I did a bit of research, and approximately 99.9% of white college students who studied this play begin, “August Wilson’s play ‘Fences’ is about race in America,” and that hot take is both reductive and dreadfully boring. Wilson was a “race man,” but I don’t think he sat down to write plays about racism—he wrote plays about life despite racism, under racism, and because of racism. When he says he stands on the ”self-defining ground of the slave quarters” he tells us (white guys) that we’re not who he’s writing for, but then in the second block quote he gives us permission to experience the theater he made anyway. We cannot separate race from the story, nor should we ignore it by hiding behind the white knight catchphrase “I don’t see race” (It’s a very real artificial construct). It’s not about being an ally, it’s about taking on the problems of oppression as our own (Gay). If we actively listen from that position then “Fences” has a lot to teach white guys about what it means to be men, and the universal struggle of being a son that is never solved—just one day dies—and from that old battlefield grows a new struggle of how to be a father.

“Fences” is a story about Troy, a former baseball player who works for the city on a garbage truck. He has two sons—Lyons is his eldest from a previous marriage and a struggling musician, and Cory is currently in high school playing for the football team. Troy’s been married to Rose for eighteen years, and the two of them and Cory live together in the home behind the allegorical fence, which like its owner is in various stages of completion throughout the story.

His brother, Gabe, used to live there as well, but Troy pushed him away. Gabe has an intellectual disability as a result of a head injury he sustained serving in WWII. At the time of the story, Troy has been cheating on his wife with a woman named Alberta, and he’s just found out she’s pregnant. Towards the end of the play, Alberta passes away during childbirth and her and Troy’s daughter Raynell is raised by Rose. The final scene takes place years later when Raynell is seven. While presumably long dead by the start of the play, Troy’s father casts a long shadow over the events of the story. According to Troy, his father was brutal and cruel, a rapist, and a pedophile. He still frightens Troy even thirty-seven years after that last beating before he ran away from home. Homeless, he “messed around there and went from bad to worse. [He] started stealing” to survive and supposedly killed a man he attempted to rob in a fight and was thrown in prison for fifteen years, which is where he met his best friend Bono and learned to play baseball. It is through Troy and his inability to communicate with these other people in his life that Wilson explores male relationships and Troy’s role in the family.

Troy loves baseball—loves its rules. He struggles with navigating nuance, and has translated life into baseball in order to make sense of it. To him there are roles to play on the team, opportunities to make a play, and players are either safe or out. There are rules to being a man, and the most important is keeping score. His brother Gabriel thinks Troy is mad at him for moving out of the house, which Troy denies. He later confesses to Rose, “Man go over there and fight the war…get half his head blown off…and they give him a lousy three thousand dollars. And I had to swoop down on that…If my brother didn’t have that metal plate in his head…I wouldn’t have a pot to piss in or window to throw it out of.” The subtext of why Troy is “mad” at Gabe is that the score is wrong. Troy invested his brother’s $3,000 to buy their house, but if Gabe doesn’t live there anymore then he stole his brother’s $3,000 to pay for his own house. Troy sees Gabe as his responsibility, another one of the “rules” for what makes a man. Gabe’s decision to leave represents a game Troy lost, and he is a very sore loser.

Troy and his friend Bono both see stoic responsibility as one of the defining features of manhood, and while they won’t say it out loud, it eventually drives them apart. Bono and Troy’s conversations are entirely about stoic responsibility, in that they never talk about it directly. In their very first scene together Bono asks, “How you figure [Brownie] be making out with that gal be up at Taylor’s all the time…that Alberta gal?” to which Troy replies, “Same as you and me. Getting just as much as we is. Which is to say nothing.” These are both symbolic statements by men with proud sensibilities. We don’t talk about our feelings and it’s not our place to tell our friends how we feel about their decisions. Bono clearly knows her name is Alberta, and he knows Troy is sleeping with her. Troy knows Bono knows, and he’s telling him to leave it alone. Two weeks later, Bono points out “I see you run right down to Taylor’s and told that Alberta gal [about your promotion],” and Troy again tells him to leave it alone by replying, “I told everybody.”

