August Wilson: The People's Playwright - Interview

These recollections are accompanied by warnings. "Walking around with 12 cents in your pocket and holes in your shoes, I don't recommend it," he says. "Fortunately, it turned out okay. It didn't have to turn out like this, but if it hadn't, I'd still be living somewhere, writing some stuff, carrying my little tablets around, doing the thing that I do. Because I found that it was a way to live my life, and it was a joyful way to live it. I've never regretted the decision to become a writer."

What Wilson brought to those early experiences--in addition to determination and a sense of adventure--was an exacting curiosity and that love of words. As he went in search of life lessons, the Hill District proved to be a worthy laboratory. He read Home to Harlem, in which Claude McKay describes a cigar shop in Pittsburgh called "Pat's Place," where railroad porters gathered. Wilson was excited by the reference and ventured to this outpost, looking for answers.

"There were these old guys standing around there, in their 70s--the elders of the community--and they were talking about all kinds of stuff: the news and politics, the paper," he recalls. "So I would just stand around and listen to them. I was just trying to learn something about life. I wasn't standing there thinking, `Oh, I'm going to be a writer.' I was just there like, `Hey, man, how did you get to be so old, `cause it's hard out here.' I really wanted to know how they survived: `How do you get to be 70 years old in America? Man, this is 1965, and you were born in 1890--something.'

"So it was that kind of thing. I would just watch them. It was just fun to hang around there. They called me Youngblood: `Hey, Youngblood.'"

It is easy to understand why, years later, as a dramatist, Wilson has chosen the Hill District as the backdrop for most of the 10 plays through which he hopes to examine, decade by decade, the 20th-century black experience. Community life represented a dynamic fusion of struggles, secrets, fantasies and strengths. The conversations that he heard and in which he participated supplied the foundation for the intimate dialogue characteristic of his plays. The intergenerational camaraderie that he encountered among black men fashioned his perceptions.

Wilson-the-playwright describes an exchange:

"One old guy called me to him one time because I had moved, and I had my little daughter, and he said, `You moved?'

"And I said, `Yeah.'

"And he said, `You come back and visit?'

"I said, `Yeah.'

"And he said, `Well, I ain't going to be here when you come back, but I've been watching you.'

"And I go, `Yes, sir.'

"And he said, `Yeah. You carrying around a 10-gallon bucket. You carry that 10-gallon bucket through life, and you gon' always be disappointed.' He said, `Get you a little cup. Carry that through life. And that way, if somebody put a little bit in it, why you got sumpn. Yeah. That 10-gallon bucket ain't never gon' be full. You know?'

"And I go, `Yes, sir.'

"He gave me a dollar or a quarter, told me goodbye, and I never saw him again. I think he was dying then; he was an ,old guy. But just from his observation of me, he was telling me, `Man, ... you gon' always be disappointed with that 10-gallon bucket.' So I managed to cut it down to a gallon bucket, but I never did get the little cup."