"We's the leftovers": whiteness as economic power and exploitation in August Wilson's twentieth-century cycle of plays.

The widespread critical attention August Wilson's work has enjoyed has helped establish his stature as the African American playwright of the late twentieth century. In particular, scholars have focused almost exclusively on Wilson's black portraits, concurring with the dramatist who, both in his plays and in his interviews, accentuates the struggles of his black characters. Consequently, whites have only been regarded as secondary actors in Wilson's drama, despite Wilson's observation that white society is the main antagonist in his plays (Grant 114). Wilson's white characters have appeared time and again in Wilson scholarship; however, they have been treated as peripheral, rather than central, to his plays. (1) Because the lives of Wilson's black characters are inseparable from those of white Americans, we need to pay more deliberate attention to images of whiteness in Wilson's work. For these reasons, in this essay I would like to reconsider his plays through the lens of whiteness. My goal in doing so is not to further privilege the already-prevalent concept of whiteness in American society and literature but to disclose its focal position in African American art and to initiate a better understanding of its connotations in Wilson's drama.

Admittedly, there are few on-stage white characters in Wilson's plays: Irvin, Sturdyvant, and the policeman in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom; Rutherford Selig in Joe Turner's Came and Gone; and the unseen yet present ghost of James Sutter in The Piano Lesson. (2) Wilson's fictive black world, however, is peopled with many whites; if they do not appear on stage, they materialize in the lives, stories, and conversations of his black characters. As early as in Ma Rainey, the playwright began reflecting on the external white world bearing down upon African Americans by employing off-stage characters. Wilson's tendency seemingly to marginalize whiteness by restricting it, for the most part, to an off-stage presence serves an important purpose: The dramatic focus can thus remain on the black characters while also implying that whites, even in their absence, are very much present, since they clearly circumscribe and govern the lives and potentialities of the black characters. Thus, Wilson's dramatic work, whose emotional center lies with his African American characters, also consistently draws attention to the pervasive and negative impact of Euro-Americans in the black community. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., makes the same point: "... one of Wilson's accomplishments is to register the ambiguous presence of white folks in a segregated black world--the way you see them nowhere and feel them everywhere" (55).

Considered as a whole, Wilson's twentieth-century cycle of plays underscores the economic, social, and judicial dominance of white Americans. (3) In this essay, I will address the first and foremost part of this equation: Wilson's emphasis on how property or capital bestows power on whites in American society so that they can make decisions which determine the course of other people's lives and, in so doing, often disrupt and destroy those lives for their own economic survival. (4) Although Wilson's cycle of plays proposes to rewrite the white version of American history in the twentieth century (with a play dedicated to each decade), it also looks back in time to slavery, the era when whiteness became associated with the most abominable ownership imaginable: that of human flesh.

Wilson first began to inspect the nature and source of Euro-Americans' economic power in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984). Set in Chicago in 1927, the play exposes the exploitation of blues musicians by the white moguls of the recording industry. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom opens with Sturdyvant and Irvin, white characters modeled after these businessmen. "Preoccupied with money," according to Wilson's character notes, Sturdyvant"is insensitive to black performers and prefers to deal with them at ann's length" (17). He owns the record company where Ma Rainey and her band are preparing to make a new record, and as Sandra Adell suggests, he "finds it particularly irritating to have to put up with one who comports herself as if she were a queen" (58). Sturdyvant has a firm grip on the band, if not Ma Rainey, because of his economic privilege. Whereas the musicians obey him almost sheepishly, Ma combats his control over her, but her resistance results in a more adamant power struggle between the two:

STURDYVANT. I'm not putting up with any shenanigans. You hear, Irv? ...She's your responsibility. I'm not putting up with any Royal Highness ... Queen of the Blues bullshit!

IRVIN. Mother of the Blues, Mel. Mother of the Blues.

