To quibble with Wilson’s contradictions—the shy biracial artist who romanticized the earthiness of the black working classes; the preacher of “Africanness” who had never traveled to Africa and lived in Minnesota; the advocate for all-black theaters who was the toast of Yale and Broadway—was also to miss the essence of his achievement. It was no accident that the first work that Wilson checked out of the Carnegie Library as a teenager was The Collected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, and that it took him almost thirty years to return the book, long after he had left Pittsburgh and become an acclaimed playwright. For August Wilson was never a historian, or even a realistic dramatist, so much as a poet of the black experience.
Wilson understood that about himself. He freely admitted that he never did historical research and knew relatively little of other playwrights. But he spoke frequently of his debt to Aristotle’s Poetics and what he saw as its message that plays didn’t need “plot points” if they had strong enough characters. His gift was not for compelling story lines but for memorable characters defined by their indelible language. He took the way ordinary black people spoke, the kind of banter that he scribbled on napkins in the haunts on the Hill, and rendered it sublime. What his plays lacked in accuracy or action they made up for in powerful metaphors for the black experience: the music that his characters sang and played to endure suffering; the physical scars they bore, or inflicted upon themselves; and the prison terms they served, robbing them of time and opportunity just as the age of slavery had robbed an entire race.
Throughout the 1990s, Wilson continued to work day and night, as though he, too, was making up for lost time. He divorced Judy Oliver and moved to Seattle, Washington, with a third wife, Constanza Romero, a costume designer he had met at Yale and with whom he would have another daughter, named Azula. With a new century dawning, he was determined to finish his ten-play project. For his 1970s play, he expanded his early one-act play Jitney to two acts. For the 1980s, he wrote King Hedley II, the story of an ex-con whose scheme to open a video store is undone in part by the forces of Reaganomics. Finally, Wilson placed bookends on the cycle. He went back to the turn of the century in Gem of the Ocean, a play that revolves around the character of Aunt Ester, a boardinghouse oracle, said to be almost three hundred years old, who represents a spiritual link to Africa and the slave ships of the Middle Passage. Then in Radio Golf, set in the 1990s, Wilson brings Aunt Ester’s story full circle, as Hill politicians and militants fight over the fate of the house that Ester left behind, now targeted to become the latest casualty of urban renewal.
While Wilson was working on Radio Golf in the early months of 2005, he began to experience nagging stomach pains. His wife, Constanza, took him to a doctor, who informed August that he had liver cancer. It was so advanced, the doctor said, that he only had a matter of months to live. Keeping the diagnosis secret from all but a few intimates, Wilson moved into a hotel with Constanza so that no one would know where to find him. He worked around-the-clock with his personal assistant, Todd Kreidler, to finish the play. Only in late August, after Radio Golf had premiered at Yale and then moved to a theater in Los Angeles, did Wilson start phoning old friends to tell them the bad news. One of the first was Dwight Andrews, a musician and United Church of Christ pastor who had taught at Yale and served as the musical director for Wilson’s early plays. As they discussed plans for August’s funeral, Constanza had suggested that Andrews preside over the service, and her husband had pronounced the idea “perfect.”
“Man, I’m sick,” Wilson told Andrews. “I only have a few months to live. I want you to put me down.”
Wilson’s instructions were clear: he wanted to be buried in Pittsburgh. When the end came in October, hundreds of America’s most accomplished black actors, directors, and writers traveled there to join his family for the ceremony. It took place in Oakland, just east of the Hill, at the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, the largest military museum in the country, built during the Gilded Age to honor veterans of the Civil War. Charles Dutton, the actor who had risen to fame playing Levee in Ma Rainey and Willy Boy in The Piano Lesson, read a passage from Fences. “Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the inside corner,” Dutton proclaimed, in the voice of Troy Maxson. “That’s all death is to me.” Phylicia Rashad transformed herself into Aunt Ester, the role from Gem of the Ocean for which she had earned a Tony Award nomination. Wilson’s boyhood friend Sam Howze, who as an adult had changed his name to Sala Udin and become an activist and city councilman in Pittsburgh, shared memories of their early years and young adulthood hanging out in diners on the Hill, talking for hours over endless cups of coffee. “Those days were the genesis of Jitney and Jitney was the genesis of the Pittsburgh Cycle,” Udin explained to the crowd.
