A reminder of the depth of America’s blues
The words of August Wilson’s play, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” were first spoken in Waterford at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center.
Ma and her rehearsal room full of Black musicians, pierced with arrows from the past and hearing the distant whir of slings to come, then moved a few miles west to New Haven, where Lloyd Richards gave the play its first full staging at the Yale Rep.
That was 36 years ago, and now the play is a film on Netflix, and a lot of people seem to be watching it.
And why wouldn’t they? The fellow playwright Wilson most and least resembles is Shakespeare. Most, because of the way each turns speech into music, least, because Shakespeare often smoothed over the troubles of ordinary folk in his quest for highborn drama. Most also, because each man chiseled away at life until the tragedy, coiled under rock and dust, was revealed.
As Ma Rainey says, “I ain’t started the blues way of singing. The blues always been here.”
We all learned about the blues this year. You try to laugh when you’re sad and sing louder when you’re fearful. And when those don’t work, you cry.
Wilson and the actor Viola Davis cover Ma (an actual historical figure) with an armature of hauteur. She is regal, bullying, inflexible, all the while giving us the sense that if she were to give in on anything, if she were to allow the slightest breeze to whistle between those protective metal plates, she would be
smashed to pieces.
Some opposite aspect of Ma lives and speaks through Levee, a young trumpet player and songwriter. He’s arrogant, confrontational, a bit of a popinjay. Behind that lies hope. He has dared to believe that his talent and his artistry will let him transcend the fate assigned to him as a Black man in America in 1912.
Levee writes music that swings, and he dreams of a world dancing to his tunes. We already know how this turns out. In 1912, there’s almost no such thing as a published Black songwriter. There’s “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” and “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which draw
breath from Black music. But we know without needing to be told the exact fate of Levee’s creations.
In the new version, Levee is played by Chadwick Boseman, the last performance of his short life. The tragic plays tragedy. It would be unbearable to watch if Boseman were not so incandescent, like ahuman horn that squeaks with joy and lets the blood from primal wounds drip out of the spit valve.
And now, 108 years later, not enough has changed. On Tuesday a Columbus, Ohio, police officer shot and killed Andre Maurice Hill, an unarmed 47-year-old Black man. Five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes, Hill lay on the ground, unattended to. The police put up crime scene tape but didn’t come to his side.
In the play, Levee, scarred as a child by watching unspeakable violence visited upon his mother, snaps at a musician who mentions a man who sold his soul to the devil.
“That’s the only thing I ask about, the devil ... to see him coming so I can sell him this one I got. ’Cause if there’s a god up there, he done went to sleep.”
Sorrow doesn’t sweeten our souls. As I write this, the two people I hold closest in my heart are both very sick, and it hasn’t made me nicer.
The only way it has brought me closer to God is to make me yell at him or beg him.
That’s why — even though Joe Biden was never my first choice — he may be exactly the president we need right now. So many of us are in so much pain, and he knows in such a deep, direct way what that’s like.
He has pre-tested tragedy. He lost his wife Neilia, his baby daughter Naomi, his son Beau. He knows he can survive it. He knows what gets lost along the way.
Much of “Ma Raney’s Black Bottom” is taken up by four Black men lingering in an airless, windowless room, which includes a mysterious door that leads nowhere. They are waiting to play the music that helps them go on, and while they wait, they compare their wounds and sift through their own stories, seeking reasons and meaning.
It would be a very strange holiday movie for any other year. It might be perfect this time around.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.