STURDYVANT. I don't care what she calls herself. I'm not putting up with it. I just want to get her in here.., record those songs on that list. .. and get her out. Just like clockwork, huh? (18)

Presumably having been crossed in the past by Ma Rainey, Sturdyvant passes the responsibility of "handling" her to Irvin, Ma Rainey's manager, who is entrusted with the role of negotiator. Irvin, Wilson says, "prides himself on his knowledge of blacks and his ability to deal with them" (17). Thus, while Sturdyvant remains aloof from the black musicians, Irvin, the go-between, carries out his orders. But the power struggle in the studio, even in the absence of the Mother of the Blues, takes its toll on the musicians, who soon clash with each other about which songs to practice for the recording session: Ma's selection or that of Sturdyvant? While Ma's longtime band members Cutler and Slow Drag champion her, Levee endorses Sturdyvant's choices in his hope to win the white man's favor and thus to be associated with his power, the power that Sturdyvant does not hesitate to exercise relentlessly over those like Levee. To his disappointment, however, Levee will, by the end of the play, discover his role to be merel y that of a pawn in the game determined by whites.

When Ma finally makes her appearance on stage, she refuses to go along with Sturdyvant's selection for the record. Her hostility toward the white men she works with has more to do with her reaction to her disempowerment as a black woman artist than with the songs per se, although the record becomes the site of their conflict:

You decided, huh? I'm just a bump on the log. I'm gonna go which ever way the river drift. Is that it? You and Sturdyvant decided m gonna tell you something, Irvin... and you go on up there and tell Sturdyvant. What you all say don't count with me. You understand? Ma listens to her heart. Ma listens to the voice inside her. That's what counts with Ma... . Now, if that don't set right with you and Sturdyvant... then I can carry my black bottom on back down South to my tour, 'cause I don't like it up here no ways. (63)

Because she can rely on her Southern fans for her financial survival, Ma Rainey can defy Sturdyvant, and the power she derives from having an alternative provides her with the unwavering tenacity she needs in her dealings with Sturdyvant and Irvin. And maybe most importantly, Ma Rainey recognizes that her record offers a lucrative business deal for Sturdyvant. In the end, the triumph is hers, at least to a certain extent: According to Sandra Shannon, "Despite her acknowledged degradation, Ma's victory seems to be in maintaining her dignity in the face of the apparent 'prostitution' of her talents and in exercising as much control as possible over the rights to her music" ("Ground" 152). Ma Rainey's triumph can best be understood in terms of her familiarity with the rules of the game, which enables her to remain in control and to negotiate with the men on her own terms. Therefore, even when most of her wishes are fulfilled, she leaves the studio without signing the release forms, the last site of her power ove r Sturdyvant. In Ma Rainey, August Wilson raises questions about who "owns" and "decides" the blues: the black artist or the white producer. The play ends on an ambiguous note when Ma departs from the studio without having given Sturdyvant the rights to her music.

But the white producer's economic exploitation extends far beyond Ma Rainey to her musicians. Having commissioned Levee to write songs for him, Sturdyvant later rejects them and offers a pittance as compensation for Levee's time. Enraged by this turn of events, Levee takes out his anger on Toledo, stabbing to death his fellow musician who, ironically, had earlier warned him about what to expect from white folks like Sturdyvant:

See, we's the leftovers. The colored man is the leftovers. Now, what's the colored man gonna do with himself? That's what we waiting to find out. But first we gotta know we the leftovers. Now, who knows that? You find me a nigger that knows that and I'll turn any whichaway you want me to. And that's what the problem is. The problem ain't with the white man. The white man knows you lust a leftover. 'Cause he the one who done the eating and he know what he done ate. But we don't know that we been took and made history out of. Done went and filled the white man's belly and now he's full and tired and wants you to get out the way and let him be by himself .... you just ask Mr. Irvin what he had for supper yesterday. And if he's an honest white man.., which is asking for a whole heap of a lot. . . he'll tell you he done ate your black ass and if you please I'm full up with you.., so go on and get off the plate and let me eat something else. (57-58)

Toledo's rather long monologue, one of the most vital passages in Ma Rainey, articulates Wilson's concise version of African American history, a long history of abuse, impotence, passivity, and muteness. Furthermore, it introduces "the white man" as an off-stage character whose influence is severely felt among blacks. It is this generic offstage presence that Wilson will consistently summon in his later work.

