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MICHAEL MORALES Ghosts on the Piano: AugustWilson and the Representation of Black American History In a New York Times interview coinciding with the Broadway opening of The Piano Lesson, August Wilson described how Romare Bearden's painting Piano Lesson originally inspired the play, and he explained what the piano initially meant to him: "It provided a link to the past, to Africa, to who these people are. And then the question became, what do you do with your legacy? How do you best put it to use?"I'In this essay, I would like to take that same question and apply it to Wilson's project ofwriting a play for every decade of this century, in order to begin considering whether a specific "philosophy of history" is emerging from the expanding body ofhis dramatic work. Although Wilson's larger project is still a "work in progress," since he has completed five major works we can begin to look critically at some of the ideas he "proposes" about history and the assumptions upon which those ideas are based, as well as the larger historical, social, and ontological implications. Wilson's task, one shared by many black American writers, is a simultaneously reactive/reconstructive engagement with the representation of blacks and the representation of history by the dominant culture. As Wilson has explained , he is "more and more concerned with pointing out the differences between blacks and whites, as opposed to pointing out similarities. We're a different people. We do things differently."2 This statement necessarily leads us to the question, though, ofwhat is the basis upon which cultural difference is explained? What are the assumptions behind a shared identity? Considering Wilson's overall project, one might assume that the basis would always be historical. Yet that assumption seems to waver in respect to the strong mystical content of both The Piano Lesson and Joe Turner and forces the question ofwhy history is being represented in such terms. 106 G H 0 S T SON THE P I A N 0 In Joe Turner's Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson, August Wilson's historical project moves into a world ofancestral visitations, visions, and ghosts, that even includes an onstage self-crucifixion as well as an exorcism. The mystical elements intertwine closely with Wilson's historical project in what might be characterized as an experiment in African American historiography. In these two plays Wilson predicates the relationship of the past to the present for black Americans on an active lineage kinship bond between the living and their ancestors. In this sense, the transmission of history becomes a binding ritual through which his characters obtain an empowering selfknowledge , a tangible sense of their own self-worth and identity, that gives them the strength to manage the future on their own terms. Like Herald Loomis, they are able to find their own songs. In Joe Turner's Come and Gone the ancestor's visitations grant visions of the middle passage to Bynum and Herald Loomis in order that they may discover themselves; in The Piano Lesson , the spirits of the ancestors are called upon for protection from Sutter's ghost, and through their protection they resolve the internecine struggle between Boy Willie and Berniece, subsequently preserving that kinship bond and, presumably, opening a world of self-realization to Berniece. In both plays meaningful progress toward the future and self-realization are achieved only by establishing connections to the past-connections represented as the power of the ancestors. Using The Piano Lesson as the example, both the literal and the metaphoric functions of the piano serve to elucidate Wilson's framing of black American history as an active relation (kinship bond) between the living and the dead. The piano provides the key links to the past in what I argue are its interrelated , dual ritual functions. First, it functions as a mnemonic device for the transmission of oral history; and second, it functions as a sacred ancestral altar, bridging the world of the living to that of the dead. The piano parallels similar devices used to preserve the oral history of several African civilizations, such as the memory boards (lukasa) of the Luba and the brass plaques of Benin. While controversy still exists about the precise representational intention of many of the brass plaques of Benin, accounts of nineteenth-century visitors to the kingdom attest to their historiographic function.3 These plaques, which covered the supporting pillars of the royal palace, represented in...

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