[In the following essay, Üsekes discusses Wilson's linking of whiteness with law and terror in his plays, suggesting that off-stage white characters symbolize a corrupt legal system that oppresses blacks.]

August Wilson has won critical acclaim for his ambitious project of chronicling the African American experience in the twentieth century with a cycle of ten plays. But those critics who have applauded Wilson's black characters have neglected to pay attention to his equally intriguing, if less prominent, white characters, an oversight which has prevailed as one of the critical blind spots in Wilson scholarship.¹ Of course, because August Wilson's cycle of plays proposes to rewrite the white version of twentieth-century American history from an African American vantage point, it features and foregrounds black characters. However, since these characters cannot avoid frequent interactions with white society at large, Wilson's work also highlights the perceptions of whiteness among black Americans as a result of these encounters. In this essay, I will focus on Wilson's association of whiteness with law and terror in his cycle of plays and its implications for his predominantly white audience. The innumerable white sheriffs, judges, and policemen in Wilson's plays—almost exclusively off-stage characters—symbolize the Euro-Americans' control over the corrupt legal system that favors them. Moreover, because the power structure refuses to protect its black citizens against Euro-Americans, African Americans fall into white hands and are brutalized. Rapists and murderers, whites thus emerge as disruptive and destructive forces in the black world, the impetus behind their violence being a desire to protect the status quo. I will conclude my essay by investigating the relationship between these provocative representations of whiteness and Wilson's critical and popular success among white audiences.

Wilson's on-stage white characters are few in number: Irvin, Sturdyvant, and the policeman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Rutherford Selig in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the ghost of James Sutter in The Piano Lesson.² Yet his dramatic world is peopled with numerous other whites (including the regularly evoked generic white man) who remain off-stage but nevertheless play a tremendous role in the lives of his black characters. These absent white Americans come to life through the oral narratives blacks on stage share with each other. Wilson explains how storytelling, a primary component of African American literature, functions in his plays:

So anytime you have five black characters on stage, it's very natural for them to tell stories, because the stories are the only way that cultural information, ideas and attitudes, community sanctions, ways of conduct, et cetera, are revealed. If I tell you a story, I'm telling you how you are supposed to act in the world. I don't just tell you a story to entertain you. There is information in there for your benefit.

(Goldman 15)

Wilson's black men communicate their experiences and the lessons therein through oral narratives, which thus often become transmitters of crucial lessons about whiteness in the black community and which also make possible white presence in these plays even when it is restricted to the margins.

In Wilson's dramatic universe, the white representatives of law persecute and prosecute the African American characters often wrongfully. The clash between these corrupt authority figures and the numerous black characters who have been victimized by the legal system points to how law has a white and ugly face in the black imagination. Troy Maxson of Fences (1985) is, in fact, one of the few African American men in Wilson's plays to be punished justly for a crime he has committed; he has served a fifteen-year sentence for manslaughter. However, most other black men in these plays claim to be harassed by the forces of law without any good reason, as in the case of Jeremy in Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986):

I ain't done nothing, Mr. Seth. I stopped by the Workmen's Club and got me a bottle. Me and Roper Lee from Alabama. Had us a half pint. We was fixing to cut that half in two when they [Mr. Piney's boys] came up on us. Asked us if we was working. We told them we was putting in the road over yonder and that it was our payday. They snatched hold of us to get that two dollars. Me and Roper Lee ain't even had a chance to take a drink when they grabbed us.

(13)

Jeremy has been arrested by “Mr. Piney's boys” (off-stage characters) and fined two dollars for loitering in the streets. The strict Seth decides that Jeremy must have deserved the punishment, whereas, his wife Bertha accepts Jeremy's explanation and defends him: “You know the police do that. Figure there's too many people out on the street they take some of them off” (13). What Bertha does not state, though, is that the only people the police remove from the streets in Wilson's world are black men.

Two Trains Running (1990) depicts a similar world in which black male characters claim to have been imprisoned without any wrongdoing. After arguing “every nigger you see done been to jail one time or another,” Wolf tells of his encounter with the white representatives of law. Chasing someone else, a police officer collides with Wolf who merely happens to be walking down the street at the time but is nevertheless arrested for obstructing justice. Wolf spends three months in prison until the judge dismisses the case. His story teaches his audience an important lesson in self-preservation: “I learned to watch where I was going at all times. Cause you always under attack” (54). Wilson's black male characters, like Wolf, insist on having been abused by the system because of their race. The demarcation between blacks and whites, those who are at the mercy of the law and those who exercise its power, albeit unjustly, is all but too apparent.

