Tag: American

An Autobiographical Note as an Introduction to Hungarian and Romanian Images in American Culture

Mei 14, 2023 / Deas / 0 Comments

“Knowing” Romanians (or at least, Tran-syl-va-ni-ahahaha-ns)

As a child, when it came to Romanians, I knew of course of Dracula, or at least his pop-cultural/film (re-, and seemingly never ending)incarnation. After all, to the extent I knew where he was from it was some place called “Transylvania,” which was either its own country–in which case it must have some pretty cool-looking postage stamps, spooky castles on forbidding mountain tops and the like–or a made-up place. I suppose this should not have been surprising for a kid, since, of the myriad Dracula films, there were ones such as “Billy the Kid vs. Dracula (1966).” (Where does that take place, Dodge City?)

Dracula’s birthday, as we all know, is 31 October, which just happens to coincide with Halloween, thereby causing some confusion. Anyway, so when I went trick-or-treating as Cornelius from the “Planet of the Apes”–it was the ’70s okay, and I was a kid, how was I to know?…I actually thought soylent green was people–in a costume that they probably use today to demonstrate the danger of fireworks–to say nothing of the mask, a cheap plastic mold with an elastic string that invariably broke, causing you to have to carry it with you and thereby destroying any capacity you might have had to surprise the people who came to their doors…unless of course they tried the “please, take just one” candy-in-the-bowl-out-front-with-the-lights-off-really-we’re-not-home-socialism-in-action method–more often than not, I would run into countless Draculas. They had the cape, the fake fangs, and that cool fake blood…and perhaps even some of those cool postage stamps. (Context is everything at Halloween. My youngest brother went sometime in the late ’80s as “Jason” from the “Halloween” horror series. A little old lady opened up the door at one house and said “Ooooooh, look at the cute little hockey player”! By the way, what happens when you go up to somebody’s house in a costume, ring the doorbell, and say trick-or-treat, on a day other than Halloween? I figure one of two things can happen: 1) they call the cops, or 2) they seek to regift the still-remaining popcorn balls and circus peanuts left over from last Halloween.)

If Dracula was only present in person on Halloween, he could be found the rest of the year on television–especially, perhaps ironically, for kids. There was Count von Count from Sesame Street. The count’s theme song included a line, “When I’m alone. I count myself. One, one count! Ahahahaha [to thunder in the background]!” Interestingly, according to the Internet’s Wikipedia (“Count von Count”) entry, there is some vampire folklore which suggests that vampires can become obsessed with counting things and that should you ever confront one, throwing sand or seeds may help to distract them (a helpful travel tip…).

The Count von Count skit is emblematic of the confused mix of Romanian, Hungarian, and sometimes inexplicably inserted slavic elements that make up the Dracula composite. For example, as in the Seinfeld scene excerpted in the introduction (whose characters actually speak a few words of Romanian in the scene!, but who are nevertheless named Katya (the gymnast) and Misha (the circus performing acrobat), names (diminutives) which are neither Hungarian, nor Romanian), the Count’s bats for some unknown reason have slavic names–Grisha, Misha, Sasha, etc. The Count’s characteristics are clearly inspired by Bela Lugosi’s (indeed, a real Transylvanian (from Lugoj), of Hungarian origin) 1931 portrayal of Dracula (down to Count von Count’s accent), and, it would appear, the Count’s cameo girlfriend “Countess Dahling von Dahling” is inspired by the Hungarian actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who is famous for being famous, as is said, and for calling people “dahling” (convenient, she has said, because then you never have to remember anyone’s name).

Finally, there was Count Chocula, a staple of Saturday morning television serials and the commercials in between which they were sandwiched (nothing in comparison to today, however, as commercial breaks took up much less time then). All I knew of him was that he presided over what looked like a really-tasty chocolate cereal that looked more like dessert than breakfast. That, of course, explains why our mother refused to buy it for us. Back in the in-retrospect-not-a-bad-time-to-be-a-kid, now much-maligned, hedonistic “have a nice day smiley-face,” “Me” decade of the 1970s, gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins was given temporary special dispensation. Gluttony was in…even if chocolate covered cereals with marshmallows were not in some households. (In those days, “nutrition correctness” had not yet taken over, as names such as Sugar Smacks (renamed Honey Smacks) or Sugar Pops would suggest.)

“Knowing” Hungarians

My introduction to Hungarians was similarly obscure. To the extent I identified Dracula with any place at all, it was, as I noted, Transylvania; to the extent that it was a country, Romania–not yet having gotten the spiel countless times by the proprietors of private rooms I was to stay in Hungary in later years, “ah, so you are going to Transylvania, you know that used to be part of Hungary–one, one dismembered kingdom, ahahahahahaha–until they took it away (to the accompaniment of thunder in the background) .” What did I know and when did I know it (well, it was the Watergate era, you know)? It was not, for example, until years later that I realized that I had once lived in the Hungarian-American mecca known as Cleveland, or that the Austrian family from whom we bought our house in a suburb of Toronto in the early ’70s was named Feleky. (It was quite a street we lived on then (1970-1974); my parents, Irish immigrants just naturalized American citizens, the mother of a friend a Prague Spring Czech refugee, and many new Greek families, doubtless some having fled the right-wing military junta of 1967-1973.)

