"She make you right with yourself": Aunt Ester, masculine loss and cultural redemption in August Wilson's cycle plays.(Essays)(Critical essay)

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.

**********

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: