Five years after his marriage dissolved, Wilson was still scraping by writing poetry in Pittsburgh when he was offered an unexpected change of scenery. A friend from the Hill named Claude Purdy had moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, and co-founded a small drama company. Purdy was looking for new works to stage, and he asked Wilson to fashion a satirical musical from some poems he had written about a fanciful Negro cowboy called “Black Bart.” Wilson thought the idea was “ridiculous,” he recalled, but he agreed to write a script he titled “Black Bart and the Sacred Hills.” While the musical was in rehearsal, Purdy asked Wilson to help with revisions and sent him a plane ticket to St. Paul. Soon after Wilson arrived in Minnesota, Purdy’s wife introduced him to her best friend, Judy Oliver, a white social worker with whom he fell in love and would later marry.
Even though the black community was much smaller in St. Paul than in Pittsburgh, Wilson liked the city’s leafy calm and he decided to stay for a while. The decision became permanent when he found a job that allowed him to support himself as a writer. The Science Museum of Minnesota hired Wilson to write one-act plays for visiting schoolchildren that dramatized museum exhibits and explained the contributions of scientific pioneers such as Charles Darwin and anthropologist Margaret Mead.
Wilson began trying to write plays for himself again, and he made a stirring discovery. Back in Pittsburgh, he had seen a production of the South African play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, which impressed him with its powerful yet utterly natural dialogue. In his attempts at playwriting until then, Wilson had tried to force words into the mouths of his actors. His friend Rob Penny had told him that was a mistake. “How do you make characters talk?” Wilson asked. “You don’t,” Penny responded. “You listen to them.”
When Wilson started to listen in St. Paul, he began to hear the voices of the men and women he had overheard in the diners, rooming houses, and pool halls of Pittsburgh. Suddenly words began to pour out of him. Scribbling in notebooks and on napkins at Arthur Treacher’s Fish & Chips, one of his new haunts, he took just ten days to write a one-act play called Jitney that consisted almost entirely of the banter he had heard from the gypsy cab drivers on the Hill. As soon as that play was finished, the voices of Southern migrants who had arrived in Pittsburgh in the 1940s began to speak to him, and he wrote a play about them called Fullerton Street. Encouraged by Penny, Wilson submitted both plays to the National Playwrights Conference, a prestigious summer theater workshop in Connecticut, but both times rejection letters came back in the mail.
How could he possibly improve on those plays? Wilson wondered. (After his first application was turned down, he had sent it again, thinking the rejection was a mistake.) But he was determined not to give up. He quit the science museum and took a job as a lunch cook at a Catholic charity, earning next to nothing but freeing up his afternoons to write. He went back to a story idea he had begun to toy with in Pittsburgh, about a studio session in the 1920s involving Ma Rainey, one of the first blues singers to have her voice committed to records. As Wilson wrote, the story grew into a tale about the conflicts between Ma’s sidemen: Levee, a brash trumpeter who is trying to ingratiate himself with the record company; and Cutler and Toledo, a trombonist and piano player who are convinced that Negroes would always be kept down in the white-run music business. This time, when Wilson submitted the play he called Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom to the Playwrights Conference, he was accepted.
When Wilson arrived in Waterford, Connecticut, in July 1982, he was welcomed by one of the most revered black theater directors in America. Born in Canada and raised in Detroit, Lloyd Richards had abandoned law studies for a theater degree and gone on to direct the original Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun. By the early 1980s, he was serving as dean of the Yale School of Drama and director of the summer Playwrights Conference. When Richards first read Ma Rainey, he was struck instantly by its original voice, by how accurately and beautifully it captured the kind of language he remembered from the Detroit barbershops of his youth. Richards was also impressed with how, using the blues as a metaphor, the play celebrated the difference between black culture and white culture. (“White folks don’t understand the blues,” Ma explains to the trumpeter Levee. “They hear it come out but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing because that’s a way of understanding life.”)
