Draft chapters for my American Century Cycle study group workbook - Gem of the Ocean
Gem of the Ocean
Syllabus
Week 9: Gem of the Ocean (2003) Synopsis: Set in Pittsburgh in 1904, the play features a man whose small crime has had deadly consequences for another man. Feeling guilty, he comes seeking the spiritual healing of Aunt Ester. A recurring character in Wilson’s plays, Ester claims to be 285 years old and is the kind matriarch of her household in Pittsburgh.
– August Wilson in the “City That Encourages Dreams”. https://august wilson studygroup.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/project_muse_588846.pdf (short read, great bio info)
– Prologue: definition and examples – https://literarydevices.net/prologue/
– Baraka: Columbia the Gem of the Ocean – https://augustwilsonstudygroup.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/baraka-gem-of-the-ocean.pdf
(early dramatic piece by Baraka, not really a forerunner to Wilson’s Gem, but definitely an influence piece)
– YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXbpLBU1gTGwfhRV207HTXPb (Playlist music selections from the play show, perhaps, church origins of blues music. Plus, lots of video clips from performances.)
– Dramaturgical case study of Gem of the Ocean: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3512&context=etd
(mainly pages 16-34, Gem of the Ocean Textual Analysis). The dramaturgical case study included has some interesting merit as the MA dissertation by a white student, who directed an all-white cast in performing Gem of the Ocean at her college, fully cognizant of what she read in August Wilson interviews about why that was not the way he would go forward. A lot of courage and spunk! I don’t know if this has been done before. Please checkout the section on textual analysis (pps 16-34).
– Huntington Literary Guide for Teachers – Gem of the Ocean: https://augustwilsonstudygroup.wordpress.com/huntington-literary-guide-for-teachers-gem-of-the-ocean/
— Articles about quilting: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/did-quilts-hold-codes-to-the-underground-railroad
Wilson dedicated Gem of the Ocean to his two daughters, Sakina and Azula. To me, that dedication indicated Wilson’s intent that the play be one for future generations, one whose themes and plots would endure and continue to inform readers and theater-goers. Interesting that Wilson wrote eight plays before dedicating one to his children.
To my daughters:
Sakina Ansari
Azula Carmen Wilson,
May the circle be unbroken
Also interesting that the play is the first one, chronologically, in the Cycle, though the penultimate one in order of plays written. I found a couple of Wilson poems in various places on the theme of advice to future generations, one expressly written by him for his daughter. Here are the two Wilson poems:
“Song, go to those yonder hills
and sit with the gods –
Call out their names
as Gabriel, a mighty note
on his judgement horn.
Hide not your face,
for you are not a sparrow
and thunder breaks not your wings –
As the gods go,
go with them in my name.”
* * * * *
“Lean ahead! Languish not in the toils
of distant dreams gone by.
Be willing as a warrior, brave,
but donned with wicked intelligence
That dispels and frightens foolishness.
Remake each error with courageous correcting –
Conceive, conspire with each instance for its terrible honesty –
Give to each hallowed star its own revolving orbit –
And many roads will open for you.”
* * * * * Gem of the Ocean is the second play in the Cycle to begin with a defined prologue. The first one was King Hedley II, the seventh play in the Cycle, and the play in which Aunt Ester dies, as opposed to Gem of the Ocean, a play that fully features Aunt Ester as a character, more than any other play in the Cycle. So both “Aunt Ester” plays open with prologues, establishing Wilson’s chops as a playwright in the classical tradition established by the Greek and Roman dramatists and Shakespeare. As an aside, five plays by Shakespeare open with prologues, Pericles, Henry V, Henry VIII, Troilus and Cressida, and Romeo and Juliet. Two others, Macbeth (the Witches) and King Richard III (as Duke of Gloucester before he became King) open with what may be called prologues. See my notes here for more on the structure of the play.
What is the source of the title, Gem of the Ocean? There is no ocean in the play itself. There is a river, but no ocean. Only in the play-within-the-play, i.e., the mystical journey to the City of Bones, do we encounter an ocean. We know of the song, an almost American hymn, Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean, and we know of the controversy between the American, “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” and the British, “Britannia, Price of the Ocean,” as to authorship and precedence. The initiation journey to the “City of Bones” almost suggests that the City is the Gem of the Ocean. Aunt Ester tells Citizen, “The people made a kingdom out of nothing.”
That brings us to a series of comparisons between Gem of the Ocean, the first chronological play in the Cycle, and Jitney, the first play written in the Cycle. Several similarities are pointed out by Professor Alan Nadel in his edited volume of essays, Completing the Twentieth Cycle. (“Returning Again, Again: Business in the Street In Jitney and Gem of the Ocean”). In Jitney, Booster, a star student-athlete, elects to murder his white girlfriend after being falsely accused of rape, while in Gem, Garret Brown chooses to die of drowning rather than be punished for stealing a bucket of nails that he did not steal. In both cases there is a suggestion of a sense of honor and an adherence to truth. Both plays highlight spaces sheltering families formed not by bloodlines but by mutual affiliations: the jitney station is a place brought together by a need (for transportation) not being met by the local economy, a gathering of men who create a livelihood essentially out of nothing. The sanctity of the jitney station (and, thus, the livelihood of the workers and their customers) is under attack by eminent domain and urban renewal. The sanctity of Aunt Ester’s house (This is a peaceful house!) is under attack from Caesar’s arrest warrants.