Wilson resumes his critique of the white man's economic power over and exploitation of blacks in Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1986). The play examines the lives of African Americans in the 1910s in a Pittsburgh boarding house while reminding its audience that slavery is neither a forgotten memory nor a thing of the past. In fact, Joe Turner is as much interested in the era of slavery as it is in that of post-Reconstruction, when the children of the freed slaves were migrating north in search of a better life. Their quest, however, which led them to new horizons, also placed them in an unfamiliar landscape, sometimes without friends or family to support them. Among these displaced black characters that Joe Turner brings to life dwells one white man, Rutherford Selig, but the most significant emblem of whiteness in Joe Turner's Come and Gone is the off-stage eponymous white character who looms over the black characters.

The historical Turner was the brother of the Governor of Tennessee and installed a quasi-slavery system in the South long after the Emancipation. Because of his privileged status, Joe Turner could secure free labor for himself without having to suffer any consequences. In an interview, Wilson elaborates on the historical background of his character: "Joe Turner would press Blacks into peonage. He would send out decoys who would lure Blacks into crap games and then he would swoop down and grab them. He had a chain with forty links to it, and he would take Blacks off to his plantation and work them" (Powers 53). The play's protagonist, Herald Loomis, is one of these enslaved African American men, and because of the seven years he has spent in bondage, he has been estranged from his wife and his family as well as his sense of self. Merely witnessing Loomis's suffering is sufficient to recognize the compelling symbolic presence of the white man on stage: "He represents the evil that takes away all the potential identified with black men, whether that evil historically took the form of slavery, sharecropping, or convict labor as a result of being jailed without any semblance of due process" (Harris 56). The destructive history Joe Turner epitomizes in this play is the haunting history white America has imprinted on black Americans. Turner is the most prominent symbol, in August Wilson's twentieth-century cycle of plays, of the economic exploitation and abuse African Americans have experienced at the hands of whites. In fact, the playwright has noted that the seven years Herald Loomis spent in peonage can "represent the four hundred years of slavery, of being taken out of Africa and brought to America" (Powers 54).

Reminiscent of the same history in some ways, Selig, the only on-stage white character of Joe Turner, is the closest August Wilson has come to creating a multi-dimensional white character. He is, for example, clearly welcome in the black boarding house where Seth's wife Bertha wants him to feel at home: "Sit on down there, Selig. Get you a cup of coffee and a biscuit" (7), and "You know you welcome anytime, Selig" (11). What distinguishes Selig from Wilson's other white characters is his sense of belonging in the black community. But even this more or less positive emblem of whiteness is not without defects. Known as the People Finder among blacks, according to one perspective in the play, he keeps records of his customers in order to locate them for others in the future. Yet Selig, because of African American history, inhabits a problematic role as the People Finder:

I can't promise anything but we been finders in my family for a long time. Bringers and finders. My great-granddaddy used to bring Nigras across the ocean on ships. . . . You're in good hands, mister. Me and my daddy have found plenty Nigras. My daddy, rest his soul, used to find runaway slaves for the plantation bosses. He was the best there was at it. Jonas B. Selig. Had him a reputation stretched clean across the country. After Abraham Lincoln give you all Nigras your freedom papers and with you all looking all over for each other. . . we started finding Nigras for Nigras. Of course, it don't pay as much. But the People Finding business ain't so bad. (41)

Rutherford Selig comes from a long tradition of "People Finders," a euphemism in this case for those in the slave-trading business or for runaway-slave hunters. Selig does not conceal the fact that members of his family have been the arch-enemies of Africans and later African Americans, although he appears to overlook the hostility which has historically existed between his ancestors and the ancestors of the blacks in the community where he works. Selig now employs his skills in a legitimate and clean trade, yet it still is a business and his source of livelihood. Its history is far from being untainted, stretching back in time to slavery. As people with African origins were objects for material gain for Selig's ancestors, his black customers are objects for Selig to locate for money. In this regard, his business carries a strong resonance of his family's past encounters with blacks.

