Fences

Fences is a modern story. Who cannot relate to it? Who cannot relate to its main character, Troy Maxson? I love Troy. He is a son of America; he is the ultimate, "maximum" son of this country, which is to say he questions the American democratic ideal. There never should have been a time, he says, too early for the realization of his or, by extension, other black's dreams. Life for him, as for Lorraine Hansberry's Walter Lee Younger, "ain't been no crystal stair" (Hughes). Troy is my father and my brother, my uncles and cousins. He is a migrant, having come up from Mobile to what was supposed to be a Promised Land--the urban North--in his case Pittsburgh, where the author himself, August Wilson, lived. Wilson knows Troy; he has met him in bars, on stoops, in smokey jazz clubs. He has captured their language and their pain is represented in that language.

The play opens on a Friday after work. How familiar this is to me. The eagle flies on Friday/Saturday I'll go out and play/The eagle flies on Friday/Saturday I'll go out and play/Sunday I'll go to church and fall down on my knees and pray. Friday is a day of relief and release for those who labor during the work week, usually in factories or on the streets of America's cities, in various capacities, for example, as sanitation workers. The jobs are hard, sometimes demeaning, but they pay oh so much better than those old jobs, picking cotton for Mr. Lubin and being cheated. Yet, Wilson suggests that, as Martin Luther King was heard to say, Michigan Avenue in Chicago is no promised land. In other words, the Negro exchanged one set of oppressive conditions in the South for a new set of oppressive conditions in the North. Troy feels fenced in. He says he "locked [himself] into a pattern" and forgot to leave something for himself. What has locked or "fenced" him in? The answer to this question depends on how large you think Wilson's critique is. The playwright once stated, in the late '80s, that black people still, by and large, had not experienced the American dream but were, rather, still in survival mode--trying to keep a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. Did Wilson see the American Dream as an American nightmare, from which one could be freed only by death? Did Wilson reject what capitalism offers the common laborer?

I do not know the answer to this question without further study, yet the life of fictional Troy Maxson does seem a case study. Troy's life seems tragic on the one hand. His life is a series of struggles framed by a desire to move away from yet an ultimate repeating of his father's blues. His father had to get the cotton in; Troy is on the rubbish. Temporarily, the lives of the two men may have been different yet similar. His father's life would have been framed by seasons, by weather cycles, and by the processes of agricultural production; Troy's life is framed by the eight-hour, five-day work week. It is a familiar scheme that Troy accepts; he makes a deal with the devil--Mr. Rand or the furniture dealer. It is the modern proposal that most of us are offered--forty plus hours a week of our lives for a wage--for money. The weekend is a short-term cure for what ails us, and what ails us is the fact that we have traded our very lives and may have come out with the short end of the stick. This is a sad realization.

Growing up in Detroit, I observed the Friday evening or afternoon ritual. Well, I didn't observe it up close. Our fathers kept their distance from their families on Fridays. A good friend of mine, whose father worked at Chrysler, was after school on Fridays, sent directly to her grandmother's house--away from her father who drank very heavily on that day and the next and sometimes became violent as a result. But he did not drink on Sundays though he did not appear to fall down on that day onto his knees to pray. Maybe he did so in quiet, but more likely his work and his "play" were his prayer or at least his communion with God. He was so much like Troy Maxson this man.