Let’s talk for a moment about Wilson’s inclusion of the closing lines from the poem, Thanatopsis (a view of death) by William Cullen Bryant. By way of background, Bryant was considered by many the first distinctive American poet, all former being British imitations or derivatives. For 50 years, Bryant was regarded as the leading American poet. He was an abolitionist and a founder of the Republican Party.
By archiving and memorializing the poem’s final lines in Gem of the Ocean, Wilson connects the plight of African American life with the great struggle for progress that is the essence of being American. And while “thanatopsis” the word is Greek for “a view of death,” Wilson turns it on its head and makes it a call for life. Eli says, “You die by how you live.” I am reminded of the Claude McKay oft-anthologized sonnet, If We Must Die, a quasi-suicide note that is considered, instead, a call to action.
It is also worth mentioning here the observation of the similarities between the City of Bones and the Valley of Dry Bones in the Old Testament. Ezekiel 37:4 connects Gem of the Ocean to Herald Loomis’s vision in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.
In previous sessions I have discussed the mask wearing during Citizen’s voyage to the City of Bones. Here I propose that the wearing of European dramatic masks by Eli, Solly and Black Mary during Citizen’s initiation both connects Wilson’s playwriting to that of the great Roman and Greek tragedians who preceded him and foreshadows the use of blackface and war paint (masks) in Radio Golf.
* * * * *
I fell a couple of weeks behind due to a really bad bout with hay fever. I had a major exposure to pollen dust out walking to my neighborhood public library, and of course, because we’ve been “shut in” with COVID, my immunity to hay fever this year was all out of whack. Such is life.
I completed the reading of Gem for the Ocean for tomorrow’s discussion and was amazed at some many oblique and direct references the play made to portions of Dante’s Divine Comedy, especially the second canticle, Purgatorio. And it’s not just specific references, but the whole story of one to the whole story of the other.
Before going too far and too deep, let me share with you a quick/compact summary I posted to a blog last December when a different group was covering “Gem.” Here’s the link: https://raymmaxx.wordpress.com/2021/12/11/blogmas-day-11/
As Citizen Barlow tours the underwater City of Bones, he constantly hears its inhabitants exhorting him to “remember me.” Isn’t it ironic that throughout his journey in Purgatory, Dante hears the same exhortation, “remember me,” often accompanied by the explanation that souls in Purgatory, when prayed for and thus remembered by humans, find their periods of penitence of shorter duration? In Canto 5 (130-133), Pia says to the pilgrim Dante,
“Oh, when you have returned into the world
and rested from the long and weary way . . . .
Kindly remember me – my name is Pia.”
In Canto 6 (25-31), in a conversation between Dante and his guide, Virgil, Dante observes,
And after I was free
of all those shades who prayed that others pray
to speed them on their way to sanctity,
“O my true light, you seem to have denied
explicitly, in a particular verse,”
said I, “that prayer can bend high Heaven’s decree,
Yet this is all the people pray for here.”
Then the plot thickens. In Canto 13 (146-150), another resident of Purgatory, Sapia, says to Dante,
“It’s a great sign that God must love you!
So please, assist me sometimes by your prayer.
I beg of you, by all you’re yearning for . . . .
go to my neighbors and renew my name.”
Finally, in Canto 27 (139-142), Dante’s “graduation,” i.e., the completion of his understudy with Virgil, is reminiscent of and analogous to Citizen’s emergence from his ordeal with the City of Bones:
“No longer wait for what I do or say.
Your judgement now is free and whole and true;
to fail to follow its will would be to stray.
Lord of yourself I crown and miter you.”
* * * * *
Let’s begin with the proposition that Gem of the Ocean is one of the most linearly constructed plays in the cycle. Let’s examine the development of the plot using Freytag’s Pyramid.
In Technique of the Drama (1863), Gustav Freytag outlined what he considered to be the most successful structure for a play, based on the writings of Aristotle, Shakespeare, and the format of the well-made play. Briefly, Freytag believed the action of the play could be organized in the shape of a triangle, stressing that there should be five distinct parts:
The introduction (or exposition) explains the place and time of the action, and briefly characterizes the environment. Often, the exposition is a summary of what has happened before the play itself begins. Following a very short prologue that sort of sets the parameters of Aunt Ester’s visitation schedule, i.e., she see people on Tuesdays and the house is a peaceful sanctuary, we are introduced to the key characters, Eli, Black Mary, Selig, Solly, and Aunt Ester. As exposition, we learn that Eli takes care of the place, Black Mary cooks and cleans, Selig is in and out as a merchant, and Solly is a routine visitor.
