This 1923 play, based on Wolfe's hometown of Asheville, presents
Thomas Wolfe's disillusionment with the corruptive forces resulting
from the development and boosterism taking place in Asheville in the
1920's.
Thomas Wolfe's paper route on display in the Pack Place Front Gallery through May 31st.
The photographs in this exhibit were taken in the historic African-American neighborhood surrounding Eagle, Market and Valley streets in the 1940s. The photographer, Juanita Wilson, documented the area due to its connection with celebrated novelist Thomas Wolfe. In the early 1910s, Wolfe delivered the Asheville Citizen newspaper in this neighborhood every morning. From a white middle-class background, Wolfe found this neighborhood both fascinating and frightening, reactions he documented in his heavily autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel.
While his descriptions of this neighborhood in his novel are touched with racism, Wolfe imbibed in the Jim Crow South. Another, less well-known work of Wolfe's, the play Welcome to our City, shows that Wolfe had an understanding of the cultural and economic injustices perpetrated against Asheville's African-American community by the city's leaders. Welcome to our City deals with an attempt by local leaders to remove the African-American community from the neighborhood pictured here in order to develop the area as a residential community for well-heeled whites.
While the play deals with the tenuous economic position of African-Americans in the 1920s, Wolfe's depictions of African-American individuals are sadly stereotypical. Wolfe's closest contact with African-Americans came in brief snatches while on his paper route. This short, impersonal contact helps explain the shallowness of Wolfe's understanding of African-Americans.
In conjunction with the reopening of the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse, Wolfe's childhood home, the Thomas Wolfe Memorial and the YMI Cultural Center are presenting Welcome to our City, directed by Bernie Hauserman, on Saturday, May 29 at 8:00 pm and Sunday, May 30 at 4:00 pm at the YMI Cultural Center's Ray Auditorium. While we will stick closely to Wolfe's original text, the African-American characters will be portrayed with more depth than Wolfe originally gave them.
We invite you to attend the play, and also to take a look around this exhibit. While these photos were taken some thirty years after Thomas Wolfe made his daily rounds in this neighborhood, it was still substantially similar in the 1940s to what it had been in the 1910s. In the 1960s Wolfe's vision of the neighborhood's transformation came vividly true, as the city, with federal Urban Renewal dollars, redeveloped the neighborhood and rerouted many of the streets.
