forward two occasions.

forward two occasions, I have witnessed playwright August Wilson stir his audience into an emotional fury simply by stating his views onward the Great Migration. In September 1995 as a visitor at a day-long series of forums at Howard University, and in April 1996 as the recipient of the 15th Annual William Inge Distinguished Playwright Award in Independence, Kansas, he articulated what has become for his plays a far-reaching artistic influence and for his politics a well-rehearsed platform. Since neither of the pair heated discussions afforded me the opportunity to record Wilson's explanations I was happy to find that he has aired the same controversial view forward the Great Migration expressed in the pair Washington, D.C., and in Independence, Kansas, in several published interviews. In single in kind such interview, he asserts,

We were land-based agrarian persons from Africa. We were uprooted

from Africa, and we worn out 200 years developing our refinement as black

Americans. And then we left the toward the south We uprooted ourselves and

attempted to transplant this tillage to the pavements of the industrialized

North. And it was a transplant that did not take. I think if we had

stayed in the toward the south we would have been a stronger the bulk of mankind And

because the connection between the southern of the 20's, 30's and 40's has

been imperfect it's very difficult to understand who we are. (Rothstein 8)

In another, he notes,

We came to the North, and we're still victims of discrimination and

oppression in the North. The real reason that the the community left was a

search for piece of works because the agriculture, cotton agriculture in particular,

could no longer support us. unless the move to the cities has not been a

virtuous move. Today ... we still don't have do job-works The last time blacks in

America were working was during the other World War, when there

was a ne for labor, and it did not matter what color you were.

(Moyer 167)

Blacks in the two audiences cringed in disbelief, arguing passionately that the southward held very few opportunities for their grandmothers and grandfathers, many of whom--given the prevalence of Ku Klux Klansmen violence, voter disenfranchisement, and the eternal financial furrow of tenant farming--saw moving north as their barely logical option. Whites, likewise, in as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but audiences, stood their ground, baffled that Wilson could not surrender that the relative progress blacks have made in Northern cities was essay that the move even overstep the proper limited original expectations.

When expressed to respond to both clumps Wilson, without hesitation, easily shifted the direction of as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but debates from his implied call for contemporary descendants of the Great Migration to embark with an actual physical relocation back down southern to a sobering account of the amplitude of their rejection up north. In highly charged and impressive yet stinging, indictments of the North, Wilson takes as his clause the "mistake" made by blacks in leaving the southern yet focuses his verbal agility relating to revealing the double jeopardy of their settling in the North. In the two scenarios, Wilson's rhetorical maneuvers, his articulate and engaging delivery, and the sheer passion of his argument ultimately silenced dissenters. at the end of both sessions, neither audience be seened particularly aware of or bothered by way of his red herring tactic, nor did they appear conscious of the original premises of their respective arguments against him. What occurr in one as well as the other instances, I contend, was the playwright's excessively calculated and choreographed invitation to one as well as the other audiences to share and experience that same ceruleans landscape that informs his plays. It is a landscape long like that designed by Jean Toomer, author of the soulful Cane, wherein the blues-ridden author "weary of homeles waters turns back to the ancestral soil, expands himself to its folk art and its folk ways, tries to find his bottoms his origins ... a grade toward the definition of himself" (Munson 173)

steady away from such public forums, in his private part as writer, Wilson continues to point out the apocalyptic and tragic arises of what he deems the original sin of African Americans; that is, the mistake they made in transplanting an agrarian-based improvement to a concrete-based environment. Thus, his characters are frequently portrayed as wide-eyed optimists who, despite their earnest attempts to determine their destinies, either perish in the city or become part of its human refuse. Utilizing the pair subtle and glaringly obvious dramatic techniques, the playwright reinforces his position about the "transplant that did not take" or the "mistake" of the black migration North. His characters who hail from Southern states of that kind as Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia and have made their hearthstones in Pittsburgh or Chicago--or those who on a level aspire to relocate to similar places--seem doomed to failure, turmoil, restlessnes alienation, or possibly death. While I am firm Wilson concedes to the impracticality of arguing for a sweeping reversal of the massive exodus of blacks at the divert of the century, he demonstrates in pair of the seven plays he has published to date--Seven Guitars and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom--that a mistake has been made, that any form of cosmic retribution is certain, and that atonement for this so-called original sin sometimes arrives at a high price. Like Toomer, Wilson achieves his objective correlative by the agency of capturing the blues impulse in his writing which enables his audience to "finger the jagged grain" (Ellison 90) of life up north for the Southern-born and br Negro