August Wilson was a playwright who explored the African American experience in 10 plays, including Gem of the Ocean and Fences. I'm trying to get through them all. Once I begin a one of these plays I'm hooked to the end. The language is rich and the undercurrent of feeling and context is profound. In an amazing brief essay introducing Fences he speaks of New York as a place devouring endless ethnicities but spitting out the black community. African Americans end up on the margins, by the rivers and railroad tracks, trying to eke out an existence. The stories are written with a poetry of pain, joy, survival and hope. The lives of the characters cry out with desire for life and wholeness, even as they struggle with addictions and poor choices and the reality of racism and classism. In spite of everything there is never actual despair. Hope survives, even amidst death and betrayal.

Reading these plays, I am a white visitor to black culture. I feel like a fly on the wall, overhearing words that were always there but unheard before. All I ever had growing up were stereotypes and imagined ideas about being black in America. Jazz helped bridge that gap over time and the civil rights movement brought some of the reality home through TV and media images. I learned from literature and music and by reading Raisin in the Sun, and by knowing superficially a black family at my high school. No matter, I will always be a visitor.

Yet I know that my life has been affected deeply by black culture and friends and acquaintances over the years. I was in a class with jazz pianist Billy Taylor once at Amherst College in which he criticized Clint Eastwood's Bird about the life of Charlie Parker. For him it was just another story of a black man being helped by a white savior-figure. In the film Charlie Parker's own inner strength and intelligence were absent, overtaken by his drug addiction. The character in the film could not have produced the music that the real Parker gave the world. You wonder if Eastwood's Parker could even read a book. The real Parker studied scores, knew music well and was well informed and intelligent. To this day musicians study the jazz solos and recordings of Parker the way classical musicians study Bach. You'd never know that from the film.

It sounds overly romantic to say it, but I have been touched by a deep spiritual intelligence in African American culture. It shines through the music, literature, dance and much else. I can't even imagine American cultural life without the presence of the black community. Our popular music at the turn of the century was somewhere between sentimental and ridiculous. A Bicycle Built for Two is a typical example. That was before ragtime and jazz became well known. Despite the racist and classist reactionary rhetoric from churches and elsewhere this music took root in the hearts and minds of many in the white community, who embraced its rhythms and even its soul enthusiastically. It allowed for a vital and significant popular music to develop in this country, music which remains at the core of American life. In real ways it was taken, perhaps stolen, from the black community, but by now we are aware of the origins of the music and give due credit, mostly. There were plenty of injustices along the way and too many musicians were left behind financially or prevented from rising as far as they might have (black big bands, as one example, and much of their music has been lost to history, unrecorded). History is making the necessary corrections, so the story is being told increasingly as it actually happened. The white swing bands, as popular as they were, have receded in significance as Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams and countless others have risen in significance.

Though it is fair to talk about black history, in fact we have to, the larger picture for me is the relationship of one culture to another. Black culture grew in relationship to white culture, from slavery to the racist realities of post-Civil War America to civil rights and beyond. The same is true for Chinese, Japanese, Native American and all other ethnicities in this country. We still live in a culture of white hegemony. But what we call "white" is continually being influenced by the cultures that feed it. Our art, our music, our dance, our theater, our politics and so much else are in no manner purely "white," whatever that designation may mean. It would be nice if white culture would more graciously acknowledge its debt to the world it has taken from. But that would be another world, not the one we live in.

For those who retreat into European culture, largely of the past, it may seem like a safe haven. For that group things were fairly good until the turn of the 20th century. What has come since, in the last 100 years and more, is problematic. If only we could get back to a world of tonal music, unregulated capitalism, dogmatic religion and morality, a largely white world that could look down on other ethnicities and pity the poor, a world before the labor movement, a world without communism and a world that had no problem with the Western hemisphere colonizing the entire "other than white" globe. It was so good to be unchallenged!

It's nothing but a fantasy, an imagined world that no longer exists if it ever truly did. I opt for due acknowledgment of that past for its real accomplishments but I don't want to live there. If I wanted to live in that world I wouldn't bother with August Wilson and his plays. They would be irrelevant to me. Better to read Shakespeare or Victorian literature. Better to listen to European classical music. Better to watch classical ballet. Better to dance the waltz, for that matter. No reason to bother with the 20th, let alone the 21st, century with its complications, many of them brought on by the very attitudes that characterized the old world.

What is clear as I read August Wilson is that the realities of the world will not just go away. Just because we imagine a people to be invisible doesn't mean they are not there. It doesn't mean that they don't have a voice or a point of view. It doesn't mean they don't cry out from the margins and make us uncomfortable in our false security. And it doesn't mean, despite everything else, that we are not enriched by their presence, acknowledged or not.