As an inciting incident, we discover a local man, accused of stealing nails, drowns himself in the river rather than face justice for something he didn’t do. And late in the scene, Aunt Ester makes her long awaited (by us) appearance.
The rising action begins with Citizen Barlow’s surprise entry into the house through the upstairs window. Citizen Barlow is desperately seeking an audience with Aunt Ester to help him with a burden weighing on his soul. He has been told on the street that she can help him. Aunt Ester is drawn to Barlow because he reminds her of one of her sons. Aunt Ester ends up offering him not only work but a place to stay. There is almost immediate chemistry between Citizen Barlow and Black Mary when they meet, which Aunt Ester encourages. In a slight complication, Black Mary’s brother, Caesar, is not so taken with Citizen Barlow, Still, the romance continues.
The climax is the highest point of the action, the highest point of tension, after which the rest of the play becomes inevitable. Gem has two climaxes. They are: 1) Aunt Ester’s decision to “treat” Citizen Barlow with a therapeutic “journey” to the “City of Bones”; and 2) Solly’s decision to burn down the local mill before his trip back south to help his sister and Caesar’s action of seeking to arrest Solly for his crime.
Two climaxes deserve two falling actions. The falling action occurs after the climax. It is usually shorter than the rising action, since there is necessarily less suspense. The falling action shows the result of the climax, and sometimes includes a calm before the storm: a moment when we believe that everything can still turn out all right. Barlow learns important lessons in repentance and forgiveness as a result of his therapy. Solly kneecaps Caesar when Caesar comes to arrest Solly for the suspected arson.
The resolution (also known variously as the denouement or catastrophe) is the closing action, where the loose ends of the play are tied. It must be brief and simple, where the character’s downfall is relieved through a great deed. In Gem, Solly seeks to escape and Citizen Barlow, now relieved of his spiritual burden, feels empowered to assist Solly. But Caesar catches Solly on the escape route, shooting him in the chest from a distance. Selig and Citizen return Solly to Aunt Ester’s house where he dies. Citizen, transformed by all his experiences, dons Solly’s overcoat, takes his walking stick, and heads south to complete Solly’s work rescuing his family.
* * * * *
Aunt Ester only sees visitors on Tuesdays. Tuesday is Ogun Day in the Yoruba calendar. Ogun is the god of iron and steel, an important deity for early century Pittsburgh. According to a book about the Yoruba religion, The Way of the Orisha (available online at https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/religion.occult.new_age/african/The-Way-of-the-Orisa.pdf), “Tuesday belongs to Ogun and rituals for overcoming enemies or conflicts are best performed on this day.” And when Citizen Barlow makes his pilgrimage to the City of Bones, he carries a piece of iron with him to make him strong of heart.
Aunt Ester hires Citizen Barlow to help Eli erect a stone wall on the side of the house, ostensibly to keep Caesar out. Solly suggests taking some wood and building a fence (a throwback to a different play, perhaps, see Fences), but Eli insists on building a stone wall.
Garret Brown chose to die in honor, rather than live in shame. Somewhat reminiscent of Boomer’s decision in Jitney to kill his girlfriend for falsely accusing him of rape, though I still see that as more of a Wilson vindication for Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.
Citizen Barlow meets Garrett Brown again in the City of Bones, where Brown stands watch as the Gatekeeper. Barlow confesses his sin and repents and is allowed to enter. There he meets “spirits” who exhort him to “remember me,” reminiscent of shadows in Dante’s Purgatorio. At one point, Barlow sees faces that all resemble his own, with tongues on fire, a metaphor cited in previous notes (and also cited in Melville’s Moby Dick).
There is a subtle suggestion early in Scene 2 that Aunt Ester’s son, Junebug, was lynched.
Garret Brown’s obituary is worthy of mention.
Solly was Citizen Barlow’s spiritual father. But might he have been Citizen’s biological father? Such a conclusion is hinted at in the play.
The relationship between Black Mary and her brother Caesar Wilks goes up and down throughout the play. Ultimately, Black Mary disowns her brother. But we find out later in Radio Golf that her brother never did disown her.
Aunt Ester explains how she became Ester Tyler and how she passes on the matriarchal identity to Black Mary. Coincidentally, a different “Black Mary,” also known as Stagecoach Mary, achieved fame as a pioneer protecting westward bound stage coaches during the “winning of the west.”
There is a longstanding tension between Solly and Caesar Wilks. I think it goes back to Caesar’s “ruffian” days as an outlaw himself, a period he describes in the play.