My mother used to make that staple of many an American household (at least at a time), “Hungarian goulash”…it sounds ghoulish, but it tastes delicious. (As is frequently noted, the American version is more similar to porkolt (stew-like) than to gulyas (a soup).) I loved it, even though I didn’t know what it was or where it came from. (It can only be said to be ironic too, although I did not realize it was ironic at a time: my father is a ’56er, only he came from Dublin, a relative (a policeman!) stiffed him at the port, and so he wandered the streets of New York with his suitcase in heavy Irish tweed during Indian summer, only to duck into a bar to see a few pitches of Don Larsen’s Perfect Game in the World Series, an event whose importance was inscrutable to him; like many a Hungarian ’56er, however, he felt like a Martian (see below for more on the theme of Hungarians as “aliens”). No, my father did not bump into Frank McCourt!)

“Goulash,” of course, already had a long history on television by that point, what with mad scientists in Warner Brothers cartoons, living in “Transylvania” among lightning storms and talking about making “spider goulash” and similar mad scientist specialties. (The other Hungarian touch used in a whole series of cartoons–including a classic Warner Brothers’ cartoon by Fritz Freleng with Bugs Bunny as a concert pianist (“Rhapsody Rabbit”) and a classic MGM cartoon by Hanna and Barbera of “Tom and Jerry” dueling it out at a piano (“The Cat Concerto”), both of which came out within weeks of each other in 1946 leading to mutual accusations that the competitor was guilty of plagiarism (see Wikipedia entry)–is the manic-depressive, mostly manic, frantic music Franz (Ferenc) Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2”.) “Goulash” was also the plot-line of what from today’s optic was a clearly racist episode (“A Majority of Two,” 4/11/68) of the 1960s sitcom “Bewitched” in which, as usual, “Darrin” (alias “Darwood”) was to entertain an out-of-town business guest–would you like a high-ball, sir, make that a double; sorry they’ve slashed the expense account, dinner at Darrin’s again…–who on this occasion was Japanese. The whole episode, Darrin’s wife, a witch named Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), is trying to track down how to prepare the meal request the businessman’s secretary had relayed: Hun-gai-ran-gou-rash. She is worried, of course, about causing the Japanese businessman to lose face if she asks, which is indeed a concern since throughout the episode when this happens to someone his or her face will literally disappear, apparently leaving a blotch of white-out. Everyone, of course, has a good laugh at the end, however, after the businessman has romanced only a mildly Asian-looking (didn’t want to have her looking tooooo Asian) stewardess, and it turns out all the businessman really wanted was “Hungarian Goulash,” but owing to his secretary’s accent…Everyone except that nosy next-door neighbor Mrs. Gladys Kravitz, who, we can deduce, must be spying on the Stevens’ household for “Dragnet” or “The FBI,” since “freak out” parties have been reported at that address…

Then, there was the show, “Green Acres,”…something was definitely up with that, but exactly what I didn’t know. Although I knew the character Lisa Douglas was eccentric, I didn’t know she was Hungarian, and I certainly did not know that she was Eva Gabor and not Zsa Zsa Gabor as is very frequently mistaken. As a kid, I thought I didn’t understand the show, precisely because I was a kid. Nope. Now, years later, I know: that wasn’t the problem.

How exactly does one describe “Green Acres?” The plot ostensibly was that Eddie Albert’s character wished to experience the “real livin'” of the countryside (today, this is known as a “r-e-a-l-i-t-y show,” starring a similarly famous-for-being-famous celebrity, Paris Hilton…who is actually related to the Gabors (see below), however, thereby causing us serious existential issues at this point in this sentence). Eddie Albert drags his reluctant Hungarian wife with him, and she is not very happy with the situation because, as we learn from the theme song, she would rather be shopping on Park Avenue. (The countryside theme was so common in CBS sitcoms during the 1960s, that some critics derisively referred to it as the “Country Broadcasting System”.) Anyway, they lived in some rural area, several hundred miles from Chicago, probably Illinois. Despite the small size of the town in which they lived, Hooterville was capable of hosting not one, but two sitcoms: Green Acres (1966-1971) and Petticoat Junction (1963-1970). (The town was apparently known best for the ample breasts of the young female stars of Petticoat Junction, since, as it turns out, the choice of name was not accidental). The two shows were united by the presence of Sam Drucker, apparently town grocer, postmaster, and banker, and the unforgettable character of George Jefferson (oh, sorry, no, too early, this was still the 1960s, strike that then). As the Wikipedia entry notes, Hooterville had Drucker’s grocery store and the hotel from Petticoat Junction…not exactly, Pixley material (to say nothing of Mount Pilot), and likely that giant sucking sound on the state’s budget. At least the town did not have Goober or Howard Sprague, clearly not local personalities the chamber of commerce wishes to advertise when trying to attract investment).

