How Does August Wilson Use Racism In Fences

Caitlin Hensel

English 267

Dr. Patterson

17 November 2014

The Fence of Inequality: Racism and Its Effects in August Wilson’s Fences

Anti-black racism is a powerful idea that permeates August Wilson’s Fences, to the point where it can be argued that it is the driving force behind the plot and characters of the play. The focus following the Maxsons, a black family living in late 1950s Pittsburgh, fills the entire play with implications of race and racism, though neither of those words are actually said in the entirety of the script. Like the title of the play itself, racism provides yet another fence for the Maxsons, encompassing the entire story’s narrative and influencing every facet of the characters’ lives. Despite the backdrop of the dawning

Civil Rights Movement, represented in the new opportunities for black people in baseball and the opportunities in Troy’s job, racism traps the family in a dead-end life they can’t escape from. This specifically molds the personality and character development of Troy, leaving him bitter and willing to make escapist decisions that tear his family apart, driving the plot to its tragic conclusion. On a thematic level, racism also traps the characters in a repeating cycle of oppression, denying Troy opportunities as a child and in turn influencing Troy to deny his sons those same opportunities, turning both Cory and Lyons into versions of him despite the new hope offered by the time period.
Troy, the father in the Maxson family and the play’s protagonist, is defined by the racist society he grew up in, affecting his personality, his actions and by proxy, the plot’s course. Throughout the play, Troy is defined as a proud man who longs to relive his glory days and chafes under the restrictions of his family as well as his social and economic position. He is bitter about his loss of youth, his lost chances, and his circumstances. This bitterness stems from past restrictions that occurred throughout his childhood and young life; namely, his violent early life with his father and his time in the Negro Leagues, both of which were influenced by the systematic racial structures of power.
These structures are clearly shown to have shaped Troy’s life even from his early life as a child, specifically through his father; Troy briefly mentions how, in his early childhood, his father never cared about his wife or his children, only about “getting them bales of cotton in to Mr. Lubin” (Wilson 17). Further exposition, along with this text, implies that Troy’s father was a planter who was only concerned with paying back the white sharecropper he worked for (17). Troy states that his father was so consumed with keeping up with debts that Troy wonders “why he was living,” saying that he was “trapped” by his responsibility to his family and to white landowner he worked under (17). Troy clearly reviles his father, calling him an “evil man,” but his father’s lowlife nature and pointless existence of trying to get the cotton to Mr. Lubin can both be traced back to the exploitative nature of the sharecropping structure to begin with. This structure of a landowner allowing a farmer to live on the land in return for a percentage of the farmer’s yield was used to oppress black people in the South by making the black farmers pay exorbitant prices for farming equipment and other necessities to yield crop, constantly leaving them in a cycle of debt that was impossible to escape from without outside intervention; this essentially left black farmers in sharecropping agreements in slavery-like conditions long after the actual practice was abolished (Byres 125). Unfortunately, taking up with a sharecropper was one of the very few options black people have in the post-Civil War South, and for Troy’s father the cycle of debt and pseudo-slavery was likely an inevitable choice; one that would have been passed down to Troy himself if Troy hadn’t literally escaped from his father’s home (124-5; Wilson 17). However, though Troy did escape his father’s fate as a farmer trying to pay back an eternal debt to a sharecropper, Troy still feels trapped in his dead-end life portrayed in Fences. Troy’s deep resentment and hatred of “standing still” and being trapped in a certain life is echoed in his contempt for his father’s inescapable circumstances and the despicable figure his father became because of it; contempt that also reflects a subconscious fear that Troy has turned out the same way because of similar circumstances.
Troy’s resentment of being trapped in a certain life is reflected in his experience with his father; however it is more clearly shown and established in the play with his history in baseball. The reader learns early on in the narrative that Troy had been in the Negro Leagues playing as a slugger, and Troy boasts that he was one of the best ballplayers in his prime. However, because of the racism of Troy’s time, he was incapable of playing in the Major Leagues, which Troy considers a great injustice; when Troy is told he simply came by too early to play in desegregated baseball, he states, “There ought not never have been no time called too early!”, echoing the sentiments of actual Negro League players who were denied the opportunity of the Major Leagues (Wilson 5; Koprince 349). This lack of opportunity is the main reason for Troy’s dissatisfaction in life and his frustration with the racial discrimination he faces, shown in his constant euphemisms of baseball to describe racism, such as the idea that when you’re black, “you born with two strikes on you before you come to the plate” (Wilson 22). This likely is also caused by Troy’s actual experiences as part of the Negro League; historically, the League traveled everywhere to play wherever they could, even in the Deep South, where they would face constant and sometimes violent racial discrimination, and Troy likely faced the harshest side of racism as a ball player (Koprince 350). Susan Koprince also argues in her article, “Baseball as History and Myth in August Wilson’s Fences,” that one of the reasons Troy’s experience with baseball seems to have affected him so much is because the game of baseball is a metaphor for the American Dream itself; an icon of the United States, baseball has always represented fair play and equal opportunity (349). Yet, despite Troy’s excellent abilities he couldn’t play in the Major Leagues, and when he was finished with the years of playing in racially charged times, he gained nothing for it, no wealth or recognition for his skills. And he wasn’t the only one; the play mentions Josh Gibson, one of the greatest Negro League players of all time, as Troy comments that Gibson’s daughter “walking around with raggedy shoes on her feet,” when a less talented but white major league player’s daughter certainly wouldn’t be suffering the same problem (Wilson 5). On a symbolic level, Troy, along with other Negro League baseball players born “too early,” were literally denied the opportunity of the American Dream promised to everyone. Though Troy may have been as amazing at baseball as he claims, the ingrained systematic racism of the time denied him any true recognition or lasting reward for his years in the Negro League, like many actual ballplayers who played for years and never made it to the mainstream Major Leagues despite their superior talent; this lack failure to achieve the American Dream because of his further contributes to his feelings of being trapped in his life, because he’s aware of all that he could not gain simply because of his skin color.
Troy’s childhood with his father left him with a contempt for staying still and being under a white man’s power; Troy’s time in the Negro Leagues left him disillusioned to the idea that he could truly achieve something great for himself and bitter at being “stuck” in his current life as a menial worker, a father, and a husband.