Richards believed that the play had the potential to go all the way to the New York stage, and he took the thirty-seven-year-old fledgling playwright and his fifty-three-page script firmly in hand. He picked actors for the workshop readings and directed them personally. He advised Wilson on how to tighten the play and build toward its bloody climax, when the trumpeter Levee stabs the trombonist Cutler and dooms himself to a prison sentence instead of a life of fame and fortune. For his part, Wilson was grateful to have found a mentor who could help him perfect his plays and serve as a kind of professional father figure. He took to calling Richards “Pop.”
Relationships between fathers and sons were thus very much on Wilson’s mind as he returned to St. Paul in the fall of 1982. So, too, was a workshop criticism of Ma Rainey that had stung him: that it was too much of an ensemble play, and that he needed to learn how to write bigger roles. Determined to show that he could do just that, Wilson began a new play that revolved around a central character who was an amalgam of two surrogate fathers from his own youth: his neighbor Charley Burley, the sanitation worker who had once been a boxing contender and Homestead Grays tryout; and his former stepfather and ex-con David Bedford.
The character, named Troy Maxson, is a former Negro League star who missed his shot at the pro leagues because he was serving time. Relegated to the life of a garbageman, Troy finds himself taking out his bitterness on his long-suffering wife, Rose, and on his son, Cory, who both fears and seeks to emulate his father. Wilson called the play Fences. He also situated it in the 1950s, as part of a new wildly ambitious goal he had set for himself: having already produced three works set in three different decades—Jitney, Fullerton Street, and Ma Rainey—he had resolved to write a collection of ten plays, one for every decade of the twentieth century.
In March 1983, around the time Wilson was putting his first draft of Fences in the mail to Connecticut, he lost his mother, Daisy, to lung cancer. They had long since reconciled, and he returned to Pittsburgh to give the maid who went on welfare to care for her children a proper burial alongside Gilded Era millionaires such as Henry J. Heinz in Greenwood Cemetery just outside Pittsburgh. Daisy Wilson would not live to witness the extraordinary success that her son was about to achieve, all made possible by the reverence she had taught him for the power of reading and writing.
That summer, Lloyd Richards invited Wilson back to the Playwrights Conference and staged a reading of Fences. The following year, he directed Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven. From there Ma went to an off-Broadway theater in New York City, where it ran for 285 performances and won the coveted New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The year after that, Richards brought Fences to Yale, fine-tuning it for a run on Broadway. In 1987 the play opened at the 47th Street Theatre, ran for more than two years, won the Tony Award for Best Play, and earned Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
But Wilson had no time to celebrate. As one play after another went into production, he continued to work feverishly toward his goal of a “Century cycle.” And as fate would have it, the inspiration for his next two plays came from another pioneering black artist who had spent his formative years in Pittsburgh, the painter Romare Bearden.
Another North Carolina native, born in the Charlotte area, Bearden had moved to Pittsburgh as a youth and graduated from Peabody High School in the late 1920s. (Billy Eckstine was several years behind Bearden at Peabody, and later he recorded a song called “Seabreeze” written by the painter, who dabbled in jazz composition.) Bearden attended Lincoln University, outside Philadelphia, then moved to
New York, where he finished college at NYU and immersed himself in the downtown art scene. In the 1940s, after serving in World War II and living in Paris, he began to develop his signature technique and themes: using paint, paper, foil, fragments of photographs, and other materials, he constructed quirky but richly evocative collages conjuring up scenes of black life. In the late 1970s, after Wilson moved to St. Paul, his friend Claude Purdy introduced him to a book of Bearden’s work called The Prevalence of Ritual. As he flipped through its pages, August recalled, he immediately recognized an “artistic mentor”—a visionary who had created a visual experience that he hoped to match in writing, capturing black culture in all its uniqueness, variety, celebration, and sorrow.
