"The Bible say": August Wilson's Scriptural Improvisation

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• “The Bible say”: August Wilson’s Scriptural Improvisation
• Patrick Maley (bio)

Very early in August Wilson’s career—in the opening scene direction to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom—the playwright puts his work in dialogue with the Bible:

Chicago in 1927 is a rough city, a bruising city, a city of millionaires and derelicts, gangsters and roughhouse dandies, whores and Irish grandmothers who move through its streets fingering long black rosaries. Somewhere a man is wrestling with the taste of a woman in his cheek. Somewhere a dog is barking. Somewhere the moon has fallen through a window and broken into thirty pieces of silver.¹

The rosary beads evoke post-biblical Christianity, but the thirty pieces of silver point directly to the Bible. The reference is to Matthew 26:14–16, where Jerusalem’s chief priests secure Judas’s betrayal of Jesus for that price. In Matthew, the sum likely refers back to Exodus 21:32, which establishes remuneration for an injured slave: “If the ox gores a male or female slave, the owner shall pay to the slaveowner thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.”² The chief priests therefore include an implicit insult in their price, essentially buying Jesus for the price of an injured slave. After Judas later returns the silver and hangs himself, the chief priests, finding it unlawful to deposit blood money in the treasury, use the bounty to buy land for burying dead foreigners (Matthew 27:7-10). The priests desire Judas’s betrayal but refuse to imbue Jesus with any significant value.

Wilson’s Chicago moon shatters into indiscriminate blood money: thirty pieces of silver lying below a non-descript window. Having descended through a window, the moon offers no light, becoming instead the potential means of the sort of betrayal, disrespect, regret, self-loathing, [End Page 435] and death found in Matthew that could happen in Chicago’s darkness. That is, if somebody should find the money and put it to the use that Wilson’s allusion suggests. Although Wilson’s past tense makes clear that the violent transformation of the natural world into blood money has already occurred, betrayal is uncertain. The money could remain unfound, be collected and put to a different use, or fund betrayal in precisely the fashion of the biblical antecedent. Wilson’s allusion thus enriches his play by reference to scripture, but signifies on biblical themes, wrenching the gospel story into the modern setting through a long human and aesthetic history that leaves scars. Matthew’s story resonates in Wilson’s world, but it is irreparably altered, rendered indeterminate and mysterious. By offering a rich web of allusions stretching to ancient Hebrew scripture, the Bible acts on Ma Rainey and the American Century Cycle, but what is to be done with and in response to that action is left to Wilson and his characters.

The consistent presence of biblical references in Wilson contributes to the development of a human-centered religiosity that runs throughout American Century Cycle. Religious elements such as biblical references, performative spiritual rites, blood memory of Africa, and blues metaphysics help Wilson’s characters work toward the goals of fostering community and finding joy to express in their songs. Within this swirl of amalgamated religious conditions, the Bible is a constant presence: 33 of the Cycle’s 77 characters reference it. But its role is just as amalgamated and unfixed as the force of religion.

The assortment of roles that the Bible plays and functions that it performs in the Cycle emphasize the agency and responsibility that Wilson’s humans and communities bear for their own spiritual journeys. The Bible is a resource with which they might fruitfully engage, but it is by no means an answer key. Instead, as Jacob wrestles God in Genesis 32:22–32, Wilson requires that his characters grapple with spiritual forces in an attempt to harmonize in such a way that supports individual and communal efforts to develop identity, dignity, resistance, and happiness. The work of the Bible in Wilson suggests that spirituality can contribute productively to journeys toward individual and communal becoming in the Cycle, but humans must labor to...