Constructive intersections: white students meet blackhistory in August Wilson's the Piano Lesson.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the last thirty years, tolerance pedagogy has become standard practice as well as a booming educational industry in American schools and colleges, with for profit and non-profit organizations offering to support diversity through curriculum development programs,

in-course training sessions, workshops, and motivational speakers. But the pedagogical goal of establishing tolerance is deeply flawed in numerous ways, perhaps most significantly in the way it implicitly theorizes difference. The idea that we must learn to tolerate difference unavoidably suggests that "we" are normative and that the "others" we must tolerate are outsiders, non-normative--weirdos. This underlying theory of difference limits what tolerance pedagogy can accomplish and does further violence to the very people it hopes to empathize with and understand, the "others" it imagines to be on the margins.

But there's another, related problem that may be less apparent: it also circumscribes and limits the identities of the people it constructs as normative. Tolerance pedagogy assumes that we always already know who is "self" and who is "other," that those categories are transparent and self-evident, and that they never shift or get mapped onto each other. It implies that these identities are unchanging and uniform, and that everyone has already taken an established and permanent place in the field of difference. Locking both the normative and the non-normative person into a fixed position within their social formations oversimplifies identity for both. Even worse, it reinforces and reifies difference in a way that makes it harder to act for justice.

In this essay, I use my experience teaching The Piano Lesson, August Wilson's play about the legacy of American slavery and racial violence, to a group of rural white high school students as the occasion to argue for another model of teaching students to consider people whose experiences are very different from theirs. Looking at the disparity between my initial teaching plan, which presumed a huge gulf between the students and the play's characters, and the students' ability to engage the play specifically and deeply from their own related experience of rural hardship and agricultural struggles, I propose that when we let go of assumptions about both normative and non-normative identities, we can start to look for constructive intersections: the ways identities intersect and overlap within social formations, the ways individuals are connected to other people's lives and struggles. Those intersections, where people find commonality, are places where collective political action can take root.

TEACHING AUGUST WILSON'S THE PIANO LESSON

Because of this teaching experience in 1999, I began to rethink how identities can overlap and intersect to enable collective action. I teach at Luther College, a church-related liberal arts college in Decorah, Iowa, that has historically drawn much of its student body from small towns and rural communities in Iowa and the neighboring Midwestern states. The college participates in a "Partners in Education" program, which seeks to bring the college's resources out to the local schools by pairing faculty with teachers and providing curriculum support. One of my former students, Laurie Smith, had begun teaching at North Winneshiek High School, and she was looking for ways to diversify her syllabus. That spring, August Wilson's play The Piano Lesson was on the syllabus of the college's first year common core course, and I was scheduled to give a lecture about it to the college's first year class. Laurie and I thought the play would offer her students an excellent introduction to African American literature--and we also thought it might stretch them to come over to the college to hear a lecture. We were planning to take them out of their comfort zone in terms of both their racial and their class identities.

August Wilson is widely recognized as one of the foremost chroniclers of African American experience, and The Piano Lesson has become a popular text in both the high school and college classroom. The play, which won him his second Pulitzer Prize for drama, is part of his cycle of ten plays about African American life, one for every decade in the twentieth century. Set in the 1930s, it stages the conflict between Boy Willie Charles and his sister Berniece Charles over a family heirloom: a piano that was carved by their enslaved grandfather with images of family members. The piano, which is always visible onstage, records and represents a tragic history of racial violence: two of the Charles ancestors were sold by their white slave owners to pay for its purchase; the father of the Charles siblings was lynched when he took the piano back. Now Berniece, living in Pittsburgh, keeps the piano in her home. She claims to value it, but she isn't using it. Boy Willie, visiting from Mississippi, wants to sell it for cash to buy a farm--the same farm his ancestors worked as slaves. At the heart of the play, then, is a conflict over history. How are the brother and sister to remember and honor the violent, tragic history represented on the carved wood of the piano?

As we brainstormed ways to make the play accessible to her students, Laurie and I were both imagining the significant barriers we faced. To begin with, she was teaching the non-college bound English class. They weren't particularly eager to read anything, and the dialect and language of the play were sure to present real difficulties for them. But we imagined a greater barrier to their understanding would be the profound demographic and cultural differences between these students and the characters Wilson depicts onstage. Wilson's dramas are Afrocentric in their focus, urban in their settings, and deeply interested in black history. Wilson was a native son of Pittsburgh, and the inner-city Hill District of that metropolis becomes the setting of nine of the ten plays in his history cycle. White characters almost never appear on Wilson's stage, and the dramas tend to feature the grit, noise, and 24 hour schedule of the big city.

