Abstract
August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle,” a play written for each decade of the twentieth century, reveals an ongoing engagement with the nature of race, crime, and punishment. Almost none of the male characters in Wilson’s cycle is imprisoned during the course of the play in which he appears, yet most share the experience of imprisonment, and thus carceral places occupy an important rhetorical space in his dramaturgy. Specifically, in The Piano Lesson, Wilson casts prison as metaphor and metonym of modern-day bondage, historicizing social forms of control that have circumscribed the social, civil, and legal rights of the African American community.
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Notes
Even in Fences, Lyons is never shown in prison; rather, after he is incarcerated, he receives a day pass to attend his father’s funeral (Wilson, 1986)
Incarceration is one of many “marks” that unify his characters; other marks are inscribed mentally and physically.
Implicit in the men’s colloquy about the criminal justice system is the realization that they are being racially targeted, or as one minister from Mississippi explains, ‘Felony is the new N-word’” (qtd. in Alexander 2010, 159).
Berniece is not present when the men sing about the Parchman Farm, which primarily housed male prisoners, because her metaphorical incarceration is distinct and gendered. Though the male characters have been literally imprisoned, Berniece undergoes another type of captivity. She is imprisoned by the painful past—both her mother’s and her own. The men, by and large, do not recognize that Berniece is fighting against systems of control in her own life. She attempts to escape what she sees as her bondage to patriarchy by defiantly rejecting Avery’s push toward marriage. It is not in the triumph of Berniece’s situation, but in her blues encoded rhetoric does she fight against the interlocking forces of oppression that she battles.
While Visvis argues compellingly for the relationship between Black music and talk therapy in terms of their emotional and psychological functioning, she also provides considerable commentary on the differences, especially as expressed in Morrison’s novel. However, for the purposes of this paper, Visvis’ general argument provides a paradigm for reading the many musical performances in The Piano Lesson in terms of trauma and healing.
Berneice keeps the piano largely due to Maretha, her daughter. In the televised version of the play, after Boy Willie catches the train for Mississippi, Berneice is shown correcting Maretha’s song on the piano; the final image is of both mother and daughter with hands on the piano. Boy Willie’s claim to the piano is trumped, perhaps, because of the need to pass on the Charles family story to future generations.
The brutal confinement that characterized chattel slavery, the convict lease system, and prison is mirrored in the circumstances of the white men’s death. The catalyst for Boy Willie and Lymon to make the trip to Pittsburgh is the death of Sutter, “a great big old three-hundred-and-forty-pound man” who died by drowning in his own well (1990, 5). Later in the play it is revealed that Ed Saunders, a man allegedly responsible for murdering Boy Willie and Berneice’s father and the other men on the train called the Yellow Dog, was, 2 months after the murders, pushed down his well. Doaker claims that “Ed Saunders fell down his well. Just upped and fell down his well for no reason. People say it was the ghost of them men who burned up in the boxcar that pushed him in his well” (1990, 46–47). The white men meet their deaths in the suffocating space of a well, and their corpses likely contaminate the land and water. It is fitting that these figures who perpetuated a toxic social landscape are, in death, defiling the ecosystem of Mississippi, and according to the logic of The Piano Lesson, the nation, itself.
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Wardi, A.J. “The Colored Man Can’t Fix Nothing with the Law”: Carceral Spaces in August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson . J Afr Am St 17, 506–517 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-012-9236-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-012-9236-z