Piano Guidance
Piano Guidance
Photo: Charles Parker
The value of the railroad to black is a common element in August Wilson's plays, in which iron rails symbolize freedom and a life's journey. He depicts trains as cheap and reliable transportation, a ready egress from difficult situations, a source of jobs, and a standard element of storytelling and blues lyrics.
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Read More »The value of the railroad to black is a common element in August Wilson’s plays, in which iron rails symbolize freedom and a life’s journey. He depicts trains as cheap and reliable transportation, a ready egress from difficult situations, a source of jobs, and a standard element of storytelling and blues lyrics. In The Piano Lesson, this symbolism is most heavily represented through Doaker Charles. To him, trains offer steady employment and the promise of a pension. Doaker summarizes the needs of travelers to visit the sick, avoid trouble, meet someone, or find a more satisfying life. As a railroad cook, Doaker is a member of a very honorable group of black men: the Pullman porters who serviced various railroads during the Depression. According to a recent study based on interviews with black former railroadmen, “Black men, from their point of view, saw the Pullman Company as a way up and a way out of poverty. Many men say it was ‘the only game in town,’ and it was a relatively prestigious game. As one porter remembers it, ‘It was a good job for a black man.’ Although Doaker’s particular assignment is to cook, others are responsible for a wide range of duties, including shining shoes, making beds, and generally catering to the all-white passengers’ every need. Since the supply of black railroad employees was originally taped from slave labor, there was a lingering tendency among the white passengers these black men encountered to act like masters. Yet given the choice between standing in breadlines to feed themselves or their families and acting the part of obsequious servants, numerous black men chose the latter while adopting various means of deflecting the racism that seemed an inevitable part of the job. …Doaker is steeped in the rich folklore that evolved among this exclusive class of black railroad men. Many fabricated a tale or trickster story had its beginnings on the long rides from station to station. Taken as a whole, these rhetorical exercises reveal not just these men’s capacities for constructing entertaining narratives but they also speak to the dominant cultural milieu for blacks at the time of their inception. “The stories the porters share are cultural artifacts: they tell us something about them, the times of which they report, and the perception of those times by the men who live them…Pullman porters are good story tellers: theirs was and still is (among the retired men today) a primarily oral culture. Making of their past a good, well-performed story is itself a prized activity and a valued capability.” Although his relatively calm bearing in The Piano Lesson may suggest otherwise, he represents yet another version of the warrior spirit. In a sense, his profession forces him to adopt a measure of Avery’s conformity, but it also compels him to use a great deal of Boy Wining’s cunning. By necessity he can transform instantaneously into the ultimate trickster, pampering and smiling at white passengers to nearly double his salary in tips while laughing with other black employees about his wiles. And they resisted with more than their wits. Under the leadership of fellow Pullman porter A. Philip Randolph, these proud black men eventually unionized to become the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, an organization that succeeded in overturning numerous unfair labor practices and inequities to pay for black railroad employees.
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