Wilson continues his criticism of the illegitimacy of the white law and its discrimination against African Americans in Seven Guitars (1995). Its protagonist, Floyd Barton, has been incarcerated more than once, first for “worthlessness” (9), later for walking down the street. According to Floyd's story, during his second brush with the law, the police arrest him “in advance,” reasoning he will commit a crime sooner or later (41-42). Canewell, one of Floyd's band members, tells a similar story of wrongful arrest; he has been taken into custody for playing music on the streets: “The police said I was disturbing the peace. Soliciting without a license. Loitering. Resisting arrest and disrespecting the law. They rolled all that together and charged me with laziness and give me thirty days” (23). Another black musician Red Carter complains of having been apprehended for carrying too much money, which the police assume he must have stolen. Wilson's message about the white legal system is anything but comforting. His black men interpret their position as one of entrapment. They are held in metaphoric chains, and all of their actions are subject to investigation by law enforcement. Any excuse can be and is used to keep them under scrutiny.³ The police officers with an inkling of suspicion about a black man would rather arrest him than allow for the possibility, no matter how remote, that he might commit a wrongful deed in the future. Therefore, in Wilson's drama, the golden principle of the American legal system, that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty, clearly does not apply to black citizens. African Americans are instead presumed guilty by the system until they can prove their innocence, and they never appear to be granted the benefit of the doubt.

August Wilson portrays deeper and more disturbing problems with the legal system: whenever Euro-American interests clash with African American interests, the white representatives of law uphold the former. For instance, Ma Rainey, on her way to her recording session, has a car accident, and her subsequent attempt to get a cab fails. The white cab driver who refuses to drive Ma and her company is knocked down. The policeman handling this incident explains that the driver “claims she knocked him down. We got her charged with assault and battery” (50). Ma adamantly denies the charge. For her, the problem lies instead in the officer's disrespect for her and his disbelief in her identity. Her insistent order to Irvin, her manager, “Tell the man who I am!” reflects on her hurt pride occasioned by the policeman's refusal to take her seriously (48). The policeman thus represents the social order—enforced by the dominant group—according to which black Americans are denied presence, identity, and any validity. For example, the policeman declines to accept that Ma's nephew Sylvester was driving her car.

POLICEMAN.
Lady, we don't know whose car he was driving.
MA Rainey.
That's my car!
DUSSIE Mae and Sylvester.
That's Ma's car!
MA Rainey.
What you mean you don't know whose car it is? I bought and paid for that car.
POLICEMAN.
That's what you say, lady. … We still gotta check.

(49-50)

The dialogue consists of a series of statements by Ma Rainey, Sylvester, and Dussie Mae, all black characters, questioned by the white officer of the law. The policeman not only refuses to believe that an African American woman could own a car, but he also sides with the cab driver: “she tries to get in this cab. The cabbie's waiting on a fare. She starts creating a disturbance. The cabbie gets out to try and explain the situation to her … and she knocks him down” (50). By disregarding Ma Rainey's narrative and endorsing the cab driver's instead, the policeman is instrumental in furthering the discrimination the cab driver reveals in his reluctance to serve black customers. Most importantly, though, the policeman, the only agent of law who appears on stage in Wilson's cycle of plays, confirms, by his presence and his mistreatment of Ma Rainey, the truth value of the stories Wilson's black characters disseminate about white police officers.

In his twentieth-century cycle, Wilson consistently draws attention to the fine but essential distinction between law and justice, between legality and legitimacy. What is considered lawful by the power structure is unjust and erodes the black characters' faith in the system. Wining Boy of The Piano Lesson (1987) shares Wilson's wariness of the white man's corpus juris:

Now Mr. So and So, he sell the land to you. And he come to you and say, “John, you own the land. It's all yours now. But them is my berries. And come time to pick them I'm gonna send my boys over. You got the land … but them berries, I'm gonna keep them. They mine.” And he go and fix it with the law that them is his berries. Now that's the difference between the colored man and the white man. The colored man can't fix nothing with the law.

