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Jeremy Grice
September 7, 2015
English 2089
Dr. Murdock
Family and community
If any of the characters in this story were powerless to change the events in the story
“Our Time” by John Edgar Wideman, it would have been Robby’s mother. While everyone
experiences hardship from time-to-time, the amount of negative situations that unfolded in such a
short time in her life had a mind altering impact. While the passing of her husband and her sons
best friend Garth could be too much for some individuals, the incarceration of her son was the
final straw in her change of the mindset she had of the system that controls us on a day-to-day
basis. While the individuals closest to Garth couldn’t fully come to terms with what happened to
Garth, Robby took this unfortunate event as a personal offense.
Over the course of this story, you can tell she knows her son is headed down a bad path,
but she has no idea just how bad things were going to get. It was as if all the events beforehand
were too much for Robby, and his mother sensed it. “My mother worried about Robby all the
time. Whenever I visited home, sooner or later I’d find myself alone with Mom and she’d pour
out her fears about Robby’s wildness, the deep trouble he was bound for, the web of
entanglements and intrigues and bad company he was weaving around himself with a maddening
disregard for the inevitable consequences.” (Pg. 428)
Wideman does such a good job with making the reader feel immersed and connected with
the characters in the story, that you can sense a feeling of hopelessness in Robby’s mother. The
couch where Robby sat could be viewed as the antagonist in this scene, because it’s acting
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almost as a barrier between Robby and his mother. He’s refusing to leave the couch, and his
mother is begging him to follow her out of the house. “She knew better. Knew if I didn’t come
right then, chances was I wasn’t coming at all. She knew but wasn’t nothing she could do. Guess
I knew I was lying too.” (Pg. 451). At this particular point in the story, its almost as if she’s
fighting with the idea that her son has been lost, and she can’t bring him back. This broke her
down, because she had given everything she had to her children, and to see one doing the things
Robby was doing, almost took a part of her she knew she would never get back. A parent will
dedicate every ounce of energy they have to ensuring their children are raised correctly. Robby's
mother gave her children everything she could, and this could be taken almost as a personal blow
to her. When your child fails, it is almost as if you are failing as the parent.
“In spite of all her temperamental and philosophic resistance to extremes, my mother
would be radicalized” (Pg. 432) Throughout the entirety of this story, Robby’s mother presents
herself as someone with common sense. Throughout everything that had happened, she stayed
reserved and never let her opinions on the situations to get the best of her. After Robby was
incarcerated, his mother changed her viewpoint on the way things were handled. It seemed like
the way Garth was treated by the Doctors was what made Robby’s mother realize that the
individuals in her hometown of Homewood were treated differently than those who lived in
wealthier neighborhoods.
“She didn’t invent the two sides and initially didn’t believe there couldn’t be a middle
ground. She extended the benefit of the doubt. Tried to situate herself somewhere in between,
acknowledging the evil of her son’s crime while simultaneously holding on to the fact that he
existed as a human being before, after, and during the crime he’d committed.” (Pg. 432). From
an outsider’s point of view, Robby had committed murder. The problem with outsiders is that
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they do not truly know the individual. They do not truly know what type of person the individual
is. They don’t know their strengths and weaknesses, and what may have led to them committing
the crime. It is very different when the person who commits the crime is your child. During this
whole ordeal, she tried to see the best in her son. The last way she would have ever wanted to
look at her son to look at him as a murderer.
“A double bind. Bad enough to be ripped off by anonymous thieves. How much worse if
the thief is your son? For mom the robbery was proof Robby was gone. Somebody else walking
round in his skin. Mom was wounded in ways I hadn’t begun to guess at.” (Pg. 454) How much
does an individual have to lose before they lose what makes them who they are? While every
person will be different, it was the death of his best friend and his father that proved to push
Robby over the edge. While losing your father is something that is beyond difficult to deal with,
dealing with the loss of his best friend Garth in the manner in which it happened is what pushed
Robby into the darkness.
“Both my grandfathers died on December 28. My grandmother died just after dawn on
December 29. My sister lost a baby early in January. The end of the year has become associated
with mourning’s, funerals; New Year’s Day arrives burdened by a sense of loss, bereavement.
Robby birthday became tainted.” (Pg. 448) For Robby’s family, death became a common event
sadly. It is easy to see why Robby formed such a negative outlook on life and toward society. For
his mother, she lost her son to the events that unfolded in such a short time.
All of these things go to show that our various discourses affect each other in both
positive and negative ways. For Robby, his main discourse was heavily affect by the community
in which he lived. His community is extremely unstable, which could be blamed for his need for
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the alcohol and drugs. Robby needed an escape from the life that surrounded him, and a positive
escape was non existent.
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References
Wideman, John Edgar. “Our Time.” Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers.
Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky, and Stacey Waite. Bedford/St. Martin’s 2014. 422-59. Print.