August Wilson told the story of his recent trip to New York, where the bellhop of his hotel called up a cab for him. The cab driver came to the door of the hotel, got out of the cab, and met the bellhop. Upon realizing that his fare was the dark-skinned man standing by, the cabbie laid into the bellhop: "I get the shit? I get the shit?" Wilson, in defiance, took a different cab.

He described the white folks of the American 50s who fled black neighborhoods as not evil people—just victims of a linguistic system that defined "black" as (and he quoted from Webster's 3rd but a close enough definition is in the American Heritage 4/e, 2000): "9. Marked by anger or sullenness: gave me a black look. 10. Attended with disaster; calamitous: a black day; the stock market crash on Black Friday. 11. Deserving of, indicating, or incurring censure or dishonor."

Wilson also told some lengthy, and excellent, stories about the crowd he ran with in Pittsburgh as a young man. Taking home a date to see his record collection, he found a padlock on the door (his rent was late). He called a lawyer friend to confirm his suspicion that it's illegal to padlock a renter's door, and smashes off the padlock, in front of his date (it bears mentioning that this summary doesn't do justice to the story-telling acumen of the man). In the morning the police come, he tells the date to go back to sleep, and he's in jail for three days: as it turns out, it is legal for the landlord of a furnished apartment to padlock-out a tenant.

His friend Cy Morocco used to give him a magazine article and say, "Hey, August, read this and tell me what you got from it." He reads it; "I got this and this and this." "Oh, yeah, good, good, that's what I got too." Only years later does he find out that Cy couldn't read. Nor could he play the saxophone, but that's another story.

The crux of the piece for me was Wilson's pert comparisons of "black people" and "white people." "A white man," he says, sees a TV set in the window of a shop and asks his buddy, 'How many inches across is that?' A black man looks at that same TV set and asks, 'Ey man—how much you think that weigh?" This one rubbed me the wrong way, and my (white) companions as well. Are black folk more inclined to steal?—What's the joke here? Sure, though, Wilson often treads the line where survival meets crime for the souls of black folk, in his plays and in his sensibilities. Thinking about it, I wondered what was a deeper immorality: the black man who steals a TV set, or the white folks with no grasp of the rubber-to-road realities that black folks face, outside the bourgeois fold.

If there's any doubt about Wilson's humanism, he keeps no secrets from the audience. He lit up at one point: "When I agreed to do this show, I asked for two conditions: that I'm allowed to smoke, and that I have an understudy."