Bertha further challenges the decency of Selig's trade, claiming that the white man only finds folks he has already taken away: "Then he charge folks a dollar to tell them where he took them. Now, that's the truth of Rutherford Selig. This old People Finding business is for the birds. He ain't never found nobody he ain't took away" (42). Like Bertha, who remains skeptical of Selig's business and its ethics, critic Kim Pereira, too, refuses to interpret Selig's role in the black community as benevolent: "... Rutherford Selig has found an innovative way to continue the family tradition by finding black people separated as a consequence of slavery and sharecropping" (59). Selig's history overlaps those of his black customers and workers, and it is in this history, in the absent offstage white characters whom Selig himself names, his father and grandfather, that we find the missing pieces of the puzzle of white-black interaction in America.

The People Finder stands for the economic power and exploitation associated with whiteness in more ways than one. A peddler, he provides Seth with raw materials and then sells the end products to other blacks in the community. Selig does not exploit Seth in quite the same way that Sturdyvant exploits the black musicians in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, but Selig's relationship with Seth is still mainly one in which the white man symbolizes the capital, and the black man the labor. Selig is the employer and Seth the employee. Alan Nadel observes the racially charged aspect of Selig and Seth's business relationship by stating that the former "controls the economy in which [Seth] Holly's labor is traded" ("Boundaries" 99). This business relationship is not the "happy fusion of black and white traditions," as Peter Wolfe would have it (94).

Joe Turner's Come and Gone also advances the dramatist's agenda on whiteness via other off-stage white characters, such as the rapacious white man who extorts fifty cents a week from black laborers at Jeremy's workplace by threatening them with the loss of their jobs. Jeremy refuses to comply: "It didn't make no sense to me. I don't make but eight dollars. Why I got to give him fifty cents of it? He go around to all the colored and he got ten dollars extra. That's more than I make for a whole week" (64). Jeremy is aware of the injustice of the situation, but his courage in standing up to the white man costs him his job, thereby disclosing the vulnerability of black Americans in the business world.

Jeremy's story also exemplifies the importance of oral narratives for African Americans. While the dramatic genre more than likely demands that at least some events take place off-stage, thus requiring the related information to be distributed by some other means, Wilson's plays rely extensively on storytelling. His black men communicate their experiences and the lessons therein through oral narratives.5 August Wilson has confirmed the essential character of the oral tradition in black culture:

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)

One of the benefits of this dramatic device is that, while information is circulated with the help of stories, the whites, who are crucial to the plays themselves, are relegated to an offstage presence in order to reserve the limelight for the black characters.

In The Piano Lesson (1987), Euro-Americans lurk behind the scenes, too. Situated in 1936, the play deliberately looks back once again at the historical and personal significance of slavery. The dramatic conflict at the heart of The Piano Lesson revolves around the two options available to Boy Willie and his sister Berniece regarding their family's heirloom piano. Whereas Berniece wants to hold onto this symbol of her heritage, Boy Willie claims it would be put to better use if they sell it and with the money buy the land on which their ancestors have toiled as slaves. Another pivotal actor in this family drama is the ghost of a white man, James Sutter, whose ancestors have claimed proprietorship over both the black family and the piano. In fact, the piano becomes the site of conflict among these three characters as they, at different points and for different reasons, lay claim to the piano.

