Perhaps August Wilson’s most famous work, Fences, explores the Maxson family’s life and relationships. This moving drama was written in 1983 and helped Wilson win his first Pulitzer Prize. Fences are a part of August Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle” collection of ten plays (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). Each drama explores its decade in the 20th century, and each explores the lives and struggles of African Americans. The author aimed to explain how African American people struggle to achieve their dreams through the fences of their limits and past, influenced by various events that exposed them to ignorance and neglect established for centuries.
The play shows the story of one of the many African American families who live in a nondescript house with an unremarkable backyard with portraits of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King on the walls. The main character, Troy Maxson, is a troublesome garbage collector and former baseball player. He was made the first African American garbage truck driver, although other drivers are white (“August Wilson + Fences,” n.d.). He represents the struggle for justice and fair treatment of people of color in the 1950s. Troy also reflects the reluctance of human nature to recognize and accept social change, he says “I do the best I can do. I come in here every Friday… Find my strength to carry me through to the next Friday. That’s all I got…” (Wilson, n.d. 55).
During his constant conversations about life with one of his co-workers, Jim Bono, the reader tries to understand his complex character. Wilson depicts Troy, who has children from 3 different women, a schizophrenic brother who returned from the war, and an ‘imaginary struggle’ with death. The author creates an image of a ‘man of the place’, Troy lives in the same city all his life, and his ‘philosophy of life’ is visible. Only his wife, Rose, seems to understand him in everything. She continuously tells Troy: “I been standing with you! I been right here with you…” (Wilson, n.d., p. 96); however, it did not help a man to break fences of constraints that existed in his head.
Troy expresses the bitterness of the past that is alive for him: poverty, wandering, betrayal, resentment, and racial injustice that act as fences for him. Troy life’s ugly side is seen in conversations throughout the play, which sheds light on how his upbringing impacts the family. Troy stubbornly brings up children and insistently reminds his sons about this injustice as he has no joy in life, highlighting, “It’s my job. It’s my responsibility! … A man got to take care of his family (Wilson, n.d. 53). The house and backyard become a field of contention repeatedly. Both sons have a strict father who defiantly declares that they need to work, that family is a duty, and dreams are for fools. Troy is a power-hungry husband and tough father, true to his endless views.
Wilson sees Troy as a man who finds solidity better than hope, a dark-skinned man who can see the new world coming but knows that it is not coming for him; it is coming for his boys. Troy’s most vital principles about everything in this world seemingly protect him and his family from the injustices of such a complicated and sometimes dishonest life. The barriers that the play’s title refers to are these Maxson’s principles that a viewer notices. Throughout the whole play, Wilson draws a parallel between the real walls (Rose continually asks her husband to finish the fence, stating “… see if the weather suits you… or is it gonna be how you gonna put up the fence with the clothes hanging in the yard…”) and the fences that Troy recreates for his family members, not allowing them to develop (Wilson, n.d., p. 33). The play raises a question of prejudice due to skin color and the theme of withering or fatigue from a life expressed in the main characters’ conversations.
Troy’s life is not easy, but he has a home, a family, a job; at that time, the ‘colored’ could not have dreamed of more. Something still gnaws at him; for some reason, Maxson always talks about death in lines “That’s all death is to me. A fastball on the outside corner…”, about how he has already encountered it more than once, but he managed to drive it away (Wilson, n.d., p. 15). Is it fear for his son, or maybe it is the fear of being happy and living the way he wants it? He feels that he must live according to society’s rules and quietly enjoy what he has. A matter of limits and constraints exists only in a man’s head and influences his whole life. Nevertheless, this is an ordinary man; he makes mistakes; Fences is just the story of his life.
To conclude, one can state that Wilson wrote the play to offer audiences a different view of black Americans. Although they see a scavenger every day as they look at Troy’s life, white people find that the same things affect the black scavenger’s life: love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. These things are just as integral to his life as they are an essential part of other people of a different identity, showing that the real fences are in our heads and are the same for everyone.
Works Cited
“August Wilson + Fences.” The Kennedy Center, n.d.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Fences.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2019.
Wilson, August. “Fences.” Scriptfest, n.d. Web.