JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE - Lincoln Center Theater Review by Lincoln Center Theater

night hawks BY CHARLES JOHNSON

SEVEN OR SEVENISH

August Wilson and I always met at 7 p.m. at the Broadway Bar and Grill, which was just a short walk from his many-roomed home on Capitol Hill in Seattle. We looked for the smokersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; section at the rear of the restaurant. We were two old men raised in the 1940s and â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;50s by proud, hardworking parents. After a handshake and a hug, we would sit down, order coffee and a big plate of chicken nachos. EIGHT Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;CLOCK

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When the waitress, a thin girl, leggy and tattooed, with bright red hair and a nose ring, returned to top off our coffee for the second time, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d relax and let our hair down. This experience, we both knew, was extremely rare in the lonely, solitary lives of writers, especially those considered to be successful by the way the world judged things, so we sometimes looked at each other as if to say, â&#x20AC;&#x153;How did you happen?â&#x20AC;? This unstated question was ďŹ lled with equal parts curiosity and affection, partly because he and I belonged to an inbetween, liminal generation that remembered segregation yet was also the fragile bridge to the postâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;civil rights period and beyond; and partly because American culture had changed so much since we began writing in the 1960s, growing coarser, more vulgar and selďŹ sh year by year, distancing itself from the vision of our parents, who were raised to value good manners, promise-keeping, personal sacriďŹ ce, loyalty to their own parents and kin, and a deep-rooted sense of decency. On the stage, his goal was to make audiences respect their hardscrabble lives and his own. This new era of hip-hop, misogynistic gangsta rap, and profanity-laced ghetto-lit sometimes made our souls feel like they needed to take a shower. But for the most part, and because Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m Buddhist, I did the lionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s share of listening. Also because my middle-class life in the Chicago suburb of Evanston had not been half as hard as his in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. He wanted someone to listen as he spoke about his life, all the experiences and ideas not always in his plays but which were, in fact, the background for his ten-play cycle. Over ďŹ fteen years I heard

Your right is to action alone; never to its fruits at any time. Never should the fruits of action be your motive; never let there be attachment to inaction in you. Bhagavad Gita, Book II, Sloka 47

about his biological father, Frederick Kittel, the German baker who was always absent from his life, and his stepfather, an ex-convict who spent twenty-three years in prison for robbery and murder. He adopted his motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s maiden name, Wilson, in rejection of his German father; he began using his middle name, August, when a friend told him not to let anyone call him by the ďŹ rst name he had used throughout childhood, which was Freddie. August told me that when he entered the newly integrated public schools of Pittsburgh he was attacked by a gang of other kids; the principal had to send him home in a taxicab to protect him, but all he could do was ask, over and over, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Why? Why are they trying to hurt me? What did I do?â&#x20AC;? And I learned about why he dropped out of high school during his freshman year, when a black teacher accused him of plagiarizing a twenty-page term paper entitled â&#x20AC;&#x153;Napoleonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Will to Powerâ&#x20AC;? and refused to apologize. Out of school at age sixteen, he worked at menial jobs. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I dropped out of high school, not life,â&#x20AC;? he often said, and that was true: he may not have been a formally trained intellectual but he was an organic one, who read shelf after shelf of books at his local library and dreamed of becoming a writer. No, he was not in school, but he did have a reliable and constant teacher: suffering. â&#x20AC;&#x153;If you want to be a writer,â&#x20AC;? a prostitute once told him, â&#x20AC;&#x153;then you better learn how to write about me.â&#x20AC;? He did take her advice. He also joined the army, and was doing quite well, but, being a proud and hot-blooded young man, he left when he was told that he was still too young to apply for ofďŹ cer training school. There was a year in his life when he was a member of the Nation of Islam, an organization that he joined because he hoped to win back the love of his Muslim wife after she unexpectedly left him, taking their daughter and stripping their home clean of every stick of furniture. Entering those barren rooms, August said, was so devastating and heartbreaking that this shock

night hawks BY CHARLES JOHNSON

SEVEN OR SEVENISH

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Your right is to action alone; never to its fruits at any time. Never should the fruits of action be your motive; never let there be attachment to inaction in you. Bhagavad Gita, Book II, Sloka 47

of emptiness washed the strength from his limbs. How many times had his heart been broken? He could not remember the countless disappointments. Like so many writers and artists I’ve known, his art was anchored in lacerations and a latticework of scar tissue. All that raw pain, poverty and disappointment, denial and disrespect—as when the critic Robert Brustein said he had “an excellent mind for