Since it represents the ancestors of the black family and evokes their white masters, too, the piano is the single most important prop on stage. Originally, it belonged to Robert Sutter, the grandfather of James Sutter, who had bought it for his wife in exchange for two of his slaves. When Miss Ophelia found the absence of her former slaves too much to bear, her husband had Boy Willie, the great-grandfather of Boy Willie and Berniece, carve on the piano images of his wife and their son, the two Sutter slaves who had been sold. However, Boy Willie brings to life on the piano more than what his master asks for; his extended family and the landmarks of their lives also find their way on to the piano, which, thus, serves not only as a reminder of the black family's history of bondage but also of African American cultural history. Boy Willie's carvings transform the piano into more than a musical instrument; it becomes a catalyst in the interactions of the black and the white families. Until then, the piano has be longed to the Sutters. However, Boy Willie, by carving his family history on it, has also claimed it as his property. The new value the piano assumes--it has been bought, in the first place, at the price of Boy Willie's family, and it artistically tells their story--results in friction between the two families and their future generations. Boy Willie's grandson Boy Charles associates the piano with his own family: According to him, whoever owns the piano also owns the black family. Therefore, it has to be removed from the Sutter household. Not suprisingly, this information is once again presented via the stories black characters tell each other on stage. These narratives unveil the past that has shaped the present in which the ghost of James Sutter "refuses to relinquish his claim on the piano as well as an unspoken related claim on these descendants of slaves once owned by the Sutter clan" (Shannon, Dramatic 160). The late Sutter haunts the black family and asserts his ownership of the piano with his unrelen ting presence on stage.

Ownership remains a source of contention among the present-day members of the black family, too. Whereas Berniece insists on keeping the piano (thus, her family history and the ghosts from her past) in her possession, Boy Willie wants to buy land with it because he believes, as does August Wilson, that whites are privileged because of what they own. According to this reasoning, African Americans with land will enjoy equal rights as Euro-Americans, an advantageous position denied to Boy Willie's father, who had no option but to sharecrop for the white man:

See now... if he had his own land he wouldn't have felt that way. If he had something under his feet that belonged to him he could stand up taller.... If you got a piece of land you'll find everything else fall right into place. You can stand right up next to the white man and talk about the price of cotton ... the weather, and anything else you want to talk about. (92)

Boy Willie (much like Hedley in Seven Guitars) sees the white man's property as the main source of his power over the black man. African Americans in the past lacked prestige because they could only serve as laborers on the white man's land, first as slaves, later as sharecroppers. Once these roles are upset, Boy Willie believes the white man's authority will end. Wilson has voiced his agreement with Boy Willie's position in an interview with Nathan Grant, declaring land the "basis of independence" (104).

Nevertheless, Berniece refuses to acquiesce to Boy Willie's plan, and the siblings remain at odds with each other until the very end, when the ghost of Sutter poses a more dangerous threat to the black family, and they need to unite forces in order to defeat him. Anne Fleche maintains that the dramatic conflict shifts in the course of the play from that between the brother and the sister to that between "their family and Sutter" (10). The ghost with whom Boy Willie wrestles in the end in "a life-and-death struggle fraught with perils and faultless terror" can only be exorcised by Berniece, who summons help from the spirits of her ancestors by playing the piano for the first time in years (106). The ending affirms that the piano rightfully belongs to the black family, who have not only conceived it as a work of art but also earned it, over many generations, with their blood. (6)

August Wilson's next play, Two Trains Running (1990), reinforces yet again the economic power of whiteness and Euro-Americans' exploitation of African Americans. The play takes place in 1969 in a Pittsburgh restaurant where its characters are working hard to ensure their economic survival in a white-dominated world. Many years ago, one of its focal off-stage white characters, Lutz, hired Hambone, a black man, to paint the fence around his store. They struck a deal according to which Hambone would receive a chicken for his labor or a ham if the job were done well. When Hambone finishes his painting job, he expects a ham, believing he has done a satisfactory job, but since it is up to Lutz to determine the merit of the black man's labor, Hamb one feels cheated out of his ham. He has protested this injustice by standing outside Lutz's store every day for nine years and demanding his ham in the few phrases he can now utter: "I want my ham. He gonna give me my ham." Hambone is a symbol in the play (as is Lutz), a man who would not just take anything but what he thinks he deserves. Holloway, "a man who all his life has voiced his outrage at injustice with little effect" (5), admires and supports Hambone's position: "[H]e ain't willing to accept whatever the white man throw at him" (30).