Interesting that August Wilson mentions John Hanson who Caesar describes as starting a riot. An internet search turns up two John Hansons. One, the President of the Continental Congress, the other, a senator who supported a program/policy to repatriate enslaved Africans to West Africa called the African Colonization Society, which resulted in the establishment of Liberia. There are internet rumors that the first John Hanson, President of the Continental Congress and hence, the first American President, was a free black from Maryland. If so, that was some riot he started.
I loved the quoting (and memorialization) of the William Cullen Bryant poem, Thanatopsis. Such classical beauty in poetry!
And finally, Eli’s eulogy of Solly brought tears to my eyes, as it does every time I read it.
“They laid him low. Put him in the cold ground. David and Solomon. Two kings in the cold ground. Solly never did find his freedom. He always believed he was gonna find it. The battlefield is always bloody. Blood here. Blood there. Blood over yonder. Everybody bleeding. Everybody been cut and most of them don’t even know it. But they bleeding just the same. It’s all you can do sometime just to stand up. Solly stood up and walked. He lived in truth and he died in truth. He died on the battlefield. You live right you die right.”
Cross-posted from Blogmas (https://raymmaxx.wordpress.com/2021/12/11/blogmas-day-11/ )
Tomorrow we meet by Zoom to discuss Gem of the Ocean, the ninth and penultimate play in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. In the play, Aunt Esther and her crew take Citizen Barlow on a journey by boat to the City of Bones, an under-the-Atlantic city built by and with the bones of those who did not survive the middle passage. In preparation for that journey, Barlow is instructed to find two coins, face side up, and a length of iron chain (as a tribute to Ogun, Yoruba god of iron).
In one fell swoop, Wilson ties together ancient (Yoruba, Egyptian), classical (Greek mythology), and Christian cultural archetypes.
Extending the mythology, the coins Barlow must find are to pay the ferryman, Charon, who steers the boat containing the souls of the dead over the rivers Styx and Acheron, an ancient Greek myth with Egyptian roots.
Aken was the patron and custodian of the boat named “Meseket” that carried the souls of the dead into the underworld in Ancient Egyptian mythology.
Charon, the ferryman, with the souls of the dead, headed to the underworld in Greek mythology.
The City of Bones has twelve gates, just as New Jerusalem is described in Revelations (Wilson doesn’t mention that, nor did he need to – everybody got it!), a city whose builder and maker is God (Hebrews 11:10).
After his journey, and upon the death of Solly, who had previously worked as a dragman on the Underground Railroad, Citizen Barlow placed the same two coins in Solly’s hands, an obulus for his troubles.
This play is the Mother of mixed metaphors!
* * * * *
I’ll begin with two characters mentioned who show up in subsequent plays in the Cycle. Roper Lee hangs out with Citizen in Gem and shows up again in Joe Turner. Rev. Tolliver preaches the Garret Brown eulogy in Gem and also appears in Joe Turner.
But overall, Gem is Aunt Ester’s play. We meet her as a fully developed character. We find out about her childhood, her children’s names, and even her plans for eventual succession of her community role to Black Mary. We learn about her former husbands and current suitors. And Wilson introduces us to her cooking methods, her manner of consulting and giving advice and even her orchestration of the journey to the City of Bones, a process she has obviously supervised before.
In previous sessions we talked about Solly’s day job as a collector of pure, or dog feces. Pure collector is listed as one of the ten worst jobs in London during the Victoria era. Mixing the pure with water makes a compound called “bate,” and bate is applied to leather to break up the fibrous structure to make the leather soft and pliable before the final stage of tanning. I visited rooftop tanning operations in Morocco, but I never saw (or smelled) dog feces being used. Maybe they do it differently in Morocco.
* * * * *
It’s a bit advanced in the Cycle, but I would like to propose yet another way of describing and analyzing the structure of the plays.
Northrop Frye, a Canadian literature professor, described and analyzed the books of the Bible, and the stories contained therein, in a book named “The Code.” As a unified book with a coherent narrative, Frye described the plot changes and development as a “U-shaped Plot” type of comedy, beginning with Genesis and the creation story, followed by a long line of historical disasters and triumphs, concluding with the final victory of the eternal city of Jerusalem at the end of Revelations. The Bible subplots, i.e., the various kingdoms and rulers in the Old Testament, as well as the lives of various disciples, all provide a sort of repetition of images and issues that serve to tie together the many “books” of the Bible, creating as well a sense of deja vu and premonition across the repetitive action and suggesting that the images and issues are “both themselves and not themselves,” suggesting that time itself may be an illusion.
In Frye’s second book, “Words with Power,” he expands his analysis from the internal structure of the Bible above to relationships and interrelationships between Biblical language and thought and the language and thought of everyday life, of mythology and of literature.
* * * * *
The decade plays portray triumphs and disasters of families and individuals in the Hill District. In each play there are events that seem to take the wind out of the sails of the characters, especially the protagonists. But in each play there is a little something at the end that suggests that the tide may be turning and the ultimate fate of characters and of the community, improving.