In contrast, the life experience of these students was profoundly rural and white. Almost everyone they knew in their community was working at jobs associated with agriculture. Their high school stood in the middle of cornfields. My own background, as a white person who grew up in a racially and economically diverse neighborhood in Chicago, made me eager to point out Wilson's enormous affection for the vibrant urban community he depicts on stage. But of the 25 high school students, all white, several had never even made the 15-mile trip over to Decorah, which, with its population of 8000, is the largest town in a 75-mile radius. They knew very little about African American culture and history; many of them, Laurie discovered, had never even met a black person. I expected the students to share the racial prejudices and fears typical of white people whose experience of African Americans is mostly mediated by MTV and criminalizing representations in mainstream news.

To help them overcome any difficulties with the language of the text, Laurie planned to show her students the Hallmark production of the play, starring Charles S. Dutton and Alfre Woodward. To help them understand the African American history and literature that provides context for the play, we planned to have them come to the college to hear me lecture on The Piano Lesson to the college's first-year class. After the lecture, we set aside an hour for discussion.

The North Winneshiek High School students attended my August Wilson lecture in a large auditorium on campus. They came in together, and sat in a tight group, with no empty seats between them. I began the lecture with Hessy v Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision of 1896 that allowed the "separate but equal" segregation of public facilities. I showed images of the Jim Crow South, the "whites only" signs on restrooms and movie theaters. I talked about the Great Migration, and the rise of black, urban neighborhoods: Harlem in New York City, Bronzeville in Chicago. I discussed the "push" and "pull" factors that encouraged the migration: the "push" of violence and lynch mobs in the south, the "pull" of cultural and economic opportunities in the north.

When the lecture was finished, the college students headed out, and I prepared to lead the discussion with the high school students. I didn't know if they would be intimidated by the formal lecture format. I was pretty sure the content of the lecture was unfamiliar to them, and I thought the braver ones might be willing to ask some questions about the African American history I had just recounted. I stepped over to them, greeted Laurie, introduced myself, and asked an innocuous question about whether they had liked the play.

What happened next really surprised me. At least seven hands immediately flew into the air, and the high school students erupted into a heated discussion. Was Boy Willie right to sell that piano? Was Berniece right to keep it? Was Boy Willie serious about buying the farm in Mississippi? Did he really know how to farm? Wasn't he likely to get ripped off by the white family who still owned the land? Why was Berniece so cold toward her brother? Was Boy Willie responsible at all for the violence she laments? Or was he taking positive steps to ensure his own survival in a violent world? And what does it mean that Berniece's daughter Maretha can't play piano music without the notes on paper?

The students turned as best they could in their bouncing auditorium seats to face each other. They began to argue intently. The Berniece supporters, mostly but not entirely women, spoke eloquently of the value of family heirlooms and the power of shared memories, even tragic ones. The Boy Willie advocates, mostly but not entirely men, were convinced that the land itself had more meaning and value than the historic piano. People on both sides of the argument quoted freely from the play, and with great accuracy and specificity. After each comment, a chorus of agreement and disagreement rang out from the other students.

Laurie and I stood before the students, occasionally intervening to be sure everyone had a chance to speak, as the hour rushed by. I've had any number of great teaching experiences, but I honestly don't recall a time, before or since, when a group of students was more energized and engaged by a literary work. I expected to lead them gently into a discussion; instead, with some astonishment, I watched them jump into the text as if all the characters were family, people they already knew intimately and deeply.

At the end of the hour, I made a few remarks about the power of drama to stage conflicts, and I released them to the care of the admissions guide who was to lead them on a tour of campus. The students nodded politely, if a bit absent mindedly, in my direction. As they walked out of the auditorium, they were still energetically debating the play.

What had happened there with the class of non-college bound juniors? Had my lecture given them the tools of historical consciousness and context they needed to crack open the text? That was a flattering idea, but the students did not seem to be talking about the historical context. They seemed to be treating the play as if it were set in the present day, and they debated the issues as if they were fresh to them, new, and urgent.

