The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  August eventually became a familiar and friendly associate after the few times I worked with him, as an actor in his plays and a producer of them, and he remained so until his death from cancer in 2005. Our relationship was professional. He knew me as one of many who were part of his repertory group. I loved playing Wilson’s characters. As a writer, he gives you so much to work with and so much to discover in your research and preparation for the role. For an African American actor, digging deep into the history, the folkways, and the spirituality of African people in the American Diaspora will take you into parts of yourself you never knew.

  Wilson was born in 1945 and was raised in the Hill District of Pittsburgh by his devoutly Catholic mother, Daisy, and her second husband. Daisy used to pray the rosary with August and his siblings, but August remembered the Church treating his family as second-class Christians, just as my mother and her brothers and sisters were. August was a brilliant young man who suffered from and raged against the injustice of racism. He confronted his own personal Chets at Central Catholic High School, but was also wounded by a black English teacher who accused August of cheating when he couldn’t believe an unusually accomplished essay about Napoléon Bonaparte could have been written by someone as young as he.

  In time, August managed to turn his pain into great art. He became one of the most celebrated playwrights of his era and created some of the most dazzling American drama of the twentieth century. He is best known for the ten plays of his Pittsburgh Cycle, nearly all of which are set in the Hill District. Each play features ordinary black characters in a different decade of the twentieth century. His examination of the African American experience over the past century exemplifies the black contribution to the universal human experience while telling the particularly black, particularly American story of triumph in the face of racism, violence, terror, murder, and abuse. August was not a religious man, but the spirituality in his plays speaks to the concrete connection we have to our ancestors, and the transformative power they can bring to bear on our lives in the present.

  For August Wilson, as with Albert Murray, the experience of African people in America is one of a “blues people” marked by resilience in the face of unspeakable odds—and a resilience that produced a culture that ultimately changed, and continues to change, all of America. August’s drama centers around the tension African Americans have in being true to themselves while assuming their rightful place as Americans in full. In August’s work, you cannot go forward into the future without first reestablishing a connection to the past and to the wider black community.

  Though critics, including my old friend Stanley Crouch, at times accused him of being too separatist, August contended that his Afrocentric vision was justified morally, historically, and artistically.

  “As Africans prior to coming over here, [our ancestors] existed, and they were the center. Everything revolved around them in their worldview. Over here, all of that has been taken and stripped away,” he noted in an interview with Carol Rosen in 1996. “So I say, ‘Let’s look at it. The world is right here in this backyard.’ There is no idea that cannot be contained by black life. We have the entire world here.”

  Yet he would not give an inch on his stance that African American uniqueness fit harmoniously within the broader tradition. “All of human life is universal, and it is theater that illuminates and confers upon the universal the ability to speak for all men,” August told Rosen. As he saw it, Western civilization had absorbed the African Diaspora, in the sense that the stories of Africans in America were now an inextricable part of the story the modern West told about itself. But the West must not dilute and dissolve the African contribution, the integrity of which is irreducible.

  To fight revisionist history that doesn’t give African Americans our due, we black folk have to celebrate the triumphs of our own culture. Yet we must resist those who claim that African Americans aren’t part of the broader American artistic and cultural tradition. This requires a self-conscious vigilance that balances participating in the mainstream with guarding and nurturing the tradition that is our own and nobody else’s.

  The American storytelling tradition generally focuses on the individual discovering his true self apart from the crowd. August consciously rejected that idea in favor of a communal ideal he considered more representative of the black experience. Though he was deeply influenced by the Black Power movement of the 1960s, August’s plays were not protest dramas and were only implicitly political. For him, the intractability of white racism was a given, but he did not want to preoccupy himself with it, because to do so would have meant granting more power to the oppressors than they deserved. (This echoes the advice Mamo and Papo gave to their children on how to handle white hatred with grace and dignity: “Don’t be the person they think you are.”)

  Strengthening communal bonds, sustaining black life amid severe trials, and bearing witness to the tragedies and triumphs of African American life are the central concerns of August Wilson’s dramas. As August told John Lahr, he wanted to show that black culture “was capable of sustaining you, so that when you left your father’s or your mother’s house you didn’t go into the world naked. You were fully clothed in manners and a way of life.”

  In the theater of August Wilson, as in the criticism of Albert Murray, I found validation of all the teaching I had absorbed from my ancestors back home, and solid ground on which to take my stand as an actor and as a man. I also found my first opportunity to show Broadway what I could do.

  The Piano Lesson begins with Boy Willie, a brash, reckless young southerner, showing up at his Uncle Doaker Charles’s house in Pittsburgh, in the midst of the Great Depression. Boy Willie is fresh out of prison in Mississippi and has come North to persuade his sister Berniece, a widow who lives with Doaker and her eleven-year-old daughter, Maretha, to sell a family heirloom: a piano that has been in their family for generations.