In the play, these feelings of being trapped leave him willing to take thoughtless actions in an attempt to escape this life; namely, having an affair with Alberta, directly affecting the plot’s course. These feelings also leave him confrontational toward the systematic white supremacy he has suffered throughout his life; though it is never explicitly stated, Troy clearly resents white people’s privilege complaining about the unfair advantages they have in baseball, at his work as a garbage man, and in everyday life. He even goes so far as to call the devil a white man who will put a black man in debt, and associates death with the Ku Klux Klan as well by describing him in “a white robe with a hood on it” (Wilson 6). This view of white men and white power being downright evil also contributes to much of the conflict in Fences; though the dawning Civil Rights Movement and new opportunities arise in sports and in life, Troy continues to remain firmly pessimistic in the face of possible change, leading to contention within his family, specifically his

son.
Fences’ setting displays the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, shown clearly through several opportunities spoken of and shown throughout the play; Troy’s advancement at his job to a position previously only held by white people and, more obviously, the knowledge of the desegregation of Major League baseball. Yet Troy remains firmly pessimistic toward these social changes. When Rose and Bono point out that baseball has black players ever since Jackie Robinson, Troy complains that there were many black players better than Robinson, including himself, and later on Troy states to Cory that nonwhite players never got to play because “the colored guy got to be twice as good before he get on the team” (Wilson 11). Indeed, desegregation still hadn’t fully occurred in the Major Leagues quite yet, and racial tensions were still quite high; just because baseball decided to end the silent agreement to keep the Major Leagues white didn’t mean that racial discrimination within the sport was over (Timpane 70; Koprince 349). Troy saw that racism didn’t end simply because segregation did; like the unofficial segregation Troy would have faced that occurred in the North despite the absence of Jim Crow laws, baseball, and the American Dream, were still silently out of rich for people of color (Shah 128). Troy’s son, Cory, believes differently; he’s proven himself to be admirable at football, and has a chance of getting into college on a sports scholarship, which could lead to new opportunities and a better life for him in the future. For Cory, times are changing, and a possible escape from poverty is blocked only by a father that is, in many ways, oppressing Cory and denying him opportunities (Awkward 212). Troy, who can’t expect college football to treat his son any better than Major League baseball treated him, is vehemently against Cory’s opportunity of college, saying that “the white man ain't gonna let you get nowhere with that football” and that he needs to learn some kind of trade so that he can “have something can't nobody take away from you” (Wilson 12). The argument between Troy and Cory of whether or not Cory could chase after this opportunity within the racist power structure is one of the main conflicts of the play, a conflict that eventually fractures the relationship between father and son past the point of repair.
With racism shaping Troy’s personality and fueling his relationship with his sons, it also plays strong influence in one of Fences’ larger themes: the continuation of the cycles of oppression, causing children to grow up into their parents. As stated before, Troy’s father was trapped in a sharecropping agreement that turned him into a hard and unloving parent that was only concerned with paying off his debts (Wilson 17). Troy talks about his father with contempt, stating that he left home at a young age after his father beat him to find new opportunities (17). Yet, because of the systematic racism in place there were no opportunities for him, leading him down a path that eventually landed him in jail for years. Even though Troy had small success in the Negro Leagues after his time in jail, it leaves him with no money, opportunities, or recognition for his talent, and he ends up in what he considers a dead-end life. He is not kind to his children; he constantly accuses Lyons, his elder son, of wanting money whenever Lyons comes around, and when Cory asks his father why Troy never liked him, Troy tells him that he doesn’t have to like Cory, that Cory is only his job and “responsibility” (12-4). Interestingly, Troy describes his own father in a similar fashion; though Troy states that “a kid to him wasn’t nothing” he admits that his father “felt a responsibility” to the family, keeping him tied there to take care of them (17). Like his father, Troy feels a responsibility to his family, but because of the way he was raised does not necessarily value strong emotional relationships, and definitely feels trapped by the duty to care of his family the same way his father did (Awkward 220). In the process of trying to escape a little from the drudgery of his life, he ends up losing the respect and love of all of his family members, leaving him with very little favorable sentiment by the time of his death, much in the same way his father was not well-liked. In many ways, Troy ends up becoming just like the father he hated.
Whether Troy recognizes how similar he is to his parent, he does not want the same fate to happen to either of his sons. Like Troy, both Lyons and Cory are pursuing a dream; Lyons wants to be a successful musician and Cory wants to play football and go to college. But Troy constantly derides them for these dreams; he berates Lyons for thinking himself too good to get a proper job and pulls Cory off the high school football team, denying his second son the chance at a scholarship (Wilson 7; 19). Part of this stems from Troy’s unwillingness to let his sons make the same mistakes he did, especially in Cory’s case. When asked why he won’t let Cory play football, Troy responds, “I want him to move as far away from my life as he can get…I decided seventeen years ago that boy wasn't getting involved in no sports. Not after what they did
to me in the sports” (14).