A Bearden collage entitled Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket particularly fascinated Wilson. It portrays a dejected-looking man in a crumpled hat, slumped at the table of a boardinghouse. Who was this man and what was his story? Wilson wondered. So he began writing a story imagining the answer. It became his 1910s play—and personal favorite—Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, named after an old blues song about a Tennessee chain gang boss. The story revolves around Herald Loomis, a Southern preacher abducted and forced into hard labor for seven years. By the time Loomis is freed, his wife, Martha, has left him, and he travels north to Pittsburgh to find her. At a boardinghouse on the Hill, he meets Bynum, an elderly “conjure man” who tells him to stop looking elsewhere for salvation and to find his own “song.” When Loomis finally locates Martha, she has embraced a new faith and tries to convert him. Instead, Loomis pulls a knife and lashes his chest in a bloody act of self-resurrection. “I don’t need anyone to bleed for me! I can bleed for myself!” he cries, before leaving the stage alone, shouting, “Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!”
The second Bearden collage that caught Wilson’s attention, called The Piano Lesson, depicts a black girl playing an upright piano while a woman, perhaps her mother, looks on. It became the spark for Wilson’s next play, set in the 1930s, about a family dispute over what to do with an heirloom piano. Boy Willie, a Southern sharecropper, comes to Pittsburgh to sell the piano so that he can buy land back home. But his sister Berniece refuses to part with the piano because it embodies so much family history: a slave owner named Sutter had sold their ancestors to pay for it, and their father had been shot stealing the piano back. “Mama Ola polished this piano with her tears for seventeen years,” Berniece reminds her brother. “For seventeen years she rubbed on it until her hands bled. Then she rubbed the blood in, mixed it up with the rest of the blood on it . . . . You always talking about your daddy but you ain’t never stopped to look at what his foolishness cost your mamma.” Finally, just as Willy Boy is about to take the piano away, Berniece sits down at the keyboard and plays it for the first time in years, shouting out the names of her ancestors to cast out the ghost of Sutter from her house and convincing her brother to leave empty-handed.
As first Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and then The Piano Lesson followed Fences to Broadway, critics began to dwell not just on the merits of the individual plays but on the overall scope of Wilson’s achievement. Joe Turner won him a third Drama Critics’ Award. The Piano Lesson won a Tony Award and a Pulitzer Prize, the second for Wilson in four years. A television production of the play aired on CBS’s Hallmark Hall of Fame, introducing millions of non-theater-goers to Wilson’s work for the first time. By now, Wilson’s body of work was being compared to that of America’s greatest playwrights, to Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. His portrait of the Hill District was on its way to being likened to the most memorable depictions of a specific place and culture in all of English literature—to William Faulkner’s Mississippi backwater of Yoknapatawpha County and to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex countryside in southern England. With the arrival of two more plays—Two Trains Running, set in the 1960s, and Seven Guitars, set in the 1940s—Wilson’s Pittsburgh was being etched in the national imagination as the definitive depiction of black American life in the twentieth century.
Yet how close to reality was it? For those familiar with Pittsburgh, there were numerous references to real places: Wylie Avenue, Logan Street, Lutz’s Meat Market, Greenwood Cemetery. There were also clearly identifiable eras in the background of Wilson’s plays. Fences harked back to the glory days of Negro League baseball, when the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays reigned. The Piano Lesson recalled the day when pianos enjoyed a place of pride in the homes of Pittsburgh strivers. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone captured the atmosphere of the pre–World War I boardinghouses where Southern migrants roomed. Seven Guitars conveyed the disillusionment of black men after World War II. Two Trains Running evoked the era of urban renewal and Black Power, with its story of an older restaurant owner worrying that his business will be torn down, a young militant planning to attend a street protest, and a long-suffering waitress enduring the casual sexism of both generations.