Moreover, I would venture to guess, this was one town where the locals did not “exceed the plan” or “break the harvest record,” despite Eva’s naturally collectivist tendencies. Instead, a lot of time was spent with fending off the vexing locals, including the featherheaded state bureaucrat, county farm agent Hank Kimball, a gender-ambiguous brother and sister painting team, and Arnold Ziffel, the “hilarious” TV-watching pig, apparently “Green Acres”s’answer to Mr. Ed (an insidious, but false, urban legend has it that the cast ate Arnold after the show was cancelled; the truth is just being on the set made him nostalgic for the sanity of the sty). The running joke of the series was that Mr. Douglas (Eddie Albert) wanted to be there, but nothing went right and the locals drove him crazy; while Mrs. Douglas, despite her love of fluffy negligees and diamonds, fit right in and understood the locals. Her Hungarianness in the show was alternatively exotic, haughty, sexy/ditzy (as connoted by her accent) and seemingly oblivious to reason–yes, a veritable goulash of “otherness.”

One would like to assume that “Green Acres” could be explained by recourse to more complicated analysis: that it was somehow a) a reflection of the drug culture’s first penetration of the creative intelligentsia (according to Alice, the wind was whispering, not yet crying Mary…”Green Acres” an accidental choice of title?!), or that b) there was some deep allegory at work here, suggesting pursuit of a utopian rural life is a chimera, and that instead you get electrification and a TV-watching pig. (Appropriately enough, when it and other such country broadcasting system shows were cancelled in 1971, it was referred to as the “Rural Purge.”) It is more likely that the show was merely escapist, almost unintentionally absurd–although it did leave a score that lent itself well to translation into Hungarian for a skit at a summer language camp years later. (One of the best indictments of “America’s Cold War realism” of the era can be found in the movie “Forrest Gump,” in a recovery room for injured soldiers during the Vietnam War…in the background “Gomer Pyle, USMC” plays on a TV…In 5 years, Gomer somehow never made it out of basic training to Vietnam…)

Through the Eyes of an American Child of the Television Age: Identifying Hungarians and Romanians as Hungarians and Romanians…through the Wide World of Sports

Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky

Speaking of Eva…I mean Zsa Zsa, no, I mean, for once this is right, Zsa Zsa Gabor…a guest spot on another rural-themed 1960s television show introduces us to our next theme: the Hungarians as “mad” or crazy (a la Lisa Douglas). In one episode (28 January 1962), Wilbur congratulates his talking horse, Mr. Ed, for having cured Zsa Zsa of her fear of horses, to which Mr. Ed responds: “She cured my fear of Hungarians” (“The Best of Mr. Ed,” multiple sites; Mister Ed aired from 1961-1966 on, you guessed it, CBS). In J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey” (published as a whole in 1961), Mrs. Glass tells Zooey: “You could use a haircut, young man…You’re getting to look like one of these crazy Hungarians or something getting out of a swimming pool” (the section also contains a reference to Zsa Zsa Gabor and use of the descriptor “Balkan”; I remember now reading this book beneath leafy trees below the Pannonhalma abbey in Hungary in June 1990) http://www.freeweb.hu/tchl/salinger/frannyandzooey.doc. (I would be curious to know here: this section first appeared in The New Yorker in May 1957, and the reference to a Hungarian “getting out of a swimming pool”–a rather strange comparison–inevitably brings to mind the famous bloody water polo match between the Soviets and the Hungarians on 6 December 1956 at the 1956 Summer Olympics (yes, that’s right, because the Summer Olympics were held in Melbourne, Australia that year). The Hungarians defeated the Soviets in a match with huge political overtones–angry Hungarian fans were reportedly ready to lynch a Soviet player for a punch to the eye of a Hungarian star–the match coming just a month after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising.)

My first personal realization of Hungarianness as Hungarianness, however, came around 1976, with the ascribed “mad” quality of Hungarians, specifically and appropriately enough, Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky. Hrabosky was a relief pitcher for several different teams in the 1970s and early 1980s, but his best years were with St. Louis and Kansas City, with 1975 being his cardinal year in the record books. The mid-1970s were the days of colorful characters in baseball, especially among pitchers: the cigar-chomping Cuban of the Boston Red Sox, Luis Tiant, who looked like we was throwing toward the outfield rather than the catcher because of his pitching motion; Sparky Lyle for the New York Yankees, his cheeks like a blow-fish filled with chewing tobacco; and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers, who talked to the ball as if it were alive and whose boyish enthusiasm unfortunately couldn’t overcome injuries that strangled his career in its infancy.