They finally have to have the talk when it becomes clear that Alberta is pregnant, and their relationship never recovers from the shame they both feel for having to discuss their feelings out loud. Bono initiates with, “Rose a good woman, Troy…She loves you…I’m just trying to say I don’t want to see you mess up…You’s in control…that’s what you tell me all the time. You responsible for what you do.” “I ain’t ducking the responsibility of it,” Troy replies, “As long as it sets right my heart…then I’m okay. ‘cause that’s all I listen to.” This, their most open and difficult conversation in over thirty years of friendship, ends with Bono offering a bet: “Tell you what I’ll do…when you finish building this fence for Rose…I’ll buy [my wife] Lucille that refrigerator.” They are back to their subtext, because men don’t talk openly like that. In talking about the fence Bono is telling Troy to repair his relationship. They don’t speak again for six whole months. Bono visits the house, and turns down Troy’s offer to stay for a drink. This time Troy starts the subtext, “Lucille told Rose you bought her a new refrigerator.” Bono replies, “Yeah, Rose told Lucille you had finally built your fence…so I figured we’d call it even.” The change in pronoun choices from the initial bet are especially telling of what they leave unsaid. Bono, implying he had to hear it from their wives instead of his best friend, is saying that the “fence for Rose” Troy was building for their home together has become “your fence”—a cage Troy built around himself. That’s the last time they ever talk to each other. A relationship destroyed because Troy was not able to live up to being what they each defined a man to be.

Men learn these coded rules as boys from their fathers. Troy’s son Lyons is exactly like him. Just like Troy, Lyons can’t be happy picking up garbage and is going to swing for the fences and try to make it as a musician. He also thinks of family as a financial responsibility. Their most telling encounter is when Lyons stops by to borrow $10. Troy wishes Lyons would visit for other reasons than money, because he genuinely regrets not having a stronger relationship with his son, but he’s so afraid of showing weakness that the words comes out as a complaint that Lyons’ mom is the reason they don’t. Lyons reasonably responds, “If you wanted to change me, you should have been there when I was growing up. I come by to see you…ask for ten dollars and you want to talk about how I was raised. You don’t know nothing about how I was raised.” Troy spent Lyons whole childhood in prison for theft. Now that Troy’s out he complains he never sees Lyons except for a handout, yet Troy refuses to go see him play music. He consistently chooses to be absent from his son’s life, and yet is surprised when Lyons returns the favor.

Cory also takes after his daddy, but from a very different example. Troy wanted things to be different with Cory, and so he had a very firm hand in raising him. Like his dad, Cory doesn’t want a dead end job; he wants to be an athlete. Troy doesn’t want Cory to have a dead end job either, which is why he’s so determined to stop him from being an athlete. Troy sees himself as one of the best there was at playing ball and yet has nothing to show for it. Against Troy’s ego, Cory’s true athletic ability is inconsequential. While Troy was playing ball he never learned a skill, and now he’s in his 50s picking up garbage. Troy worries about Cory’s future without discipline and school, which is what he passes on. However, Troy’s refusal to open up means this motive is never communicated to Cory. As he tells it, “You ain’t never done nothing but hold me back. Afraid I was gonna be better than you. All you ever did was try and make me scared of you. I used to tremble every time you called my name. Every time I heard your footsteps in the house.” Troy and Cory’s relationship is never repaired before Troy’s death. Troy says his own father “ain’t cared nothing about no kids.” He never showed any affection and only saw his kids as labor on the farm. However, he doesn’t see how similarly he’s treating Cory. Rose points out that he only wants to hear “Good job, son,” but Troy stubbornly says, “He’s got to make his own way. I made mine. Ain’t nobody gonna hold his hand when he get out there in that world.”

