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Roscoe Lee Browne believes Wilson is "as good as O'Neill" 

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Ford. Six years later I traded that in on a Cadillac. There wasn't no way in the world I was going back to Jackson then. Do you know what they do to a nigger they see driving a Cadillac in Jackson?'

"From there," said Wilson, "I had to find out who Stovall was and why Memphis had to go back. [He has to go back to claim his birthright, a theme that re-echoes through the Wilson dramas.] Then I discovered Hambone standing there, waiting for his ham [promised him nine-and-a-half years earlier by Lutz the butcher, who had paid him instead with a scrawny chicken], then the Prophet Samuel, and then Aunt Esther [a local seer and advisor who is either 322 years old or 349, depending on who's telling it]." 

After that he discovered and created and made flesh and tongue and brains and soul, all the others: the retired house-painter Holloway (Roscoe Lee Browne, opposite the Memphis of Al White); Wolf, the numbers dealer (Anthony Chisholm); Risa, the counter girl who scarred her legs so men would leave her alone (Cynthia Martells); lobotomized-by-life Hambone (Sullivan Walker); West, the gangster turned wealthy undertaker (Chuck Patterson); and - oh yes - harum-scarum kick-over-the-table Sterling, played by Larry Fishburne.

August Wilson was born April 27, 1945, in the Hill district of Pittsburgh, the son of a German-American white father who wasn't around very much, and of Daisy Wilson, a janitor at the courthouse who raised six children (August was the fourth) in two cold-water rooms over Bella's grocery store. For ten years August's stepfather was David Bedford who was a little like Troy Maxson of Fences.

There was no Your Barber Shop where young Wilson could hang around in his boyhood, which was problematic enough in other ways as the only black kid at Central Catholic Parochial School, cut from the football team as "too light" at 175 pounds and sometimes dispatched 
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home by taxi to avoid the gentle attentions of his schoolmates. At 12 he walked into the Carnegie Library and discovered Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. It gave him strength. But by the time he was 22, he was - perhaps like Sterling in Two Trains - "negotiating" his life from day to day, "and it didn't look like I'd make it to 23."

There was no barber shop, but there was Pat's Place, a cigar store on Wylie Avenue on the Hill. When young poet Wilson was in despair - not knowing how to write plays - he asked Rob Penny, with whom he'd grown up: "How do you make them talk?" Penny said "You don't, you listen." So that day or the next, says Wilson, "I saw this old guy, and I followed him into Pat's Place and listened to him and some other old guys arguing about did the B&O stop in Pittsburgh in 1932."

The argument about the B&O stopping in Pittsburgh worked its way into Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, and there's a bit of railroad stuff, as you might suppose, in Two Trains Running, including this:

"People kill me, talking about niggers is lazy. Niggers is the most hard working people in the world. Worked three hundred years for free. And didn't take no lunch hour. Now all of a sudden Negroes is lazy. Don't know how to work. All of a sudden when they got to pay niggers, ain't no work for him to do. If it wasn't for you, the white man would be poor. Every little bit he got, he got standing on top of you. That's why he could reach so high. He give you three dollars a day for six months and he got him a railroad for the next hundred years. All you got is six months worth of three dollars a day."

"Isn't that extraordinary writing?" says Roscoe Lee Browne, the actor who delivers these lines. "Having had the great good fortune to work in the theatre with great poets and great dramatists, I put August Wilson very high in that pantheon. I believe absolutely that he is every bit as good as O'Neill. He plumbs the psyche

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ÉGOÏSTE
To assume he is uncaring or aloof is to misread him.
He walks on the positive side of that fine line separating arrogance from an awareness of self-worth.
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ÉGOÏSTE
FOR A MAN
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