WE SOMETIMES LOOKED AT EACH OTHER AS IF TO SAY, HOW DID “YOU” HAPPEN? THIS UNSTATED QUESTION WAS FILLED WITH EQUAL PARTS CURIOSITY AND AFFECTION. the twelfth century”—all this he alchemized into plays that, before his death in 2005, earned him two Pulitzer Prizes, eight New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, a Tony Award, an Olivier Award, a National Humanities Medal presented by Bill Clinton, a Broadway theater renamed in his honor, and twenty-eight honorary degrees. Yet the public could know only the media-created surface, not the subterranean depths, of any artist. Every time you sat down to create something, your soul was at stake. Every page—indeed, every paragraph—had been a risk. Every sentence had been a prayer. Speaking of those honorary degrees, August told me that he recently came across one of them in his attic and suddenly burst into tears, because he couldn’t for the life of him remember this particular award that was so dear bought with his own emotional blood. What no one knew, or could know, was that after every one of his ten plays opened he fell into a period of severe depression that always lasted for two solid weeks. He talked freely because he knew that I understood these things. How, despite the strong black male personas that our past pain made us present to the world, we were far more sensitive than we could ever dare show (and had to be sensitive and vulnerable in order to create), with the external world being no more than raw material for our imaginations, and that meant we were eccentric: he didn’t drive, or do e-mail, or exercise, and if someone walking a dog came his way on the sidewalk he would step into the street, because dogs frightened him—why, I can’t say. More than once he shared with me his fantasy of ﬁnishing his ten plays and telling the world that he was retiring. Then, when the reporters went away, the phone stopped ringing, and he had vanished from public view, August planned to sit on his Capitol Hill porch reading piles of books he’d never had the time to get to, playing with his young

daughter, and writing without interruption or distraction for a decade. When that ten years ended, he said, he planned to emerge from seclusion like Eugene O’Neill after his decade away from the spotlight, and with plays that would be as powerful and enduring as The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten. He also hoped one day to write a novel. Those nights at the Broadway Bar and Grill, he needed to talk about things like this. And sometimes he expressed a fear that shook me to my very foundations. MIDNIGHT

At some point during our conversations, his thoughts always turned to the ambiguous state of black America. August and I were doing well, he said, but he couldn’t forget the fact that Broadway theater tickets were expensive and twenty-ﬁve percent of black people lived in poverty, and therefore never saw his plays. He said there were too many black babies being born out of wedlock and without fathers in their homes. Too many young black men were in prison, or the victims of murder. Too many were living with the HIV virus. It was as if, forty years after the end of the Jim Crow era, black America was falling apart. “So let me ask you a question,” he said. We’d long ago ﬁnished our entrées and only a sprinkling of people remained in the place, so his voice was clear when he asked, “Do you think any of it matters?” “What?” “Everything we’ve done.” His eyes narrowed a little and smoke spiraled up his wrist from his cigarette. “Nothing we’ve done changes or improves the situation of black people. We’re still powerless and disrespected every day—by everyone and by ourselves. People still think black men are violent and lazy and stupid. They see you and me as the exceptions, not the rule.” “You don’t see any real changes since the sixties?” “No,” he said. “Not really.” For a moment, I didn’t know what to say. I knew that he meant all this. You could see it in his plays—that sense of despair, futility, and stasis. If he was right, then, I wondered, what good was art? And his words took the philosopher in me to an even deeper dread. If you paused for just a moment and pulled back from our minuscule dust mote of a planet in one of a hundred billion galaxies pinwheeling across a thirteen-billion-year-old universe that one day would experience proton death, then it was certain that all that men and women had ever done would one day be as if it never was. I wondered: Had we then wasted our lives? Was man, as Sartre put it in Being and Nothingness, “a useless passion”?

TWO O’CLOCK

We paid our bill, left a generous tip, and stepped outside to the empty street, talking on the wide strip of cement for another hour. This business of whether art mattered beyond the easily forgotten awards and the evanescent applause had reenergized us—or maybe it was the coffee we’d been drinking for the past seven hours. Also, we both knew that it was still too early to go home to our wives. We climbed into my Jeep Wrangler and drove south on East Broadway to Madison Street, where I hung a left and after one block downshifted into the helterskelter of the International House of Pancakes parking lot. Something was wrong here. There was a blue-and-white police car outside IHOP, and a cop was talking to one of the employees. Not ready to give up on the night, we stepped around the police car and went inside. THREE O’CLOCK