(38)

Wining Boy believes that the American legal code does not extend equal rights to blacks and whites. White Americans enjoy more power in society and can protect their rights better than black Americans because of the loopholes or vagaries in the law. Moreover, they have officers who ensure that the interests of the white race are secured while no one safeguards the rights of the underdogs of the system. In fact, Two Trains Running illustrates Wining Boy's theory very well. Memphis has bought some land from Jim Stovall, a white man, with the condition that if any water was found on the land, “the sale was null and void” (72). When Memphis discovers a source of water after months of backbreaking work, Stovall demands his land back. Memphis attempts to straighten things out in court, but the judge rules in favor of Stovall. Stovall has secured his interests with the help of the white-biased law, which thus renders African Americans powerless, and the incident demonstrates Wolf's point that “the colored man can't fix nothing with the law.”

Nevertheless, black Americans are not necessarily locked into a position of impotence as long as they can afford “justice.” Wilson advances his critique of the forces of law and order by emphasizing their susceptibility to bribes. The white men not only manipulate the law to punish black Americans but also to make a financial gain off their jurisdiction by asking for and accepting bribes from blacks. Like most other white officers whom Wilson has created, the policeman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) agrees to ignore the charge brought against Ma Rainey for the right price. In The Piano Lesson, Lymon's mother has to bribe the sheriff to set her imprisoned husband free: “The sheriff looked at that hundred dollars and turned his nose up Told her, say, ‘That ain't gonna do him no good. You got to put another hundred on top of that’” (63). Unless the sheriff had received the full sum, Lymon's father would have been sent to work at Parchman Farm for a minimum of three years.⁴ In Wilson's twentieth-century cycle, the so-called justice decreed by whites becomes something that can be bought and sold for the highest price. Consequently, the already privileged members of the white race enjoy power by their command of the law, and black Americans are left to fend for themselves by having to pay for “justice.”

Perhaps another avenue for blacks to defend their rights in American society is to participate in the legal system, yet the fate awaiting those who become insiders is far from enviable. In Two Trains Running, Wilson questions the power African Americans possess as participants within the judicial system. In his legal battle against city hall, Memphis' black lawyer Chauncey Ward III fails to reach a satisfactory deal for his client. Thereupon, Memphis substitutes a white lawyer in his place, who eventually wins the case so that Memphis obtains an even higher amount for his restaurant than what he had been holding out for. According to Peter Wolfe, Memphis' success implies that “Wilson's blacks can sometimes prevail against white America” (30), but one cannot ignore how Memphis' success is made possible by a white attorney. In other words, the playwright discloses how black Americans lack significant power even in the role they might play as agents of law. Wilson also suggests that these African Americans have to blindly obey and uphold the (white) system to be able to participate in it. For instance, Chauncey Ward's father, “The first black judge they had down there,” was “death on niggers. Give one fellow five hundred years” (58). According to Wilson's depiction, black Americans who work for the establishment have to pay a price for their personal success. They are so alienated from their racial identity that they become faithful servants of the dominant group and ill-treat their fellow men much more so than the whites do. On the other hand, this incident may also signal how the power structure only permits such puppets to practice law so that the status quo can be maintained.

In August Wilson's imaginative world, law is white, but it is very much blemished. The failings of the judicial system in America, such as the physical and legal protection it denies black citizens, place African Americans at the mercy of the white vigilante groups and the white population at large to whom blacks are offered as sacrificial lambs. Wilson in his twentieth-century cycle also portrays whiteness as a terrorizing physical force for blacks, thus confirming bell hooks' claim: “All black people in the United States, irrespective of their class status or politics, live with the possibility that they will be terrorized by whiteness” (175). According to hooks, black Americans associate their racial Other with “the terrible, the terrifying, the terrorizing” (170). August Wilson corroborates bell hooks' assertions by portraying the white man as the formidable foe of blacks who furthers his control over them with the threat and use of violence.

