Ignore the corny title por favor.
I’m taking this class called African American Playwright, where we use interdisciplinary studies to discuss the plays in August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle. It’s pretty interesting, and I’ve really been enjoying the plays.
I was reading Gem of the Ocean the first play (chronologically) in the cycle, and this excerpt stood out to me. In it, Black Mary addresses Citizen after he asks her to spend the night with him:
One after the other they come and they go. You can’t hold on to none of them. They slip right through your hands. They use you up and you can’t hold them. They all the time taking till it’s gone. They ain’t tried to put nothing to it. They ain’t got nothing in their hand. They ain’t got nothing to add to it. They too busy taking. they taking ‘cause they need. You can’t blame them for that. they so full of their needs they can’t see you. Now here you come. You don’t even know what you need. All you see is a woman. You can’t see nothing else. You can’t think nothing else. That blinds you.
This is a common theme I keep seeing in Wilson’s plays. The men and women easily attach and detach from one another. In a class discussion, I expressed how I didn’t like the casualness of these relationships. Then my professor pointed out that these men and women are fresh from slavery. They are not used to the consistency that the “traditional” family model provides. They are broken people. People who have been hurt and damaged. People who haven’t been permitted to love. People who have forgotten how to love.
Sometimes I wonder if we’ve still forgotten how to love. Now, this isn’t some rant about how black love doesn’t exist anymore. My parents have been married for over 25 years; I see successful black love everyday. But I still wonder if a lot of us are still those broken people that take without giving, and that don’t know how to care for one another.
And I wonder if we ever will relearn how to love ourselves and each other in the best possible way.
What do you think?
