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Article Excerpt
Cynthia L. Caywood and Carlton Floyd
"She Make You Right with Yourself": Aunt Ester, Masculine Loss and Cultural Redemption in August Wilson's Cycle Plays
August Wilson proclaimed the centuries old matriarch, Aunt Ester, his most significant character. Her presence incarnates a key Wilson idea: The need for African Americans to move forward into the future through embracing their past. This movement has been hindered by African Americans embracing European American values, particularly African American men, who have been hopelessly disenfranchised by European American definitions of masculinity that reward assimilation and result in the rejection of the African sensibilities that Wilson saw as essential to African American survival. Wilson's Decalogue documents repeatedly the need for African American men to reconnect with traditional, culturally rooted African sensibilities as they have been preserved by Aunt Ester. Ultimately, Aunt Ester must die to make way for a male redeemer whose presence symbolizes a restoration of this traditional African ethos in African American lives, a presence not yet existent, but one for which a glimmer of hope remains.
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In Two Trains Running, August Wilson introduces an offstage character when he comes to see as "the most significant persona of [his ten play] cycle" (2005, x). This character is Aunt Ester, the centuries old former slave who, Wilson says, is "the embodiment of African wisdom and tradition--the person who has been alive since 1619 ... and has remained with us" (Dezell 2006, 255). In the play, which is set in Memphis Lee's Pittsburgh diner in 1969, Aunt Ester provides solace and salvation to several of the characters who are attempting to find guidance through their turbulent and changing world. She urges them to reconnect with their past. Her advice is simple: "If you drop the ball, you got to go back and pick it up" (Wilson 1993, 109). Wilson explains her meaning: "[B]lack folk are always looking for something to come from outside of themselves in order to effect their salvation or change their condition in the world" (Grant 2006, 177). In contrast, he says, Aunt Ester "suggests that your experience is alive, that there is a repository of wisdom and experience a person can [and should] tap into" (Lyons 2006, 218).
In Two Trains, then, Aunt Ester incarnates a key Wilson idea--the need for African Americans to embrace their cultural context, the "field of manners," to use James Baldwin's phrase of which Wilson was so fond (Savran 2006, 26), that has been shaped by spirituality, history, community, and tradition. This interest is somewhat nascent in his earliest plays, Jitney and Ma Kainey, although the historical, social, and communal forces that have shaped the characters' lives still provide the context for the plays' events and conflicts. But beginning with Fences, Wilson introduces elements that in their super-naturalism, in their wedding of realism to paradoxical magic or spectacle, forecast Aunt Ester's presence. In Fences, Gabriel Maxson, Troy's younger, brain-damaged brother believes that he is the archangel whose name he shares. At the end of the play, his atavistic dancing and howling blow open the gates of heaven "as wide as God's closet" (1986, 93), allowing Troy's soul to enter. The need for such a figure is further developed in Wilson's next play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. The mysterious, mystical power of the past stands at the center of the play in the form of Herald Loomis, a damaged, rootless wanderer who is able to rediscover his power by finding his "song" after he meets with Bynum, a healer and shaman. Bynum guides him on a regenerative journey to the "City of Bones," the vast, underwater graveyard for the thousands of ancestors who died crossing the Adantic on their bloody journey into slavery. This life-affirming ancestral power is fleshed out in The Piano Lesson, Wilson's next and fifth play. There the estranged siblings, Boy Willie and Berniece, must set aside their bitter differences and join forces to exorcise the ghost of the farmer, Sutter, descendent of the man who owned their great grandparents, who is haunting the family. Their struggle is successful only when Berniece calls upon the spirits of their ancestors for help, a call that Wilson describes as "A rustle of wind blowing across two continents'" (1990, 106). (1)
Through these early plays, then, the need for a cultural figure that can withstand the trauma of this earth, a "grounded" figure that is itself a mouthpiece that can open the gates of heaven, emerges. (2) Moreover, Wilson posits that the possibility of moving forward toward a better future necessitates returning to acknowledge and recuperate a less than heavenly past. No African American need be ashamed of this history, according to Wilson. The enslavement of Africans warrants shame, not those Africans that were enslaved (2001, 32). While the past in its fullness must be acknowledged, there is a particular tradition of artistic expression in this past that Wilson seems most interested in recuperating, for it is in this tradition that:
