It’s about to be a very busy season for the actor André Holland. His latest film, “Love, Brooklyn,” begins its theatrical run on August 29th. A day after, he will start a new run of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play “The Brothers Size,” at the Shed. Both projects are, in their own ways, expressions of community: in “Love, Brooklyn,” Holland plays a writer crafting an appraisal of his beloved borough, while “The Brothers Size” represents a continuation of a decades-long creative relationship. (Holland and McCraney worked together on “Moonlight,” which was based on a play of McCraney’s, and Holland is also in a producing collective with several fellow-actors who, he says, follow McCraney “everywhere he goes.”) Not long ago, Holland joined us to talk about some books that have fed his thinking on community—its influence on making art and its entanglement with themes of care and progress. His remarks have been edited and condensed.
The American Century Cycle
by August Wilson
I grew up in a very small community, hearing people tell their stories while sitting on the front porch or around a fire barrel. I always felt like the stories that I encountered naturally as a child were incredibly inspiring, but when I got into drama school, I couldn’t really find those stories on the American stage, until I encountered August Wilson.
The Century Cycle (also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle) is a group of plays, all about the Hill District, in Pittsburgh, where Wilson grew up. Wilson spoke a lot about how he spent much of his time just listening to people, that he wanted to record exactly the way they talked, and there’s this thing that happens in his plays where, suddenly, a character will go on for pages at a time. In “Jitney,” a character named Fielding, who up until that point has been a sort of comic character we don’t learn a lot about, talks at length about the big heartbreak of his life—he tells a group of people waiting in the Jitney station the story of how he lost the woman he loved and never got over it.
When I was in “Jitney,” I used to sneak around to the wings to watch Anthony Chisholm do that speech. He told me he had played the role something like twenty-four times. But when I watched him, every single time he did it, it was as if it was happening for the first time. It’s a remarkable moment because it shows something that is possible only because the other people in the station are holding space for him. You really understand that his vulnerability can be made legible only by the fact that there are witnesses to it. That’s just one of the unique and beautiful ways that community shows up in Wilson’s work.
The Souls of Black Folk
by W. E. B. Du Bois
I think I found this book in a used bookstore when I was in college. I bought a copy and started reading it without really having the context to know what I was reading. One chapter I’ve been thinking about is “Of the Meaning of Progress,” in which Du Bois recounts teaching in Tennessee and talks about encountering a young Black woman named Josie.
Josie tells Du Bois about her community, which would really love to have a school. When he sets one up, she’s clearly the brightest student in the class, by far, but, like many of the other students, there are a lot of things on her plate, like taking care of her siblings. Du Bois’s portrait of her points to the limitations that are produced by segregation and racism and how, despite those things, this young girl is still striving.
When Du Bois comes back years later, he learns that Josie has died. The book doesn’t tell you exactly how, but it does say that Josie had spent the years in between his visits toiling away, and that one of her brothers was imprisoned. Du Bois describes her death with a beautiful line. At the end, he says, “Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.” Her death exemplifies this loss of brilliance and possibility. Despite the fact that Josie was held in a community, and that she and the people around her tried to make things different, these forces still acted on her life in a way that made it impossible for her to flourish.
Home
by Toni Morrison
“Home” is not very long, but it’s stunning. It follows a man named Frank Money who grew up in Lotus, Georgia, with his sister, Cee. I don’t want to give too much away, but, basically, Frank ends up leaving Georgia—he joins the Army and takes this long journey on which he sees all these horrible things—and then one day he gets a letter saying that his baby sister is ill and that he needs to come home.
The beginning of the novel paints a picture of Lotus as a place where life is not possible for Black people. The fact that Frank thinks fighting in the Army is a better choice than his own home tells you a lot about what the place was. But when he returns, his entire perspective changes. Morrison describes him encountering the women in the neighborhood and feeling a kind of love from them that he maybe never really knew before.
When Frank eventually finds his sister, he wants to go in and see her right away, but the women of the community who have been caring for her tell him he has to wait. So he sits outside for so long, waiting and waiting. Meanwhile, these women who haven’t really been prominent in the story up to that point—they’ve always been there, but you don’t really know much about them—they suddenly become central. The way you see how the community of women care for one another, that really touches me.