Troy’s belief that the system hasn’t changed, that black people will never gain opportunities in white power structures, drives him to keep Cory from even trying (Koprince 354-5). Unfortunately, all this does is exacerbate Cory’s resentment of Troy, eventually leading to a confrontation that almost becomes physical and ends with Cory leaving Troy’s house for good in a strong parallel to the way Troy left his father’s house (Wilson 26-7). When the reader finds Troy and Lyons again in the final act, the similarities between both sons’ paths and their father’s is even more pronounced. Lyons is now in jail, but still pursuing his music, the same way Troy went to jail and pursued baseball; Cory has given up his dreams and joined the military, and like Troy has become bitter about his lost chances, unwilling to go to Troy’s funeral because of the bad blood between them (28-9). Cory’s mother, Rose, even remarks upon it, stating “You Troy Maxson all over again” (29). And like Troy before him, Cory wants nothing to do with his father, denies the idea of being anything like him. The failure of success and lack of opportunities for black people trapped each generation of Maxsons in a cycle where they end up trapped just like their father before them; from Troy’s father to Troy to Cory and Lyons, each bear the strong imprints of their upbringing despite their best efforts, implying that the racism that shaped their lives is

inescapable.
The system of racism surrounds Fences in a very similar way to the play’s name, trapping the main characters in a mire of inopportunity and unfavorable circumstances. Starting from Troy’s childhood as the son of a farmer under a sharecropper to the failure of the American Dream in the Negro Leagues, Troy’s personality was driven by the racist environment he was surrounded by, influencing the plot of the play and condemning his sons to the same attitudes he had despite the new hope offered by the Civil Rights Movement and the progressiveness of the time. [more to add to the conclusion later]

Works Cited
Awkward, Michael. "The Crookeds With the Straights: Fences, Race, and the Politics of Adaptation." May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Ed. Alan Nedel. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 1994. 205-29. Print.
Byres, T. J., ed. Sharecropping and Sharecroppers. London: F. Cass, 1983. Print.
Koprince, Susan. "Baseball As History And Myth In August Wilson's "Fences." African American Review 40.2 (2006): 349-358. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 23 Oct. 2014.
Shah, Aarushi H. "All Of Africa Will Be Free Before We Can Get A Lousy Cup Of Coffee: The Impact Of The 1943 Lunch Counter Sit-Ins On The Civil Rights Movement." History Teacher 46.1 (2012): 127-147. Academic Search Elite. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.
Timpane, John. "Filling the Time: Reading History in the Drama of August Wilson." May All Your Fences Have Gates: Essays on the Drama of August Wilson. Ed. Alan Nedel. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 1994. 67-86. Print.
Wilson, August. Fences. London: Penguin, 1988. PDF.