, and religious rituals—to triumph over racism, poverty, hardship, and pain. Wideman now brings a black voice to themes that received a mainstream modernist treatment in the early books. Wideman speaks in a black voice even louder and deeper than...