Fences by August Wilson
An Analysis of the Character of Troy Maxson.
To raise a fence you must cut and nail boards, dig holes and hammer posts into the ground. It’s rough, demanding work but can be achieved with basic tools and without requiring too much in the way of skill, intellect or artistic flair. Once a fence is raised it’s raised. If it’s done well it could stand for a very long time, generations even. But a fence is static and rigid. It stands or it falls and between those two extremes there is only rot. A garden is something much, much different. A garden is a living, breathing organism. It can grow unruly and tangled but with proper consideration will give sweet fruit, sustaining vegetables and beautiful flowers. A fence cuts you off, delineating the accumulations of your life; what is yours, from what isn’t yours. A garden in contrast plugs you into a wider symbiosis: Worms will make the soil healthy, animals will feast on the captured dew and bees will carry fertility to other parts of the city.
Troy Maxson is a fence builder. His wife Rose is a garden tender.
Troy Maxson is a 53-year-old Black man with a blue collar gig as a garbage collector in Pittsburgh, he’s an ex-convict, and an ex-baseball player from the negro leagues, and for the second time in his life Troy Maxson has hit the colour barrier: Blacks can’t drive the trucks, only take out the trash. It’s a dirty job in a dirty city with artificially limited prospects for advancement, and when we encounter Troy the hopelessness of it all is seeping into his soul like slow poison.
Not that you’d know it immediately. He’s jumping off the truck, talking a mile a minute, routines we will come to learn have been well-rehearsed to fashion the tragedy of his life into a recognizable pattern. Troy is as mighty as his name suggests: He has big, strong hands, shoulders like the sagging roof beams of a forgotten temple and in his dilapidated athleticism still lurks the charm of someone once used to winning. But like that fabled city with its impenetrable walls, you get the sense Troy is more structure than man. He’s manufactured himself to certain specifications in order to meet the economic and societal challenges foisted on him.
In the first half of Fences there’s a key scene where Troy and his teenage son Cory are in the backyard working on the titular fence. Its haphazard and scrappy production will ultimately take up the length of the entire play. The backyard, such as it is, is not much more than an alleyway, the only hint of beauty being a shrubby little garden that Rose is developing.
In Troy’s beleaguered mind the fence they’re building is going to keep out all the vindictive influences of the world — even death, a spectre that’s been chasing him since birth. But to Rose the fence will keep her family in, and guard the small piece of love she’s blossomed on the unfeeling concrete of the world. As Bono, Troy’s prison friend remarks, “some build fences to keep people out, some people build fences to keep people in.”
As they work, father and son butt heads. Troy is certain that, just as his baseball dreams were shattered, Cory’s football and college prospects will be choked by the white power structure. Cory believes times have changed. At a rhetorical impasse Cory, desperate for some recognition of his own personage, baldly asks his father, “How come you ain’t never liked me?”
We’re more than a few generations out from slavery but society still expects Troy to operate his body as though it were nothing more than an unfeeling piece of machinery. He can point handily to all the elements of love he’s purchased with the sweat of his toil. Cory has food, clothes and a roof over his head. To Troy, taking care of his son is a duty, a responsibility he engages in without joy. He’s building his son as mechanically as he does that fence, attempting to cut him into bits as though he weren’t a flesh and blood human.
It was in prison that Troy started playing baseball and it gave him a paradigm to view the world. It’s something more than a passion but short of a philosophy. It’s the metaphor he returns to again and again but it’s long outlived its usefulness. Life is messy and people don’t follow set rules. Troy believes the quicker his children learn the harsh lessons he’s learned, the better off they’ll be. Maybe he’s right. But children need cultivation, not hammering into shape.
As youth and sexuality slide away we learn Troy has been having an affair with a woman named Alberta, and that the mistress is pregnant. In Troy’s justifications for the relationship “I can step out of this house and get away from the pressures and problems . . . be a different man. I ain’t got to wonder how I’m gonna pay the bills or get the roof fixed” we can hear the faintest, dying echo of those long ago baseball days when his body spoke for itself, he was aligned with his passions and the future was full of possibility.
When Alberta dies in childbirth Troy implores Rose to raise the child — Raynell — as her own. It’s his last pure act. The child is saved but the marriage is destroyed.
Troy goes on living life in the way life goes on. He drinks and he works. He even crosses that colour barrier and becomes the first black garbage truck driver, but he quickly finds it engages his soul no more than being on the back of the truck did.
Years down the line we find the family assembled in the backyard for Troy’s funeral. The mighty fence has finally been raised. The fence didn’t keep out death of course. In a final irony, just like the city he’s named after, Troy’s demise came from within — a heart attack. But things have changed, Rose’s garden is flourishing and Raynell, now six or seven and radiant as a sunbeam, is tending to it, straining to see growth with her bare eyes.
“I told you it ain’t gonna grow overnight. You got to wait,” says Rose.
To use one of his beloved sports metaphors, in the end, the game was rigged for Troy. But he did his part as well as he could. Like countless others forgotten in the unjust churn of history, he rammed up against the boundaries set for his race, he used his body and he turned the clock forward. It’s not nothing, it’s a life.
