Philadelphia Fire

Philadelphia Fire is a 1990 novel by American author John Edgar Wideman. It explores the aftermath of the 1985 assault by City of Philadelphia Police on a house occupied by an Afrocentric organization called MOVE, an assault in which eleven people died. Told partly by an alter ego for the author called Cudjoe and partly in the author’s own voice, the novel explores the role of racial violence in American history and in Wideman’s own life. Wideman is one of America’s most decorated living authors, and for Philadelphia Fire, he won the American Book Award and the first of two PEN/Faulkner Awards.

The first of the novel’s three parts opens as Cudjoe, a former writer and creative writing teacher, learns about a disaster in his hometown of Philadelphia. A city police helicopter has dropped a bomb on a compound occupied by an organization called MOVE—combining Black Power and back-to-nature ideologies—killing eleven MOVE members, among them five children. The resulting fire has destroyed sixty-five homes in a predominantly black neighborhood.

When he hears the news, Cudjoe is in Mykonos, Greece, living in self-imposed exile from the United States because, having married a white woman and fathered mixed-race children, he feels himself to have become “a half-black someone, a half-man who couldn’t be depended upon.”



Cudjoe discovers that one MOVE member is rumored to have survived the fire, a boy named Simba “Simmie” Muntu. Learning that Simmie has since disappeared, Cudjoe becomes determined to find him. He sets out for Philadelphia and is dismayed by the rot that seems to have beset life in his city: “Did anything get better instead of worse?”

He interviews Margaret Jones, a former MOVE member, who explains the MOVE philosophy to him. It centers on “the holy Tree of Life. How we all born part of it. How we all one family. [The founder s]howed us how the rotten system of this society is about chopping down a Tree. Society hates health. Society don't want strong people.”

Next, Cudjoe reaches out to an old sports buddy, Timbro, who now works for the black Mayor of Philadelphia as a cultural attaché. Timbro explains that the Mayor’s office was embarrassed by MOVE, which the Mayor and his team saw as a cult: “Mayor breaking his butt to haul the city into the twenty-first century and them fools on Osage want their block to the jungle.”



Cudjoe takes part in a game of pick-up basketball in West Philadelphia and gathers further perspectives on the fire from the other players.

In Part 2, Wideman drops the mask of “Cudjoe”: “Why am I him when I tell certain parts?” Wideman and his wife watch coverage of the MOVE fire on CNN. They are interrupted by a phone call from Wideman’s son, recently imprisoned for his role in a drug-related murder. Wideman thinks about the cruel system which has separated him from his son for the next twenty-five years, wondering whether he will ever be able to write his son’s story: “Not dealing with it may be causing the forgetfulness I'm experiencing.”

After this scene, Cudjoe returns to tell the story of his effort to stage Shakespeare’s The Tempest in a West Philadelphia park during the 1960s, with local black kids taking the roles. This section is refractive and modernist in style, with many voices and complex allusions. As Cudjoe tells the story of his failed staging of Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest becomes a way of retelling the story of the fire. The fire is the storm of the play, Prospero the various figures who comprise the establishment of white power, and Caliban the suffering black population of the city. The story of the fire is raised to the level of archetype or myth: a “lesson…about colonization, imperialism…of the weak by the strong, colored by white, many by few.”



The novel’s short final section begins with another story of fire on the streets of Philadelphia. A homeless man named J.B.—who once provided the City with information about the MOVE family—witnesses the suicide of a white businessman, who leaps from the Penn Mutual building. J.B. steals the businessman’s briefcase. Later he is caught with it by a gang of white youths, who set him on fire.

The ending of the novel returns to Cudjoe as he attends a memorial service for those killed in the MOVE fire. In his head, he addresses the other attendees: “Hey fellas…If they offed them people on Osage yesterday just might be you today. Or tomorrow . . . because that day in May the Man wasn't playing. Huh uh. Taking no names. No prisoners . . . And here you are again making no connections, taking out no insurance.”

Reviewers received Philadelphia Fire rapturously: “Wideman writes of sex and race and life in the city, with all the beauty, profane humor, and literary complexity of Joyce writing about Dublin.” However, many reviewers noted that the angry and despairing tone of the novel might trouble readers: “With its dark and cynical humor, this metafiction will disturb as many readers as it dazzles” (Kirkus Reviews).