As the ceremony drew to a close, Udin heard the sound of a trumpet offstage. He recognized the tune of “Danny Boy,” the poignant Irish ballad of farewell. As the slow, plaintive melody filled the cavernous memorial hall, Udin looked around to see people sobbing and pulling out handkerchiefs to mop their tears. Then Wynton Marsalis appeared onstage, blowing his rust-colored horn, and walked into the seats. Marsalis played the haunting last notes of “Danny Boy,” then without skipping a beat tore into the first, joyous bars of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
Suddenly the four hundred mourners were on their feet. They sang along. They stomped the floor. They waved handkerchiefs in the air. With Marsalis leading the way, they formed a New Orleans–style procession and marched out onto the street. As pallbearers loaded Wilson’s casket into a silver hearse, the mourners climbed into their cars. In a long, snaking phalanx, they followed the hearse to Greenwood Cemetery, ten miles to the east, where Wilson would be laid to rest not far from the gravesite of his beloved mother, Daisy. But rather than take the direct route, the hearse and the cars made one last trip through the streets of August Wilson’s youth and his imagined theatrical universe: from Bedford Avenue, where he was born, to Crawford Street, where he first listened to Bessie Smith sing the blues.
A hard rain was falling, but as Udin and the other mourners looked out from their car windows they could see hundreds of Hill residents lining the streets, holding aloft homemade signs. “May All Your Fences Have Gates,” read one, quoting the inscription with which Wilson liked to sign his plays. “August, You Have Blessed Our Lives with Stories and Images Like No Other,” read another placard. Rain be damned, the famous actors and directors and musicians rolled down the windows to wave and shout greetings, and the residents waved and shouted back, and for one wet day in autumn the Hill District once again felt like the Crossroads of the World.
Teenie Harris with his light meter and Speed Graphic camera on the streets of Pittsburgh.
Charles “Teenie” Harris was a star sandlot athlete and numbers runner who taught himself photography and worked for The Pittsburgh Courier for four decades. Known as “One Shot” for the speed and efficiency with which he deployed his Speed Graphic press camera, Harris left a stunning record of black Pittsburgh in its heyday—including most of the photos in this book.
Joe Louis (right) at the Loendi Club in 1938 with (left to right) Woogie Harris, Teenie’s racketeer brother; singer Cab Calloway; and light heavyweight boxer John Henry Lewis.
From the 1920s until the 1950s, so many black luminaries passed through the Hill District that it became known as “Little Harlem” and “the Crossroads of the World.” Visiting athletes and musicians were feted at the Loendi Club, the black counterpart to the Duquesne Club of Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age tycoons, and gathered at the Crawford Grill, the leading nightclub on the Hill.
Ella Fitzgerald poses in 1948 with then husband, Pittsburgh-born bass player Ray Brown.
Louis Armstrong dines with a local singer and journalist at the Crawford Grill in 1945.
Duke Ellington (right), Billy Strayhorn (center), and dancer Charles “Honi” Coles at the Stanley Theatre, the show palace where Ellington and Strayhorn first met.
In 1938, Duke Ellin
gton was performing in Pittsburgh when he was introduced to a shy but brilliant recent high school graduate named Billy Strayhorn— beginning one of the most fabled collaborations in jazz history. Later Strayhorn became best friends with Lena Horne, who spent her early twenties in Pittsburgh reuniting with her racketeer father and struggling in a failed marriage.
Lena Horne with her father, Pittsburgh hotel owner and numbers runner Teddy Horne.
Lena sings at the Loendi Club accompanied by pianist Charlotte Enty Catlin, who was also Billy Strayhorn’s teacher.
Gus Greenlee holds court at the Crawford Grill, from which he ran his racketeering empire and his baseball operations.