In addition to the obvious examples of the terror white America signifies to black America, an equally important but less overt instance of white terror looms over these plays: slavery. Wilson's mission to rewrite American history in the twentieth century has also necessitated his look back at the era of slavery. The most prominent symbol of slavery in Wilson's twentieth-century cycle, Herald Loomis of Joe Turner's Come and Gone stands as testimony, very vividly, to the horrors and brutality of slavery.⁵ Wilson's character notes identify him as “A man driven not by the hellhounds that seemingly bay at his heels, but by his search for a world that speaks to something about himself. He is unable to harmonize the forces that swirl around him, and seeks to recreate the world into one that contains his image” (13-14). His seven-year imprisonment by the infamous Joe Turner has turned Loomis into less than a man; he is shattered, he is broken. For many years, he has traveled in a world that has dehumanized and emasculated him: “I been wandering a long time in somebody else's world” (72). When he arrives at Seth's boarding house with his daughter, his ultimate objective is to supersede this externally imposed image with an internally based and more positive one. Loomis' inability to stand up in Act 2, despite Bynum's coaxing, represents Loomis' lack of self-sufficiency at this point, the sufficiency that he will find by the end of the play. The finale of Joe Turner epitomizes African Americans confronting their legacy of bondage to whites and breaking free from and transcending that horrible past. In one of the more overt instances of white terror, Levee in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom recounts a haunting incident from his childhood when his family was traumatized by his mother's rape:

Must have been eight or nine of them. She standing there frying that chicken and them means come and took hold of her just like you take hold of a mule and make him do what you want.

(Pauses.)

There was my mama with a gang of white mens. She tried to fight them off, but I could see where it wasn't gonna do her any good, I didn't know what they were doing to her … but I figured whatever it was they may as well do to me too.

(69)

In spite of his fear, Levee makes an effort to protect his mother against the white men with his father's knife. While his attempt to kill one of the men fails, he clearly puts an end to the rape, but becomes the object of the white man's fury as the white man Levee has attacked now assails him. After Levee is wounded, the white men flee the crime scene, fearing Levee will die. His father, upon finding out about the rape, kills four of the men before they “Caught up with him and hung him and set him afire” (70). The father's strategy for revenge has to depend on guile since he lacks any power in the social system controlled by whites. Therefore, he smiles and lies to his wife's rapists while he takes justice into his own hands. Levee's narrative is striking in that it reveals the physical violence of Euro-Americans against the whole black population, including women and children. In this poignant story, the images of the knife and the fire, of raping and lynching operate together to instill in the audience the terror white America signifies to black America. Such fear is entrenched in the minds of blacks who, for centuries, have been at the mercy of those who owned them.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom insists on the equation of whiteness with terror with another oral narrative about the white assault against the black. Cutler, the guitar and trombone player, shares with the other band members the story of Reverend Gates, who, having missed the train when he was looking for an outhouse at a station, is deserted in a small town. Soon a group of white men close in on him and order him to dance for them: “That's the only way he got out of there alive … was to dance. Ain't even had no respect for a man of God! Wanna make him into a clown” (97). Reverend Gates has had to dance for his life at gunpoint, afraid to show any signs of hesitation, while the authority he commands as a religious figure is dissipated for those who would rather not acknowledge authority in a black man. Consequently, in Ma Rainey as well as in other Wilson plays, the perpetrators of violence leave their indelible impression on the audience indirectly, through the stories passed on about them in the black community. The Piano Lesson relies, for the most part, on the same dramatic technique of narration to delineate a comparable image of whiteness. The frightening presence of Sutter's ghost serves another, more significant purpose in The Piano Lesson⁶; it provides the link to the black family's violent past. Robert Sutter barters two of his slaves, Boy Willie's great-grandmother and her son, for Mr. Nolander's piano. Later, Boy Willie's great-grandfather, also named Boy Willie, is commissioned by his master to carve the images of his wife and son on the piano for his mistress who misses her former slaves. However, Boy Willie doesn't quit until he carves his family history on the piano which, thus, becomes a symbol to the black family and their future generations of their slavery to the Sutters. Therefore, Boy Charles, the father of Berniece and Boy Willie, decides to remove the piano from the Sutter household:

Now, I don't know what happened when Sutter came home and found that piano gone. But somebody went up to Boy Charles's house and set it on fire. But he wasn't in there. He must have seen them coming cause he went down and caught the 3:57 Yellow Dog. He didn't know they was gonna come down and stop the train. Stopped the train and found Boy Charles in the boxcar with four of them hobos. Must have got mad when they couldn't find the piano cause they set the boxcar afire and killed everybody.

(45)

The punishment for Boy Charles' transgression is to be burnt alive, another instance of the white man terrorizing the black man. Violence eventually accelerates as the ghosts of the victims, the so-called Ghosts of the Yellow Dog, castigate the white men, according to a folktale, by pushing them down their wells. Wilson's plays, as I will examine in more detail later, offer an antidote to white terror: black terror.

