The Piano Lesson

August Wilson was born in 1945 in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, the predominantly Black and immigrant neighborhood where most of his plays are set. His mother, Daisy Wilson, was a Black woman who worked as a domestic cleaner. Wilson was named Frederick August Kittel after his father, Frederick Kittel, a white German immigrant and pastry chef. Kittel was violent and had an alcohol addiction; he abandoned his family when Wilson was five, leaving his mother to raise him and his six siblings alone. In 1958, his mother remarried David Bedford, a working-class Black man who was much more of a role model and father. They moved to the mostly white suburbs, where they were targeted for racist harassment that forced them out of one home. Wilson was intelligent, but school was a series of struggles. He left one school due to racist bullying. At the next, he was bored. At the third, in 1960, a teacher failed a paper Wilson wrote for history class, alleging that he plagiarized it. Wilson left that day and dropped out at age 15. To hide this from his mother, he would leave for school each day and go to the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, where he read and educated himself. He also spent time in the Hill District, talking to people, listening to their stories, and writing. Wilson bought used records by the stack, discovering a revelation in the voice of the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith. He had never heard anything like it, and he recalled thinking, “Wait a minute. This is mine…there’s a history here” (Wilson, August. Interview for NPR. “Intersections: August Wilson, Writing to the Blues.” NPR, 2004). The blues are pervasive in Wilson’s plays, and he maintained that the blues are not self-pitying but uplifting: “Because you can sing that song, that’s what enables you to survive” (Wilson, 2004).  

In 1965, at age 20, Wilson dropped his father’s name for his mother’s and became August Wilson. He started writing poetry. At the same time, the fight for racial equality in the United States was shifting. After the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X, the Black Power movement based on his teachings attracted Black activists who were dissatisfied with the civil rights movement’s inability to produce the type of structural change needed to effect real social and economic equality. Instead of integration into a white-dominated society, which was the goal of the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement emphasized Black nationalism and pride. Its members fought for Black self-determination and self-empowerment, which meant building Black cultural institutions and celebrating Black heritage instead of trying to desegregate white ones. This gave rise to the Black Arts movement, which was the cultural and artistic arm of Black Power, beginning in 1965 when playwright and activist Amiri Baraka founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem. Wilson and a group of Black Hill District artists, educators, and writers formed the Centre Avenue Poets’ Theater Workshop to host poetry readings and jazz. Wilson, now 23, knew little about theater when he teamed up with Rob Penny to start the Black Horizon Theater with a Black Nationalist mission in 1968. Black Horizon lasted until the early 1970s, and in 1974, the Kuntu Repertory Theatre was founded by Dr. Vernell A. Lillie to continue Black Horizon’s work. Kuntu produced Wilson’s earliest plays, which are unpublished and now all but forgotten.

In 1978, Wilson moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, to work with the Penumbra Theatre. He wrote his first professionally produced play, adapted from his poems, which was a satirical musical based on Lysistrata and set in the Wild West called Black Bart and the Sacred Hills. It was a disastrous opening, with sexist humor that led to several women walking out and a fire on the stage, but Wilson kept writing. In his earliest works, Wilson explained, “I didn’t recognize the poetry in the everyday language of black America” (Phillips, Maya. “August Wilson, American Bard.” New York Times, 2020). Then, he began to allow those Black Hill District voices that he had listened to so attentively to trickle into his work in all its natural and authentic music. Language creates a dichotomy between Wilson’s unknown plays, produced in underfunded Black theaters, and his canon, the 10-play Century Cycle produced in professional, white-dominated League of Resident Theatres (LORT) venues. Therefore, Wilson isn’t considered part of the Black Arts movement as a major playwright, but his early life and work provide a necessary and rich foundation for his life’s work. In “The Ground on Which I Stand,” his now famous 1996 keynote speech delivered to a Theatre Communications Group conference, he stated, “The Black Power Movement […] was the kiln in which I was fired” (Wilson, August. “The Ground on Which I Stand.” Theatre Communications Group National Conference, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1996. Republished by American Theatre, 2016). Wilson went on to call for funded Black professional theaters. He stirred controversy by denouncing the practice of “colorblind” and diversified casting, or casting BIPOC actors in traditionally white roles, which was the primary racial equality initiative in professional theaters at the time. Wilson stated:

To mount an all-black production of a Death of a Salesman […] as an investigation of the human condition through the specifics of white culture is to deny us our own humanity, our own history, and the need to make our own investigations from the cultural ground on which we stand as black Americans (Wilson, 1996).