“There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone.” — August Wilson
August Wilson’s words arrived in torrents, revealed truths and touched lives, told extraordinary stories about ordinary people, created magic in a theatrical world of light and shadow. He died Sunday at age 60, a playwright and an American.
We remember him for the plays he left behind, an epic cycle of African-American lives and culture in the 20th Century. We remember him for his personal story, his rise from Pittsburgh to world acclaim.
And we remember him for his words, short and muscular, a string that yielded power and beauty, that sounded gorgeous, arguably sublime, even as the speaker reached a crescendo.
“Those who would deny black Americans their culture would also deny them their history and the inherent values that are a part of all human life,” he said in a 1996 address titled “The Ground on Which I Stand.”
He made it clear in that address that he was part of a larger story.
“Growing up in my mother’s house at 1727 Bedford Ave. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I learned the language, the eating habits, the religious beliefs, the gestures, the notions of common sense, attitudes towards sex, concepts of beauty and justice, and the responses to pleasure and pain, that my mother had learned from her mother, and which you could trace back to the first African who set foot on the continent. It is this culture that stands solidly on these shores today as a testament to the resiliency of the African-American spirit.”
He learned about life, learned from his mother and elders, learned from the blues and the books.
“From my early childhood, books have always been an important part of my life,” he said at a 1999 library celebration in Pittsburgh. “That has carried over in my adulthood and I have often fallen asleep with a book in my arms where there should have been a woman. I have stained the pages of books with coffee, ketchup, water, mustard, bourbon and more than a few times with tears.”
More Top Picks Best Stick Vacuums
In the end, that’s what we are left with. Wilson’s words, his prose and plays.
For as Wilson put it, “writing a play is like walking down the landscape of the self.” Those words came from the foreword of “Seven Black Plays,” an anthology of award-winning works from Columbia College’s Theodore Ward Prize for African-American Playwriting.
Wilson lauded the works of his colleagues and offered up the challenge that confronts every writer facing a blank page or blank computer screen. “To write for the ages is within our capabilities, which are as wide as God’s closet and embrace much finery.”
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic