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

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Cigdem Usekes

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.