The customers in IHOP at this hour were nighthawks, the people who slept all day and ventured out only after dark: a group that may have included the occasional prostitute, gangbanger, pimp, or drug dealer. A fidgety waiter seated us in a booth behind the cash register. I saw the police car pull away. Inside, the air felt tense and fibrous. The other patrons were poker-faced and skittish, speaking in whispers, watching for something, their eyes occasionally flashing with fear. August noticed this, too, but he said nothing. He was more at home in this setting than I was. It was a replay of Pittsburgh’s Hill District. He knew what to expect. I didn’t. When the waiter brought us two cups of flat, brackish coffee, we tried to resume our conversation, but, try as I might, I couldn’t concentrate on his words. Then the front doors opened and two young men wearing lots of bling—the one in front compact in build, the one behind him tall and thin, like Snoop Dogg—walked straight past a waiter, who tried to seat them, and headed toward a table in the back where two women sat with a chuffy-cheeked young man whose complexion was pitted and pockmarked. The first man, handsome and cleantimbered, began singing at the man who was seated. But wait. It wasn’t singing. It was rap. A kind of rhymed challenge. I couldn’t make out the words. Being an old gaffer, I could never keep up with the japper of fast-talking rappers, but everyone in IHOP sat listening, frozen in their seats and afraid. Then he and his companion laughed and walked back to the lobby. A moment later, the man with the bad skin stood up, clenching and unclenching his fists, and he walked with long strides to the lobby, too. I could tell they were talking. A few seconds passed. Then all at once I heard a tumult, a crash, the sound of shattering glass. I half stood on the red seat beneath me to get a better view. The first two men sailed like furies into the third, smashing wooden high chairs over his head. He jack-

knifed at the waist and I heard a flump as he hit the floor. The other two stomped his fingers and kicked his face to a pulp, breaking bone and cartilage. Then they fled. Their victim staggered weakly to his feet, his breath tearing in and out of his chest, blood gushing from his lips. Then he, too, reeled out into the night. The fight was over in ten seconds. All that time, I’d been holding my breath. Finally, I faced round to August. But he was gone. Not too surprisingly, I picked him out in a crowd of customers who had wisely scrambled toward the exit at the back of the room. The moment the fight started, his old Pittsburgh instincts had kicked in, telling him to duck for cover in case someone started shooting. FOUR O’CLOCK

It took the police only a few minutes to return. We felt shaken by what we’d seen. Forty years earlier, we could have been those young men destroying each other. I looked at August; he looked at me, and perhaps we both thought at the same time, How did you happen? It went without saying that we figured it was finally time to go home to our wives and children. We stepped carefully around pools of blood, broken glass, and splinters of wood at the entrance and returned to my jeep in the early-morning light, the air full of moisture. I said little. A strong rain wind slammed into the jeep as I drove him home, making me hunch over the steering wheel. Finally, August broke the silence. He said, “People always ask me why black folks don’t go to the theater. I try to tell them we’ve got enough ritual and drama in our lives already.” I stopped the jeep in front of his house. We shook hands and promised to get together again soon. Since his death, I often replay in my mind the image of America’s most celebrated black playwright slowly climbing the steps to his front door; and at last I understood in what way decades devoted unselfishly day and night to art really mattered. The love of beauty had been our lifelong refuge as black men, a raft that carried us both safely for sixty years across a turbulent sea of violence, suffering, and grief to a far shore we’d never dreamed possible in our youth, one that was free of fear, and, when his journey was over, laid him gently, peacefully to eternal rest. Dr. Charles Johnson is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Professor for Excellence in English at the University of Washington (Seattle). A MacArthur Fellow, he is the author of the National Book Award– winning novel Middle Passage and many other works. The full text of “Night Hawks” will appear in the Summer 2009 issue of The Kenyon Review.

TWO O’CLOCK

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DIRECTORâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

AN INTERVIEW WITH

BARTLETT SHER

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DIRECTORâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

AN INTERVIEW WITH

BARTLETT SHER

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BY KATORI HALL

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From the outside, A. Schwabâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dry Goods Store on Beale ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t nothing but a throwback. In its window, chipped mannequins model the typical general-store lookâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;knickerbockers, pin-striped overalls, calico dresses, and Elvis Presley trucker hats. Cast-iron skillets and bottles of barbecue sauce lie strewn at the mannequinsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; feet. I know that to a tourist the window dressing screams Memphis (and not necessarily in a good way). Founded in 1876, Schwabâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s has survived everything from a yellow-fever epidemic to race riots and the DisneyďŹ cation of the street that gave birth to the blues. You can get just about anything you want there: rock candy, pickled eggs, cheese graters, hoodoo love potionsâ&#x20AC;Ślove potions? Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right. On the left-hand side, as soon as you come through that door banging open with that old jangly bell, a wall of hoodoo awaits your wonderment. There ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t too many stores selling John the Conqueror root, mojo candles, lodestones, and love-potion oils all out in the open like this. The store sells more than one hundred and ďŹ fty kinds of powders and oils and twenty different kinds of herbs and roots that treat every human ailment from lack of money to lack of love. Well, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve often suffered from loneliness, so one day, while visiting my hometown, I made a beeline for Schwabâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s special section. I was looking for love, and by God (or hoodoo!) I was gonna get it. I was the lone customer perusing the section, but I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t care. There were different love oils: the Cleopatra; the Special 20; the I Can, You Canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t; and the Love Drawing. I looked over my shoulderâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;nobody was paying me no never mind. I plucked a vial of Love Drawing from the shelf and marched across the rickety ďŹ&#x201A;oor to the cash register. Squeak. Screech. Squeeeaaakâ&#x20AC;ŚSo much for secrecy. I put my goodies on the counter. The cashier didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t bat an eyelash. Folks must have bought this on her watch before. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Two dollars and fourteen cents,â&#x20AC;? she said. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all?â&#x20AC;? I asked. She nodded and gingerly placed the vial in a brown paper bag. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t put too much on, now,â&#x20AC;? she said, smiling. All I could do was blush, which is really hard for a black girl to do.

â&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ?¤â&#x17E;źâ?¤â?¤â&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ?¤

â?¤ â?¤ â&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;ź

Goofering. Hexing. Conjuring. Fixing. Rooting. Laying down a trick. Hoodoo is a child of many names. A folk-magic system born in Africa and raised in the American South, hoodoo was practiced by slaves and their descendants. Despite the torturous Middle Passage and the systematic oppression of their spirits and their culture, Africans managed to pass down the rituals, recipes, and secrets of their ancestors cloaked in the culture and magic of hoodoo. This magic fused with the mysticism of the Native American culture, mutating and growing into a powerful belief system that utilized herbs, roots, body ďŹ&#x201A;uids, animals, and minerals, along with charms and amulets, that re-created the magic of their motherland. Hoodoo is not a religion; itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s magic of the sweetest kind. Hoodoo is not to be confused with voodoo, a West African religion that merged with Catholicism in the Caribbean. That religion eventually sailed across the Gulf, taking root in the port of New Orleans. Many scholars attribute hoodooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mistaken identity to uninformed white writers who used the terms interchangeably. Unlike the voodoo religion, where gods and deities have spiritual power over humans, in hoodoo, power and control are placed in the hands of those who practice and believe. Hoodoo can draw money to you. Bring you luck. Can bring you bad luck, too. Can even send you straight to the graveyard, you cross somebody bad enough. There is a recipe for everything under the sun. It can heal you if youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re sick or make somebody sick to love you. In fact, matters of the heart is a category of specialty for every hoodoo conjurer. When the character Mattie visits Bynum, the hoodoo man in August Wilsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Joe Turnerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Come and Gone, sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s searching for a longlost lover who caught a bad case of itchy feet and left her with a heart full of wanting. Bynumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s known to have the gift of binding people to each other, and she solicits his help: â&#x20AC;&#x153;It ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t nothing to make somebody come back,â&#x20AC;?Bynum says. â&#x20AC;&#x153;I can ďŹ x it so he canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t stand to be away from you. I got my roots and powders, I can ďŹ x it so wherever heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s at this thing will come up on him and he wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be able to sleep for seeing your face. Wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be able to eat for thinking of you.â&#x20AC;?

â?Ľ

Ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t nothing like a brokenhearted woman. And a brown brokenhearted woman ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t nothing to mess with. A brown brokenhearted woman from the South? Well, she can do you some damage if she got a little hoodoo in her hand. And Mattie knows the power she can evoke with a love charm or spell from the likes of a powerful conjure man like Bynum. Unfortunately, her trip to Bynum proves fruitless. After further investigation, Bynum realizes that Mattieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lover is bound to another woman so he gives her a bag of roots that are meant to bring her luck, not love. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Take this and sleep with it under your pillow and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll bring good luck to you,â&#x20AC;? he tells her. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Draw it to you like a magnet. It wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be long before you forget all about Jack Carper.â&#x20AC;? This belief that all human beings have a hand in their own destinies was a magical concept to a people who lived in a world where they had no control. Where they could be bought and sold at a momentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s notice, snatched away from their loved ones in the deep blue of the night. No wonder love charms were such a powerful resource for these often brokenhearted people. Having been proven to work, many of these spells and juicy concoctions still exist to this very day. Hoodoo can help you make love, and it can help you break up love, too. It all depends on the power of your hoodoo hand.

â?Ľ

TO DRAW LOVE

Women have been known to carry a nation sack. Once found only in Memphis, this is a small bag worn close to a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body, perhaps in her bra or under her belt, and often ďŹ lled with objects of the wanted love: a photograph, a ďŹ ngernail or hair clippings, snippets of clothing, even semen. This top-secret charm is meant to be kept out of reach; if a man touches a womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nation sack, heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sure to meet with ill fortune.

â&#x17E;źLOVE DRAW NATION SACK

â&#x17E;źFEEDING POWDER 2 tablespoons powdered lemon verbena Handful of crumbled rose petals 3 drops attar of roses 3 drops lavender essential oil 2 drops angelica essential oil Place sack in bra over heart and watch your loved one ďŹ&#x201A;ock like a bee to a ďŹ&#x201A;ower.

Hair, nail clippings, and body ďŹ&#x201A;uids, such as semen, saliva, or menstrual blood, are often used in love spells to keep love. These ďŹ&#x201A;uids hold the power and essence of a person. But, gross as it may sound, there may be a science to this ancient magic. ScientiďŹ c studies have found that certain pheromones exist in these ďŹ&#x201A;uids, particularly menstrual blood, that can set the stage for a natural attraction. Many have employed such sneaky tactics to keep their honey faithful.

