Railroad Lore and Mysticism in August Wilson’s "The Piano Lesson"

Abstract

August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson (1987) which plays in Pittsburgh in the kitchen and parlor of a railroad cook’s house in 1936 is the third drama of his cycle of an investigation of Black Americans’ lives in the U.S. after slavery.

Boy Willie travels with a friend to his uncle’s, a railroad cook’s, house where his sister Berniece lives, in order to sell their mutual heirloom, a piano bearing carved life scenes and faces of their ancestors, to buy the dead slave owner’s land for farming. Two of their ancestors once were sold as slaves for the price of this piano, and their father ultimately had been burned in a railroad car of the Yellow Dog for stealing the piano he conceived as family possession. The almost deadly argument between brother and sister ends in not selling the piano, after Boy Willie had to fight the ghost of the murdered slave owner, and Berniece saved his life by playing an exorcism song on the piano she had not dared to touch for years.

Wilson’s characters make gothic experiences at the famous railroad crossing at Moorhead, MS, where allegedly the ghosts of the Yellow Dog talk back to the seeker. Says Wining Boy, the musician: “The train passed and I started to go back up there and stand some more. But something told me not to do it. I walked away from there feeling like a king. Went on and had a stroke of luck that run on for three years.” (35) What do ancient African sacrificial rites have to do with American railroad lore? This review paper will focus on the importance of railroad music in The Piano Lesson, and the mystical veil covering the railroad crossing, “where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog.”

Keywords:Yellow Dog; Moorhead, MS; C.W. Handy

Introduction: The Spirit World, and Finding One’s Self

“You look up one day and you hate the whiskey, and you hate the women, and you hate the piano. But that’s all you got. You can’t do nothing else. All you know how to do is play that piano. Now, who am I? Am I me? Or am I the piano player? Sometime it seem like the only thing to do is shoot the piano player cause he the cause of all the trouble I’m having.” (41)

[Wining Boy to Doaker, Boy Willie, Lymon]

Finding one’s self, developing historical consciousness yet making peace with one’s past, establishing identity through music, or better, one’s own song or voice – this is the big picture of August Wilson’s drama The Piano Lesson – subtly interspersed with an unresolved criminal story of white former slave owners falling head-on into their wells, and the mystery of the ghost-ridden railroad crossing “where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog.” All the characters just try to do what they are best at – Avery has become a preacher and is trying to establish his own church; widowed Berniece is a mother and wants to fulfill this role completely, not needing a man to define herself as a woman; Doaker is a self-content railroad cook (“I’m just living the best way I know how. I ain’t thinking about no top or no bottom.” (93)). Doaker has once laid the rails of the Yellow Dog railroad line: “I’m cooking now, but I used to line track. I pieced together the Yellow Dog stitch by stitch. Rail by rail. Line track all up around there. I lined track all up around Sunflower and Clarksdale. Wining Boy worked with me. He helped put in some of that track.” (18) Lymon wants to make his fortune in Pittsburgh, and Boy Willie wants to buy Sutter’s land and become a farmer in the South (“That’s what I’m gonna do with my life! Why I got to come up here and learn to do something I don’t know how to do when I already know how to farm?” (46)). Little Maretha is taught to behave like a white girl, admonished by her mother not to show her “blackness,” gets a nice hairstyle, attends public school and in addition the Irene Kaufman Settlement House (“as a source of white-generated socialization and art classes for ghetto dwellers,” Snodgrass 2004, 60), and is expected to become a piano teacher.

Probe to the core of every one of Wilson’s plays and you will find black men struggling to make a sale, secure a loan, finesse a transaction, get what is owed them, find a job, outrun a union clause, win a bet, pawn something of value in exchange for ready cash, or scrape together enough to retrieve the possession they once hocked. His characters are just a train ticket and a hustle away from glory, a fair contract away from stardom, a steel-mill job away from prison, a promised ham away from contentment, a memory away from slavery. (Weiss 2005, The Chicago Sun-Times )

Only Wining Boy has a reason to be winy, since he seems already past the point of making anything meaningful out of his life; having lost his fortune, wife, and his success as a musician. As in Wilson’s other plays, music gains an important role. In Fences , we witnessed a song about the old dog Blue as a sort of dirge. In The Piano Lesson , music provides the beat of the story, and an African ritualistic exorcism song separates the black and white opponents in the climactic end. Wining Boy who “gave up professional music because it depersonalized him and left him unfulfilled” (Snodgrass 2004, 61) plays a “rambling gambling man” song (47-48) describing his nomadic life, and a song about a hesitating woman in memory of his wife (39). Doaker sings a railroad song (55) that provides him with rhythm for his work – ironing his uniform pants while cooking. Like Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , who found his personal song after his bloody cleansing and emergence as the “shiny man,” Berniece has to play her song on the piano (107-108) to be freed from the spirits of the past, whom she has always been afraid to awaken, and to save her brother from the white man’s spirit. Here, the clash between the races is exemplified. Her success is rendered by her “thank you” chorus, the last words of the play.

The literal presence of a white slaveowner’s ghost is a heavy reminder that Wilson’s history lesson isn’t all black, it’s chiaroscuro. Sutter is like the undead, the vampire from some expressionist film, who has come to prey on the people who don’t believe he’s there. (Nadel 1994, 9)

Wining Boy is a desperate, run-down, worn-out pianist who has already been through the storms of life, who has ruined his marriage until his wife Cleotha finally died of jaundice, and who cannot find consolation or success in playing the piano any more. His negative world view goes so far that sometimes, he would rather kill the piano player in him, the part of his personality that he conceives as failure. He is caught in an identity crisis, wondering who he is and what his role in life and society is going to be. However, he also possesses wisdom, nurturing family superstition, since he is “one who has been there”: he has been standing at the very crossing point of the old Southern going north to south, and the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley railroad going east to west, which is in the town of Moorhead, Mississippi, where the “Ghosts of the Yellow Dog” (i.e., the spirits of the men who burnt in the boxcar lit by the whites on their search for the piano robber) are said to talk back to the questioner and seeker. In order to find his true self, and to experience success in life, Wining Boy had to overcome his suicidal feelings, to experience a growth of his own body and soul, and he walked from the haunted place feeling like a king:

A lot of things you got to find out on your own. I can’t say how they talked to nobody else. But to me it just filled me up in a strange sort of way to be standing there on that spot. I didn’t want to leave. It felt like the longer I stood there the bigger I got. I seen the train coming and it seem like I was bigger than the train. I started not to move. But something told me to go ahead and get on out the way. The train passed and I started to go back up there and stand some more. But something told me not to do it. I walked away from there feeling like a king. Went on and had a stroke of luck that run on for three years. (…) (35)

While Wining Boy makes a mystic experience, both Boy Willie and his sister Berniece have lost their “sacral connection” to their inherited piano, and with it, to their African ancestry, which has to be reestablished at the end of the drama. In Williams & Shannon (ed.; 2004, 138) the Piano Lesson is called a “multilayered slave narrative,” containing elements of three forms of slave narrative expressions: the inscribed narrative (conveyed through Doaker’s story of the provenance of the piano, containing elements of a classic, antebellum slave narrative), a contemporary slave narrative (a “liberation tale,” blues narrative), and the piano itself being a key non-spoken narrative device.

In the drama, we do not witness a piano lesson in a literary sense, but the whole lives of the characters are a lesson, incorporating the quest of the “Who Am I” and “Where do I come from.” In Boy Willie’s case especially, it is also the “Where am I going to,” since he is the avant-garde, enterprising, visionary character, who is always on the road, who wants to mark the road as he goes along, who actually leaves the house where Doaker, Berniece, and Maretha have settled down, who wants to purchase the former plantation where his ancestors once toiled as slaves, to become a land owner and farmer. And in order to procure the financial means, he is willing to sacrifice what he conceives merely as some piece of wooden artwork, and what his sister Berniece considers a sacrosanct – the family heritage, a beautifully carved piano displaying heads and scenes of life of his forefathers and -mothers, having cost two slaves and the blood price of their father’s ultimate death for stealing it. However, the white master’s ghost will not let him take the piano away. Also, the ghosts of the past, present as masks carved on the piano (an analogue to Yoruba Egungun masks standing for the communication with the dead ancestors) say their veto by adding physical weight to the piano. The piano gets so heavy that Boy Willie and his friend Lymon cannot even lift it, and the white man’s ghost engages in a real physical fight with the Boy Willie. This scene is supernatural and astonishing in the otherwise rather realistic piece. Snodgrass calls these mystical elements the “gothic mode”:

The New World version ofGothic modeemphasizesmacabre terrors(Sutter’s fall down a well in The Piano Lesson ),horror(an impromptu knifing in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Seven Guitars ),eeriness(an exorcism of a poltergeist in The Piano Lesson and the mystic angels hovering above Floyd Barton’s grave in Seven Guitars ),mystery(the long life of Aunt Ester in Gem of the Ocean and Two Trains Running and Floyd Barton’s unfathomable murder in Seven Guitars ),dissipation(Wining Boy’s begging for drinks in The Piano Lesson and Fielding’s boozing on the job in Jitney ), the femme fatale (Ruby in Seven Guitars ), the hoveringphantasm of death(Miss Mabel Holly in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and Troy Maxson’s arguments with Mr. Death in Fences ),surreality(Citizen Barlow’s descent to the City of Bones in Gem of the Ocean ),doom-laden melodrama(Alberta’s death in childbirth in Fences and the dice game that ends King Hedley II ),raffish criminal heroism(Floyd Barton in Seven Guitars and Elmore in King Hedley II ), andsubconscious impulses(Levee Green’s to-the-death protection of his Florsheims in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and the title character’s impetus to crime in King Hedley II ). (Snodgrass 2004, 91. Bold print added.)

Not as abundant as in Gem of the Ocean, where the culpable who has come to Aunt Ester to get his soul washed mounts a paper ship made out of her Bill of Sale from slavery times and travels to the mystical City of Bones, or as in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , where corpses walk on the water, but in a very effective way Wilson includes metaphysic elements and African ancestor worship in this drama, in order to solve earthly problems through spiritual forces:

From Herald Loomis’s vision of the bones rising out of the Atlantic Ocean (the largest unmarked graveyard in the world) in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone , to the pantheon of vengeful gods (“The Ghosts of the Yellow Dog”) in The Piano Lesson , to Aunt Ester, the then 349-year-old conjure woman who first surfaced in Two Trains Running – the metaphysical presence of a spirit world has become increasingly important to my work. It is the world that the characters turn to when they are most in need. (Parks 2004, 30)

The improbable and unlikely gain great weight in The Piano Lesson , a play in which “faith and intuition, omens and portents often assert their might at the expense of reason” (Wolfe 1999, 108). August Wilson’s rival Brustein had downgraded his work by calling this drama the weakest of his first four; however, one can say in Wilson’s defense that

Robert Brustein’s verdict, that Piano Lesson is ‘the most poorly composed’ of Wilson’s four Broadway-produced works to date because of its ‘repetitiousness, crude plotting, and clumsy structure,’ falls wide of the truth. Clever, determined, and visionary, Piano Lesson goes beyond even Joe Turner in yoking both the knockabout and the absurdity of daily life to the spirit world. (Wolfe 1999, 108)

African Ritualism and the Yellow Dog Mystery: C.W. Handy’s Rag and Blues

“The crossroads is a prime spot to place sacrifices so that they will be taken to the otherworld, a practice that has been retained by both Cuban and American practitioners of Yoruba religion.” (cited from Drewel in Snodgrass 2004, 195)

http://www.deltablues.net/dawg.html

The picture above shows the famous railroad crossing at Moorhead, Mississippi, in the “Sunflower District.” At this point, the “Southern,” which was the Southern Railway running North to South and beginning operations in 1894, crosses “The Dog,” or the “Yellow Dog,” a vernacular name for the Yazoo Delta Railroad running East to West. Thus, the sentence “where the Southern cross the Dog” can stem the earliest from 1894. “Dog” or “short-dog,” by the way, was railroad slang for a local or branch line. According to an anecdote by C. W. Handy, this railroad acquired the name though a black trackside worker who, when asked what the letters “Y.D.” on the tender of a locomotive meant, answered “Yaller Dawg, I guess.” The reason for this, however, remains mysterious: it can either have to do with strikers and protests, regarding the “yellow dog contracts¹,” or with an actual yellow dog running along the tracks and barking at the trains. “Conant told of the laborer in the rail laying gang at Moorhead, where the old Southern Railroad, now the Columbus and Greenville, and the Y&MV crossed: ‘He saw an old yellow dog walk across the Southern and remarked on it to his companions.’ “ (Official Publication of the Illinois Central Historical Society, 2004, 19) The hypothesis alluding to the yellow dog contracts might be supported by the “Payroll Blues” recorded in 1928 by Lucille Bogan, which contained the following lines:

Pay day on the Southern, pay day on the Yaller Dog,

Pay day on the Southern, pay day on the Yaller Dog.

An’ I want to meet that pay roll an’ try to make a water-haul.

Mens out on the Southern they make dollars by the stack,

Mens out on the Southern they make dollars by the stack.

An’ I have money in my stocking when that payroll train gets back.

(Official Publication of the Illinois Central Historical Society, 2004, 27)

And what does August Wilson have to say about the name of this railroad line? According to the dramatist, through a definition by Boy Willie, it is “Cause the Yazoo Delta railroad got yellow boxcars. Sometime the way the whistle blow sound like an old dog howling so the people call it the Yellow Dog.” (85)

In 1903, William Christopher Handy (1873-1958), the “Father of the Blues,” wrote the “The Yellow Dog Rag,” drawing his inspiration from a tramp. He related how he had heard a lean, raggedy, black guitarist in Tutwiler’s railroad depot, singing of going to where the ‘Southern cross the Yellow Dog’:

A few weeks later Handy was at the depot at Tutwiler, another small town south of Clarksdale, waiting for the train back home. Out under the baggage shed a lonesome Negro was picking a tune with a knife blade from a battered guitar, moaning some words about ‘Gwine where de Southern cross de Yaller Dawg.’ Handy made a note of the words and the tune. He still had no conscious plan of attempting to develop something of commercial value from this music which he had been enjoying all his life. The sheet music, the piano rolls and the phonograph records which sold were traditional waltzes, Broadway ballads, and ragtime, not the down-to-earth Negro blues. (Official Publication of the Illinois Central Historical Society, 2004, 32/33)

In 1914, Handy composed his corresponding “The Yellow Dog Blues.” (By the way, the publisher of the Blues thought that the song really dealt with animals, yellow dogs, which is why the cover of his edition shows dogs.) In the 1920s, the tune was recorded by various jazz bands and vaudeville-blues singers; for example, in 1923, Lizzie Miles cut probably the first recording of the Handy blues composition. About two years later, Bessie Smith came out with her famous version, accompanied by Fletcher Henderson’s Hot Six. The text of Handy’s original blues goes as follows:

William Christopher Handy: Yellow Dog Blues

E'er since Miss Susan Johnson lost her Jockey, Lee
There has been much excitement, more to be;
You can hear her moaning night and morn.
Wonder where my Easy Rider's gone?
Cablegrams come of sympathy
Telegrams go of inquiry
Letters come from down in "Bam"
And everywhere that Uncle Sam
Has even a rural delivery.
All day the phone rings
But it's not for me,
At last good tidings
Fill our hearts with glee,
This message comes from Tennessee.

Chorus:
|: Dear Sue your Easy Rider struck this burg today
On a south bound rattler side door Pullman car
Seen him there an' he was on the hog.
(The smoke was broke, no joke,
Not a Jitney on him)
Easy rider's got a stay away
So he had to vamp it but the hike ain't far.
He's gone where the Southern 'cross' the Yellow Dog. :|

I know the Yellow Dog District like a book,
Indeed I know the route that rider took
Every cross-tie, Bayou, burg and bog.
Way down where the Southern cross' the Dog,
Money don't zactly grow on trees
On cotton stalks it grows with ease;
No race horse, race track, no grandstand
Is like Old Beck an Buck shot land,
Down where the Southern cross' the Dog.
Every kitchen there is a cabaret
Down there the Boll Weevil works
While the darkies play
This Yellow Dog Blues
The live long day.

Chorus:

How did August Wilson hear about the Yellow Dog (a literary topic also perused by Eudora Welty and Faulkner), and decide to include this piece of railroad lore in his drama The Piano Lesson ? Astonishingly, he does not mention the Father of the Blues at all as his inspiration; mainly Bessie Smith, who merely recovered his previous version. In his interview “Men, Women, and Culture: A Conversation with August Wilson” from 1993, Nathan L. Grand asked the author where the story of the Ghost of the Yellow Dog was derived from, and received the following reply:

The Ghost of the Yellow Dog was actually a short story I wrote many years before. It was my attempt to portray those benevolent and vengeful ghosts of the African pantheon. If you mess with me, the Ghost of the Yellow Dog will get you. You mess with any black folk, the Ghost of the Yellow Dog’s gonna get you. [Laughter]

One of the parts of the play I like is when Wining Boy talks about going down to stand on the spot. Originally in the story, you’d stick out your hand at that spot and the god would give you five. But he stood on the spot and called out the names of the ghosts, and they talked to him. The important thing that people are missing here is that you have to know the names of the ghosts, or you have to know the names of the gods, which is what Toledo tells Levee [in Ma Rainey ]. Knowing the names of the ghosts allows you to tap into your ancestral energies, or spirit, or however you want to put it. (Grant 1993, 184)

[...]

¹ “The employee is required to sign a card stating he is not a union member and would not join a union as long as he worked for the company.” The phrase in its most derogatory form meaning a coward or in union parlance a “scab”. “… the term “yellow dog” stigmatized the conduct of the individual willing to be bound by such an agreement.” (Official Publication of the Illinois Central Historical Society, 2004, 26)