Regardless of what the conflict between Hambone and Lutz might portend, Two Trains Running ends with a somewhat promising outlook on an African American economic future. In a battle of his own with city hall, which is trying to buy out his restaurant, Memphis finally receives more from them than what he has bargained for. Yet the underlying message remains hopeless: The blacks' money ends up in the pockets of the dominant group:

The money go from you to me to you and then--bingo, it's gone.... You give it to the white man. Pay your rent, pay your telephone, buy your groceries, see the doctor--bingo, it's gone. Just circulate it around till it find that hole, then--bingo. Like trying to haul sand in a bucket with a hole in it. (34)

Because the economic system is in the hands of the majority, African Americans cannot retain the money they earn, and they have to rely on illegal operations like playing numbers, which is once again controlled by whites. When Sterling hits the numbers and discovers his share has been cut b the Alberts--a regular occurrence whenever "thirty or forty niggers get lucky enough to hit the numbers the same day," according to Holloway--h protests furiously (84). Sterling's calling off the bet with Old Man Albert and asking for his two dollars back without returning the white man's six hundred, marks an attempt, albeit feeble, at retaliation.

Discussing the historical background for his play, Wilson has drawn attention to the inequity in the American economic and social setup, even as late as the sixties:

In 1968, the relationship of blacks to white Americans was not that much different than the relationship of slaves to their masters. It was like a day off on the plantation. Nobody was working. There were no jobs. There were all these people with families but no means of support, because society didn't have any use for them. (Dworkin, "Blood" 8)

Holloway's "stacking niggers" speech (34-35) confirms Wilson's observation above. That the socioeconomic system in America has from the outset weighed on the shoulders of its black citizens, holding them down, is one of the points Wilson revisits in his work. Without black workers both during and after slavery; America would not be the America that it is today. Whites have used blacks to attain their goals and to build an optimal society for themselves, but having accomplished their objectives, they have no further use for blacks, who in the end are discarded by those who have exploited them and their labor to the fullest extent. Moreover, Euro-Americans have managed to take credit for the products of black labor and do not hesitate to disparage these workers now for their "laziness," a handy excuse to explain away their unemployment in the sixties, the historical backdrop for Two Trains Running.

Seven Guitars (1995) returns to a world similar to that of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Both plays, although set in different eras, the former in the 1940s and the latter in the 1920s, explore how record companies owned by whites take advantage of black musicians. Floyd Barton, like Ma Rainey, has to work with the white moguls on unequal terms. Not until he has a hit record does his manager, Mr. T. L. Hall, another off-stage white character, invest in Floyd, and does Savoy Records invest him to Chicago for another recording session. Though now famous, Floyd and his musician friends are as hard up as ever. In this capitalistic setup, the whites are only interested in making a profit off Floyd's music, and not in his or his band's financial welfare. Canewell and Red Carter, for instance, complain about their past experiences with white producers, especially about having been cheated out of their wages:

FLOYD. This time it's gonna be different. We gonna get the money up front.

FLOYD. He don't have to care nothing about you. You all doing business. He ain't got to like you. Tell him, Red, you got to take advantage of the opportunity. It don't matter if he like you or not. You got to take the opportunity while it's there.

CANEWELL. It wasn't all about the money. He treat me like he didn't care nothing about me.

CANEWELL. Just cause I was there on an opportunity don't mean he got to treat me bad. He on an opportunity too. You creating an opportunity for him. (47)

The black musicians in the recording business have no value as human beings for the white businessmen. Thus, Seven Guitars posits that blues musicians like Ma Rainey have not made much, if any, progress in the two decades between the twenties and the Forties. Artists like Floyd are as expendable as they were twenty years earlier, and American society and businesses are not likely to be transformed in favor of their black workers.

