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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Toward the end of August Wilson's exquisite play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" (revived at the Royale, under the deft direction of Marion McClinton), the eponymous Delta blues singer, whose low throaty contralto broadcasts her impudence and her independence, turns to her session musicians and opines about the blues (which the real Rainey claimed to have christened in 1902 on a tent-show junket). "White folks don't understand about the blues," she says. "They hear it come out, but they don't know how it got there. They don't understand that's life's way of talking. You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life." The blues are catastrophe expressed lyrically. In their bathos and braggadocio, they repeat and repair what Zora Neale Hurston called "the muteness of slavery." The music allows African-Americans, Wilson says, "to reconnect, to reassemble and gird up for the next battle." His play is itself a blues song, and it does, onstage, what Rainey says her songs do: it understands life; it takes an empty world and fills it up with something.
"I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon's lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes," Hurston wrote in 1950. Wilson shows that this lack of curiosity--a sort of chronic amnesia--extends to African-Americans as well. "Blacks in America...
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