â&#x17E;źLOVE SPELL NO. 9 Wash the doorway or bedroom ďŹ&#x201A;oor with your urine.

â&#x17E;źLOVE SPELL NO. 32 Boil a lock of your loved oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hair in your urine.

â&#x17E;źLOVE SPELL NO. 45

â?Ľ

Especially for the ladies: slip a drop of menstrual blood into your loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s drink or food, like coffee or spaghetti sauce. TO BREAK A LOVE AFFAIR

Get a rotten egg and write on it nine times the name of the person you want to send away. Write where and how far away you want the person to go. At midnight, take it to the personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home and throw it against his or her door. â&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ?¤â&#x17E;źâ?¤â?¤â&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ?¤

â?¤ â?¤ â&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;ź

Despite its obvious magical strength, during the Great Migration many blacks chose to renounce hoodoo as they abandoned their rural Southern roots for the cosmopolitan urban centers above the Mason-Dixon Line. Wilsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Joe Turner captures this cultural attitude through Seth, the boarding houseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s owner, who looks at Bynumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s â&#x20AC;&#x153;heebie-jeebie stuffâ&#x20AC;? with skepticism. Hoodoo was deemed too backward and uncivilized for life in the new New World of the North. It was like a magical umbilical cord crossing the ocean back to Africa, a reminder of the pastâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a past that many wanted to leave behind. Over time, hoodooâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hold over her sons and daughters waned as the descendants of slaves lost their knowledge of her. However, the residuals of Africa can be felt as many rituals have managed to survive time and the shaming of the culture. People still secretly perform many of these rituals, such as salting rooms to release negative energy or carrying black-eyed peas wrapped in foil to draw money. (My own mother carried this in her pocketbook for an entire year, and money just kept on a-coming.) Recipesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;old and newâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;can be found in stores, online, or in the many reference books dedicated to the culture. Even I plan on going back to good old Schwabâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s to get me some more of that Love Drawing oil as soon as I can. It works, yaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll. As long as you believe. Katori Hall is the author of Hoodoo Love. She is a Lila Acheson Wallace Playwriting Fellow at the Juilliard School.

Â&#x2030; 5POZ 'JU[QBUSJDL *DF #BCZ $PVSUFTZ PG 1JFSPHJ (BMMFSZ

Red ďŹ&#x201A;annel Pair of male and female blue lodestones 1 piece of orris (Queen Elizabeth) root 5 dried red rosebuds 5 pennies Personal item from the person you are drawing (e.g., tiny photograph, lock of hair, button, soil from that personâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoe)

TO KEEP LOVE

â?Ľ

TO DRAW LOVE

â&#x17E;źLOVE DRAW NATION SACK

â&#x17E;źLOVE SPELL NO. 9 Wash the doorway or bedroom ďŹ&#x201A;oor with your urine.

â&#x17E;źLOVE SPELL NO. 32 Boil a lock of your loved oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hair in your urine.

â&#x17E;źLOVE SPELL NO. 45

â?Ľ

Especially for the ladies: slip a drop of menstrual blood into your loverâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s drink or food, like coffee or spaghetti sauce. TO BREAK A LOVE AFFAIR

â?¤ â?¤ â&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;źâ&#x17E;ź

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TO KEEP LOVE

THE

Pittsburgh

CYCLE

BY CHRISTOPHER RAWSON

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BEGGARâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SONG

AUGUST WILSONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S HILL DISTRICT

BY A. VAN JORDAN I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t remember the last time I was touched. In a dream, a tongueâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Or, just breathâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Outlined my navel With ï¬&#x201A;ute music And I curled up, Rolled to an empty beach, Burrowed into wet sand. When I woke, My life was full of contradiction. I trusted no one not The one who love me not The ground that held me not The sky that caressed my cowling back. My only fear is love; I have a defense against all others. My only friend is my skin; I send letters to myself. If I could dream now, A dark woman would obsess Over my hands. She would stalk Through brush and trees and other earth To corner me on my back, Stab me with her tongue, Dance with all the forbidden steps That my heart kept secret. In my life, Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve hid from everything above my head. I knew my life was empty, yet I lived long. We all come from dust. I rub my belly to the ground. Every man has a song. I like guitars; theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re full of emotion. We all must die, But in my death, let me live. Take my husk and make a charango. Open me up and throw away my armor. Let blood and tears mingle with music. Let my naked body be a mirror to the world. Smell what lack of love does to the ï¬&#x201A;esh. 1

A. Van Jordan was born and raised in Akron, Ohio, and is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He is a member of the Cave Canem Workshop and has taught at Warren Wilson, Prince Georgeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Community College, and with AmeriCorpsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Writers Corps. 1. A charango is a South American string instrument made from the shell of an armadillo.