While we only have Troy’s word for it, it’s very clear the effects his father had on him when he was a child from how he tries to parent his sons. One of the few times Troy opens up is when he tells Lyons and Bono about the day he left home. He had “got to sniffing around Joe Canewell’s daughter” when he was 14 and she was 13. His dad caught them together, and Troy thought he was in trouble for not doing his chores, “But I see where he was chasing me off so he could have that gal for himself. When I see what the matter of it was, I lost all fear of my daddy. Right there is where I become a man.” He fights his father, and buys the girl time to escape, but his dad beats him unconscious and when he wakes up lying in a field his eyes are swollen shut. He never saw his dad again, but “I could feel him kicking in my blood and knew that the only thing that separated us was the matter of a few years.” Seeing his father hurt that girl taught him that a good man should protect women, but the objective terms he usues to describe their fight over who got to “have that gal for himself” shows he never learned to respect women.

Throughout the story Troy sings a song he believe’s his dad wrote about their old dog, Blue. The song says Blue was true and good, words his father said about the dog but never about his own son. Part of Troy’s self-loathing stems from the ways he sees his father’s influence in the way he treats women, the way he is cruel, and in how he loses his temper. He also hates himself for not living up to his dad’s standard of “good” which is to be “true.” His traumatic childhood has severely damaged his ability to love himself, and made it all but impossible to love his own sons.

The most poignant statement about fathers and sons in the story comes from Rose at the end. Cory carries very complicated feelings for his father, even after he’s gone, and doesn’t want to go to Troy’s funeral. Rose says this: “Your daddy wanted you to be everything he wasn’t…and at the same time he tried to make you into everything he was. I don’t know if he was right or wrong…but I do know he meant to do more good that he meant to do harm.” In the end, Troy succeeded. When the family is brought together again for Troy’s funeral we learn that Lyons got caught cashing bad checks and is in a work house. He’s a criminal, like his dad, but he’s a white collar criminal. He’s not in prison, he still plays his music, and he didn’t leave his ex on the other side with a kid like Troy did. We also see that Cory is in the marine corps. He learned the discipline Troy had been trying to instill in him. He has a paycheck, he has a retirement plan, and government benefits. He’s an athlete, and he is full of anger, like his dad, but he has options and a healthier outlet. Cory ultimately chooses to attend the funeral. Troy may never have been able to come to terms with his relationship with his father, but Cory proves stronger and will find closure.

So, white guys, there are a lot of universal lessons to be learned on masculinity and the relationships between fathers and sons in “Fences.” It’s true that responsibility is important, but fear of falling short of perceived responsibility should never stop us from sharing our feelings with others. Troy’s father inflicted trauma on him that he carried his whole life and eventually passed on to his own children, but he learned a little bit in his lifetime and was able to teach his sons to be a little better than he was. By the end of the story we’re left with the hope that Lyons and Cory might someday be fathers themselves, and they will be able to add a little bit of what they learned so their sons too will be better than they were.

I began this essay with a very long introduction about August Wilson’s 1996 keynote speech on Black theater, and I hope that by framing it this way it helped to make the themes discussed more accessible to an audience of any ethnic background. Because if we have learned something about generational systems of abuse from Troy and his sons then let’s go back to that premise we sidestepped. Of course “Fences” is a story about race in America, and like Wilson we are not experiencing it in a vacuum. But maybe we can get a little more out of his words than Brustein and the other men of that generation did—actually listen to what he’s saying—and then try to teach our sons to be a little better then we are. While “Fences” was not written for you, his “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech was written for everyone, and carries a call to action.

1. TL – Internet slang for “Too Long”

2. DR – Internet slang for “Didn’t Read”

I point this out because if you just read a white guy with no kids tell you what it means to be a Black father for ten pages then there’s a good chance you don’t run into “TL;DR” very often.

I have said this many times before, but everything I know I learned from watching Star Trek, and that is especially true for this paper. Captain Sisko and his son Jake on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were the greatest father/son role models in my life, and there just wasn’t room in this already staggeringly long paper to get to them. Avery Brooks, who played Captain Ben Sisko, said, “The relationship between Sisko and his son was … very important. That was something else you still don’t often see on air, at least as it concerns black and brown men and their sons. We got to play complicated, emotional and intricate scenes, and we got to have tender and fun moments. It wasn’t a pat relationship or an easy one, and it was very realistic.” (qtd. in Bastién).

Thanks, Captain!