“Ever since slavery got over with…Word get out they need men to work in the mill and put in these roads…and niggers drop everything and head North looking for freedom. They don’t know the white fellows looking too. White fellows coming from all over the world. White fellow come over and in six months got more than what I got.”
One of the themes which the play pursues is the consequences of the Great Migration which is a term applied to the mass exodus of blacks from the south following the abolition of slavery and especially during the early part of the 20th century in response to Jim Crow laws. Most were leaving behind rural areas with small pockets of integrated populations of which they were always very much in the minority to settle into the large urban areas of the north like Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, New York, of course, and the play’s setting, Pittsburgh. Dashed expectations about racism, opportunity, segregation and stability related to the migratory experience are examined through the prism of the play’s narrative focus.
“I stopped by the Workmens Club and got me a bottle, me and Roper Lee from Alabama. Had us half a half a pint. We was fixing to cut that half in two when they come up on us. Asked us if we was working. We told them we was putting in the road over yonder and that it was our payday. They snatched hold of us to get that two dollars. Me and Roper Lee ain’t even had a chance to take a drink when they grabbed us.”
Both Jeremy and Roper Lee from Alabama are part of the migration from the south and Jeremy is here relating an experience to one of the failures of expectations that came with the movement northward. The “they” who terrorized them are not fellow blacks born and raised in the north nor big city baddies picking on the transplanted country bumpkins. The story related by Jeremy is one of police harassment. Harassment not for committing a crime or even being suspected of criminal activity, but simply for being black. The reality that systemic racism in municipal authority does not magically disappear once one steps across the Mason-Dixon Line is one the play’s tragic messages about history of being black in America.
“My daddy called me to him. Said he had been thinking about me and it grieved him to see me in the world carrying other people’s songs and not having one of my own. Told me he was going to show me how to find my song I asked him about the shiny man and he told me he was the One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way. Said there was lots of shiny men and if I ever saw one again before I died then I would know that my song had been accepted and worked its full power in the world and I could lay down and die a happy man.”
This quote is absolutely essential because it introduces two very important symbols that together speak to the primary theme holding everything else together. The “song” here is a metaphor for self-identity and the “Shiny Man” is the symbolic Other capable of affirming that identity. Taken together, the song and he Shiny Man become a complex metaphor for the establishment and affirmation of black independence from the burden of having their identity conferred upon them by white authority. The narrative trek of the play—within its contextual connotations of the Great Migration as an open act of rebellion against southern authority and dominance—is about the primal importance of finding one’s own identity and having identity affirmed rather than authorized.