The savagery of the white against the black is underscored also in Two Trains Running. After his legal attempts to save his farm from Stovall fail, Memphis has to face the irate white man who, having been challenged by a black man, will stop at nothing in order to punish him:

They took and cut my mule's belly out while it standing there. Just took a knife and sliced it open. I stood there and watched them. They was laughing about it. […] He kinda reared back, took a few steps, and fell over. One of them reached down, grabbed hold of his dick, and cut that off. I stood there looking at them. I say, “Okay. I know the rules now. If you do that to something that ain't never done nothing to you … then I know what you would do to me. So I tell you what. You go on and get your laugh now. Cause if I get out of this alive I know how to play as good as anyone.” […]

[…] Got home and they had set fire to my crop. To get to my house I'd have to walk through fire. I wasn't ready to do that. I turned around and walked up the hill to Natchez. Called it a draw.

(72-73)

Memphis loses his farm, his crop, and his mule and is displaced by the white man who, out of greed, will commit the most abhorrent acts of violence, as if the legal protection guaranteed him is not enough.

The depiction of whiteness in these plays is such that Euro-Americans exercise violence to get what they want, to threaten African Americans, to demonstrate to them the extent of their power and cruelty in case their wishes are disregarded by black Americans. Conditioned by centuries of slavery, whites, even in the twentieth century, assume, according to Wilson, that they have a right to everything they might desire, and that their wishes are not to be opposed. When they are, blacks are punished in the most horrible ways: hanging and burning. Consequently, Wilson represents whiteness in these plays as a repulsive and terrible force that can keep black Americans in check. The images of the destruction whites embody are knives and guns with which they rape, kill, or threaten to kill African Americans.

Violence breeds violence, however, and at times, Euro-Americans fall victim to it when their monstrous deeds backfire. For example, Levee in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom attacks one of the white men raping his mother, and later his father wreaks destruction on them by killing as many of them as he can. Likewise, the Ghosts of the Yellow Dog in The Piano Lesson have sought retribution for their violent deaths at the hands of whites by pushing them down their wells. Boy Willie, too, has discovered the “power of death”: “See, a nigger that ain't afraid to die is the worse kind of nigger for the white man” (88). Recognizing the same power in guns, Memphis in Two Trains Running criticizes the supporters of the Black Power movement for their naiveté.

I don't know how these niggers think sometimes. Talking about black power with their hands and their pockets empty. You can't do nothing without a gun. Not in this day and time. That's the only kind of power the white man understand. They think they gonna talk their way up on it. In order to talk your way you got to have something under the table.

(42)

Black Americans need guns to protect themselves and their rights in a society that leaves them no legal avenues to do so. But Holloway warns us that the armed black is alarming to those in power:

A nigger with a gun is bad news. You can't even use the word “nigger” and “gun” in the same sentence. You say the word “gun” in the same sentence with the word “nigger” and you in trouble. The white man panic. Unless you say, “The policeman shot the nigger with his gun” … then that be alright. Other than that he panic. He ain't had nothing but guns for the last five hundred years … got the atomic bomb and everything. But you say the word “nigger” and “gun” in the same sentence and they'll try and arrest you. Accuse you of sabotage, disturbing the peace, inciting a riot, plotting to overthrow the government and anything else they can think of.

(85-86)

Through these multiple instances of blacks resorting to or advocating violence, August Wilson appears to be contending in his plays that unless blacks can discover a means to assert their own physical power, they will continue to be terrorized and victimized by their white compatriots. Of course, if this were true, then it would inevitably raise a rather sensitive question about Wilson's political message. Although his non-pacifist characters promote retribution for white brutality, they are few in number, and they do not have to function as the dramatist's mouthpiece. After all, Wilson has never publicly supported violent measures. A champion of self-determination for all oppressed peoples, Wilson has defined this term ambiguously: “What it [self-determination] means is to alter the relationship of yourself to the society you live in. Acquiring some power, for instance, is a way of altering your relationship with society without overthrowing anything [such as the government]” (Livingston 32). The source and nature of such power remain unknown. Wilson has reiterated the importance of “altering one's relationship to the society in which one lives,”⁷ but he has refrained from spelling out how to accomplish it. If asked this question directly, Wilson might respond that the only way for blacks to assert themselves in American society is to gain economic independence and to attain self-sufficiency, Wilson's ultimate message to African Americans. Memphis illustrates this point well. By the end of Two Trains Running, he announces his decision “to go back and pick up the ball”: “I'm going back to Jackson and see Stovall. If he ain't there, then I'm gonna see his son. He enjoying his daddy's benefits he got to carry his daddy's weight” (109). Both his self-confidence and bank account boosted as a result of his victory against city hall, Memphis can finally act on his long-standing intentions to demand his farm back and seek justice.

