Introduction
One of the most disenfranchised
group of workers that most corporations can get way with without having to pay
them any wages than the rival groups of the third –world sweatshops are the
American prisoners. These laborers have been stripped of their economic,
political, and social rights legally and has ultimately meant that they are the
second-class citizens. The prisoners do not form forming unions silenced
violently for speaking out and forced to work long hours under bad conditions
for no or very little wages.
This form of marginalization makes
the convicted workers to be practically invisible in modern day society. They
are kept hidden and, there are hardly any resources available to reflect their
plight or their circumstances.
There are currently
more than two million prisoners in American locked behind bars. We cannot hear
or see them and; they make up the modern day slaves in this 21st century. This
paper addresses the problem of prison labor as represented in the literary work
“The Piano Lesson “by August Wilson.
The Piano Lesson
August Wilson was born in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania in a family of seven. He dropped out of school at the age of
sixteen because of the intense racism. He opted to educate himself
independently in one of the local city library. While doing a wide range of
jobs, Wilson developed keen interest in writing. He eventually founded the
Black Horizon a Hill theater company in 1968.
However, it was until 1978 that he started producing
mature t dramas after moving to St. Paul, Minnesota. His first piece was the Jitney
drama that tells a story about a group of travelers and workers in a taxi
station. This piece was well-received and praised locally especially because of
the black urban speech experimentation. In 1990, Wilson was awarded his
Pulitzer award because of the Piano Lesson. The Piano Lesson is a tale about
the struggle of two siblings because of a beautiful family heirloom. It is a
piano carved with various images of the African ancestors and had the craft of
their grandfather who was a slave.
The plays’ historical backdrop is the
American Great Depression as well as the black migration period from the South
to the North. During the migration, there was a steady shift of black people
that finally stabilized in the 1930s. The migration leads to the creation of
new black communities in the North that were later affected by the economic
meltdown. The play’s inspiration is from the painting of Romare Bearden that
shows a conversation between a student and teacher. This depiction acts as an
allegory of how learning has to happen among African Americans in negotiating
their history. In addressing this work, Wilson managed to formulate two main
questions which are according to Sandra Shannon, “What do you do with your
legacy, and how do you best put it to use (The Dramatic Vision of August
Wilson, 146).
Therefore, the entire works in this play “The Piano Lesson” concerns
itself with a range of analogous questions. Thus, this play does not just
emerge from a meticulous research on the everyday life and dialect in an era,
but it also presents issues like historical representations, memories, history,
and legacy that form the main conflict in this play.
•
Is the problem or issue raised by the work of literature still a problem today?
If so, to what extent?
Since the start the start of the 20th
century, both agricultural-based and industrial based prison labor faced major
problems. The innovation of efficient farming tools and equipment brought about
major changes in the labor -intensive nature of agriculture industry. The
prison farms even with its much cheap labor did not compare with the private
farms using mechanized tools. The introduction of this new machinery has
greatly reduced prison farming during the 1930s. The new machinery greatly helped
in rising of livestock and for growing crops that were to be consumed by the
inmate population. The only exception of this was the case f the prison system
in Texas in which the cotton crops processing were in prison textile mill that
is still a viable enterprise to this day (Yardley, 123).
There are more than 100, 000 inmates
in the US who do a wide range of commercial activities in which some earn as
little as 21 cents on an hourly basis. Federal Prison Industries (FPI) a US
government program currently employees 21, 000 inmates who produce a wide
variety of products such as file cabinets, clothing, military helmets and
electronic equipment. The selling of these products was for private companies
and federal agencies. The sales from FPI are over $600 million annually and
raise more than $37 million as profits. Furthermore in the last two and a half
decades, more than thirty states have passed laws that allow the utilization of
convict labor among commercial enterprises. The programs are now in existence
in more than 36 states.
America clearly imprisons more of its
citizens compared to other nations of the world. The US currently has more than
25% prisoners of the world. There were more than 2.3 million Americans in 2008
in jail or prison. One in every 48 working age men is behind bars according to
the Center for Policy and Economic Research. This number does not include the
undocumented immigrants under detaining and awaiting sentencing, deportation or
juveniles within the school to prison pipeline (Yardley, 123).