Then there was Hrabosky who despite the Slovak-sounding last name claims Hungarian descent. Contrasting the absence of colorful characters among pitchers in today’s baseball, Gordon Edes wrote in a wonderful–if he were Hungarian, we might even say “sweet”–article in 2003 about Hrabosky as follows:

But for sheer theatrics, one reliever remains in a league of his own: Al Hrabosky, known as the “Mad Hungarian” when he pitched for the Cardinals, Royals, and Braves from 1970-1982. With his Fu Manchu mustache, long hair, and a silver ring, the Gypsy Rose of Death (“I don’t even remember the stupid story I made up for that, it was so far-fetched–probably a family heirloom of Dracula”), Hrabosky would turn every outing into performance art. He’d stomp off the mound toward second base, eyes blazing, the fury practically seeping through his uniform as he turned back to the hitter who was left waiting at the plate until he was done working himself into an altered state he called his “controlled hate routine,” then whirled around, pounding his ball into the glove while the home crowd generally went nuts. (Gordon Edes, “Hrabosky had a flair about him,” “The Boston Globe,” 28 March 2003, F9, reprinted on the Internet)

How did Hrabosky get his nickname? Again, Edes recounts:

The nickname, he said, came from a team publicist. No one was sure of his nationality–[the American film star] “Burt Reynolds once called me ‘The Mad Russian'”–and only the spelling-bee champions got his name right. But then one day, a Cardinals publicist, Jerry Lovelace, said “Hey, M.H.,” to the young pitcher from Oakland, Calif., and a nickname was born….I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “Mad Hungarian.” I said, “I like it.” (Edes, 2003)

Hungarians, I concluded from watching his television appearances and from his nickname, must be associated with craziness. That is how, of course, many images are passed on, not with malice, but as descriptors for individuals, a way of awarding identity and for marketing purposes. Hrabosky’s “mad” behavior was established before his nationality (as Burt Reynolds’ calling him “The Mad Russian” indicates, in itself a negative and positive reflection of “East European” ethnicity in the United States at the time–interchangeable, part of a melting pot, even if a separate one from those of West European ethnicity–although cultural constructionists would view such “everycountry” ascription more darkly (see below)), rather than his Hungarianness being identified first, and his behavior seen as reflecting his Hungarianness. Once the two become intertwined, however, and given the propensity for collective associations to outweigh individual associations, it was difficult and almost irrelevant to know which came first–the two were married and interchangeable in the popular imagination, or at least sports fan’s imagination.

Nadia…

It was also the Bicentennial Summer of 1976 when I was introduced to Romanians, also through sports. It was, of course, through Nadia Comaneci (“N.C. I”), an endearing young Romanian gymnast who scored seven perfect 10s, the perfection being driven home even more by the fact that the scoreboards only went up to 9.9, the perfect score of 10 being considered unattainable! (The scoreboard would show 1.0 because it could not go past 9.9….Spinal Tap’s invention of the 11 not having been invented yet.) Nadia spawned “Nadia-(Ro)mania” of a sort. ABC which carried the Montreal Olympics in the United States attached a musical theme to the gymnast’s performances; “Nadia’s theme” then climbed the pop charts! (It was actually the theme to an American soap opera, “The Young and the Restless,” but it was through its attachment to Nadia who used it for one of her floor performances that it became famous.)

Of course, I have asked myself since then: would the reaction, the outpouring of genuine warmth and admiration from Americans (Canadians, and Westerners in general) have been the same had Nadia been representing Bulgaria and not Romania–to say nothing of the Soviet Union? True, the USSR’s Olga Korbut generated enthusiasm four years earlier in Munich but nothing like Nadia. Was it Nadia’s comparative youth and “cuteness/sweetness/prepubescence?” Was it her coach, the charismatic, bear-like Hungarian, Bela Karolyi (their relationship presented as indicative of the “warm ethnic relations” fostered by “Ceausescu’s Romania”)? Perhaps, but I also think it was against the backdrop of Romania’s highly-crafted and the U.S. and West’s highly-courted image of Ceausescu’s Romania as the great thorn in the Soviets’ side, bravely standing up to Moscow and more Western in their culture and people (“a Latin people in a sea of Slavs”)–i.e. thus not Balkan or truly “Eastern,” somehow caught by accident “behind enemy lines.” It is simply difficult to believe that something approaching Nadia-mania could occur in the post-Cold War world; it was a reflection of the time in which it took place.

