“We’s the Leftovers” Whiteness as Economic Power and Exploitation in August Wilson’s Twentieth Century Cycle of Plays.
By Cigdem Uskekes
In “We’s the Leftovers”: Whiteness as Economic Power and Exploitation in August Wilson’s Twentieth Century Cycle of plays, Cigdem Uskekes seeks to define what it means to be a white character in an August Wilson play.
Wilson has a tendency to marginalize whiteness by restricting it to an unseen offstage presence. There are precious few white characters that actually participate in the action of this plays. However, the argument is made that whiteness plays a large role in his work as white society is the main antagonist in all of Wilson’s works.
White characters are always peripheral in Wilson’s plays, with the exception of Sturdyvant in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Selig in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, there are few white characters who directly influence the plot of the play, but the presence of whiteness is felt everywhere. Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it this way: “…one of Wilson’s accomplishments is to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world- the way to see them nowhere and feel them everywhere”.
Toldeo’s monologue in Ma Rainey in which he discusses how African American history is like the leftover stew white Americans don’t want to eat because they’re full of their own history articulates Wilson’s concise vision of African American History. It also introduces the white man as an off-stage character whose influence is severely felt.
Joe Turner, set in 1910, discusses the era of the end of slavery and the struggles of blacks during reconstruction to find their place in a white world in which they are not wanted. We find in Joe Turner, Rutherford Selig. The closest Wilson has come to creating a multi-dimensional white character; he has a sense of belonging to the black community, which based on his past as a People Finder for the chain gangs of Joe Turner, is unfounded.
In The Piano Lesson there is in emphasis on black v. white ownership. Berniece wants to keep the piano previously owned by a white family because of the carvings on it that represent her family and the ghosts from her past. Her brother, Boy Willie, wants to sell it to buy land because he believes the whites are privileged because of the land they own and he wants to use their piano to buy land from them.
In spite of what his plays may indicate, August Wilson does not have deep-seated hate for white people, he doesn’t think they are depraved souls. What he hates is the American capitalist system. Critics like Brustein say Wilson has invested too much in narratives of victimization of African Americans by white people. Wilson says he uses these stories to convey a sense of black victory and hope for the future. His plays honor the “warrior spirits” among African Americans, people who are not afraid to fight with white society or whomever or whatever may stand in their way and most of his plays end with a celebration of victory over white society.
Wilson on his blues aesthetic: “The blues are the African American community’s cultural response to the world”.
Plum seeks to explore how Wilson’s plays function as a cultural trope that foregrounds the marginalization of African Americans in order to reawaken cultural consciousness.
History is supposed to be an interpretation of events by an objective observer. In constructing American History, historians (who are mostly white male protestants) have glorified white male settlers and marginalized women and people of color, Wilson emphasizes the significance of the chain gang in Joe Turner something which traditional histories of the U.S. leave out.
Wilson is widely regarded as the only playwright of his generation that can be mentioned in the same breath as O’Neill, Williams and Miller, the best of the 20th century American playwrights, saying the size and scope of his vision reminds us of Shakespeare’s and of the beginnings of western drama in Greece. Robert Brustein of course disagrees with this statement and calls Wilson’s approach to playwriting conservative and appeases white liberal guilt without intimidating.
According to Wilson, the blues reawaken cultural consciousness and provide a new understanding of life to African Americans who have been widely left out of mainstream American history books and consciousnesses. Like classic blues, Wilson’s plays appeal to white and black audiences for different reasons. His plays are a potential source of empowerment that helps African Americans shape their future by becoming informed cultural historians. White audiences may be able to find some parallels to their lives as descendants of European immigrants. Through the discourse of the blues, Wilson envisions a more inclusive notion of America.
According to August Wilson, the greatest mistake African Americans made was migrating to the North after Emancipation. In the 7 plays published up until this article was written, Wilson addresses the fault of the northward migration of African Americans. Wilson said that each play captures the impulse of the “Southern Negro’s initiation into the Northern way of life.”
Several characteristics follow these transplanted characters: blasphemy, self-mutilation, convulsions, arrested speech, unexplained scars, incarceration, domestic turmoil, splintering of the nuclear family structure, and mental trauma that manifests itself in either neurosis, schizophrenia, or dimentia.
In Seven guitars, Pittsburgh isn’t Northern enough for many of the characters to feel they have escaped the South, Chicago, the home of the blues, and even farther North is the proverbial Promised Land.
There are anti rooster sentiments in both Seven Guitars and Fences. To Hedley and Troy, roosters represent farm life, which represents their roots in the Southern agricultural tradition. The symbolism in Seven Guitars of the goldenseal plant being weak in non-native soil with fragile roots, uprooted by Floyd burying the money represents the cultural uneasiness and oppression of blacks by Northern white American capitalism.
Levee in Ma Rainey is abrasive, conniving, insecure, bitter, blatantly anti-Christian and homicidal. His character epitomizes the Northern transplant that did not take. He witnessed his parents murder on their land in the South so he understandably fled. His fate is directly related to his decision to flee North rather than avenge his father’s death in the South. Levee’s Florsheim shoes represent his struggle to fit in in the north, and Toledo, who he always considered country, or Southern, stepping on his shoes, drove him to his breaking point.
Wilson is not suggesting that all African Americans migrate back to the Sotuh, but rather he is asking African Americans to take a look at their history to see what struggles they overcame in the South, and keep them as a part of their lives in the North.