The cost of thus incarceration is not in even
distribution. Excess of the incarceration is falling predominantly on the
African American communities as reflected in August Wilson‘s work, The Piano
Lesson.
Though the black people comprise only
of 13% of the general population, they account for up to 40% of the overall
prisoner’s pollution in the US. Thus the incarceration o the black males and
females is almost three times higher than the Whites and Hispanic (Yardley,
123).
Wilson cleverly pairs the underlying
themes such as the oppression under the Jim Crow rules with palpable images
such as the slave -era ankle chains. The key theme that underlies Wilson’s
literary work is the oppression of blackness and the struggle for identity. We
get to understand the actual happenings through dialogues in this story that
dominate reportage, storytelling, and testimonies. These modes of speech
transmit and preserve the family legacy. The dialogues present the struggle of
ghosts of slavery that asserts they in people’s memories especially the case of
the Parchman Prisons farm. At Parchman Prison Farm, we can analyze the issue of
labor problem.
Governor James K. Vardaman opened the
Parchman Prison Farm in 1904 to become a highly profitable labor camp. The farm
had more than 20,000 acres that cover forty-six squire miles. The prison owned
a brickyard, sawmill, a slaughterhouse, two cotton gins and a vegetable canning
plant. Unlike the other ordinary prisons that took a lot of state revenue, the
Parchman Prison Farm helped to furnish the state treasury with huge profits
annually from the sale of cottonseed and cotton.
The prisoners in Parchman farm had
to ensure the cruelty and most difficult conditions that are just similar to
the former slavery days. Inmates had to live in cells that are overcrowded with
overflowing waste buckets, bloodstained floors, and walls covered with vermin.
Also the convicts were forced to work in the scorching sun in the cotton fields
for many hours. They were whipped barbarously by a three-foot long leather
strap with six inches known as the, “Black Annie”. Convicts were tripped on
their naked backs in front of all the other peoples. For the case of an
apprehended escapee he had to withstand lashings of an unlimited number. There
were a handful of paid guards to supervise the prisoners called the “trusty
shooters” who have the authority of shooting any convict trying to escape
(Taylor, 56).
Boy Willie Charles in the Piano
Lesson aims to forget his three year sentence in Parchman Farm. That was
operated by Inmate labor. The issue raised in this novel is that the leasing of
convicts was an answer to the South in addressing the overcrowding of jails and
prisons. The prisons overcrowded with incarcerated blacks under the less famous
Black Code systems for felonies and misdemeanors. Under the populists pressure
the, merchandising of prison labor ended as well as penal farming. Other
convict bondage similar to those of the medieval fiefdoms took their place.
Currently the prison farming history is found
in penitentiary records and state archives and also in court proceedings,
legislative minutes, and dramatic monologues such as blues music by Mose Alison
and in folk tales. Wilson in his tale the Piano also talks about the
experiences of the Parchman Farm. Prisoners slaughtered and tended cattle,
harvested cotton and raised vegetables on forty-six square miles of the delta
cropland. Any outside observer would notice the complex mimic of a plantation
that is well kept in the antebellum south. Both the unskilled and skilled
labour was needed from the 90 percent male’s blacks to run the brickyard,
sawmill, vegetables, and fruit cannery and cotton gin factories. The prisoners
suffered from poor health conditions; they had to work under the scorching sun,
leading to accidents, exhaustion and, insect-borne diseases. They lived in
caging and chaining in filthy places, survived on bread and water diet. They
also went through dog bits, strip searches, pillorying and altering, ear
cropping, lashing and branding (Plum, 210)
•
Does the work of literature accurately reflect the difficulty and nature of the
problem or issue? If so, how? If not, why not?