An alternate theory would be that the students responded because August Wilson's art was capable of transcending race and history to speak a universal message. Isn't it true that great art transcends such human constructs and limitations? Perhaps the students were moved by the play's universal themes of family struggle and redemption. Perhaps it did not matter, finally, that the characters in the play were African Americans in the 1930's, so very different from white teenagers in contemporary rural Iowa.

But the students made no reference to universal themes in Wilson's play. Instead, they focused intently on the particular conditions Wilson describes in the play, especially the conflicts he describes between rural and urban. They didn't want to talk about how families everywhere struggle in general. They wanted to talk specifically about the Charles family, and whether they could buy the land, and whether Boy Willie could make a small farm work, and whether the heirlooms that hold a family history can or should be traded away for cash.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The urgency and intensity of the discussion suggested that the rural students actually did know the characters who populated The Piano Lesson like they knew their own family members: in some ways, these were their family members, not anybody's family members, not universal Family, but particular, individual people from their own experience. Reading Wilson's play and seeing it performed on video was not at all an experience for them in confronting the "other." Wilson held up a mirror to their own particular lives, their own community, and their own historical moment.

Like the characters in The Piano Lesson, the high school students already knew a lot about conflicts over the ownership of land. Many of them sympathized with Boy Willie, and emphatically endorsed his desire to secure the land for his family. A few, however, sided with his uncle Doaker and his friend Lymon, the characters in the play who tell Boy Willie to give up his dream of farming and face reality.

This conflict did not seem a theoretical one to them. As young adults in a Midwestern agricultural community at the close of the twentieth century, they were at the receiving end of several decades of depopulation, land devaluation, and farm consolidations. Their own farming community, like all rural communities in Iowa, has suffered serious attrition and economic hardship. Rural sociologists describe the 1980s in rural America as the worst decade for the farm economy since the Great Depression (Lobao & Meyer 557). In those ten years, the population of the United States grew by over 19 million, but Winneshiek County lost almost a thousand people, about 5% of the population. Between 1980 and 1990, the value of land in Winneshiek County dropped precipitously, a trend which continued steadily, if less dramatically, through the 90s. By 1999, when the high school students came to discuss The Piano Lesson, the land in their community had lost over 50% of its value, when adjusted for inflation (SETA).

Because the students had felt these economic pressures in their own rural families and community, they were also in a position to appreciate Wilson's critique of the Great Migration. Throughout his career, Wilson engendered real controversy by claiming that the Great Migration "failed" for African Americans, who left the south for promises of advancement in the north, promises that generally failed to materialize. All of Wilson's plays reveal his deep mistrust of the "transplant that did not take" (Rothstein 8). As Sandra Shannon has argued, "in his private role as writer, Wilson continues to show the apocalyptic and tragic results of what he deems the original sin of African Americans; that is, the mistake they made in transplanting an agrarian-based culture to a concrete-based environment" (660). In The Piano Lesson, Berniece and her boyfriend Avery have left the agricultural economy of the south for the service economy of the north. Berniece cleans houses in the rich part of town, and Avery operates an elevator in a downtown building. These are soul killing, menial jobs, which contrast profoundly with the independence and freedom Boy Willie associates with owning land. The rural high school students focused much of their discussion on the decision that generates all the action of the play, Boy Willie's decision to stay on the farm instead of following his sister north. That was a pressing question for them, too. Most of the grown-ups in their community, including the farmers, have taken some kind of work in town. As high school juniors, their own futures were looming. Like Berniece, they may have hoped for clean work with nice clothes. But they quickly saw that her work was just a new form of servitude, and that Avery was literally going nowhere in his elevator. The students held no illusions about town life or town jobs. They respected Boy Willie's energy and independence, and they shared his profound suspicion of the bright lights and big city jobs.

When Laurie Smith and I taught August Wilson's play, The Piano Lesson, to 25 high school students from rural Iowa, we chose a play that we believed would show them something profoundly unlike their own lives. But the identities of the rural students intersected with Wilson's characters in ways we had not predicted, and those connections energized and animated them. As the middle class college educator who grew up in the city, I was ready to tell them about the urban African American history and culture that I thought would help them step outside the limited circle of their own experience and enter the alien imaginative world Wilson describes. Instead, they had already made their own start. They enthusiastically brought Wilson into their circle, and used his art to reflect on issues of great urgency for their own community.

That moment of constructive intersection empowered the students to act collectively. They raised their hands. They discussed and debated with each other. Although they were in a college lecture hall, they participated. It was a small, brief gesture toward what people can accomplish if they act together, but it was thrilling.