There is repetition, of character personality types and of issues, like incarceration, inter-community violence, urban renewal and gentrification, theft of land and refusal to pay an honest wage, and we see infidelity, and distrust, and resentment. The repetition, on the surface, might suggest a deficit of imagination on the part of the playwright, but that would be a very superficial analysis that overlooks the role of repetition as a unifying factor across the decades as well as across the plays themselves.
We see inter-spliced the language of religion and spiritualism and the language of everyday life, augmented occasionally by the language of the blues, Wilson would add, always descriptive of a less than optimal situation, but always celebratory at some level.
Frye wrote about the primary concerns of life, the things we share with all plant and animal life, like food, drink, sex, property and freedom of movement, all embodied in myth and literature. Then he contrasts these with secondary concerns of religion, class, nation, tribe and their concerns, piety, virtue, patriotism, embodied in culture.
We see these issues played out in the alternation of decades in the Cycle plays. Wilson goes out of his way to focus our attention on food, drink, sex (in a subtle way – the plays are never pornographic), and certainly property and freedom of movement. Every play features these things prominently. But there is also the focus, often soft-pedaled, on piety, virtue and patriotism and we can think of plenty of examples.
The long and short of it is that Frye provides us an interesting model for thinking about the plays, once we have worked past the inherent resistance to comparing Wilson’s storytelling to that of the Bible.
Columbia, Gem of the Ocean has its own interesting story twists. Was it an original or was it copied by/from Britannia, Pride of the Ocean? Was its author Thomas A’Beckett, David Shaw, or George Willig? What is the significance of its 1957 revival as a Broadway hit, The Music Man, a musical about a fraudulent band director who was at heart a con man?
One final post-discussion idea is the meaning of the title away from the above idiosyncrasies of the song. Perhaps, as someone in the group discussion mentioned, the actual “gem” is the City of Bones itself, and not just the name of a ship. “It is a beautiful city,” Aunt Esther describes, where “the people made a kingdom out of nothing.” What if Columbia is not the lady with the flame in the Columbia Pictures logo, nor her antecedent in Roman mythology, Minerva, nor her antecedent in Greek mythology, Athena, nor the Babylonian Semiramis, all representative of Isis of the great Egyptian pantheon, but an actual submerged city, maybe even the mythical Atlantis.
And maybe, to extend the metaphor even further, the submerged City of Bones represents not necessarily an ancient underwater city, but the promised destiny of America, lost at sea by a mean and selfish sea captain.
* * * * *
Structure: Gem of the Ocean is one of two plays in the cycle to have a prologue. Why might a play have a prologue?
They say Euripides invented the prologue. He prefixed a prologue to the beginning of his plays to explain upcoming action and make it comprehensible for his audience. Other dramatists in Ancient Greece continued this tradition, making the prologue a part of the formula for writing plays. Greek prologues generally explained events that happened in time before the time depicted in the play. Roman dramatists carried the prologue to a new level, giving even greater importance to this initial part of their plays.
From Wikipedia:
In what is perhaps a coincidence, French playwright John Racine introduced his play, Esther, a choral tragedy, with a prologue with the character Piety as its speaker. The prologue in Gem features Eli, described as Aunt Ester’s gatekeeper and a friend to Solly.
“The actor reciting the prologue would appear dressed in black, a stark contrast to the elaborate costumes used during the play. The prologue removed his hat and wore no makeup. He may have carried a book, scroll, or a placard displaying the title of the play. He was introduced by three short trumpet calls, on the third of which he entered and took a position downstage. He made three bows in the current fashion of the court, and then addressed the audience.
The Elizabethan prologue was unique in incorporating aspects of both classical and medieval traditions. In the classical tradition, the prologue conformed to one of four subgenres: the sustatikos, which recommends either the play or the poet; the epitimetikos, in which a curse is given against a rival, or thanks given to the audience; dramatikos, in which the plot of the play is explained; and mixtos, which contains all of these things. In the medieval tradition, expressions of morality and modesty are seen, as well as a meta-theatrical self-consciousness, and an unabashed awareness of the financial contract engaged upon by paid actors and playwrights, and a paying audience.”
The other play in the cycle with a prologue is King Hedley II, the play set in the 1980’s where Aunt Ester dies.
Aunt Ester is featured very prominently in Gem. Of course, the setting of the play is Aunt Ester’s house, 1839 Wylie, and we know that 1839 is a symbolic reference to the year of the Amistad mutiny, a revolt by enslaved Africans that resulted ultimately in repatriation to Sierra Leone and, perhaps most importantly, in a crystallization of the abolitionist movement in the United States. Perhaps Wilson could have used 1831 Wylie, in homage to Nat Turner’s revolt, or 1859 Wylie, in homage to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. The difference, perhaps, is in the success of the Armistad versus the failure of the other two. Or it could just be the residential address.