Certainly, the standing ovation for the Romanian delegation as it entered the Los Angeles Coliseum at the 1984 Summer Olympics–which unfortunately lent itself easily to continuous exploitation by Ceausescu thereafter, during the most-difficult years of his reign–and Nadia’s escape from Romania in November 1989, became metaphors for and barometers of Romania’s political situation and U.S.-Romanian relations. The appropriately surreal “1984” moment reflected the Chernenko, pre-Gorbachev nadir of Soviet-American relations in the 1980s–arms reductions talks’ were essentially put on ice between late 1983 and 1985–and the continued greater importance attached to Romania’s foreign policy over Ceausescu’s “Golden Era” domestic policy (the 1984-1986 period being perhaps the worst and most hopeless according to some, in part owing to brutal weather, and the weakness of reform currents at that moment elsewhere in the bloc). By 1989, with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in full swing–and with “Gorbymania” having changed the image of the Soviet Union extensively in the United States–the image of a transmogrified Nadia–as if 1976 had never happened–involved in a “tawdry affair” with a married man (Constantin Panait), escaping from Romania, seemed to symbolize the ills of Ceausescu’s Romania and how it now stood in stark contrast to the rest of the Eastern bloc. As the Seinfeld episode demonstrates, and as I will discuss in more detail below, the gymnast frame stuck in the popular imagination, however. It was Nadia who set that mold.

(A Romanian-American scholar once told me how surprised he was to look up on the television screen one day in November-December 1989, only to see the married father of four, the Romanian émigré for whom a now aging and plumper Nadia had allegedly left Ceausescu’s Romania: the scholar had tended bar with the guy…and the guy still owed him money! My first encounter with “real, live” Romanians from Romania also had a sad sports theme in a sense. It was in Keleti pu., the eastern train station in Budapest in May 1985. Amid the clapping of rusting toilet flanges and intermittent torrents of urine falling to the tracks below, Romanian boys in dingy blue track suits with trim that had once been white chased each other around the unmistakable “CFR” railcars of the time…)

August Wilson – The Most Compulsive and Strident Voice From the Black American Theatre

Mei 13, 2023 / Deas / 0 Comments

August Frederick Kittel Wilson, a prolific American writer whose plays, like Eugene O’Neill’s, Arthur Miller’s and Tennessee Williams’ are produced throughout the U.S. regularly soon became the most important voice in the American theater after Lorraine Hansberry, a position that he maintained until his death in 2005 with a string of acclaimed plays starting from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom first exciting the theater world in 1984.

August Wilson mostly relies on the “4 B’s”: the Blues; fellow playwright, Amiri Bakara; Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges, and painter, Romare Bearden to tell what in his estimation he needs to tell in writing his plays. Apart from this, he has no particular method of writing his plays.

The blues have always had the greatest influence on Wilson, as he himself confessed in an interview with Sandra G. Shannon: “I have always consciously been chasing the musicians, It’s like our culture is in the music. And the writers are way behind the musicians… So I’m trying to close the gap.” 1

Wilson was also greatly influenced by playwright Amiri Baraka, who was part of the Black Art movement of the 1960’s. Through Baraka’s writing, Wilson “learned sociology and political commitment” and to include the emotions of anger and violence in his works. But far from supporting Baraka’s advocacy of a violent revolution, Wilson believed that African Americans need to develop a “collective self-reliance grounded in black history and culture” a preoccupation which seems more akin to that of his other mentor, Jorge Luis Borges.

Wilson was influenced not only by good writing but also by art as he claimed, that when he saw the painter Bearden’s work that was the first time that he saw black life presented in all its richness. He was so moved that he there and then resolved that he wanted to do just that-as he wanted his plays to be the equal of Bearden’s canvases. Wilson thus started creating authentic sounding characters that have brought a new understanding of the black experience to audiences in a series of plays, each one addressing African Americans in each decade of the twentieth century.

Although Wilson’s plays have not been written in chronological order, the consistent and key theme in each of them is the sense of disconnection suffered by blacks that have been uprooted from their original homeland, first from Africa and then their moving northwards away from the Jim Crowism of the slave holding south for the northern industrializing cities of Chicago and New York.

Wilson lamented that by their failure to develop their own tradition, which should be a more African response to the world, [African Americans] lost their sense of identity. Wilson has felt therefore that black people must strive to know their roots in order to understand themselves and then regain their lost identity. His plays have therefore been geared to demonstrate the black struggle to either gain this understanding and thence their identity-or escape from it.

Each of his ten plays set in a different decade of the 20th century enables Wilson to explore, often in very subtle ways, the myriad and mutating forms of the legacy of slavery. Each one of this cycle called “The Pittsburgh Cycle” or his “Century Cycle,” set in a different decade, depicting the comedy and tragedy of the African-American experience then, is unprecedented in American theater for its concept, size, and cohesion. Nine of them are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, an African-American neighborhood that takes on a mythic literary significance like Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, or Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Ballybeg.

Although the plays are not strictly parts of a serial story, some characters appear (at various ages) in more than one of them. Children of characters in earlier plays may even appear in later ones. The character Aunt Ester, a “washer of souls” who is reported to be 285 years old in Gem of the Ocean, which takes place in her home at 1839 Wylie Avenue, and 322 in Two Trains Running and who dies in 1985, during the events of ‘King Hedley I1 is the most frequently mentioned in the cycle. In another, Radio Golf , much of the action revolves around plans to demolish and redevelop Aunt Ester’s house, some years after her death.