In his plays, Wilson denounces Euro-Americans who implement and carry out a twisted system in the name of law and order and who act on their infinite greed. The striking aspect of Wilson's cycle, however, is not necessarily that it confirms well-known facts about racial profiling by the police or the bias of the American judicial system against non-whites or even that it depicts whites as cold-blooded murderers and rapists. Wilson's drama is especially intriguing, I think, because of Wilson's remarkable critical and commercial success among white audiences—in spite of his white portraiture. After all, Wilson is the most successful African American playwright in American history with two Pulitzer prizes to his name, and a consistent Broadway success that is hard to match. His foremost critic, Robert Brustein offers a plausible explanation for how white theatre-goers can find Wilson's art “palatable” even when they are constantly being vilified by the characters on stage:

In comparison with the raging polemics of Ed Bullins or Amiri Baraka, Wilson's indictments are relatively mild. His characters usually sit on the edge of the middle class, wearing good suits, inhabiting clean homes. Securely shuttered behind realism's fourth wall, they never come on like menacing street people screaming obscenities or bombarding the audience with such phrases as “black power's gonna get your mama”—which may further explain Wilson's astounding reception.

(28)

Brustein is not alone in his appraisal of Wilson as a non-threatening black artist for white audiences. Sandra Shannon states: “Obviously influenced by revolutionary playwrights of the 1960s who sought to agitate their audiences by any means necessary, Wilson chooses a toned-down version of their more sensational attempts at didacticism” (6). Yvonne Shafer maintains, too, that “Unlike many black playwrights, his [Wilson's] own experience and his knowledge of the history of blacks in America has not led him to produce bitter, vituperative dramas” (17). Interestingly, critics who have not taken issue with Wilson's political statements “on stage” (in his plays) have instead targeted the dramatist's statements “off-stage” (e.g, in interviews). For instance, the playwright has come under fire for refusing to have Fences directed by a non-black director, even more than a decade after Paramount Pictures bought the copyright for the screenplay in 1987. The “separatist” label Wilson wears is further entrenched by his critique of white theatres that take funding away from black theatres by producing black plays or by employing black actors.⁸ In light of these remarks, Wilson's critics have not abstained from using this opportunity to highlight Wilson's so-called hypocrisy in having his plays produced for the most part in white theatres.⁹ Wilson perhaps willingly complicates his own authorial position by seeking out this double audience, which James Weldon Johnson had perceived as a crucial problem for black writers: “The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, this problem of the double audience. To whom shall he address himself, to his own black group or to white America?” (477). As most other African American writers, August Wilson finds himself addressing both the white and the black populace in America. However, unlike Baraka or Bullins who have had their plays produced in smaller Off-Broadway theatres, Wilson's plays have hit Broadway soon after their Yale Repertory Theatre debut, thus reaching a larger white audience with more mainstream literary tastes.

Robert Brustein has questioned time and again the source and nature of Wilson's success. According to his theory, the white audience, to whom Wilson owes both his critical and monetary success, can safely participate in his plays while being able to expiate their guilt: “Still, enough radical vapor floats over the bourgeois bolsters and upholstered couches to stimulate the guilt glands of liberal white audiences” (28). Brustein may, after all, be correct in his appraisal, at least to a certain extent. While clearly a talented playwright. Wilson has also managed to strike a golden balance between too little and too much of the cathartic material on stage. Unlike Baraka or Bullins, Wilson takes a milder approach to his subject matter; his plays have none of the violent rhetoric of Baraka or Bullins.¹⁰ The stories sandwiched between the ample humor that Wilson employs in his writing help tone down the seriousness of his message; his audience is spared the uncomfortable experience of watching, for example, any white violence against blacks. Thus, the African American oral tradition succeeds on multiple fronts: Wilson can get his message across without having to agitate and alienate his white audience. Following this format, Wilson can also satisfy the needs of his black audience by upholding and chronicling the black version of American history and by retaining the limelight on them, their hopes and victories. In other words, August Wilson has proven that he can have his cake and eat it, too.

