From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly feed African slaves wander into the city…  They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth.*

But the main theme of the play is the displacement of the newly freed slaves and the first generation of African Americans born to freedom in search of new lives but also in search of families that could not survive the oppression that still endured.  Herald Loomis (Chad Coleman) manages to escape the clutches of Joe Turner after seven years of servitude and returns to his home to find that his wife Martha (Danai Gurira) moved north to try and make a new life, leaving their daughter Zonia (Amari Rose Leigh) in care of her mother until she could send for her.  Loomis, distraught, takes Zonia off in search of Martha and we meet them as they wander into the boarding house. 

Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy.*

Rebuilding lives and a nation after the devastation of slavery doesn’t come easily and August Wilson takes us back on a journey that provides a small snapshot in time not so long ago where the country’s growing pains were deep and ever present.  Fast forwarding a mere 98 years later and experiencing his story alongside the first African American president in our country’s history was a subtext that resonated throughout the Belasco Theater and brought a tear to my eyes.