74 pages • 2 hours read
August WilsonMa Rainey's Black Bottom
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Blues
Ma Rainey tells Cutler and Toledo, “White folks don’t understand about the blues. They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that’s life’s way of talking. You don’t sing to feel better. You sing ‘cause that’s a way of understanding life” (66). She describes the blues as something that she didn’t create but extracted from the world. As an art form that originated on the Southern plantation, created by slaves and their descendants, the blues represents the commodification and appropriation of black culture. The blues exploded as a popular mainstream art form in the 1920s, and white producers and musicians seized it, reforming and profiting from it. Ma Rainey describes it as an art form that is essentially black, originating from a collective black soul. In the mouths and hands of white people, the blues are disconnected from the cultural pain at its roots. They become revised and sanitized.
When Sturdyvant discusses the changing trends in what audiences want out of the blues, he is talking about increasingly white audiences. They want more spectacle and rhythm. By altering the style of the blues and repackaging it for white listeners, Sturdyvant and his ilk are ejecting black artists from the music they created. His willingness to buy Levee’s songs but not Levee’s himself indicates the forthcoming movement in which white artists act as mouthpieces for invisible black songwriters. For Ma, the blues “help you get out of bed in the morning. You get up knowing you ain’t alone” (66). To Toledo, the blues “fill up that emptiness” (66) in the world. Cutler associates the blues with religion, recognizing, “In the church sometimes you find that way of singing. They got blues in the church” (66). To Sturdyvant and Irvin, the blues are just the latest development in popular music, a vehicle for making as much money as they can before public tastes shift.
Levee’s Shoes
At the beginning of the play, Levee is late to the recording studio as he is out spending the money he won from Cutler in a card game on a new pair of shoes. The shoes, which cost more than twice what he won from Cutler, symbolize Levee’s expectations of fame, fortune, and a better life. Although the rest of the band teases and mocks Levee for spending so much money on shoes, Levee believes that they are a part of his new image, the image of the next big music star. Were Levee to achieve that goal, the expense of the shoes would be negligible compared to the money he would earn. Levee treats the shoes as a manifestation of his dreams. He wants Dussie Mae, who rejected him the night before, to see him in the shoes and understand that he is a rising success. He refuses to begin practicing until he has finished polishing them. When Slow Drag steps on them, he angrily and furiously shines them. At the end of the play, when Toledo steps on them, he takes Toledo’s accidental carelessness with his shoes as equivalent to Sturdyvant’s shattering of his dreams and kills him.
Levee makes fun of Toledo for wearing clunky farmer’s shoes, claiming, “You can’t dance like this with them clodhoppers Toledo got!” (29). Toledo recognizes Levee’s fancy shoes as frivolous. They aren’t a symbol of social advancement or power, they are self-indulgent. Toledo accuses, “That’s the trouble with colored folks…always wanna have a good time” (30). Levee, who believes that Sturdyvant has committed to record his music, treats the job playing for Ma Rainey as his last day of invisibility. He throws away his name as a background musician by refusing to follow Ma’s direction and pushing her to fire him. He antagonizes musicians who have worked in the field for decades. The purchase of the shoes is his attempt to become what he believes he is on the verge of becoming. Once Sturdyvant has taken his music and his dream of fame is destroyed, the shoes are all he has left.
The Knife
When Cutler attacks Levee for criticizing the Christian God he believes in, his excessive reaction—not only punching but continuing to beat him when he’s on the ground—reflects his intense investment in his religion. When Levee retaliates by pulling out a knife, he raises the stakes of the fight to a new, deadly level. The knife is a symbol of anger and unresolved hatred. In Levee’s story about the white men who gang-raped his mother, he says that he tried to attack them with a knife, but one of the men took it from him, leaving a deep, ugly scar on his body. As a child, he was helpless. Even with a knife, he couldn’t overcome the men who were attacking his mother. The men who raped his mother did so to humble his father. They violated her body in order to cripple a black man’s pride. By besting him so thoroughly in the fight, Cutler injures Levee’s pride. Levee responds to Cutler the same way he responded to the white rapists, except Levee expects a God who loves white men to allow him to injure or kill Cutler unlike the gang of men who injured him instead.
At the end of the play, Levee’s response to Toledo stepping on his shoes is similarly disproportionate. While a person can heal from a few punches, the fact that Levee carries a knife that he brandishes at all is an indication that he is willing to commit permanent damage. When the knife he has metaphorically carried for so many years finally achieves purchase, he suddenly discovers what permanent means. Rather than unleash his rage on Sturdyvant, who, like Cutler, has humiliated him, and as a white man more closely represents those white men from his childhood, he turns it on a fellow black man. Of course, in 1927, violence from a black man toward a white man would have meant certain death for Levee. Although Levee claims that he isn’t afraid of white men, he is only posturing. When Sturdyvant deliberately takes away his agency, he slinks away, but when Toledo accidentally insults him by stepping on his shoes, Levee takes out the full force of his aggression.
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