THE

Pittsburgh

CYCLE

BY CHRISTOPHER RAWSON

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BEGGARâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SONG

AUGUST WILSONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S HILL DISTRICT

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THE SONG WAS CREATED TO BRING THE NEWS AROUND. FOR INSTANCE, THERE WAS A TERRIBLE FIRE DOWN IN NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI, AND THAT FIRE CREATED SO MANY SONGS BECAUSE IT AFFECTED SO MANY DIFFERENT PEOPLE—THERE WAS A TREMENDOUS LOSS OF LIFE. JT KVTU B CJH 5± B IVHF 5 CPY XJUI B TUJDL BOE B QJFDF PG SPQF PO JU UIBU LJOE PG NBLFT UIF CBTT TPVOE +BXµT IBSQ BOE KVH 4QPPOT XFSF BMTP SFBM QPQVMBS 4QPPOT BOE CPOFT :PVµWF HPU FWFSZUIJOH "OE ZPV IBE UP IBWF EJGGFSFOU LJOET PG EBODFT±PG DPVSTF UIF XBMU[ BOE UIF OBHP BOE UIF DBMFOEB XIJDI BSF "GSJDBO BOE $SFPMF EBODFT UIBU XFSF CVJMU PGG PG B RVBESJMMF XIJDI XF LOPX BT TRVBSF EBODJOH 8FµWF DSFBUFE B DPVOUSZ WFSTJPO PG JU IFSF CVU BMNPTU FWFSZXIFSF ZPV HP UIFSFµT B WFSTJPO PG UIJT EBODJOH 5IF PME NVTJD JT 4BUVSEBZ OJHIU 8IFO FWFSZCPEZµT EPOF XJUI UIFJS DIPSFT UIFZ TXFFQ PVU BO BSFB JO UIF CBSO BOE UIF NV TJDJBOT DPNF PWFS BOE UIFSFµT B ¾EEMF BOE UIFSFµT B CBOKP BOE UIFSFµT B HVJUBS BOE MBUFS PO UIFSF XBT B EPCSP PS B TMJEF HVJ UBS BOE IBSNPOJDBT BOE IBOE DMBQQJOH BOE GPPU TUPNQJOH BOE EBODJOH 8IFO ZPV IFBS NVTJD GSPN -BUJO DPVO USJFT JO UIF $BSJCCFBO 1VFSUP 3JDP $VCB BOE 4BOUP %PNJOHP ZPV DBO GFFM B TUSPOHFS "GSJDBO QSFTFODF JO JU 8IBU NBLFT "NFSJ DBO NVTJD TP EJGGFSFOU GSPN NVTJD JO UIFTF PUIFS QMBDFT 8FMM UIF ¾STU UIJOH JT UIBU JO UIFTF PUIFS DPVOUSJFT "GSJDBOT XFSF KVTU CSPVHIU JO UIF TMBWF PXOFST EJEOµU EP BOZ UIJOH PUIFS UIBO TBZ ²)FSF ZPV BSF IFSFµT XIBU ZPV EP OPX HFU PO XJUI UIF XPSL ³ *O UIF 6OJUFE 4UBUFT UIFSF XBT BO BDUVBM CSFBL JOH BOE TIBQJOH PG UIF QFSTPO 5IFSF XBT OP

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BY STEVEN HAHN

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Seth and Bertha Hollyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s boarding house sat at a crossroads in African-American history. Although the largest number of blacks who participated in what we call the Great Migration were still to come, already in 1911â&#x20AC;&#x201D;when the play opensâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;migrants from the urban and rural South were making their way into the cities of the North. There they encountered new landscapes and ďŹ gures of economic, political, and cultural life, including African-Americans like Seth Holly, whose roots were Northern rather than Southern and who looked upon the recent arrivals as backward country folk. The tensions and negotiations between these groups, as August Wilsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s play shows, would shape black communities for decades. Pittsburgh attracted African-Americans eager to escape the hardening repression and ferocious racial violence of the Jim Crow South. Part of the attraction was due to the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s economic dynamism. By 1911, Pittsburgh had emerged as one of the most powerful and productive engines of industrial America. Following the Civil War, and with the introduction of the Bessemer process, iron and steel manufacture boomed and acted as a magnet for thousands of European immigrants, notably Poles and Italians. During the ďŹ rst decade of the twentieth century, roughly 150,000 people worked, mostly as unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, for companies (including Andrew Carnegieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s) that together produced well over half of the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s steel and more than a quarter of its steel rails.