the African in the confines of the slave quarters sought to invest his spirit with the strength of his ancestors by conceiving in his art, in his song and dance, a world in which he was the spiritual center, and his existence was a manifest act of the creator from whom life flowed. He could then create art that was functional and furnished him with a spiritual temperament necessary for his survival as property and the dehumanizing status that was attendant to that. (Wilson 2001, 19-20)
In these words, Wilson asserts the need for an iconographic presence, a resource or repository invested with a life-affirming ancestral power. The pivotal moment in this idea's development occurs in The Piano Lesson, where sister works with brother, and the ancestors of Boy Willie and Berniece are invoked in a song "that is both a commandment and a plea. With each repetition it gains in strength. It is intended as an exorcism and a dressing for battle" (Wilson 1990, 106). Aunt Ester is an ancestral response to this song, this demand, petition, and cry for divine intervention. (3)
Her vital importance is underscored as she appears, either in name or in presence in four of the final five plays of the cycle. Although she is absent from Wilson's seventh play, Seven Guitars, the drama nonetheless promises that a Redeemer of the African American community will appear. This promise is essential to understanding why in the next play, King Hedley II, the eighth and perhaps the darkest, work of the cycle, Aunt Ester must die. King Hedky's action is shaped by the characters' largely indifferent response to Aunt Ester's unexpected death, which is symbolic of their indifference toward the history and ancestry Aunt Ester represents. (4) In the next play produced, Gem of the Ocean, Aunt Ester is the central character. She guides a desperate young man, Citizen Barlow, to peace and courage by sending him on a metaphorical journey through the Middle Passage to the ancestral City of Bones on the ocean's floor. Finally, in Wilson's last play, Radio Golf set in the mid-nineties, the play's central conflict lies between two African American entrepreneurs "who are planning to bulldoze Aunt Ester's home to make way for their urban renewal project. The play's protagonist, real estate mogul and mayoral candidate Harmond Wilks, ultimately must choose between selling off or selling out this sacred ancestral site or keeping it and putting his heritage to good use.
Given, then, how important Aunt Ester is, especially to the final plays, there is surprisingly little critical commentary about her. What critical commentary there is suggests a shared sense of her importance; however, this acknowledgement is limited both in the extent to which Aunt Ester is examined and in the content of these examinations. For example, Kim Marra, in an essay on Wilson and stereotypes, classifies Aunt Ester as the most powerful example of Wilson's use of the African American matriarch, a "matriarchal deity" (Marra 2000, 154) who is, nonetheless, unhappily "locked in stereotypical bipolar constructions of black femininity" (Marra 2000, 151). Mary Ann Snodgrass offers a similar perspective, identifying her as "the eternal mother to Wilson's black Americans," one who is "the voice of Africa, the culture-keeper" (Snodgrass 2004, 82-3). Charles Isherwood, in his obituary for Wilson, representatively comments that Aunt Ester "came to embody the continuity of spiritual and moral values that Mr. Wilson felt was crucial to the black experience, uniting the descendants of slaves to their African ancestors" (Isherwood 2005, 2). Harry Elam Jr. contends that "Aunt Ester mediates between the worlds of the living and the dead through the force of her will and in a manner that is unique. The unseen Aunt Ester might be Wilson's most feminist construction" (Elam Jr. 2004, 184).
Critical interest in Aunt Ester has also been limited by spirited critical debate over whether or not Wilson is sexist. For example, Kim Marra argues that he fails to create meaningful roles for women, relying instead on worn out and redactive racial stereotypes. Mary Ann Snodgrass concurs, labeling his female characters as two dimensional and claiming that the plays "situate women in limited and limiting spheres of influence under the burden of a single character flaw or weakness" (Snodgrass 2004, 220). While Elam Jr. argues that Wilson's women "challenge orthodoxy and press against historical limitations," he also concedes that they are largely relegated to secondary roles (Elam Jr. 1994,165). (5) The evidence of the plays themselves suggests that Wilson was far less interested in women than men, as there are 55 male and only 22 female characters in the ten-play cycle, and Snodgrass correctly argues that Aunt Ester is his first dominant female character (Snodgrass 2004, 82). Wilson himself admitted that creating...
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