Fences

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Fences (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by August Wilson
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Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 80

Sample

August Wilson was named Frederick August Kittel when he was born to a German father and an African American mother in 1945.
Wilson was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA. His father drifted in an out of his family. His mother and a stepfather, David
Bedford, mostly raised Wilson. When Wilson was sixteen, he was accused of plagiarism at school when he wrote a sophisticated
paper that the administration did not believe he could write. When Wilson's principal would not recognize the validity of
Wilson's work, she suspended him and later ignored his attempts to come back to school. Wilson soon dropped out and educated
himself at the local library, reading everything he could find. In the 1960's, Wilson steeped himself in the black power movement
while he worked on his poetry and short stories. Eventually, in the sixties, Wilson reinvented himself as a playwright. His
work was nurtured through institutions like the Yale School of Drama, where the Dean of the Drama School at the time, theatre
director Lloyd Richards, recognized Wilson's talent. Richards later collaborated with Wilson in New York on Broadway. Fences was Wilson's second play to go to Broadway and won him the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama again in 1990 for his play The Piano Lesson.

Wilson has taken upon himself the responsibility to write a play about black experiences in the United States for every decade
of the 20th century. Only two decades remain, the first years of the century and the 1990's. Fences is his play about blacks in the 1950's. Beginning in 1957, between the Korean and Vietnam wars, Fences ends in 1965, but the themes of the play directly place its consciousness in a pre-civil-rights-movement, pre-Vietnam-war-era
psyche. Fences takes place in a still latent time. Like the popular Sam Cooke song of the day proclaims, "A Change is Gonna Come," but not
quite yet.


In Fences as in Wilson's other plays, a tragic character helps pave the way for other blacks to have opportunities under conditions
they were never free to experience, but never reap from their own sacrifice and talents themselves. This is Troy Maxson's
situation. Troy's last name, "Maxson," is a compressed reference to the Mason-Dixon line, considered as the imaginary line
originally conceived of in 1820 to define the separation between the slave states and the free states. Maxson represents an
amalgamation of Troy's history in the south and present life in the north that are inextricably linked.


Wilson purposefully sets the play during the season Hank Aaron led the Milwaukee Braves to the World Series, beating the New
York Giants. When Fences takes place, blacks like Aaron proved they could not only compete with white ballplayers, but that they would be leaders
in the professional league. Since we can look back on history with 20/20 hindsight, Wilson asks his audience to put together
what they know of American history with the way his various characters experience and perceive history through their own,
often conflicted eyes.


All of Wilson's plays take place in his hometown of Pittsburgh, and Fences is no exception. The Pittsburgh of the Maxson family
is a town where Troy and other men of his generation fled from the savage conditions of sharecropping in the south. After
Reconstruction failed, many blacks walked north as far as they could go to become urban citizens. Having no resources or infrastructure
to depend on, men like Bono and Troy found their way in the world by spending years living in shacks, stealing, and in jail.
Wilson clearly draws a linear link between the release of the slaves to the disproportionate number of black men in our jails
and in low-income occupations by arguing that the majority of a homeless, resource-less group let loose into a competitive
and financed society will have a hard time surviving lawfully. Wilson's characters testify to the fact that the United States
failed blacks after Lincoln abolished slavery and that the government's failure, made effective legally through Jim Crow laws
and other lawful measures to ensure inequality, continues to effect many black lives. Wilson portrays the 1950s as a time
when a new world of opportunity for blacks began to open up, leaving those like Troy, who grew up in the first half of the
century, to feel like a stranger in their own land.


Fences is divided into two acts. Act One is comprised of four scenes and Act Two has five. The play begins on a Friday, Troy and
Bono's payday. Troy and Bono go to Troy's house for their weekly ritual of drinking and talking. Troy has asked Mr. Rand,
their boss, why the black employees aren't allowed to drive the garbage trucks, only to lift the garbage. Bono thinks Troy
is cheating on his wife, Rose. Troy and Rose's son, Cory, has been recruited by a college football team. Troy was in the Negro
Leagues but never got a chance to play in the Major Leagues because he got too old to play just as the Major Leagues began
accepting black players. Troy goes into a long epic story about his struggle in July of 1943 with death. Lyons shows up at
the house because he knows it is Troy's payday. Rose reminds Troy about the fence she's asked him to finish building.


Cory and Troy work on the fence. Cory breaks the news to Troy that he has given away his job at the local grocery store, the
A&P, during the football season. Cory begs Troy to let him play because a coach from North Carolina is coming all the way
to Pittsburgh to see Cory play. Troy refuses and demands Cory to get his job back.


Act One, scene four takes place on Friday and mirrors scene one. Troy has won his case and has been assigned as the first
colored garbage truck driver in the city. Bono and Troy remember their fathers and their childhood experiences of leaving
home in the south and moving north. Cory comes home enrag. . .