Most African-Americans arriving in Pittsburgh worked in the lower reaches of the urban working class as day laborers, porters, janitors, waiters, coachmen, and domestics. Their relative exclusion from the industrial berths (except as imported strikebreakers) owed much to the waves of Eastern and Southern Europeans ďŹ&#x201A;ooding into the mills, to their lack of experience and local employment networks, and, of course, to racial discrimination. What they did ďŹ nd in Pittsburgh were men and women like Seth and Bertha Holly, AfricanAmericans who could claim deep historical roots there or elsewhere in the North. The history of African-Americans in Pittsburgh is as long as the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s history. They came in small numbers as servants, trappers, scouts, craftsmen, wagoners, and soldiers, ďŹ rst with the British forces during the French and Indian War (1754-63), and then with the initial settlers around Fort Pitt. A good many were slaves. Pennsylvania, like all the colonies of British North America, gave legal sanction to slavery, and although the Pennsylvania state legislature enacted an abolition bill as early as 1780, the bill called for â&#x20AC;&#x153;gradualâ&#x20AC;? rather than immediate emancipation: it freed only the children of slave parents, and only when those children reached the age of twenty-eight, thereby providing slave owners with the fruits of slave labor during the most productive years of the slavesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lives (a form of compensation to the owners). African-Americans in Pittsburgh, as in other parts

BY STEVEN HAHN

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history

AT THE OF

of the North, thus resided in a netherworld between slavery and freedom well into the nineteenth century—some as slaves, others as indentured servants, and increasing numbers as fugitives from neighboring states like Virginia, where slavery remained legal until the Civil War. Although the African-American population made up only a tiny proportion of Pittsburgh’s inhabitants between 1800 and 1860 it grew from a scant hundred to more than two thousand. Indeed, among Northern cities, only Cincinnati experienced a more rapid

EVERYWHERE AFRICAN-AMERICANS TURNED, THEIR LIVES WERE AT RISK. SLAVE CATCHERS SCOURED THE STREETS IN SEARCH OF RUNAWAYS, AND THEY SHOWED NO COMPUNCTION ABOUT KIDNAPPING BLACKS WHO WERE OFFICIALLY FREE. rate of black population growth during this period. By 1850, blacks clustered in the lower Hill District, near the city’s downtown, in an area that came to be known as Little Hayti, and about half of them had been born in one of the Southern states. There they built churches (including an AME and an AME Zion church), a school, and a cemetery, and established a newspaper, several mutual-aid and temperance societies, and a militia company. There, too, a few of them—mostly barbers, butchers, and grocers—became modestly prosperous and accumulated a bit of property. It was the core of a community. But it was a community under siege. Everywhere AfricanAmericans turned, their lives were at risk. Slave catchers scoured the streets in search of runaways, and they showed no compunction about kidnapping blacks who were ofﬁcially free. Pittsburgh’s municipal government excluded African-American children from the public schools in 1834, and a state constitutional convention disenfranchised eligible black voters in 1837. And during the 1830s, on several occasions, white mobs attacked black residents either to enforce their submission or to drive them out of the city. African-Americans fought back; if anything, their developing political consciousness and their mobilizations may have courted white hostility. Early in the 1830s, following the lead of their counterparts in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh blacks formed abolition societies (sometimes in alliance with whites) and crowded into halls to hear the likes of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who visited the city on speaking tours. They published antislavery pamphlets, assisted the ﬂight of fugitive slaves, and organized to thwart the designs of slave catchers. Before long, they began to protest their civil and political disabilities and joined in conventions demanding the rights that white Americans enjoyed.

Among their most influential leaders was Martin R. Delany. Born of a free black mother and an enslaved father in western Virginia, Delany and his family fled to Pittsburgh just as the abolitionist movement was taking shape. He threw himself into politics, first publishing a local newspaper, The Mystery, and then joining with Frederick Douglass to publish the North Star in Rochester, New York. All along, Delany had deepening doubts about the prospects for African-Americans in the United States, and by the 1850s, after being dismissed from Harvard Medical School on explicitly racial grounds, he returned to Pittsburgh and urged blacks to leave America and to establish a nation elsewhere, perhaps in West Africa, where he would soon travel. Delany’s militance and his support for black emigration captured the political tensions of the time and charted the directions in which future black thought and politics would move. He is regarded as one of the founders of black nationalism. But when the Civil War erupted Delany moved even more forcefully against slavery. He enlisted in the Union Army and actively recruited African-Americans in the North. The struggles of African-Americans not only helped bring an end to slavery but also advanced a progressive political agenda. Owing to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, blacks in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in America gained the rights of citizenship that the Supreme Court had previously denied them, and the eligibility to vote. By the mid-1870s, black protest had led to the desegregation of the Pittsburgh school system, a rarity anywhere in the United States during the nineteenth century. Even so, the limits of change still left Pittsburgh blacks in a world of exclusions, separations, and discrimination: as to where they could live, eat, stay, or enjoy the public culture. Most painfully, they were largely excluded from work in the burgeoning mills, mines, and factories, and thus relegated to the lower rungs of the city’s social and economic ladder. Heavily concentrated in the third and fifth wards of the Hill District, though in close proximity to other immigrants, they managed to grow in numbers—surpassing twenty thousand in 1900 and giving Pittsburgh the sixth-largest black population in the nation—and to construct an increasingly dense civic life of churches, clubs, and fraternal societies, and an economic grid of small businesses and rooming houses. Not least, they fashioned their own sets of social distinctions and expectations, with which Southern black migrants would have been greeted when they arrived at Seth and Bertha Holly’s place. Steven Hahn’s many books include the Pulitzer Prize–winning, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003), and The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (2009). He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with the historian Stephanie McCurry and their two children, Declan and Saoirse.