Seeing how the rural students understood Wilson by the lights of their own experience changed my pedagogy. Before this experience, I used to organize much of my classroom discussions of African American literature around what I thought the students didn't know about racial oppression and violence. I took a historical approach to the social construction of race, and I emphasized how racism has been institutionalized and reinforced by the forces of law and custom. This pedagogical strategy can be a useful corrective at a small, Midwestern, and mostly white college like Luther. Many of my students seem to think racism stopped being a problem in American society sometime after 1960, and that it certainly doesn't have anything to do with them and their lives today. These students can and should learn about the powerful social forces at work in all our lives. They can learn about injustice, past and present. They can learn to see, as the peasant yells out in Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail, "the violence inherent in the system."

But that isn't where I start my classroom discussions now. My literary criticism is still materialist and structuralist, and I still teach how social formations described in literary texts are rooted in history. But I start with a different expectation of what these social constructions of race, class, gender, and the other markers of identity will mean to my students and how they will understand them. Now I start by finding out what my students already know, and from there I explore with them how their own experiences and knowledge help them to understand and identify with the messages of the text. This is a simple enough change, but the consequences are powerful.

I have learned to allow more time in the classroom for my students' own personal histories to enter into our discussions, especially their work histories. As a teacher, I help my students explore how people might be connected to one another as well as how they are different. I work to counter the assumption that race, gender, class, sexual orientation and the other markers of identity are static and stable positions, and that marginalized people are always representing their own marginality and difference. I look for places where our artists and poets say surprising things about their own complex interpellations into social formations.

This approach does run the risk that students, encouraged to map their own experiences onto the experiences of others, will fail to see difference. Laurie and I were thinking about the gulf between the students and the characters in Wilson's play because those differences are important and they are real. The high school students in the auditorium that day had never been the victims of racism. However much their rural community was struggling, they had never lived under the threat of the lynch mobs or the police violence that Wilson describes as part of the daily lives of his African American characters. It's important that when we search for constructive intersections we continue to recognize the profound differences in people's experience of oppression.

If the students fail to recognize these systemic and powerful differences, they may think the whole point of identifying their own personal histories is to put themselves and their own experience at the center of analysis, at the expense of others. It would be very wrong, not to mention ridiculous, to suggest that August Wilson's main purpose was to illuminate the lives of white people. Sometimes I do get students who, blind to their own privilege, insist on the importance and centrality of whatever marks of difference they have experienced, which they consistently depict as their own victimization. I particularly remember a class conversation with a white, fairly wealthy, heterosexual male college student, who was very incensed by the way he had been treated in grade school for a reading disability. It's hard to feel a lot of sympathy for a student who overlooks the numerous privileges he has been afforded. I think it's fine to say in those circumstances something like "cry me a river." But that sense of victimization is truly problematic only if the student ends his analysis there, not if he starts there. I challenged him instead to use the frustration he felt from his own experience of difference as a way to engage the experiences of others. I tried asking him "What did having a reading disability allow you to see about power, about normative expectations? What do your experiences of both ability and disability allow you to understand about the struggles of other people? What do they enable you to accomplish, by yourself or with others?" In pursuit of these constructive intersections, I ask all my students to find places where, in their experience, coalitions are being built, where bridges are being crossed, where knowledge is being produced--and where their own participation is making a difference.

I will never underestimate the violence and tenacity of any of the forces of domination, nor will I discount the specificity of individual experiences of oppression. But I will continue to help my students look for surprising connections and affinities, because those are places where people can find solidarity and make common cause.

WORKS CITED

Lobao, Linda, and Katherine Meyer. "Economic Decline, Gender, and Labor Flexibility in Family-Based Enterprises: Midwest Farming in the 1980s." Social Forces December 1995 74(2); 575-608.

Rothstein, Mervyn. "Round Five for the Theatrical Heavyweight." New York Times 15 Apr 1990: 1-8.

Shannon, Sandra G. "A Transplant that Did Not Take: August Wilson's Views on the Great Migration." African American Review Winter 97, 31.4. 659-666.

SETA: Office of Social and Economic Trend Analysis. "Ag Land Values from Iowa State University Extension for Winneshiek County, Iowa." Iowa State University. 15 June 2007 <http://www.seta.iastate.edu/landvalue/iacounty.aspx? state=IA&fips=19191>

Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. New York: Penguin Books 1990.