Arguably, Mr. T. L. Hall is the least attractive off-stage white in Seven Guitars: He has sold fake insurance in the poor black neighborhoods. Canewell remains the only character, though, to perceive Mr. T. L. Hall's thievery through a Darwinian lens: "There's lots of poor people. Mr. T. L. Hall say he didn't want to be one. Selling that fake insurance might have been his only chance not to be poor" (85). Approached from this perspective, the exploitation of blacks by whites, no longer synonymous with iniquity, might merely illustrate nature's principle of the survival of the fittest.

Given the recurrence of negative white portraits in Wilson's twentieth-century cycle, we are left with a difficult question about the playwright's stance on whiteness: Does August Wilson regard Euro-Americans as immoral individuals who have been exploiting their black fellow countrymen for centuries? I think the answer to this question is not so easy as it seems. Wilson has denied that he aims to depict whites as depraved souls. For instance, in response to a question about Selig's intentions, Wilson has defended his white character: "...he's not evil at all. In fact, he's performing a very valuable service for the community" (Powers 53). Some of Wilson's black characters appear to share this assessment of white America. Like Canewell, who doesn't castigate Mr. T. L. Hall, Memphis in Two Trains Running excuses Lutz's treatment of Hambone, saying he would have done the same himself, and underscores instead the foolishness of leaving it up to someone else to determine the value of one's own labor.

I believe that Wilson's target is instead the American capitalist system, which allows the strong to be stronger and the weak to be exploited. No one can deny, though, that this system was established by whites who have reaped its benefits. Whites, since their initial contact with blacks, have approached them as free or cheap labor and have capitalized on their labor. Thus, even after the Emancipation, the American history of the twentieth century remains one of abuse and bondage for African Americans. Black Americans, now free, can still not enjoy sovereignty, economic independence, or cultural equality and are unfortunately still within the tight grasp of the white majority. Mary Bogumil comments on the stasis in American racial relations that Wilson depicts: "Wilson's strategy of writing a play for each decade of the twentieth century

focuses attention on this long journey with little progress and change, one that so many African Americans have taken" (9).

Wilson's foremost critic, Robert Brustein, takes issue with the adverse representations of whiteness that Wilson projects in his twentieth-century cycle:

Presumably wilson is preparing to cover . . . more theatrical decades of white culpability and black martyrdom. This single-minded documentation of American racism is a worthy if familiar social agenda, and no enlightened person would deny its premise, but as an ongoing artistic program it is monotonous, limited, locked in a perception of victimization. (28)

Has Wilson invested too much in narratives of victimization as Brustein claims, or does he use the story of whites' exploitation and abuse of blacks to convey a sense of black victory and hope for the future? Wilson maintains that his goal is the latter. In an interview with Bonnie Lyons, he has spoken up for his black characters who, he argues, "don't respond as victims. No matter what society does to them, they are engaged with life, wrestling with it, trying to make sense out of it. Nobody is sitting around saying, 'Woe is me'" (11). Likewise, C. W. E. Bigsby perceives a celebratory tone in these plays but also warns us: "This is not to say that... [Wilson] deals with victories but that he chooses to focus on the often losing battle of individuals placed under the kind of pressure which makes personal meaning so difficult to sustain" (287). By placing his black characters under such pressure, Wilson often exalts his drama to the level of tragedy, in (unconscious) accordance with Arthur Miller's redefinition of the Greek concept in his essay "Tragedy and the Common Man":

... the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing--his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society. (4)

Even though Wilson has made a point of distancing himself from the Western literary tradition, his writings observe the dramatic principle Miller discusses above. In Wilson's plays, black characters find themselves in an ongoing struggle with a hostile social and economic structure and its white representatives. Whether they fight may be more important than whether they win or lose in the end.

