The American Century: Literature since 1945 667most part to critical and commercial acclaim. Born on “The Hill,” a racially mixed
area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a black mother and a white father he seldom
saw, Wilson encountered racial prejudice early. He also encountered two formative
cultural influences: black talk and black music. In a cigar store in Pittsburgh, he
recalled, he would stand around when he was young listening to old men telling
tales and swapping stories. Later, listening to the records of the blues singer Bessie
Smith, he became determined to capture black cultural and historical experience in
his writing. One of his first publications was, in fact, a poem called “Bessie.”
Beginning to write plays in the 1970s, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom established his
reputation. Set in 1920s Chicago, it describes the economic exploitation of black
musicians by white record companies and the ways in which victims of racism are
compelled to direct their rage at each other rather than at those who cause their
oppression. It is also a memorable combination of the vernacular, violence, and
humor. So is Fences, which concerns the struggles of a working-class family in the
1950s to find security. Here, Wilson also uses myth to tell the story of Troy Maxson,
a garbageman, ex-convict, and former Negro Baseball League player, who cannot
believe that his son will be allowed to benefit from the football scholarship he has
been offered.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is set some forty years earlier than Fences, in a
Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. Focusing on the personal and cultural after-
math of both slavery and the Great Migration, it explores the lives of characters
who are in danger of being cut off from their roots. The Piano Lesson, in turn, is
placed in 1937 in Pittsburgh: concentrating on a conflict between a brother and a
sister, over who has the right to own a family heirloom, the piano of the title, it
dramatizes the debate between African-American and mainstream cultural values.
Two Trains Running moves forward several decades, to the late 1960s – to a coffee
shop where regulars discuss their troubled relation to the times – and Seven Guitars
then moves back to the 1940s. Wilson declared that, as a playwright, he wanted to
“tell a history that has never been told.” His major plays reflect this. For him, they
were all part of a major project: the “Century Cycle” of ten plays, each of them
intended to investigate a central issue facing African-Americans in a different dec-
ade of the twentieth century. The others are Jitney (1983), King Hedley II (2000),
Gem of the Ocean (2003), and Radio Golf (2005). He was aiming at nothing less than
raising collective awareness: rewriting the history of every decade so that black life
would become a more acknowledged part of the theatrical history – and, for that
matter, the general history – of America. In 1991 Wilson recalled that his plan, to
bring a silenced past into dramatic speech, began with “a typewritten yellow-labeled
record titled ‘Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine’ by someone
called Bessie Smith.” “It was the beginning,” he explained, “of my consciousness that
I was a representative of a culture and the carrier of some very valuable anteced-
ents.” He continued to pursue that plan after that, in plays that work precisely as the
“yellow-labeled record” did: by bringing a whole culture and its past to life, with
rhythmic flair and passion.GGray_c05.indd 667ray_c 05 .indd 667 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM