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Understanding 9/11tv August Wilson CSPAN August 19, 2017 6:48pm-7:03pm EDT
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by these bookshops continuing to be in existence. >> our encore presentation of some of the stops along the c-span cities tours from this past year continues as we take you to pittsburgh, pennsylvania. >> when i left my mother's house i went into that community and learned what it meant to be a man. there were stores and shops along the avenue. they are not there anymore. the discrimination they faced was from the darker skinned students who chased the kids home after school calling them cracker in this and then they come flying up the street. there was a gate there in that would stop the kids. one day their mother daisy told them listen we are going to put an end to this. don't close the gate, let them
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come flying on up and she stood back in that corner there back in that corner hidden with this big pail of water that she used for bathing. i don't know how she did this. the kids came flying back and she doused them with this big bucket of water and she said you kids leave my kids alone. that was part of the dynamic. it was an integrated neighborhood. it was not one really of racial tensions. "august wilson" is such an iconic pittsburgh figure and all but one of his major plays really have pittsburgh themes whether it's urban redevelopment , whether it's the coming of drugs or whether it's urban renewal later in the 1990s in the hill district. so he and his plays really capture an important part of
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pittsburgh's history. wilson had a real sense of place he walked the streets of the hill district. he never drove a car. he didn't have a license, didn't like driving and didn't like flying. he was a person who walked. he could walk for miles and as he walked he observed. he watched the guys on the corner. watched people in the barbershop. he'd go into arbor shops and go into the pool halls and talk with them. he would learn from them and he could really capture the atmosphere of those spaces. he liked to work there. that's where he did his writing and i think while he was writing he was also listening at the same time and absorbing the atmosphere and the style and the feel of those places. he had an idea of the sort of like that he wanted to portray and it was the life on the streets and off the streets.
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it wasn't shot off in some sort of obscure location. it was his everyday life, everyday people in everyday settings and he wanted people to be aware that art exists there. life exists there. important things are said there, things we can learn from in those places that people drive right by and don't pay any attention to, things that others look down on her luck away from. a lot of people are outsiders like he is. one of the remarkable things in the neighborhood it was multiracial, multiethnic, jewish italian, syrian and people got along. people really care for one another. it really was a community. people asked about each other's children. it was a neighborhood you didn't have to lock your doors. was a quiet neighborhood. there were no bars, no brothels.
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very little retail at all on the street. very solid, working-class lower middle class sort of life here. so wilson had a very comfortable childhood in that regard in that it was a pleasant place and they talked about this, of how well the neighbors got along. so he didn't really experience discrimination or racism or prejudice until he left the hill district when they move to hazelwood when he was a teenager as he grew up here it was really a very comfortable nurturing sort of environment. he was also a very creative person. the house they lived in was very run down, the paint peeling on the walls and things like that and the kids all slept in the bed together. this was two rooms for five
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people so they shared the bed and august would get next to the wall and he would pick the paint chips off the wall. and then he would make stories up about the figures have emerged from that, from the figure you could see from the paint missing. so he was always thinking creatively even as a little kid. this is the wilson house. it was situated in the back where they live. the wilson's had the bottom two rooms when they first moved here this was actually the basement. they had those two rooms up there in what looks like the second floor but it's really the first four and that's where they had five people in those two rooms. then in the 50s the family who lived above them, a family called hadley who figures in this play they had the apartment
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up about then when they moved out around 1952 the wilson's got that apartment so expanded their living space. this was their home that he really related to that meant so much to him. his father did not live with them. his father did not live here. his father had another family in the south hills. his father had another enemies of his father would come here after work today was a baker. his father was a big or so he bade downtown overnight like bakers do. they work at nights on the morning he would come to the wilson home and by the time he got here at 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning the kids had already left for school spirit by the time the kids come back from school he had already left year so he wasn't around much. they didn't really bond for that reason. one reason he had trouble identifying them bonding with his father was his father was an alcoholic. he was a very talented baker but
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he had a real drinking problem. he was a serious alcoholic. so i think possibly for that reason august sell them drank himself. he spoke like a smoke factory but he didn't hit the bottle really at all just socially a little bit. it's really kind of a mystery of just what the relationship to china too was. his role father was his neighbor who lived across the street from him charlie early who is a prizefighter. it was a figure that you could see a kid getting -- about so august really idolize charlie and charlie almost adopted august as his son. charlie's wife julia was august mother's best friend so there were a lot of ties between the two. august model themselves after
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charlie. in addition to being an outsider which august was she had what he called the warrior spirit and of course charlie is a boxer rate a fighter, somebody who stands up not someone who's necessarily aggressive and hostile because charlie wasn't that the charlie could take a punch. you take a punch you don't let it get you down. you get back up. charlie is the one -- he's angry he didn't get to play major league baseball. charlie was a prizefighter and should have been a world champion but never got the fight at that time. was too early at that time. charlie never got the breaks he should have. >> i go out there every morning bust my put up with this cracker every day because i liked him. he was the biggest phóc i ever
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saw. it's my job. it's my responsibility. do you understand that? amanda scott to take care of his family. you live in my house and keep your behind in my bed close till your -- my bedroom with your food. because i like you. because you are my flesh and blood. >> he had this idea that's what a warrior does. that's what his mother did so charlie was a very important part of august development by the neighbor across the street a few doors down from where he grew up and that is part of what we call the warrior spirit. he didn't write anyplace in pittsburgh. all his plays, it's well-known hero simon pittsburgh but they didn't go anywhere. the plays that made them they must he wrote after he left the city. he lived in st. paul, minnesota which is ironic because he channeled the voice of experiences of pittsburgh.
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he himself said it really took moving out of the city to a place very different from pittsburgh to really hear those voices. when you're surrounded by them you are up to close. it's like your heart be. you are not really aware of it because it's so close to you. so he left pittsburgh when he was 32, 33 and moved to st. paul got homesick and started back to these voices and people he had known and he then was able to just channeled those in ways he hadn't done in pittsburgh. pittsburgh the plays and poetry he wrote were very abstract, complex in the modernistic trend , very difficult to understand, o. paik and he didn't capture the language of the people. but he knew that language. he just felt he needed to
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elevate it to bring more honor and dignity to the people. as neighborhoods go it's a big neighborhood especially the original because it included all that lower stuff that is now gone, from urban renewal. it was very large neighborhood. it was the city's oldest neighborhood and you can see it's right next to downtown so is it's the first neighborhood that was developed. it was old and it was large but he always lived there and that makes a difference in terms of race relations. he never had this oh somebody's coming in to our city. blacks were there from the very beginning so what you had was a thickening of people. blacks were ours here in immigrants for hours here and it just sort of thickened but you never had a real push and as you can see in this area -- the jewish live south of center avenue. that was the heavily jewish part
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there was a lot of overlap and blacks lived there and the italians live down that way the italians and the greeks and the syrians that there were jewish who lived there and blacks who lived there as well. there was a lot of overlapping. it was a remarkable neighborhood in terms of, you know one of the things that people think about history of cities like chicago or washington there were early race riots before the king assassination. pittsburgh didn't have those and when you look at the history of american cities as you look in most places they didn't have that. when you have the sense that people will always be fighting tooth and nail this shows no not necessarily. we focus on like the dog that
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barks if it's quiet nothing happens historians don't look at our newspapers don't look at it or whatever. if there is a right or an outbreak, the it's the attention and if you only look at that then you generalize those and that's another thing about pittsburgh story will tell. this is a neighborhood where people did get along together. by getting out and really seeing life in paying attention to it august realized life is complex and that's what makes his plays are adjusting. they are not just simplistic things where you know the answer , if you know the good guys then you know the bad guys. people have conflicting feelings so he was really able to capture that because not only did he observe but he thought about what he had observed and he was very honest about it. when you are within black america there is variety.
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it's not all just one thing or the other. there are different opinions and he captures that and shows it in his plays. there were also arguments an august place where people were going back and forth on some topics because he realized we are not simple people, simple minds. we are complex just like anybody else and that's really part of why he's such a compelling playwright. >> here we are in concord massachusetts on mike simpson road which is also known as the battle wrote where the death coast marge dan on april the 19th of 1775 starting the american revolution.
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