August Wilson's plays honor the "warrior spirits" among African Americans, those who are not afraid to put up a fight with white society and with whatever or whoever else may stand in their way. The "warrior spirits" are those, Wilson explains, "who look around to see what the society has cut out for them, who see the limits of their participation, and are willing to say, 'No, I refuse to accept this limitation that you're imposing on me... (Moyers 179). Most of Wilson's plays end by celebrating the success of such warriors: Boy Willie wrestles with the ghost and exorcises it with the help of Berniece; Herald Loomis breaks free of his past; Memphis receives a large sum from city hall for his restaurant. Of the few who lose in the end, Levee and Floyd, for example, their lives attain more meaning as a direct result of their doomed battles. And as August Wilson suggests, we should be extolling these individuals and their lives rather than merely condemning the antagonistic forces in their way because the latter response, after all, would diminish them to the position of objects rather than acknowledge their full subject status. A better understanding of Wilson's delineation of whiteness gives us a more complete sense of the struggles and achievements of these black warriors.

Notes

(1.) While a number of scholars have been perceptive regarding the crucial presence of white society on Wilson's otherwise black stage--see, for example, Bogumil; Wolfe; Rocha; Harris--a systematic and comprehensive analysis of August 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.) See Usekes.

(4.) For my discussion, I draw from Wilson's cycle of plays with the exception of Jitney! and King Hedley II, the yet-unpublished accompanying pieces to the cycle, and Fences, a play which foregrounds the social privileges of white Americans more so than their economic privilege.

(5.) As Norine Dworkin has remarked, storytelling is central to Wilson's work, as it is to African American literature in general ("Chronicle" F5).

(6.) Boy Willie and Berniece's ancestors have worked as slaves for the Sutters; in addition, Boy Charles has paid with his life for stealing the piano from the Sutter household.

Works Cited

Adell, Sandra. "Speaking of Ma Rainey/Talking about the Blues." Nadel, May 51-66.

Bigsby, C. W. E. Modem American Drama, 1945-1990. 1992. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Bogumil, Mary L. Understanding August Wilson. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1999.

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

Dworkin, Norine. "Blood on the Tracks." American Theatre May 1990: 8-9.

--. "The Wilson Chronicles." Sun-Sentinel 22 Apr. 1990: F1+.

Fleche, Anne. "The History Lesson: Authenticity and Anachronism in August Wilson's Plays." Nadel, May 9-20.

Gates. Henry Louis, Jr. "The Chitlin Circuit." New Yorker 3 Feb. 1997: 44+.

Goldman, Jeffrey. "Think of History as One Long Blues Tune: August Wilson." Dramatics Apr. 1990: 12-17.

Grant, Nathan L. "Men, Women, and Culture: A Conversation with August Wilson." American Drama 5.2 (1996): 100-22.

Harris, Trudier. "August Wilson's Folk Traditions." 1994. August Wilson: A Casebook. Ed. Marilyn Elkins. New York: Garland, 2000. 49-67.

Lyons, Bonnie. "An Interview with August Wilson." Contemporary Literature 40.1 (1999): 1-21.

Miller, Arthur. "Tragedy and the Common Man." 1978. The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller. Rev. ed. Ed. Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola. New York: Da Capo, 1996. 3-7.

Moyers, Bill. "August Wilson." A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping Our Future. Ed. Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 167-80.

Nadel, Alan. "Boundaries, Logistics. and Identity: The Property of Metaphor in Fences and Joe Turner's Come and Gone." Nadel, May 86-104.

Nadel, Alan, ed. May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Iowa City: U of Iowa P. 1994.

Pereira, Kim. August Wilson and the African-American Odyssey. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

Powers, Kim. "An Interview with August Wilson." Theater 16.1 (1984): 50-55.

Rocha, Mark William. "American History as 'Loud Talking' in Two Trains Running." Nadel, May 11 6-32.

Shannon, Sandra G. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, DC: Howard UP, 1995.

--. "The Ground on Which I Stand: August Wilson's Perspective on African American Women." Nadel, May 160-64.

Usekes, Cigdem. "'You Always Under Attack': Whiteness as Law and Terror in August Wilson's Twentieth-Century Cycle of Plays." American Drama 10.2 (2001): 48-68.

Wilson, August. 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.

Cigdem Usekes is Assistant Professor of English at Western Connecticut State University.