In the 1930s, Pittsburgh boasted the two best baseball franchises in the Negro Leagues—the Homestead Grays and the Pittsburgh Crawfords, They had a bitter rivalry fueled by the warring egos of Grays owner “Cum” Posey, the son of a black shipping and mining tycoon, and Gus Greenlee, who used his racketeering fortune to purchase the Crawfords and raid Posey’s best players.
Josh Gibson in a Homestead Grays uniform for the second time in the 1940s.
The fearsome Pittsburgh Crawfords of 1932, featuring Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson (back row, second and third from left) and three other future Hall of Famers.
P.L. Prattis (center, in vest) and staff gather in the Courier newsroom in the mid-1940s.
After the death of pioneering publisher Robert L. Vann, his widow and protégés carried on Vann’s crusade on behalf of black soldiers. Led by executive editor P.L. Prattis, the Courier launched the “Double V Campaign”—urging black Americans to support the cause of victory in World War II in exchange for the promise of greater racial equality at home—and sent more war correspondents to the front than any other black newspaper.
Frank Bolden in his World War II correspondent uniform.
Jesse Vann (center) and Bill Nunn (looking over her shoulder) celebrate the wartime circulation boom by signing the 300,000th issue of a 1946 edition to come off the press.
Billy Eckstine (right) and his orchestra, featuring Dizzy Gillespie (center) and Charlie Parker (to his right), perform in Pittsburgh in 1944.
Pittsburgh-born crooner Billy Eckstine was one of the most popular male singers, black or white, in America before a controversial photo of his encounter with white female fans ran in Life magazine in 1950 and began his slow descent from superstardom. Eckstine is less well remembered as an innovative big band leader who served as a mentor to bebop pioneers Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan.
The Life photo of Billy Strayhorn with fans outside New York’s Bop City in 1950.
Sarah Vaughan (right), who first came to Pittsburgh with Eckstine’s band, visits in 1950.
Jackie and Rachel Robinson (left) arrive in 1946 for minor league spring training in Dayton, Florida, where the Dodgers had sent two Pittsburgh chaperones to greet them.
In the late 1930s, a young sportswriter named Wendell Smith joined the Courier and began a crusade to integrate the major leagues. A decade later, he recommended Jackie Robinson to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey and served as Robinson’s traveling companion and spokesman during Jackie’s minor league tryout with the Montreal Royals and historic rookie year with the Dodgers.
Wendell Smith, the Courier sportswriter who led the crusade to integrate pro baseball.
Robinson and Branch Rickey reunite in Pittsburgh a decade after Smith connected them.
Eleanor Roosevelt and local children at a monument to FDR in the Hill District in 1956.
In the 1930s, the Hill District became Ground Zero for the political migration of black voters to FDR’s Democratic Party after Robert L. Vann proclaimed that it was time to turn “the picture of Abraham Lincoln to the wall.” Twenty-five years later, the Lower Hill was destroyed in the name of urban renewal, and a decade after that, much of the Middle Hill was burned out in the riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
The Bethel AME Church, the last building to be destroyed on the Lower Hill in 1957.
Martin Luther King Jr. meets the press during his final visit to Pittsburgh in 1966.
Erroll Garner, the beloved piano virtuoso and composer of “Misty.”
Of the scores of remarkable pianists that Pittsburgh produced over the years—from Earl “Fatha” Hines and Mary Lou Williams to Ahmad Jamal—none was more dazzling than Erroll Garner. Although Garner was often depicted as an inexplicable genius because he didn’t read music, his peers knew better. “What was different about Erroll was one word: Pittsburgh,” Jamal said. “Pittsburgh produced this kind of talent.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALTHOUGH MOST OF the people I write about in this book are no longer living, I am grateful for the help I received from surviving family members and colleagues. Lynell Nunn welcomed me into her home in the Hill District and talked to me about her grandfather, Pittsburgh Courier managing editor Bill Nunn Sr., in the basement den where her father, Bill Nunn Jr., also a Courier editor and later a scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers, kept three generations’ worth of memorabilia. Patricia Prattis Jennings, the retired principal keyboardist for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, sat by the piano where she still practices and reminisced about her father, Courier executive editor P.L. Prattis. Rod Doss, the current publisher of The New Pittsburgh Courier, shared personal and institutional memories of former Courier publishers Robert L. Vann, Jesse Vann, and Ira Lewis. Charlene Foggie-Barnett, the director of research for the Teenie Harris Archive, told me vivid stories of being photographed by Harris as a child, as well as family tales of her father, Bishop Charles Foggie, for decades the leader of the city’s AME Zion flock, and her mother, Madeline Sharpe, a friend and confidante to Lena Horne during Lena’s turbulent late teens and early twenties in Pittsburgh.
