The city of Pittsburgh, in Western Pennsylvania, is strategically located at the intersection of three significant waterways: the Allegheny and the Monongahela Rivers, which merge in Pittsburgh to become the Ohio River. Many other cities in New York, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois are located along the shores of the Great Lakes. These advantageously located cities experienced economic boom times beginning in the early 1800’s, and they became preferred destinations during the Great Migration, a roughly sixty-year time period (from 1910-1970) when many Black Americans left the South to travel north in search of better economic and social opportunities. In her book The Warmth of Other Suns, journalist Isabel Wilkerson describes the Great Migration as “the first mass act of independence by a people who were in bondage in this country for far longer than they have been free.”
The twentieth-century American South was a place of terrible harshness for Black Americans. Landmark Supreme Court decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education, and legislation such as the Civil Rights Act, were still decades away. “Jim Crow” laws—the state-sanctioned and state-enforced laws that maintained rigid segregation in all areas of society—as well as blatantly racist practices, such as voter suppression and redlining, combined to create nearly insurmountable odds for Black individuals struggling to thrive and prosper. Moreover, the American South was a violent and dangerous place for Black Americans, often fatally so. These dire circumstances, combined with the prosperous times and plentiful jobs that industry brought to many Northern and Midwestern American cities, led countless Black Southerners to leave their homes and travel north in search of a better life.
Pittsburgh was one such destination city, and the Hill District, where August Wilson grew up and where nine of the ten plays of his American Century Cycle are set, became a vibrant center of Black American life during the early twentieth century. (The exception is Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which is set in Chicago, in 1927.) Initially the communities that made up the Hill District included Irish and Italian immigrants and Eastern European Jews, as well as Black Americans. But the Black community grew the most rapidly, and the Hill District soon became an important cultural center, especially for jazz music, and Hill residents flocked to the many new clubs in the area where famous blues and jazz artists played to enthusiastic crowds.
The characters in The Piano Lesson represent the different ways in which the Great Migration played out. All of the characters (possibly except for Grace) have come to Pittsburgh from the South. Doaker has apparently settled down for good in Pittsburgh, as have Berniece and Maretha. Boy Willie never intends to stay in Pittsburgh, while his friend Lymon never intends to leave. Doaker’s older brother, Wining Boy, travels restlessly back and forth between Pittsburgh, the Midwest, and the South, hoping to find the fame as a musician, and the personal peace, that have so far eluded him. And Avery is described as having “taken to [Pittsburgh] like a fish to water, finding in it opportunities for growth and advancement that did not exist for him in the rural South.”
In 2023, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a history of the Great Migration and the effects of Jim Crow in her dissenting opinion in the affirmative action case. She concludes, “History speaks. In some form or another, it can be heard forever.” Watching The Piano Lesson, we can hear history speaking in the characters’ words, in their songs, and even in the sounds made by Sutter’s Ghost. August Wilson endeavored in his plays to fill in the gaps and erasures created not only by formal histories but even by some Black individuals themselves, represented by Boy Willie (who wants to sell the piano) and Avery (who is unable to bless it because its power is stronger than his attempts to overcome it). Wilson seems to suggest that in order to move forward, Black Americans first needed to acknowledge (as Berniece does) the inheritance of enslavement bequeathed by the ancestors, and to carry that awareness with them as they traveled north into an uncertain future.
Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson. Wikimedia Commons