“White folks don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ’cause that’s a way of understanding life.”
— From Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson
It is a profound indictment of American pop culture that a person as distinguished as August Wilson (easily one of the greatest dramatists in U.S. history) can die with hardly a notice in the national media. And, this indictment is especially poignant because of Wilson’s own lamentations on the superficial and racist nature of this culture. But now he’s dead: having succumbed to liver cancer at the age of 60 at his home in Seattle, Washington last weekend.
I feel compelled, however, to ask this question in his honour: Why did the theatres on Broadway not go dark in tribute to Wilson as they did earlier this year in tribute to Arthur Miller? And, I do not proffer some Pollyannaish version of equal treatment here. But if Miller got the Broadway version of one minute of silence, then surely Wilson deserved at least 30 seconds!
Wilson chronicled the story of black life in America (in plays like Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Fences and The Piano Lesson) with the precision of an historian, the introspection of a psychologist, the perspective of a sociologist, the drama of a playwright and the justified rage of an ordinary black man.
Alas, even though acclaimed and well-compensated for his works, Wilson went to his grave fulminating against racial injustice – as evidently prevalent on Broadway as it is in boardrooms – that still limit the pursuit of happiness for so many blacks in America. But, in addition to singing, black folks are now rapping the blues….
Click here for more on the life of this extraordinary American from the Detroit Free Press.
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