The literature material The Piano Lesson
clearly presents the horrors of the Parchman Farm. Public weeping involved
using a long leather strap call the Black Annie that was handed over from the
days of slavery. Each weeping involved three to four guards who strip the culprit
to the waits and spread his body on the floor. The sergeant issues the
punishment for infractions such as breaking tools, laziness, cursing or bad
mouthing a prison staff, pilfering and, fighting. Other serious penalties
involved slashing the feet soles, palms, buttocks, calves and other body parts
over a period of days which led to eventual death. It was until 1905 when the
federal court put an end to convey farming in 1972 because of its unusual and
cruel punishment. Furthermore the brutal farm system contributed to protests,
breakouts and whole subset of horror stories and blues lyrics. Due to the
informal cataloging of crimes against humanity in the farm systems, Wilson uses
his characters to show their memories and their eyewitness account of this black
history at the Parchman Farm State Prison.
The Piano Lesson by Wilson
accurately presents the modern day prison industry in the wake of the criminal
“justice” system. The states have the power to determine the size of the worker
pool. The work of literature showed how the recently freed slaves as well as
their descendants have to labor so as to generate revenue (OShinsk, 101).
•
Are there any important aspects of the issue or the problem that the work of
literature doesn’t capture? If so, what are they?
The literature has left out the important
discussion on how private companies benefit from the almost cheap labor from
prisoners. The US prison system is a riddle with classism and racism and worst
still the exploitation of prospers. The private companies enjoying the easy and
cheap labor are not from Mexico, Indonesia or China. Rather, the companies are
from this country the land of the free and democratic people. Large US
corporations are employing prisoners as a source of free and cheap labor
(Khaled, 1).
This shows that inmate labor has been a
brilliant strategy for most corporations in they are the ever-hungry quest to
maximizing profits. Companies have to use a whole range of workers who are not
just cheap but also easy to control as reflected by August Wilson in his book.
In the use of prison labor pool, these companies avoids the need to provide
benefits to employees such as not paying wages or very little wages, sick days
and health insurance covers. The companies have no worries about the employees
demand for vacation and the sick day or even paying workers. Those workers who
refuse to work are to go to disciplinary rooms and loose privileges.
Studies have clearly
shown t the wastage of the complex prison-industrial nature of America to the
innocent lives and the taxpayer dollars. It is an aspect that the literature
text does not address. Despite the complexity, rolling back the rates of
imprisonment has also proven to be a major challenge than ever before (Benns
1).
Conclusion
By analyzing the social problems in
literature, it is possible to find documented issues that are less known to
most people. The play by Wilson August “The Piano Lesson” portrays our modern
social problem of prison labor. It shows how the abolition of slavery quickly
culminated in the rise of Convict Leasing and the use of Black Codes, which
work together in perpetuating the servitude of the an African American
population by exploiting the 13th amendment loophole. The US constitution
mentions that no involuntary nor slavery servitude except for the reasons of
punishments will be a crime in which the party will face conviction.
The black codes are laws that
criminals the African Americans legal activity and provide a reason for mass
imprisonment and arrests of the freed blacks. These laws have resulted in the
rates of African Americans surpassing the total number of Hispanics and whites
in the U.S prison. Additionally, while in jail, these prisoners are exploited
by large corporations who are hardly paid anything for their work. These are
the same issues found in Wilson’s work on the Piano Lesson.
Work cited
Benns Whitney. “American Slavery, Reinvented” Sept
21, 2015. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/prison-labor-in-america/406177/
Khalek Rania. “In the eyes of the corporation,
inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit.”
2011 July 21. Retrieved from http://www.alternet.org/story/151732/21st-century_slaves%3A_how_corporations_exploit_prison_labor
OShinsky, David. “Worse
than slavery”; Pargcamna Farm and the Ordeal of the Jim Crow Justuce. New York,
Free Press, 1997.
Plum, Jay. Blues, History
and the Dramaturgry of August Wilson. An African American Review. Vol 27, No 4,
Winter 1993, P 561-567
Taylor Banks William. Down on Parchman Farm. The
Great Prison in Mississippi Delta. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999.
Yardley, Jonathan. In the Fileds of Despair. Washington
Post, March 31, 1996
Sherry Roberts is the author of this paper. A senior editor at MeldaResearch.Com in assignment writing services if you need a similar paper you can place your order from essay writing services.
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