Interesting that Eli opens the Prologue with the exhortation “This is a peaceful house.” It is a peaceful house every day, but Aunt Ester will only see visitors on Tuesdays. In one of the previous sessions, a group member revealed that in the Yoruba calendar, Tuesday is day three of a four day week and is devoted to the Orisha, the collection or pantheon of Yoruba gods,
Citizen Barlow has just recently arrived from down south and is basically homeless, sleeping under a bridge. Aunt Ester takes him in, gives him a room, and provides him work with Eli building a wall around back. The stated purpose of the wall is to “keep Caesar on the other side.” Caesar is a local law enforcement agent/officer, so keeping him out adds to the sanctuary nature of the house.
Early in Act Two, preparing for the trip to the City of Bones, Aunt Ester instructs Black Mary to “Go get the map.” Following a monologue with Mr. Citizen, Black Mary enters with a quilt that has a map embroidered on it. We can talk about how an embroidered quilt is a type of archive with information embedded in it. Historians have differing opinions about whether quilts were used as signaling devices for escaping slaves on the underground railroad. Interesting that Wilson decided to associate the map to the City of Bones with a quilt. It certainly could have just been a map.
One more tidbit and I am going to close out this “introduction.” William Cullen Bryant is supposed to have written at age 17 the famous poem, Thanatopsis, a portion of which appears is Act Two Scene Two and is echoed at the very end of the play. A year later, when Bryant went away to law school, his father found the poem and submitted a draft of it to the North American Review, a publication still in print. Critics doubted the authenticity of the poem, much like Wilson’s 9th grade teacher doubted his authorship of his paper on Napoleon. Later in life, critics accused Wilson of borrowing heavily from the playwright Arthur Miller, or at least emulating his style. So, as an aside, why is the partial text of Thanatopsis included in the play?
From William Cullen Bryant, Thanatopsis:
“So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.”
* * * * *
Quite possibly because of current events, I found myself focusing early on two thoughts. First, I focused on the repetition by Eli that Aunt Esther’s house at 1839 Wylie Avenue was a peaceful house, a safe space, a place of sanctuary. Today we have sanctuary cities, whole cities that seek to provide a safe space, outside of and secure from the harm of the reach of immigration laws. Aunt Ester’s house was a sanctuary for migrants, not necessarily fleeing the long arm of immigration law, but certainly seeking to escape the reach of oppressive legal structures.
At the same time, why is Citizen Barlow allowed to stay at Aunt Ester’s house? Because he can help Eli build a wall, a wall whose purpose it is ostensibly to keep Caesar (the Law) out. We see the wall and sanctuary as serving opposite masters. But perhaps this play gives us a different perspective on both sanctuaries and walls.
It also occurred to me that this play could be (perhaps should be) called “The Adventures of Citizen Barlow.” But to do so would detract from the development of other characters, from Black Mary who is “becoming” Aunt Ester; from Solly, who dies in spite of the contribution he makes to the “freedom” of so many others; and from Caesar, who appears to be an unredeemable nuisance on the community, but who may, before it is all over with, may find redemption as well as “his justice.”
I was also struck by the sweetness of the courtship between Citizen Barlow and Black Mary, where Black Mary is open to Citizen Barlow’s advances, but keeps it real at every level. And I can’t ignore the thoughtfulness expressed between both Aunt Ester and Eli (platonic) and Aunt Ester and Solly (too much romance talk for two old people, perhaps).
I spoke in an earlier session about how contrived I found the visit to the “City of Bones,” about how Eli, Solly and Black Mary must have enacted this routine before, rehearsed it, worked out its flaws. I also mentioned in an earlier post the sadness of the Garret Brown obituary. For me, it still evokes the same feelings of poetic sadness and regret.
A new thought this reading is the similarity between Caesar Wilks long monologue and the Parable of the Talents (overlook me, I’m always trying to find signs and signals of redemption in Caesar, possibly because he reminds me so much of men in my family, for better or worse).
One member of our group focused our attention on the stolen bucket of nails that resulted in Garret Brown’s death early in the play. Symbolically, Jesus was executed by being “nailed” to the cross, so that is a heavy metaphor. Nails are essential to carpenters and for building construction and that makes them valuable. England was the largest producer of nails worldwide during the American Revolution and nails were rare in the colonies. People would burn old houses just to extract the nails and many people “made” their own nails at home. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable. I am myself a nail maker.” Just for kicks, here is a history of nails and a video of a blacksmith making nails.
This mention of “honor” brings us to another point in our discussion. Garret Brown could swim. Eli mentions in Act 1 Scene 1 that Brown was “treading water,” suggesting that he could have saved himself, had he so chosen. Brown chose death before dishonor because he knew he was not guilty of theft. We will see that theme of a sense of honor, and of preserving and protecting that honor in subsequent plays.
postscript. There is a possible connection between the City of Bones and Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Dry Bones. Certainly, the Twelve Gates of the City of Bones is connected to the mention of Twelve Gates in the Bible.