  The piano is unique in that it has images of their family members carved in its wood during slave days. Originally owned by the Sutters, the white family that also owned the Charles family, the piano became a totem of the Charleses, charged with spiritual power. Boy Willie sees the piano as his ticket to a new life. He wants to take the money he earns from selling it and return to the South to buy a portion of the land the Charles family once worked as the Sutter family’s slaves. Prideful Boy Willie is preoccupied with proving his equality to the white man and holds fast to a characteristically southern idea that owning land is the measure of a man’s worth.

  Berniece won’t have it. She is the custodian of the piano and cherishes it as a symbol of their ancestral legacy. But she is also afraid of what it represents. Even though slavery was long past, the siblings’ father, Boy Charles, became convinced that their family would always remain bound to the Sutters as long as they owned the piano, into which his family’s history had been carved. The Sutters killed him for his role in stealing the piano, which his two brothers, Doaker and Wining Boy, carried to the North.

  Mama Ola, Berniece and Boy Willie’s mother, poured her grief over her husband’s death into that piano, which Berniece played as a young woman. After Mama Ola’s death, Berniece quit playing the piano; she has hidden its legacy from her daughter, fearing that the sorrow and the suffering it holds will be too great a burden for Maretha to bear.

  The conflict in the play comes from Boy Willie and Berniece fighting over the piano’s fate. The piano cannot be divided in two without destroying its value. Berniece accuses her brother of selling his soul.

  In Berniece, I see a reflection of those within African American society, and in my hometown, whose love of place, community, and tradition is so fierce that it manifests as fear and loathing of the unfamiliar. People will often hold so tightly to what they know that they harshly criticize, even reject, those within the family and community who deviate from it.

  Ultimately, if you really understand your identity, and love tradi
tion and authenticity, leaving its origin will never dilute it; it will only make it stronger.

  In New Orleans today, whenever I say something controversial, there is always somebody who accuses me of being a fake and a turncoat to the city. This is a self-serving lie, and deep down, these critics have got to know that. The truth is that the New Orleans culture that you’re born into and raised up in will be with you no matter where you go. You take it with you and add to it, and give back, renewing the tradition by making your own contribution to it.

  Yet Berniece is not entirely wrong in her conservatism. Boy Willie maintains that the piano is nothing more than a piece of wood that can be used to stake him in a better future. In his egotism and pride, he has no reverence for the past and its legacy of blood and tears. To him, it is something he can relate to only as a thing to be manipulated. It has nothing to teach him and no hold on him. I think of Boy Willie when I see the apathy and sense of entitlement so many of our young people have today. As the old Albert King blues song puts it, “Everybody wants to laugh, but nobody wants to cry / Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

  Wynton Marsalis is perhaps the preeminent exemplar of the lesson August Wilson taught in so many of his plays. Wynton is a prophetic artist who stood up to the prevailing jazz culture of his day and said we cannot achieve greatness if we disrespect our ancestors and the tradition they have handed to us. The road to the future goes through the past. “If I have seen further,” said Isaac Newton, “it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants.” Wynton couldn’t have put it better himself.

  When Wynton came along, jazz had become all about emulating pop music and rock and roll. Wynton rejected that and set out to reclaim the legacy of the jazz past as the platform from which to launch jazz into the future. When guys were going to clubs playing music in T-shirts and jeans, Wynton said, no, I want to be clean, I want to look good in the clubs. Pops and Thelonious Monk and those guys, they wanted to look good in the clubs. How can my music be taken seriously if I don’t take myself seriously?

  Wynton’s critics have called him sanctimonious, but they don’t understand the difference between reverence and sanctimony. The road to artistic greatness is narrow and few travel down it—but Wynton and his brother Branford inspired a whole generation of jazzmen to follow them along that difficult path.

  They may even go pop; Branford played with Sting, after all; and Trombone Shorty, the young New Orleans horn phenom, has become a pop star now. But there’s a depth of musicianship that Shorty can delve into because he has mastered the classics. He can play the most difficult intro in jazz, “West End Blues” by Louis Armstrong, and that is an education that nobody can take from him, ever. Shorty can blaze meaningful new trails into pop and jazz’s future because he is deeply in touch with its past.

  As with the Marsalis family’s horns, so with the Charles family’s piano. In The Piano Lesson, the deeper meaning of Boy Willie’s struggle with Berniece has to do with what these siblings should do with their past. Is it something that is valuable only insofar as it can be converted into a profitable future, as Boy Willie thinks? If it should be conserved and revered, as Berniece believes, how can we keep the past from holding us hostage and preventing us from opening ourselves to new life? This is a question that all Americans must face, but it has particular emotional and philosophical resonance for African Americans.

  When I read The Piano Lesson and decided to audition for the Boy Willie role, I felt in my bones that this was the story of my slave ancestor Aristile. The slave owner Sutter traded “a nigger and a half”—a mother and her little son, the Charles family’s ancestors—for the piano, as a present for his wife. To me, this was Aristile and his mother, whose name is lost to history, sold away from their Kentucky family and sent down the river, never to see them again. My family did not have a piano, but we had the same pain. Every black family in America does. When I auditioned for the Boy Willie role, I turned upstage and said a silent prayer to Mamo, asking for her help in getting me the chance to tell the story of her father, my ancestor, our patriarch.