The plays often include an apparently mentally-impaired oracular character a different individual in each play – for example, Hedley [Sr.] in Seven Guitars, or Hambone in Two Trains Running. Most of the ideas for the plays have come from varied sources such as images, snippets of conversation, or lyrics from blues songs captured by Wilson’s ever-vigilant writer’s eye and ear. As a result of the influences from his immersion into the blues music culture, virtually all of his characters end up singing the blues to show their feelings at key dramatic moments in his plays.

The play Fences evolved from his seeing an image of a man holding a baby, and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone from the depiction of a struggling mill hand in a collage by acclaimed black painter Romare Bearden, whom Wilson has cited as having a particularly strong influence on his work.

Born Frederick August Kittel in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 1945, Wilson, the fourth of six children, grew up in a black slum in a two-room apartment with no provision for hot water or a telephone above a grocery store at Bedford Avenue in an economically-depressed neighborhood inhabited predominantly by black Americans, as well as Jewish and Italian immigrants.

His father a white German immigrant baker, also named Frederick August Kittel, seldom spent time with his family. as Wilson reveals that his father very rarely came around. So he grew up in his mother’s household in a cultural environment which was black. His mother, Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, whose own mother had walked north from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life, had to raise her six children relying on welfare checks and wages from house cleaning jobs thus managing to keep them clothed, guided, schooled and fed. According to him, she had a very hard time feeding Wilson and the rest of her children. But in spite of all that. Wilson admitted that he had a wonderful childhood. …For as a family, they did things together: saying the rosary every night at seven o’clock., sitting down and having dinner at a certain time. …and being that they didn’t have a TV, listening to the radio.

August Wilson’s induction into the racism and race-consciousness that was to be a constant theme in his works started in the late 1950s, when his mother married a black man, David Bedford, causing them to move from the Hill to a then predominantly white working class neighborhood, Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility with bricks being thrown through the windows at them. Though there was now racial unity if not harmony in the home, the relationship between Wilson and his stepfather was rocky even when he was a teenager. An ex-convict whose race prevented him from earning a football scholarship to college, David Bedford would become a source for Wilson’s protagonist Troy Maxson a former baseball player blocked from the major leagues by segregation in his play Fences, which won my interest in August Wilson a few years ago.

August Wilson’s literary career owes much to his mother who taught him to read very early, a process which to Wilson was transforming:him enabling him to unlock information and to be better able to understand the forces that are oppressing you. Learning to read at the age of four, Wilson consumed books voraciously, at first reading the Nancy Drew mysteries his mother managed to buy for the family. When he was 5 years old, he secured his first library card from the Hill District branch of the library on Wylie Avenue. He made such good use of it that he soon wore it out and cried when he lost it. At the age of 12 he was already a regular. client in the library. Wilson was not an exceptional student. He was so distracting that he soon developed a reputation for yelling answers out of turn in class.

His mother sent him to St. Richard’s parochial school in the Hill, and then to Central Catholic High School in Oakland. As the only black student there, he was constantly taunted and harassed. Threats and abuse drove him away in 1959, just before the end of his freshman year but the next school at which he enrolled, Connelly Vocational High School proved unchallenging.

So he switched to Gladstone High School, which was just across the street. Though he was supposed to move to the 10th grade but because he hadn’t graduated from the 9th at Central, he had to take 9th grade subjects. As the work was well behind what he had already done, he was bored and remained complacent until he decided he wanted to get into the after-school college club run by one of the teachers.

It was that teacher who, doubting that a black child could do that well on his own, writing such a well-written 20-page term paper on Napoleon as Wilson submitted accused him of plagiarism. This mostly white parochial high school also gave him a harsh dose of racism often finding notes on his desk which read “Nigger go home.” Sick of this he dropped out in the 10th grade in 1960 at the age of 15 and for a while not telling his mother.

“I dropped out of school, but I didn’t drop out of life,” as he recalled leaving the house each morning and going to the main branch of the Carnegie Library in Oakland “where they had all the books in the world. … I felt suddenly liberated from the constraints of a pre-arranged curriculum that labored through one book in eight months.”

At home, Wilson’s family had to endure racial taunts at the mostly white Hazelwood area of Pittsburgh. At age 15, Wilson began to educate himself, beginning in the “Negro” section of the public library, reading works by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and other black writers, Wilson made such extensive use of the Carnegie Library to educate himself that they later awarded him a degree, the only such one they have bestowed anyone.

Like Richard Wright ,Wilson was caught up in the power of words. His fascination with language made him an avid listener, soaking up the conversations he overheard in coffee shops and on street corners, and using the titbits of conversations to construct stories in his head.

