Fences by August Wilson

TROY: (With a quiet rage that threatens to consume him.) Alright... Mr. Death. See now... I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take and build me a fence around this yard. See? I'm gonna build me a fence around what belongs to me. And then I want you to stay on the other side. See? You stay over there until you're ready for me. Then you come on. Bring your army. Bring your sickle. Bring your wrestling clothes. I ain't gonna fall down on my vigilance this time. You ain't gonna sneak up on me no more. When you ready for me... when the top of your list say Troy Maxson... that's when you come around here. You come up and knock on the front door. Ain't nobody else got nothing to do with this. This is between you and me. Man to man. You stay on the other side of that fence until you ready for me. Then you come up and knock on the front door. Anytime you want. I'll be ready for you.

I'm excited to teach the eleventh grade next year, for the first time in years--American Lit. Our department decided that our "common text"--the one book we all have to teach--would be August Wilson's Fences, part of his "Pittsburgh Cycle" of plays and an extremely popular book to read in high school. I'd never read it, but I've seen the movie with Denzel Washington and Viola Davis, which I now know is a pretty faithful rendition. The story of the two-act play centers on Troy Maxson, a trash collector and former ballplayer in Pittsburgh. After years of conflict, Troy has settled into a comfortable middle-aged life with his wife Rose and son Cory. Reminders of more difficult times abound: Troy's son from another marriage, Lyons, comes asking for money, and his brother Gabe, whose traumatic war injury has damaged his brain, has recently moved out. And more trouble is on the horizon: the conflict with his son Cory over his intention to play college football, for one, and the secret affair he's been having with a woman at work.

The first act of Fences struck me as being about work and how to get ahead. Troy is in the middle of a conflict with the sanitation department about the fact that all their "lifters" are black and their drivers white; to snag a plum driving job would be the kind of incremental progress that validates his belief in hard work within the limitations of Civil Rights-era society. He has nothing but contempt for gamblers and thieves, those who would advance by irrational leaps, or cheat a system even though it's unfair. We learn somewhere in the latter half of the first act that Troy spent fifteen years in prison after an attempted robbery gone wrong, which explains this outlook.

Its worst manifestation is his conflict with Cory: Troy simply refuses to believe that powerful whites will let Cory succeed on the field, so he refuses to sign off on his release papers. Yet we feel that Cory is not wrong when he says that Troy simply doesn't want him to be better than he was, and there are unsettling intimations that Troy, too, does not owe his success entirely to hard work, as with the suggestion that he has pocketed his brother's disability payments. One way of reading Fences is as a critique of the ideology of hard work and incrementalism, an ideology which proves stronger than the will to follow it.

Many of the play's themes come to bear on the central symbol of the fence that Troy is building throughout the play's first act. In one sense, the fence is an symbol of desperate protectiveness; a symbolic barrier Troy uses to demarcate what is "his," not just against outside threats, but Rose and Cory. As Troy loses a grip on the house and the domestic life it contains--thanks to his affair--the value of this symbolic border becomes increasingly meaningful, leading to a violent showdown with Cory over who belongs within the fence. But one also hears the resonance of the phrase "swing for the fences," an echo of Troy's success as a ballplayer which puts the shrunkenness of his dreams into harsh perspective. In the passage quoted above, the fence becomes a barrier between Troy and even death, the ultimate fact of life which looms over all our beliefs about hard work and getting ahead--the one thing that Troy knows for sure will take all of this away from him.

One thing I like about Fences is that, in its own way, it reproduces themes recognizable in white American fiction and brings their racial component to the forefront. It fits in quite neatly with lots of mid-century fiction about the ennui of success--think Appointment in Samarra or Rabbit, Run--but reveals the way that, for black Americans, success means something different, is more precarious. And it is as powerful a meditation on the "American dream" as The Great Gatsby, and perhaps more honest in its knowledge that this dream has never been equally possible for all.