Notes

1. While several scholars—particularly Mary Bogumil (Understanding August Wilson), Peter Wolfe (August Wilson), Mark William Rocha (“American History as ‘Loud-Talking’ in Two Trains Running”), and Trudier Harris (“August Wilson's Folk Traditions”)—have been perceptive to the vital presence of white society on Wilson's otherwise black stage, a systematic and comprehensive analysis of Wilson's white portraiture is yet to be undertaken.

2. Like Sandra Shannon, I consider the ghost to play a significant and tangible role on stage. He is, without any doubt, a palpable force for both the black characters and the audience.

3. In Wilson's drama, the police, as an agent of the white race, frequently keep a close eye on the “suspicious” activities of the black minority. For instance, Sterling in Two Trains Running reports that during the Malcolm X rally the police took pictures of those who attended. Wolf responds sarcastically, “They don't go out there where the white folks at and take their pictures” (104). The police officers are thus depicted as collaborators of the dominant group in a racial conspiracy to oppress the subordinate and innocent minority. Although it is possible to repudiate the reliability of these stories and dismiss their truth value, arguing they might have been embellished by their narrators, one point stands: Wilson's black characters tell similar stories and stress the negative impact of the white men in the world inhabited by blacks.

4. In The Piano Lesson, Lymon, who has done time at Parchman Farm for stealing wood, describes the penitentiary: “They work you too hard down there. All that weeding and hoeing and chopping down trees” (39). For a detailed discussion of the abhorrent treatment of black prisoners at Parchman Farm, see David M. Oshinsky's “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996) and William Banks Taylor's Down on Parchman Farm (1999).

5. In one of the quintessential scenes of the play, Loomis has a vision of bones rising out of water, symbolizing the Middle Passage and those who were lost on this tragic journey from freedom to slavery, also presaging the horrors awaiting them in America.

6. The invisible yet palpable ghost of James Sutter does not completely terrorize the black family, but his presence is sufficient to evoke fear. Even to Boy Willie, who remains skeptical of the ghost's reality until the very end, Sutter represents an unwelcome force to be reckoned with. He is only convinced of the ghost's actuality by the end of the play when he is forced to “wrestle with” him.

7. See Wilson, “The Ground on Which I Stand,” p. 15.

8. See Wilson, “August Wilson Responds,” pp. 102-03.

9. See Joan Herrington's “‘Responsibility in Our Own Hands.’” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 13.1 (Fall 1998): 87-99.

10. In his manifesto for The Revolutionary Theatre, for instance, Baraka argues: “what we show must cause the blood to rush, so that pre-revolutionary temperaments will be bathed in this blood, and it will cause their deepest souls to move, and they will find themselves tensed and clenched, even ready to die […]. We will scream and cry, murder, run through the streets in agony, if it means some soul will be moved […]” (131). Working out of the same ideology, Ed Bullins in It Bees Dat Way had black actors physically assault members of the white audience as part of the play. In his essay “Black Theatre Notes,” Bullins articulated a similar artistic stance to Baraka's: “Black Theatre […] cannot be polite; for the nature of Black Art and Theatre is its essential threat to the status quo white Western Civilization. Or Black Theatre can be as polite as an executioner can be to the condemned” (5).

Works Cited

Baraka, Amiri. “The Revolutionary Theatre.” Selected Plays and Prose of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones. New York: William Morrow, 1979. 130-33.

Brustein, Robert. “The Lesson of The Piano Lesson.” The New Republic 21 May 1990: 28-30.

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hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination.” Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism. Ed. Ruth Frankenberg. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 165-79.

Johnson, James Weldon. “The Dilemma of the Negro Author.” The American Mercury 15 (Dec. 1928): 477-81.

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———. “The Ground on Which I Stand.” American Theatre 7 (Sept. 1996): 14-16, 71-74.

———. Joe Turner's Come and Gone. New York: Plume, 1988.

———. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. New York: Plume, 1985.

———. The Piano Lesson. New York: Plume, 1990.

———. Seven Guitars. New York: Plume, 1997.

———. Two Trains Running. New York: Plume, 1993.

Wolfe, Peter. August Wilson. New York: Twayne, 1999.