In modern liberal thought, movement is intimately associated with freedom and freedom with movement. In a modern literary-philosophical tradition, walking in particular has been aligned not only with freedom but also with writing. But neither the liberal ideals of freedom and/as movement, nor the practices of walking as a key to contemplation and writing, have been axiomatic for African Americans. The recurring thematization of walking and writing in John Edgar Wideman’s novels provides a notable angle on how this relation may be thought in an African American context. His Philadelphia Fire (1990) provides a concrete example, not only of how the relation between freedom and movement may be thought in a context of constant physical constraint, but also of how this relation may be negotiated by actively claiming the interconnecting practices of movement and writing. It thereby assists in reclaiming metafiction from its associations with (white) postmodern and postcritical discourses.