The blues, thought August Wilson, “is the best literature black Americans have”. He harnessed the music’s raw vitality for the stage
of liver cancer in 2005, aged 60, but his plays have lives of their own. The ten parts of his American Century Cycle—which, between them, won two Pulitzers and heaps of acclaim for chronicling the black American experience in each decade of the 20th century—are still finding new audiences on stage and screen. This year, as usual, his work has been performed across America: “Radio Golf” in Philadelphia, “Fences” in Jackson, Mississippi, “Two Trains Running” in Miami.
Most of these dramas unfold in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, which, when Wilson was growing up there, was a slum known as “Little Harlem”. Though he was originally named Frederick August Kittel junior after his mostly absent white German father, Wilson said he never questioned his racial identity because no one else seemed to: “All the things that were closed to Negroes at that time were closed to me.
The women in his plays are outnumbered by the men, but tend to be sturdier, more sensible and more memorable. Their wisdom seems to come from resignation: relegated to lives of laundry and cooking, they know better than to dream big. The men are the tragic figures, grasping for dignity in emasculating times. “I been wandering a long time in somebody else’s world,” says a recently freed slave in “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone”, Wilson’s favourite of his plays.
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