August Wilson: Completing the Twentieth-Century Cycle

Beginning Again, Again :Business in the Street in Jitney and Gem of the Ocean

T he foreboding presence of Herald Loomis that haunts Joe Turner ’s Come and Gone is explained, finally, in terms of spiritual, material, and historical deprivation. Loomis has been deprived of his song, his labor, and, most important for my purposes, his start. A start—a beginning—is a temporal marker, quite distinct, as Edward Said has made clear, from an origin (Said, 6), an important distinction in understanding the work of August Wilson, whose opus is steeped in multifarious temporalities. As I have noted elsewhere, for Wilson, it’s all about time.1 It’s about time, for example, that Memphis Lee reclaimed his land and that Boy Willie finally owned the land made fertile by the sweat of his ancestors. It’s about time Troy Maxson finished his fence and Hambone got his ham and Risa found a man, and that Ma Rainey and Floyd Barton got to their respective Chicago recording studios; it’s about time that Ma Rainey signed away her voice and that Levee got his chance to solo. And the difference between Levee’s version of the blues and Ma Rainey’s version is all about time. The play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, moreover, is about the time when the value of music ceased to be its performance and became instead the record of its performance.2 At any given time, since the beginning of recorded time, the record separates a “before” from an “after.” Troy Maxson, therefore, is not in the record books as a home-run hitter because, his friend Bono explains, “You just come along too early,” to which Troy responds, “There ought not never have been no time called too early” (9). And this is something Wilson proves when he brings into the second alan nadel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Beginning Again, Again Business in the Street in Jitney and Gem of the Ocean Beginning Again, Again 15 half of his cycle the play Jitney, a play he wrote that came along too early. Thus, like Troy Maxson, Wilson with Jitney was reconfiguring the before/ after relationship that informed his history by giving us the beginning of the cycle before it began. Because there are always two trains of thought running through his plays, however, Wilson also gives us, with Jitney, a culmination: the moment when the historical past represented in the cycle meets the present from which that history is recorded. From the moment of Jitney’s inclusion in the cycle, all of Wilson’s plays will take place roughly in the present day—meaning roughly in a moment contemporaneous to their writing—with the exception of Gem of the Ocean, the play that provides the cycle’s alternative beginning. Written after the end of the century that it, in Wilson’s dramatic world, begins, Gem of the Ocean, like Jitney, is simultaneously a culmination and an initiation, for the dramatic world of which Jitney is the first instance will give birth to Aunt Ester, while the historical trajectory initiated by Gem of the Ocean will lead us to thecrumblinginner-cityneighborhoodsofthepost-1960s,theworldwhere human dignity must continually reinvent itself in the face of decaying and confiscated property. Jitney, set in the 1977 jitney taxicab station in the Hill section of Pittsburgh , thus reenacts the antebellum conflict between human rights and property rights. Space here does not allow even a cursory investigation of the multifarious and profound ways in which this conflict is intertwined, in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the Gordian knot of transcontinental nationalism. A few obvious points must, however, be stressed. First, the Union, in order to expand, needed not only to acquire territory but also to convert that territory into states—states that would participate as equal members in the complex system of legal reciprocity that allows the unimpeded flow of commerce and secures the universal sanctity of ownership. This process of reciprocity, which composes the legal concept of comity, becomes dysfunctional when specific states have laws such as those surrounding slavery that directly contradict one another. To resolve this contradiction by invoking the rationale of states’ rights requires another contradiction: that the federal government has to enforce those states’ rights; that is, that the innate rights of states was dependent on the 16 alan nadel supplementary power of the federal government. Under the instrumentalist philosophy of jurisprudence that dominated in the first half of the nineteenth century, a virtual mandate arose to protect...