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of the North, thus resided in a netherworld between slavery and freedom well into the nineteenth centuryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;some as slaves, others as indentured servants, and increasing numbers as fugitives from neighboring states like Virginia, where slavery remained legal until the Civil War. Although the African-American population made up only a tiny proportion of Pittsburghâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s inhabitants between 1800 and 1860 it grew from a scant hundred to more than two thousand. Indeed, among Northern cities, only Cincinnati experienced a more rapid

Steven Hahnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s many books include the Pulitzer Prizeâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;winning, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003), and The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (2009). He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with the historian Stephanie McCurry and their two children, Declan and Saoirse.

BY CORNELIUS EADY

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rate of black population growth during this period. By 1850, blacks clustered in the lower Hill District, near the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s downtown, in an area that came to be known as Little Hayti, and about half of them had been born in one of the Southern states. There they built churches (including an AME and an AME Zion church), a school, and a cemetery, and established a newspaper, several mutual-aid and temperance societies, and a militia company. There, too, a few of themâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;mostly barbers, butchers, and grocersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;became modestly prosperous and accumulated a bit of property. It was the core of a community. But it was a community under siege. Everywhere AfricanAmericans turned, their lives were at risk. Slave catchers scoured the streets in search of runaways, and they showed no compunction about kidnapping blacks who were ofďŹ cially free. Pittsburghâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s municipal government excluded African-American children from the public schools in 1834, and a state constitutional convention disenfranchised eligible black voters in 1837. And during the 1830s, on several occasions, white mobs attacked black residents either to enforce their submission or to drive them out of the city. African-Americans fought back; if anything, their developing political consciousness and their mobilizations may have courted white hostility. Early in the 1830s, following the lead of their counterparts in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh blacks formed abolition societies (sometimes in alliance with whites) and crowded into halls to hear the likes of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, who visited the city on speaking tours. They published antislavery pamphlets, assisted the ďŹ&#x201A;ight of fugitive slaves, and organized to thwart the designs of slave catchers. Before long, they began to protest their civil and political disabilities and joined in conventions demanding the rights that white Americans enjoyed.

Among their most inďŹ&#x201A;uential leaders was Martin R. Delany. Born of a free black mother and an enslaved father in western Virginia, Delany and his family ďŹ&#x201A;ed to Pittsburgh just as the abolitionist movement was taking shape. He threw himself into politics, ďŹ rst publishing a local newspaper, The Mystery, and then joining with Frederick Douglass to publish the North Star in Rochester, New York. All along, Delany had deepening doubts about the prospects for African-Americans in the United States, and by the 1850s, after being dismissed from Harvard Medical School on explicitly racial grounds, he returned to Pittsburgh and urged blacks to leave America and to establish a nation elsewhere, perhaps in West Africa, where he would soon travel. Delanyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s militance and his support for black emigration captured the political tensions of the time and charted the directions in which future black thought and politics would move. He is regarded as one of the founders of black nationalism. But when the Civil War erupted Delany moved even more forcefully against slavery. He enlisted in the Union Army and actively recruited African-Americans in the North. The struggles of African-Americans not only helped bring an end to slavery but also advanced a progressive political agenda. Owing to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, blacks in Pittsburgh and elsewhere in America gained the rights of citizenship that the Supreme Court had previously denied them, and the eligibility to vote. By the mid-1870s, black protest had led to the desegregation of the Pittsburgh school system, a rarity anywhere in the United States during the nineteenth century. Even so, the limits of change still left Pittsburgh blacks in a world of exclusions, separations, and discrimination: as to where they could live, eat, stay, or enjoy the public culture. Most painfully, they were largely excluded from work in the burgeoning mills, mines, and factories, and thus relegated to the lower rungs of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s social and economic ladder. Heavily concentrated in the third and ďŹ fth wards of the Hill District, though in close proximity to other immigrants, they managed to grow in numbersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;surpassing twenty thousand in 1900 and giving Pittsburgh the sixth-largest black population in the nationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and to construct an increasingly dense civic life of churches, clubs, and fraternal societies, and an economic grid of small businesses and rooming houses. Not least, they fashioned their own sets of social distinctions and expectations, with which Southern black migrants would have been greeted when they arrived at Seth and Bertha Hollyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place.

WAVERLY PLACE, ROCHESTER, NY

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