By his late teens, Wilson had dedicated himself to the task of becoming a writer. For by this time, he knew what he wanted to be, a writer, even though this created tension with his mother, who wanted him to become a lawyer. But when he continued to work at odd jobs, she got so fed up with what she considered his lack of direction that she forced him out of the home. He then got enlisted in the U.S. Army for a three-year stint in 1962, but somehow got himself discharged a year later, and went back to working odd jobs such as porter, short-order cook, gardener, and dishwasher

August Kittel changing his name to August Wilson thus honoring his mother after his father’s death in 1965 marked the symbolic starting point of his serious writing career. For that same year he bought a used typewriter, paying for it with twenty dollars that his sister, Freda, gave him for writing her a term paper on Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. It was also the year that he discovered and first heard the blues, when he heard a tune sung by Bessie Smith entitled “Nobody in Town Can Bake a Sweet Jellyroll Like Mine.” He was mesmerized by the emotions that Smith’s sassy delivery exuded. The source of his artistic vision could thus be traced to this time. The blues had a big impact on Wilson, for through the blues, as well as his experiences listening to the tales of the older folks, he learned that “both the history and culture of African Americans had their roots in an oral, rather than a written tradition. By stages it would lead to the understanding that this oral tradition consists of an extended riposte to a set of values and codes imposed on blacks by white America”. These two things stimulated his literary and theatrical prowess.

His literary development moved up one stage further when at the age of 20 Wilson moved into a boarding house, rented a room and began writing lines of poetry on paper bags while sitting in a local restaurant, gathering inspiration from tales swapped by elderly men at a nearby cigar store. Here he got the other important part of his education. For “Pittsburgh” as he once described it “is a very hard city, especially if you’re black,” so each day which he said was rough. had to be continually negotiated. to the deprivation was that he grew up without a father.So when he was 20, he went down onto Centre Avenue to learn from the community how to be a man.

That community provided many fathers for him in– the old men chatting in Pat’s Place or on street corners; the inhabitants of the diners where Wilson sat and listened; like-minded friends with artistic inclinations. His true father was both the small community that nurtured him and the larger Pittsburgh that, by opposing, stimulated and defined his artistry.

Furthermore, Wilson expanded his literary landscape by immersing himself in the works of Dylan Thomas and John Berryman as well as in Amiri Baraka’s poems and plays which he loved because of their lively rhythms and street-smart language.

Wilson’s literary education continued at Pittsburgh’s Halfway Art Gallery, where he found an audience for his poetry, and became acquainted with some of “Pittsburgh’s black literati.” Together they formed the Center Avenue Poets Theatre Workshop. In the late ’60s, as a part of this talented group of poets, educators and artists of the future, young men, whose regular haunts were at the Halfway Art Gallery and the Hill Arts Society, Wilson remembered that he always had a napkin and a pencil ready by him. Although some of his poems were published in some small magazines over the next few years, he failed to achieve recognition as a poet.

Earlier on we identified mostly literary and artistic influences on the works of August Wilson. Apart from these there were ideological as well as political influences on his life and works much of which came from Malcolm X. Malcolm X bore such a strong influence on Wilson that he gave him the sense of direction he needed to resist the easy temptations of the streets. For it was Malcolm X who offered the young fatherless Wilson a vision of black manhood. It is as a mark of his devotion to him, that Wilson even possessed an album of his speeches which one expects he must have been listening to over and over again thus forming part of his linguistic landscape along with those familiar voices and discussions in the pubs and restaurants he frequented.

According to Wilson himself: “When we saw or heard Malcolm we saw or heard ourselves. Whatever the self was: Malcolm the Bad Nigger. Malcolm the Boisterous. Malcolm the Defiant. Malcolm the Brave. He was all these and more” It is then not surprising that this theme pervades Wilson’s male protagonists, as each seeks to “survive as a black man in America” .

The writings of Malcolm X in this way had great influence on the orientation of Wilson and on his writings. Wilson through him took up the banner of cultural nationalism which meant black people working toward self-definition, self-determination, as Wilson put it. “It meant that we had a culture that was valid and that we weren’t willing to trade it to participate in the American Dream.” He became involved in the debates of the ’60s and continued up to his death to consider himself “a black nationalist and a cultural nationalist.” following various black identity movements and fighting for social justice.

From poetry which he did not have such a successful publishing record in, August Wilson moved on to the area where he was to gain his fame, theater. August Wilson first became aware of the theater through Pearl Bailey in Hello, Dolly, around 1958, 1959. “My mother was in New York and brought back the program, her first and only Broadway show.” But his first brushes with theater had been off-putting. In 1965, he saw a 30-minute excerpt of The Rhinoceros at Fifth Avenue High School. “That was the first theater I recall, and I wasn’t impressed.” He met some of the actors in John Hancock’s 1966 Pittsburgh Playhouse company, but he stayed for only 20 minutes of Bertolt Brecht’s A Man’s a Man. But in 1968, when Mr. Penny wrote a play and the Tulane Drama Review had a special issue on black theater “… was the first time I’d seen black plays in print — there hadn’t been any plays on the Negro shelf at the library. So we did them all.”

In 1969 Wilson and his friend Rob Penny, a playwright and teacher, founded the black activist theater company Black Horizons on the Hill District of Pittsburgh focusing on politicizing the community and raising black consciousness. Through this theater formed to promote “black self-awareness,” Wilson produced and directed plays that “challenged both the aesthetic and the ideological premises of the reigning Caucasian theater”. Black Horizons also gave him the chance to present his own early plays, mostly in public schools and community centers.

