![]() ![]() There he finds her tended by Mr Eli, who maintains and watches over her and Black Mary, who cooks and cleans for her. He comes to the home of Aunt Ester, at 1839 Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh, seeking her assistance. In Gem of the Ocean, Citizen Barlow is haunted by his past. His project is so much more proactive as he considers how this past now impacts on the African American present. Yet in Gem, as well as his other works, Wilson is not simply reviewing this past and reevaluating history. Within such moments Wilson reviews the choices that blacks have made in the past. Wilson has situated this play at this precise moment just as he has positioned every work within the cycle at critical historical junctures, key transitional moments in the story of Africans in America. ![]() 'So live.' And so ends the beginning of August Wilson's history plays, the first play in his ten-play cycle, set in 1904 at the dawn of the first migration of blacks from the South to the North. As he pours a drink and raises it in a toast, he says, 'So live.' It is a noble petition of hope for the future of the gathered community and a purposeful plea for African Americans to live a life founded on personal integrity and committed to the collective struggle for truth. ![]() Gem of the Ocean (2003) ends with the benediction and instruction offered by Mr Eli, Aunt Ester's gatekeeper, over the newly deceased body of his friend Solly. ![]()
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