Remember, Restore, Redeem
a dramaturgical essay by Stephanie Lein Walseth

"I got a strong memory. I got a long memory. People say you crazy to remember. But I ain't afraid to remember. I try to remember out loud. I keep my memories alive. I feed them. I got to feed them otherwise they'd eat me up."
                                     Aunt Ester

We are a country with amnesia. When faced with the choice of examining the past, living in the present and driving toward the future, Americans inevitably and overwhelmingly choose the last of these three options. We are comfortable with this decision and the forgetting it enables. Our history textbooks glance backward only briefly enough to highlight dates of wars and to celebrate the victors' accomplishments, allowing us to create grand narratives of an America of glittering goodness, hope and possibility.

August Wilson's work proposes another choice. He materializes what theater artist Anne Bogart calls a "changing of the time register," slowing down, living in that double moment that theater can create - both present and past simultaneously. His plays call us to revisit some of the more painful moments of our collective American past, and to dwell there and listen to the stories his characters have to tell. Not for the purpose of instilling guilt in non-African American audiences, but for the possibility of redemption through an act of restorative justice much like the one Citizen Barlow encounters in his meeting with Aunt Ester (Elam 76).

This dwelling is not an easy task. The time of the play, 1904, was witness to a tremendous amount of strife. It had been 41 years since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, and yet Jim Crow laws perpetuated fear and segregation. Efforts to stem the tide of black migration to Northern cities for industrial jobs led to a rise in lynchings, race riots and horrific acts on the part of the Ku Klux Klan. For those blacks who were able to move north, their options for employment were few, and often consisted of low wage, menial jobs under the supervision of unscrupulous leadership. Despite the adoption of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution, black voter disenfranchisement was enforced by means such as the Mississippi Plan, which required the payment of poll taxes and literacy tests. While the end of slavery had been written into law, hearts and minds were still reeling, trying to reconfigure power structures that had been in place for nearly 250 years. This transition to "freedom" was complex, multilayered and by no means easy.

Wilson's entire Twentieth Century Cycle, in which he wrote a play for each decade, remembers and reanimates this transition and its lasting effects throughout the 1900s. In Gem, written in 2003 but chronologically the first in the series, he transports us back to the heart of this transition. In this space he allows his characters to embody and vocalize the epic and the specific, the shared experiences of a people, and the nuance of individual lives. Their perspectives implicitly echo those of Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, prominent and influential black leaders of their time, and their actions materialize competing views about the best way to live in this tumultuous time and place.

Wilson's work, in this cycle and in this play, embodies the wisdom of the Sankofa bird, a symbol of the Adinkra people of West Africa. This bird, whose body faces forward and whose head looks back, reminds us that in order to know who we are and where we are going, we must know where we have come from. Gem allows us that opportunity to look back. It calls us not only to recognize what our national amnesia has caused us to overlook, but even more importantly, it offers us the opportunity to remember ourselves as a collective of people who share this history, to put back together our bodies, our hearts and our minds. By bringing us face-to-face with this painful moment of our past, Wilson offers us a moment, not of punishment, but of remembering, redemption and restoration. The choice to dwell in this moment, to go on this journey is ours, as Black Mary notes, "Aunt Ester can help you if you willing to help yourself."

Timeline of significant events

1619

• Date of Aunt Ester's birth.
• Though African slaves and servants had been in contact with the New World via Spanish and French expeditions, this year marks their presence in English America, with the landing of 20 slaves at Jamestown, Va., in August.
• The slave trade continues to bring Africans across the Middle Passage until 1808, during which time an estimated 10-20 percent of potential slaves perish at sea.

1838*

• The Underground Railroad is organized, with the fugitive slave Harriet Tubman (ca.1820-1913) becoming its most outstanding black conductor, making 19 trips to the South and liberating more than 300 slaves.

1839

• Amistad uprising - Joseph Cinque and his fellow mutineers were eventually freed and returned to Africa.

1861-

• U.S. Civil War begins in 1865 1861 with the secession of 11 Southern states from the Union.

1863

• Emancipation Proclamation is signed on January 1.

1865

• The 13th Amendment to the Constitution is ratified by Congress on December 18, prohibiting slavery in the U.S.

1904

• The action of the play takes place; Aunt Ester is 285 years old.

* This date is contested by other sources, one of which indicates that the term was coined around 1831, though assisted escapes from slavery occurred between 1780-1862. It should be understood as one marker of a complex history of resistance to the institution of slavery in America.

© 2012 Penumbra Theatre