I am indebted to Pittsburgh scholars and journalists who have been studying its history for far longer than I have. Professor Laurence Glasco of the University of Pittsburgh helped me to understand how the culture of black Pittsburgh was shaped by the origins of its Southern migrants. He also warned about the limitations of what he calls “the Narrative”: the tendency of black history written since the civil rights movement to focus primarily on black struggle and white oppression, often at the expense of appreciating the scope of black achievement. Larry was also kind enough to read an early version of the manuscript for historical accuracy and nuance.
David Shribman, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who since 2003 has served as executive editor of the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, shared insights into his adopted city and caught numerous errors and typos in the unedited manuscript. Frank Proctor—perhaps the leading oral historian of black Pittsburgh since Frank Bolden’s death—regaled me with stories of growing up on the Hill and attending Schenley High School. Eliza Smith Brown, editor of books on the city’s development and architecture, made me appreciate the importance of Pittsburgh’s topography and neighborhood culture. Maxwell King, another part-time historian who runs the Pittsburgh Foundation, put the story in the context of two “Pittsburgh Renaissances”: the post–World War II experiment in urban renewal that destroyed much of the Hill District and had tragic ripple effects for the black community; and the city’s current revival, which has lifted Pittsburgh out of its Rust Belt doldrums but has sadly yet to reach most of its black residents.
During my trips to Pittsburgh, I benefited from the guidance and hospitality of Darryl Ford Williams, executive producer of the PBS American Masters documentary on August Wilson; her husband, Joe Williams III, judge on the Allegheny Court of Common Pleas; Eric and Cecile Springer, stalwarts of the black business and civil rights establishment; Linda Lane, former superintendent of the Pittsburgh school system; Julie Swiderski, director of Westinghouse Academy; Rick Wertheimer, former charter school principal and education reformer; David Grinnell, archivist at the University of Pittsburgh Library, who helped me sort through the papers of P.L. Prattis, Frank Bolden, and Erroll Garner; and Robert “Rock” Robinson, pres
ident of the Pittsburgh Duffers golf league and his fellow weekend warriors. I must also give a special shout-out to my cousin Leslie Ann Smedley, who let me stay at her lovely home, shared many delicious meals, and helped me to assemble missing pieces of family lore.
For their willingness to read early versions of the book and offer feedback, I thank Gail Lumet Buckley, Henry Louis Gates Jr., David Hajdu, and Nicholas Lemann. For the special interest they showed in this project, I am grateful to Pittsburgh natives Howard Fineman, Allan Dodds Frank, and Elliot Wolk, to the great civil rights reporter Hank Klibanoff, and to longtime comrades Henry and Celia McGee, Jonathan Alter, Renee Edelman, and Jason Wright. As always, Lynn Nesbit gave me candid and wise advice before, during, and after this undertaking. Alice Mayhew edited the book with her usual mix of intellectual empathy, organizational genius, and tough love on deadline. Jonathan Karp was generous in his support, and Richard Rhorer, Stuart Roberts, Lisa Healy, Fred Chase, and Jackie Seow provided invaluable assistance and good cheer in getting the book to the finish line. Rachel and Matthew Whitaker kindly took time from their busy lives to read galleys and offer perceptive thoughts. As always, their mother, Alexis Gelber, was my first reader, my most honest critic, and my most enthusiastic cheerleader.
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