American Literature
Spring 2012
Spragins

Jitney (1976) by August Wilson

August Wilson (1945-2005), the son of a baker and a cleaning woman, is today America’s pre-eminent playwright. He was born in Pittsburgh and raised in poverty. Describing his youth, he notes that his parents tried to shield him from knowledge of the even greater hardships that they had endured. He said, “My generation of blacks knew very little about the past of our parents. They shielded us from the indignities they suffered.” His education only began when he dropped out of school in the early 1960's, disgusted by racism, and began reading on his own at the local library. He had aspirations to be a poet and sought publication while supporting himself with menial jobs. During his 20's, Wilson hung out with the Hill District corner men, passing time on stoops, in coffee shops, and at Pat's Place, a local cigar store. Years later, the voices he absorbed while hanging loose with retirees and sharpies would re-emerge in his plays, sometimes with little artistic tampering. Most of the plays he would write are set in the neighborhood in which he grew up. But Wilson had to leave home to find his artistic voice. He moved to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978 and found work at the regional theatre there. Jitney was his first play.

For the past twenty-five years Wilson has been engaged in a magnificent theatre project: the ten-part story of the African experience in America during the 20th century: one play set in each decade. The action depicts the struggle towards birth of a genuine black consciousness. The first play in the cycle, Gem of the Ocean, arrived on Broadway last year. The final play of the cycle, Radio Days, just opened at the Yale Rep and is playing right now at Center Stage in Baltimore.

The plays are just wonderful. Wilson possesses gifts as a dramatist that are rarely combined in one person: he has a natural sense of the rhythms of the spoken word; he grasps the power of theatrical imagery, and he generates explosive action in the engine of plot. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a lady blues singer tyrannizes her band while they struggle with abuses and exploitation in the early recording industry. In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, an ex-sharecropper searches for the strands of an extended family separated during the first Great Migration. In Fences, for which Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize, a great hitter from the Negro Leagues, forced to quit baseball so that he can support his family, turns on his son when he enlists in the Army. In The Piano Lesson, another Pulitzer Prize winner, a brother and sister argue about whether to sell their family’s most prized possession, a stand-up piano carved with the likenesses of their great-grand parents.

All of Wilson’s plays are written in the tradition of American psychological realism inherited from Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, but his dramaturgy also incorporates unique aspects of African art. You can hear drumming in the syncopation and improvisation of the spoken word. Moments occur in the plays when the invisible realm of ancestral voice impinges on the day-to-day experience of his characters. In all of his plays Wilson creates characters whose eloquence drives captivating monologues, and he devises plots which build again and again to disturbing and bloody finales. Almost all of Wilson's plays are also set in the Pittsburgh Hill district in which he grew up. Wilson moved away from his home as a young man, but it remains the fertile locale to which he returns in his imagination to write his plays.

Jitney was Wilson’s breakthrough as an artist. Written and set in the late 1970’s, Jitney’s action unfolds in a Pittsburgh gypsy cab garage on the day that the ‘jitney’ drivers learn that their business is being closed down to make way for Urban Renewal. Becker, the owner of the company, is tired. He says, “18 years of driving—you look up one morning and all you’ve got left is what you ain’t spent.” And the day that Becker finds out that the city has condemned his building is also the day his son, Booster, is coming home, having served twenty years in the state pen for murder. Faced with the loss of his job, Youngblood, a Vietnam vet, struggles to avoid the break up of his relationship with Rena and threatens to veer off the straight and narrow. Pressured by racism and facing a slanted playing field in a changing economy, will the drivers turn on each other?


Essay on Jitney

Do middle class values serve the jitney drivers in Pittsburgh in 1978?

Becker's faith in hard work, his strategy of accommodation with racism, and his resolution to follow the rules have been shaken to the core. how have the people in his neighborhood really survived to this point, and what will happen now that the city is moving them out? Has the role of middle class values changed in the years between 1963 and 1978? Has the time come for Becker to reconsider his judgment of Booster's militancy?