Fences: Focusing on the (Invisible) African-American Working Class

I brought this novel as a text for my African-American Literature course in high school. Later, I needed this book again for my African-American Culture course at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL). August Wilson wrote about the illumination and celebration of African-American culture. He explored African-American voices that were oppressed and invisible to dominant (white) American culture.

“To write is to fix a language” and stories have “fat with substance” he once said. He would take a decade in American history, focus on the larger issues affecting blacks and write about it. Most of his plays’ settings come from his youthful experiences in Pittsburgh, PA. Fences, by August Wilson, begins in the 1950s where descendants of black ex-slaves learn and cope with the struggles of life: racism, segregation and family life. The Maxson household is an ancient two-story brick house in a small alley in a big-city neighborhood reminiscent of Pittsburgh, PA, an industrial northern city.

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“The descendants of African slaves were offered no such welcome or participation. They came from places called the Carolinas and the Virginias, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. They came strong, eager, searching. The city rejected them and they fled and settled along the riverbanks and under bridges in shallow, ramshackle house made of sticks and tar-paper. They collected rags and wood. They sold the use of their muscles and their bodies. They cleaned houses and washed clothes, they shined shoes, and in quiet desperation and vengeful pride, they stole, and lived in pursuit of their own dream.” (Book excerpt)

This play begins with Troy Maxson, the main character, sitting on the porch of his home with his friend, Bono. Troy and Bono, around their 50s in age, are garbage collectors for the city. They have a conversation about death. Troy tells his friend:

“Death ain’t nothing. I done seen him. Done wrassled with him. You can’t tell me nothing about death. Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner.”

Then Lyons appear on stage. He is, in his 30s, Troy’s son from a previous relationship. He wants to start his own musical group, but his father distastes such ideas. Gabriel, his younger brother, appears and thinks he’s the angel Gabriel because he was injured in the Second World War. He is always talking about heaven and what the angels plan to do. Troy has a wife, Rose, and son, Corey. Corey, around 17 years of age, has ambitions to play football. Troy believes that a man must work for his house and family and disapproves football, although he played baseball in his youthful years. Cory argues with his father why he doesn’t want him to play football. Troy responds:

“Like you? I go out of here every morning…bust my butt…putting up with them crackers every day...cause I like you? You about the biggest fool I ever saw.

It’s my job. It’s my responsibility! You understand that? A man got to take care of his family. You live in my house…sleep you behind on my bedclothes…fill you belly up with my food…cause you my son. You my flesh and blood. Not ‘cause I like you! Cause it’s my duty to take care of you. I owe a responsibility to you!”

He then wins a victory at his job to become a truck driver, a job usually reserved for white men. While we think this is a triumph that Troy gets such a higher-paid position, he loses contact with his friends and family. Troy has an affair with a woman his wife does not know. When word hits that he will have a daughter from Alberta, the woman with whom he was having an affair, Rose becomes livid. Troy’s world becomes smaller after he knows those around him less and less. Rose tells him:

“I been standing with you! I been right here with you, Troy. I got a life too. I gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot with you. Don’t you think I ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me? Don’t you think it ever crossed my mind to want to know other men? That I wanted to lay up somewhere and forget about my responsibilities? That I wanted someone to make me laugh so I could feel good. You not the only one who’s got wants and needs.” (71)

Earlier in the play, Troy tells his family a story how he never knew his father. His father, while he was scared of him, was a sharecropper and the meanest man alive. Despite his hatred for his father, he still sings the song of Blue Dog his father once sang to him. It is 1965, Troy dies and everyone he knew comes together on stage. Corey meets his little sister he has never seen and together they sing the song of Blue Dog. This, through oral tradition, passes down to his children after his death.

The symbolism in this play includes fences, seeds, baseball and oral tradition. The black vernacular Wilson portrays is excellent and realistic. Troy has a fence that surrounds himself from those around him, including his family. No matter how hard they try to step into his circle, no one knows about his affair with Alberta and he never lets his son, Corey, fulfill his dreams. Death is a significant symbol in this book, in that, Troy always seems to be invincible and that he’s living life on a baseball diamond with the mission not to strike out. He is afraid of change, how the world is changing around him and wants no one around him to succeed (like Corey going off to college to play football).

Baseball symbolizes a time period where blacks had their own Negro leagues. Troy used to be a great baseball player but he was too old to join the integrated leagues that include rising stars like Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron. The seeds emphasize Rose’s position that she is a nurturing mother and experiences many stages of growth: Troy and Raynell. The role of black men is important in this play. There is also a lack of father-to-son relationships through generations: how Troy never knew his father, how Lyons never knew Troy and now Corey, etc.

Oral tradition has always been significant in the African-American community. During slavery times when black slaves had no ability to read or write, people will gather together and tell stories, often historical/identity genealogy, to the younger generations. This practice continues in Sub-saharan Africa and other parts of the world where a written language is non-existent. Troy leaves his history on his children as he tells them his life and the song Blue Dog.

What many people may not know is that in his name, Maxson, it is a combination of the Mason-Dixon line, the territorial boundary that divided the North and South in antebellum America. “Maxson” describes the conflicting social and cultural times Troy faces as the world is changing around him and his family. All his life he had to work to survive because if he had demanded black pride/liberation, he would have ridiculed and harmed psychologically and physically due to American racism. But his son, Cory, is part of a new generation of young African-Americans who will fight for their dreams and horizons.
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Fences is the second major play by this poet-turned playwright. His other plays include the Broadway spectacular performance, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984), and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986). This book is written in narrative form as a play with two acts.

This play was first performed at Yale University’s Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut in 1985. Later, the play opened on March 26, 1987 at the 46th Street Theatre, with leading Hollywood actors like James Weldon Johnson and Courtney B. Vance in April 30, 1985. It was originally presented “as a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s 1983 National Playwrights Conference.” This book was the winner of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Wilson also dedicated this book to Lloyd Richards. Richards, who writes a foreword (introduction), to this book is also the Dean of Yale School of Drama and Artistic Director at the Yale Repertory Theater.

(I purchased this used book at my high school for $5.00. 101 pages, includes an introduction by Lloyd Richards and brief biography & critics of August Wilson. This book originally sells for $9.95.)