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Gem of the Ocean is the penultimate play in August Wilson’s American Century Cycle, and the first play in chronological order of the ten decades covered in the series. It is Aunt Ester’s play, as she figures prominently among all the characters in the ensemble cast. We’ll come back to that, but first, let’s chat briefly about the title.
The title, Gem of the Ocean, comes from a patriotic song and unofficial national anthem written in the 1840’s by Thomas A’Becket, a British musician and long time resident of Philadelphia, at the request of David T. Shaw. Columbia Gem of the Ocean is often compared to the British song, Britannia Pride of the Ocean, which appeared a few years later, and, in fact, reasonable people differ about which one came first. But that part is not important for our discussion here. What is important is that the song saw a great resurgence in the 1957 Broadway hit, The Music Man, a musical set in 1912 Iowa about a con man, Harold Hill, who convinces schools to buy marching band uniforms and instruments but who is not a musician and has no intention of teaching the bands how to perform. The play has an interesting thematic connection to Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, also set in 1912, which also featured a con man, Theodore Hickman, aka Hickey. The Music Man won five Tony awards in 1958.
Also, in 1957, jazz musician Charles Mingus produced an album, The Clown, which included a spoken word piece by Jean Shepard featuring a seal climbing and descending a ladder playing Columbia Gem of the Ocean on a plastic trumpet.
We’ve gone far afield of the Wilson play. Aunt Ester is not a con man like Harold Hill in The Music Man or Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. But she is clearly a magician and her “routine” is the play within a play she and the residents of her rooming house perform when they “take” Citizen Barlow (and others) to the mythical City of Bones. Let’s unpack this play within a play, starring Ester Tyler.
Step 1. Aunt Ester directs Barlow to take a bath, put on clean clothes, and say a prayer. Black Mary helps him prepare the bath.
Step 2. Eli and Solly share a drink of whisky with Barlow. (Eli, Solly, and Black Mary are all “in” on it and clearly have participated in this “routine” before.
Step 3. The hypnotism begins. Citizen Barlow goes “under” at Aunt Ester’s suggestion. He goes down to the bottom of the boat. He can feel the boat rocking. Eli, Solly and Black Mary reinforce the hypnotic suggestion.
Step 4. Eli and Solly don masks and pretend to chain Barlow to the boat’s bottom. Barlow becomes convinced he is chained to the boat.
Step 5. At Aunt Ester’s suggestion, Barlow sees other faces chained in the boat’s bottom. They all have his face.
Step 6. Terror stricken, Barlow lets go of the symbolic paper boat Aunt Ester tells him he needs to enter the city. The paper the boat was made of was Aunt Ester’s Bill of Sale when she was a slave. But he still has the chain link that Solly gave him for good luck. The link is from an ankle chain that Solly kept after escaping slavery, so it serves the same symbolic purpose.
Step 7. Solly and Eli, still masked, symbolically whip and brand Barlow and throw him into a hull where he is alone. He is thirsty, but there is no water. He lapses into unconsciousness.
Step 8. Awakened by Black Mary’s voice, softly singing Twelve Gates to the City (see playlist), Barlow comes to and sees the City of Bones. Black Mary points him in the direction of the Gatekeeper (Solly in a different mask).
Step 9. Barlow, still under hypnosis, acknowledges that the Gatekeeper is Garrett Brown. He confesses to Brown that he was the one who stole the nails and seeks forgiveness.
Step 10. The Gatekeeper opens the gate allowing Barlow to enter the City of Bones. He sees the people inside with their tongues on fire, a subtle reference, possibly, to the third day in Melville’s Moby Dick.
“Finally, there was the impartation to them of a new strange power to speak in languages they had never learned. It was because they were filled with the Holy Spirit that this extraordinary gift was exhibited by them. Not only did the Spirit enable them thus to speak, but even the utterance of words depended on His divine influence – they spake “as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
Citizen Barlow’s rebirth completed, he sits down and cries. The journey ends and he emerges from the hypnotic spell. He is back at Aunt Ester’s house, his soul transformed, redeemed.
In what can arguably be called the third act of this two act play, signaled by Eli’s pronouncement, “This is a peaceful house,” Caesar gets kneecapped by Solly, who then escapes. Citizen Barlow and Black Mary form a pact for the future. Caesar arrests Aunt Mary for harboring a fugitive, then, in the next scene, shoots and kills Solly. In a symbolic gesture after Solly’s passing, Barlow places the two pennies he collected for his journey to the City of Bones in Solly’s hand to pay the ferryman.
He takes off his coat and puts on Solly’s coat and hat and takes Solly’s walking stick, signaling his succession as the new underground railroad conductor, smuggling blacks from post-Emancipation servitude the South.
postscript. Some interesting facts and anomalies in Gem of the Ocean:
Garret Brown, whose suicide resulted in Barlow’s transformation, is also the name of a filmmaker and inventor who developed the Steadicam in the 1970’s. Brown’s invention allows camera operators to film while walking without the normal shaking and jostles of a handheld camera. He also invented the SkyCam (for football games), DiveCam (following olympic divers) and MobyCam (underwater camera following olympic swimmers).