His first play, Recycling, drawing on the unhappy 1972 termination of his 1969 marriage to Brenda Burton.was performed for audiences in small theaters and public housing community centers, Soon thereafter, his friend Claude Purdy moved to St. Paul to work with its black theater group, Penumbra, inviting Wilson to join him.

In 1976 Dr. Vernell Lillie, who had founded the Kuntu Repertory Theatre at the University of Pittsburgh two years earlier, directed Wilson’s one-act play The Homecoming. When Wilson saw that same year Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead, a comic-tragic account of life under apartheid at the Pittsburgh Public Theater was the first time he saw a whole, professional play.

Wilson, Penny, and poet Maisha Baton also started the Kuntu Writers Workshop to bring African-American writers together and to assist them in publication and production.

To find the voice that would make him famous as a playwright, Wilson thought that he needed to gain distance from his roots which opportunity came in 1978 when he visited his friend Claude Purdy in St. Paul, Minnesota in response to his earlier invitation to join him. Purdy urged Wilson to write a play and Wilson felt more ready than ever before for as he told the New York Times.. “Having moved from Pittsburgh to St. Paul, I felt I could hear voices for the first time accurately..” . In ten days of writing while sitting in a fish-and-chips restaurant, Wilson finished a draft of Jitney, a play about jitney drivers set in a gypsy-cab station in Pittsburg which he submitted to the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and which won him a $200-a-month fellowship. Jitney was revised more than two decades later as part of his 10-play cycle on 20th century Pittsburgh.

At Saint Paul, Minnesota Claude Purdy helped him secure a job writing educational scripts for the Science Museum of Minnesota where he was also writing short plays for its Children’s Theater. Wilson’s satirical play, “Black Bart and the Sacred Hills,” a musical satire based on the story of the life of an outlaw of the Old West was adapted from his poems at Mr. Purdy’s suggestion and became an item in a workshop production four years later..

Though the drama written during this period does not show much genius, “Yet behind the self-consciousness of these early works is a notable ease with words and a poetic melding of the colloquial and the profound”

In 1981 Wilson moved to Seattle where he would develop a relationship with Seattle Repertory Theatre which would ultimately be the only theater in the country to produce all of his works including his ten-play cycle and his one-man show How I Learned What I Learned.

Wilson once explained that St. Paul and Seattle — cool, northern, Scandinavian cities — appealed to him precisely because of their unlikeness to Pittsburgh, allowing him to look back more intently at the true material of August Wilson Country, source of his rich stream of stories, characters, images and conflicts.

August Wilson died on October 2, 2005 at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle after in a rare and dramatic moment, initiating a month long wait for his departure after he announced on August 26, 2005, through his hometown newspaper, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, that he had been diagnosed with liver cancer in June 2005 and had been given three to five months to live. The previous December, August Wilson’s thoughts had turned to mortality at his approaching 60th birthday when he said, “There’s more [life] behind me than ahead. I think of dying every day. … At a certain age, you should be prepared to go at any time.”When in May 2005, he was diagnosed with liver cancer and the next month his doctors determined it was inoperable, he showed that he was indeed prepared, telling the Post-Gazette, “I’ve lived a blessed life. I’m ready.”

Wilson has won many prizes and awards including two Pulitzer Prizes, best drama, for Fences in 1987 and for The Piano Lesson in 1990; seven New York Drama Critics Circle Awards for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, 1984, for Fences, 1987, and for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, 1988; Tony Award, best drama, for Fences, 1986-87; American Theater Critics Award, 1986, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1998 and Harold Washington Literary Award, 2001.

August Wilson had received many honorary degrees, including more than two dozen honorary doctorates with one from the University of Pittsburgh where he served as a member of the University’s Board of Trustees from 1992 until 1995. He also had Rockefeller and Guggenheim Fellowships, a National Humanities Medal, the 2003 Heinz Award in whereHumanities and Arts and the only high school diploma issued by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Wilson received the Freedom of Speech Award at the 10th Annual U.S. Comedy Arts Festival held in Aspen, Colorado, and sponsored by HBO.

On October 16, 2005, the Virginia Theatre in New York’s Broadway theatre district was renamed the August Wilson Theatre, the first Broadway theatre to be named after an African-American. In addition, a street has been renamed August Wilson Way.

The historic home of the playwright at Bedford Avenue,where his mother raised him and her other children was dedicated as an official state historic landmark on May 30, 2007.

He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in suburban Pittsburgh on October 8, 2005. His survivors, his third wife, costume designer Constanza Romero, and his two daughters, Sakina Ansari and Azula Carmen were amongst friends, relatives, writers, producers as well as City officials at the graveside.

WORKS CITED

1. Shannon, Sandra G. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington, D.C.: Howard University, 1995.