"…if you live long enough the boat will turn around": The Birth and Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson

The article "'If you live long enough the boat will turn around': The Birth and Death of Community in Three Plays by August Wilson," examines what are, chronologically, the first and final two plays of Wilson's decade-by-decade cycle of twentieth-century African American life: Gem of the Ocean, King Hedley II, and Radio Golf. The article uses Joseph Roach's notion of "surrogation"-"the enactment of cultural memory by substitution" (1966, 80) to explore how communities continually changing societal values. Gem builds to a clear and optimistic moment of "surrogation" while the plays set near the end of the century offer a darker and more ambiguous interrogation of how a community can move forward after losing its spiritual center-represented through Wilson's Aunt Ester.