Selig bought his horse, Sally, from a Jacob Herlich, who went to New York to go into business with his brother. In real life, a Jacob Herlich joined his brother in New York in the mattress business.
Selig repeats his lines from Scene One describing his horse in the next play of the series, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, word for word.
Jefferson Culpepper was the name of a caricature of a black college professor in early film versions of Our Gang.
There are two mistakes in the reproduction of William Cullen Bryant’s poem, Thanatopsis, both in the penultimate line: should be “like one who” not “like one that,” and “the drapery of his couch,” not “the drapery of his cough.”
Some found poetry from Aunt Ester:
I got a strong memory.
I got a long memory.
People say you crazy to remember.
But I ain’t afraid to remember.
I try to remember out loud.
I keep my memories alive.
I feed them. I got to feed them
otherwise they’d eat me up.
I got memories go way back.
I’m carrying them for a lot of folk.
All the old time folks.
I’m carrying their memories,
and I’m carrying my own.
Eliza Jackson, Solly’s sister who wrote him from Alabama, was also the name of a woman in Lancaster County, PA, who, along with her Quaker activist husband, Day Wood, ran an Underground Railroad station. (see below)
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postscript from Facebook update:
The theater is filling up fast for the first Saturday night performance of August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean here at Round House Theatre in Bethesda.
postscript. Excellent production, evidenced by prolonged standing ovation. Stephanie Berry as Aunt Ester really gave Phyllicia Rashad a run for her money. Her stage presence was sublime. Solly won my heart on the stage in a way that he never had from merely reading the text. Oooh, that walking stick! Spoiler alert: on the ride home down a rainy Wisconsin Ave we hypothesized that Solly may have been Citizen Barlow’s biological AND spiritual father.
Don’t miss it! — at Round House Theatre. Review of Bethesda performance
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Below is a link to the poem where Phillis Wheatley mentions “Columbia.” Ironically, or maybe not, it was enclosed in a letter she wrote to General Washington, which this poem mentions, but without background. In later years, Washington spoke favorably about Wheatley.
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/his-excellency-general-washington
more here: https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/phillis-wheatley
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Gem of the Ocean, set in 1904, represents the first decade in the Century Cycle. It is also the play in the cycle that gives us the full portrayal of Aunt Ester, who is more of a myth in earlier plays (Two Trains, King Hedley), a spirit presence that never actually reaches the stage but lurks in the background.
Gem of the Ocean, we learn in Act 2, is an imaginary boat, a document folded in the shape of a boat, Aunt Ester’s Bill of Sale (Sail) from Guilford County, NC. But the document that becomes a model of a boat serves as a prop during the staged journey to the City of Bones.
But what was that voyage? Was it a seance? Was it an exorcism? Or was it just a dramatic ritual? It seemed that Citizen Barlow believed something out of the ordinary was happening. But it also seemed like Eli, Solly, Black Mary, and Aunt Ester had all done this thing before, had practiced every aspect and had it down cold. I think it was a type of ritualistic exorcism. But it works for Mr. Citizen, a recent arrivee from Alabama with a heavy burden on his soul.
Garrett Brown’s obituary is the saddest thing I have heard in an August Wilson play. But I’m so happy Wilson included its text in the play:
BLACK MARY (Reads): “Garret Brown of Louisville, Kentucky departed this life on September 30, 1904, at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at midday, in the midst of a life of usefulness and in the fullness of his powers. He was born of slave parents June the 29th 1862, in Charleston, South Carolina. At an early period in his life, interested parties hurried the mother and three children northward, without the protection of a husband and father, to begin a long siege of poverty. Mr. Brown leaves to mourn his unfinished life, a wife and three children, and a host of family and friends.”
Solly Two Kings is another interesting character. He changed his name from Uncle Alfred to Solly Two Kings (David and Solomon from the Bible) after he escaped from slavery in Alabama and fled to Canada, but he missed his family, so he returned South and worked as a “dragman” in the Underground Railroad. He now collects dog feces, called “pure,” and sells it to gardeners and to tanners.
Caesar Wilks, the community constable, has been through his own transformation, having been a bit of a thug in his younger days. Through illegal means, he raises enough money to purchase a small commercial property, but not before he gets selected by the crime bosses (politicians) uptown to run their operation and maintain order on the Hill. He let’s it all go to his head under the guise of “respectability politics.”
Then there is the dynamic relationship between Aunt Ester and Black Mary, Wilks’ sister by a different mother. Wilks’ father was a rascal too. And we will see his grandson, along with Citizen’s son, in the next and final play, Radio Golf.
Finally, doesn’t this underwater sculpture, Vicissitudes by British-Guyanese sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor remind you of the City of Bones? It is not intended to depict the Middle Passage, but its intended message speaks to us still.