Much of black Pittsburgh’s legacy, however, was missing from Wilson’s work. There was little acknowledgment of the migrants who came to the city with high degrees of literacy and cultural sophistication, or the entrepreneurs who built barbershop chains, funeral parlors, and a thriving national newspaper that employed hundreds of Negroes. (One of the few businessmen with a major part in a Wilson play, the undertaker West in Two Trains Running, is a one-dimensional villain.) Apart from a fleeting reference to a raffle at the Loendi Club in Seven Guitars, there were few nods to the life of the Hill’s black social elite, or the high-rolling racketeers like Gus Greenlee and Woogie Harris who were part of it. Other than the blues musicians who appeared in many of Wilson’s plays, there was no sense of the fertile creative culture, fed by strong arts programs in the city’s high schools, that produced Earl Hines, Billy Strayhorn, Erroll Garner, and Wilson’s own hero, Romare Bearden. There was hardly a glimpse of Wilson’s own cohort, struggling black poets and painters living a black American version of La Bohème.
To hear Wilson discuss his work, those omissions were quite deliberate. In dozens of interviews he gave once he became famous, he spoke eloquently of his desire to highlight the beauty and profundity of everyday black speech and to celebrate the heroism of the invisible black working class. But Wilson was just as outspoken in his belief, forged at the height of black nationalism, that blacks could rise into the middle class or beyond only by shedding their true racial and cultural identity. “America offers blacks a contract that says, ‘If you leave all that African stuff over there and adopt the values of the dominant culture, you can participate,’ ” he told literary scholar Bonnie Lyons. “The ones who accept go on to become part of the growing black middle class and in some areas even acquire some power and participation in society, but when they finally arrive where they arrive, they are no longer the same people. They are clothed in different manners and ways of life, different thoughts and ideas. They’ve acculturated and adopted white values.”
In Wilson’s worldview, to be financially successful or socially elite was almost by definition to no longer be authentically black, since the essence of blackness was struggle. In a word, it was the blues. So what didn’t fit his definition of blackness he ignored, even as he sought to encompass a century’s worth of black experience in ten plays. In that sense, Wilson’s own contribution to black Pittsburgh’s heritage was to make it at once larger and smaller than it had been before him, to shrink the legacy even as he was enshrining it.
Yet while Wilson may have depicted only one dimension of black Pittsburgh’s history, he managed to capture its larger spirit in two essential ways. One was his sheer ambition—the audacity to dream that he could capture a century’s worth of experience in plays about life on the Hill. It was the sort of drive that, each in their own way, Cap Posey, Robert L. Vann, Gus Greenlee, Cum Posey, Billy Strayhorn, Lena Horne, Bill Nunn, P.L. Prattis, Frank Bolden, Billy Eckstine, Erroll Garner, Wendell Smith, Edna Chappell, and Evelyn Cunningham all possessed, and would have saluted in Wilson. So, too, would
have Andrew Carnegie, Pittsburgh’s ultimate example of white ambition; and as far as August Wilson was concerned, the respect was mutual. In 1999, Wilson made a special trip to Pittsburgh to speak at a hundredth-anniversary ceremony for the Carnegie Library in Oakland, the one that had put the world at his fingertips as a youth. “Labor historians do not speak well of Andrew Carnegie,” Wilson told the crowd. “Among other things, they call him a scoundrel. But I can say nothing bad about a man who made it possible to sit in his library and read the labor historians’ reports. Andrew Carnegie will forever be for me that man who made it possible for me to stand here today.”
The second insight that Wilson absorbed in Pittsburgh and celebrated throughout his work was the power of community. Whether in the ordinary life of rooming houses and jitney stations, or in the grandest accomplishments of the Hill District in its heyday, the glory of Pittsburgh was always as much communal as individual, explained as much by the dynamics of fellowship and competition as by lonely suffering or genius. It was a power, Wilson believed, that black people understood far better than white people. “The basic difference in worldview between blacks and whites,” he once said, “can be expressed as follows: Western culture sees man as being apart from the world, and African culture sees him as a part of the world.” It was also why Wilson preferred his stories of ensembles to his most famous work, Fences, with its spotlight on the tragic protagonist Troy Maxson. (“I want to say here for the record, of the plays that I have written it is my least favorite play,” Wilson said, with a laugh that conveyed that he knew that saying so might upset some of his fans. “It’s not my signature play.”)
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