  In the play, what exorcises the tormenting spirit of slavery and white oppression, and heals the rift between the two Charles siblings, is art—specifically, music that Berniece draws out of the piano in a moment of intense crisis. She invokes the ancestors in an incantatory prayer set to music, one she creates in that crucible of fear and suffering. The music breaks the curse that haunts her brother and keeps the family broken.

  The Piano Lesson shows the power of African American art to bridge the past and the future, to bind the wounds of slavery and oppression, and to heal the generational violence we commit against each other as the legacy of the violence done to us. As August used to say, discovering Bessie Smith and the blues at the age of twenty was a turning point in his life, because it taught him that he had a history, and that the material of everyday African American life—his life and the life of his people—was the stuff of tremendous dignity and the highest art. He subsequently revered the act of artistic creation so highly that before he would sit down to write, he would wash his hands as an act of ritual cleansing.

  Boy Willie’s attitude toward the power of art and culture is unfortunately common today. He saw the piano’s worth only in materialistic terms. He tells Berniece he wouldn’t begrudge her keeping the piano if she would use it to make money somehow. This is how far too many of us see art: as something that’s nice to look at or listen to, maybe, but separate from the real business of life, which is practicality.

  This is tragically shortsighted. It assumes that decisions are made strictly from bloodless cost-benefit analysis, as if human beings were creatures of the mind alone and not also of the heart. It’s not to say that engaging the heart is irrational, but rather that art and culture can provide a complementary way of understanding the truth of things.

  In the Divine Comedy, when the pilgrim Dante climbs the seven-story mountain of Purgatory, he learns about the virtues by first encountering them depicted in art created by the hand of God. The lesson is that the initial encounter with beauty prepares the individual’s imagination to accept moral truth.

  Consider the impact that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on American history. The book became a national and international sensation because it put a human face on slavery in America and galvanized the determination to put an end to it. During the Civil War, when the author met Abraham Lincoln, the president is believed to have said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides an unusual example of a work of art having a direct and consequential effect on how the wider society understands and deals with a political issue of utmost importance. Rarely can cause and effect in these matters be drawn so clearly. But to believe that one has to be able to measure and quantify the impact of art on the wider culture before that impact can be said to exist is absurd.

  The second August Wilson play I appeared in was a 1992 Philadelphia production of the drama Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. The 1984 play is about the dislocation of African Americans emerging from slavery, having to discover who they are in a condition of freedom. Wandering into Pittsburgh from the South in the first decade of the twentieth century, these “dazed and stunned” sons and daughters of freed slaves are, in August’s words, “isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of the gods and only guessing at their faces.”

  Though in the industrialized North, the migrants are what the playwright calls “foreigners in a strange land,” they arrive knowing that they must shape “the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth.”

  I portrayed Herald Loomis, a man who had been kidnapped and pressed into a chain gang by Joe Turner, a legendary white villain from blues songs. The real-life Joe Turner was Joe Turney, a politically connected Tennessean w
ho in the 1890s rounded up black men on petty criminal charges and forced them to do years of hard labor on his plantation. In Memphis, when black men would disappear, their women would lament, “Joe Turner’s come and gone.” Turney entered blues mythology in W. C. Handy’s song “Joe Turner’s Blues.”

  In the play, Herald Loomis and his eleven-year-old daughter arrive in a Pittsburgh black boardinghouse, renting a room while they search for Martha, the wife who left Herald during his seven years of captivity. Herald meets fellow tenant Bynum, an elderly former slave who is a “root man”—a healer and visionary who keeps alive the African folk religious traditions. He is said to have the mystical gift of binding lost people together.

  After Sunday dinner, Bynum leads the tenants in a “juba,” a traditional African call-and-response ritual, calling on the Holy Ghost. An angry Herald, a church deacon who has lost his Christian faith, utters a blasphemy. Suddenly, Herald is possessed by a spirit and thrashes on the floor, speaking in tongues. Old Bynum understands that the terrified Herald is having a vision. Bynum asks him what he’s seen.

  “I come to this place . . . to this water that was bigger than the whole world,” says Herald. “And I looked out . . . and I seen these bones rise up out the water. Rise up and begin to walk on top of it.”

  The bones sink back into the ocean, Herald says, causing a huge wave, washing them all ashore.

  “Only they ain’t bones no more,” says Bynum.

  “They got flesh on them!” says Herald. “Just like you and me!”

  Bynum, we learn, once traveled supernaturally to the “City of Bones,” a realm in the ocean where the bodies of enslaved Africans who perished in the Middle Passage and were thrown overboard now reside. August once described Herald’s vision as a kind of baptism.