Seven Guitars

Set in 1947, Seven Guitars investigates the ethos of the decade following World War II and the build-up to the Civil Rights movement. Like his other plays, Seven Guitars provides an intimate glimpse into a brief period in the lives of a small group of Black characters rather than portraying grand, sweeping watershed events. In a preface to the text, August Wilson writes:

I am not a historian. I happen to think that the content of my mother’s life—her myths, her superstitions, her prayers, the contents of her pantry, the smell of her kitchen, the song that escaped from her sometimes parched lips, her thoughtful repose and pregnant laughter—are all worthy of art. Hence, Seven Guitars.

While the proliferation of American racism and White supremacy is certainly a constant presence in the lives of Wilson’s characters, White people exist on the periphery of Wilson’s insular world. They live primarily offstage with only a handful of onstage appearances throughout the ten-play cycle.

Each play is written to stand alone, but they exist within the same world, loosely interrelated with the occasional character who appears in more than one play or descends from characters in another decade. For instance, in Seven Guitars, Ruby is a young woman in the early stages of pregnancy by either a man who is dead or the man who killed him. She chooses Hedley to become the baby’s father, and reappears in Wilson’s 1980s play, King Hedley II (1999), which centralizes her son, Hedley’s namesake, as a man in his forties. The plays in the Century Cycle are about the way shifting social conditions affect the building and fragmentation of Black families and communities. Seven Guitars examines the desire of African Americans to form legacies and lineages under the looming threat of death in a society that considers their lives disposable.

Death is a constant presence in the play, which begins and ends with the gathering after Floyd’s funeral and centers on the story of his tragic and untimely death. The dramatic tension in the play is not based on the question of whether Floyd will scrape by and survive, but of when, how, and why he will die. Floyd’s death is inevitable, but as his friends discuss, every person’s death is inevitable. In the first scene, Floyd’s friends parse their fears and attitudes about the mysteries of death. Vera, in her deep grief, believes that she saw angels carrying Floyd away at the cemetery, a comforting image for someone in mourning. They wonder where Floyd went after he died and whether he had known on some level that his life was about to end, revealing their anxieties about and resignations to their own mortality.

As Black people in the 1940s, life is particularly precarious. The men arm themselves with guns and knives, and even Louise has her ex-husband’s pistol, hoping to protect themselves from death. Canewell and Floyd, who have both been arrested and beaten, are acutely aware of the threat of racial violence and the prison system that steals months of their lives. Hedley prefers to die of tuberculosis rather than trust White doctors to treat him. And the constant roadblocks that Floyd faces as a Black man create a deep, desperate frustration. Beyond fame and fortune, Floyd is seeking a route to immortality through his music and proof that his life is not disposable because he is Black. He declares that he will do anything to get to Chicago, even fill a cemetery.

Canewell sees the cemetery as a great equalizer where everyone ends up buried the same way. But Floyd sees his mother’s grave becoming overgrown and forgotten, erasing her existence. He pays money he needs to reach Chicago to give his mother a headstone, a permanent monument. Floyd’s willingness to risk his life in the robbery suggests that his imminent death might result from his reckless ambition, a morality tale about the downfalls of pride. But Floyd doesn’t die of his own ambition. He dies because a random sequence of events clashes with Hedley’s delusions. His death isn’t deserved or satisfying, or even logical. There is no protection from death, and Floyd certainly didn’t see it coming. Floyd’s record lives on as a captured bit of his voice and liveliness that survives him, even with the finality of the fact that there will never be another one.