Fences postscript: Summer reading and some thoughts on Troy.

If by chance Stage’s production of August Wilson’s Fences, or the brief stop of pitching phenom Stephen Strasburg in Syracuse on his meteoric rise to the mighty Nationals, has piqued your interest in baseball, then two recently published books might make your summer reading list: Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend by James S. Hirsch and The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron by Howard Bryant.

I confess I’ve not yet had a chance to read either, but even the handful of reviews I managed to get through (almost all favorable) put me in mind of Fences. Take this from Sam Tanenhaus’ review of the Aaron biography in The New York Times Book Review (May 13, 2010): “Henry Aaron was 14 when the Brooklyn Dodgers passed through Mobile [AL] to play an exhibition in 1948. The presence of Jackie Robinson, about to begin his second season, dispelled the admonition Aaron had heard from his father: ‘There ain’t no colored baseball players.’ Not in the major leagues, he meant.”

This passage certainly conjures the conflict between Troy and his son Cory concerning Cory’s potential recruitment for a college football team. Troy’s bitter experience with segregation in the major leagues drives his vehement opposition: “The white man ain’t gonna let you get nowhere with that football noway.”

Aaron’s father knew firsthand the degradation of segregation as rigidly enforced in Mobile during the Jim Crow era. Tanenhaus notes: “Blacks had to yield their place in line at the general store to ‘any whites who entered,’ and yield their jobs, too. When racial violence erupted at the shipbuilding company where Aaron’s father, Herbert, was employed as a riveter, in 1943, a local newspaper blamed the company for not adopting ‘a clear-cut policy of absolute racial segregation.’”

Unlike Troy, however, Herbert Aaron did not stand in the way of his son’s talent. No doubt for him it was a given that whatever his son did—shipbuilding or baseball—Henry would be plagued by racism, and he was, from the segregated restaurants and hotels on the road to the raw prejudice of fans, teammates, and opposing players right up to the death threats he received years later as he closed in on Babe Ruth’s home run record.

Reading of Aaron’s experience led me to consider Troy’s opposition to Cory’s desire to play football and go to college? Surely, Troy knows Cory will never escape racism, so why hold him back? Troy’s answer is for Cory to learn a trade, work with his hands (“That way you have something can’t nobody take away from you.”), as if African American mechanics or carpenters were somehow protected from racism.

Wilson set Fences in 1957, ten years after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby broke the so-called color barrier. In 1957, Aaron led the Milwaukee Braves to a World Series championship. Other characters, notably Rose, understand that times have changed since the pre-war days when Troy played ball in the Negro Leagues: “They got lots of colored boys playing ball now. Baseball and football.” Troy’s best friend Jim Bono concurs: “You right about that, Rose. Times have changed, Troy. You just come along too early.”

Troy won’t hear it. He determined seventeen years ago when Cory was born that his son would not play sports. Even invocations of the greats of the game won’t sway him. Mentions of Robinson and Aaron provoke only a derision that borders on the incomprehensible. On Robinson: “Hell, I know some teams Jackie Robinson couldn’t even make! What you talking about Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson wasn’t nobody.” On Aaron (who in 1957 hit .322 with 44 home runs and 132 rbi on his way to the MVP and a World Series ring): “Hank Aaron ain’t nobody. That’s what you supposed to do. That’s how you’re supposed to play the game. Ain’t nothing to it.”

How do we explain such seemingly irrational responses? Bitterness and jealousy are certainly easy answers but provide only a partial explanation at best, and while Wilson never shies away from revealing such petty human foibles in his characters, he is never content to stop there. There is always a deeper question, and in this instance, the question became one I had to ask myself. Why do I expect, or perhaps want, Troy to behave reasonably? The answer is clear and simple: I am naïve.

Troy Maxson is a man whose life has been governed and brutally defined by an irrationality—the irrationality that is racism. It is an irrationality that has been legitimized and institutionalized and prevented him from fulfilling the better part of himself. It is an irrationality that not only defies but arrogantly scorns the reasonable, as Troy knows too well: “I’m talking about if you could play ball then they ought to have let you play. Don’t care what color you were. Come telling me I come along too early. If you could play . . . then they ought to have let you play.” They (how brilliant of Wilson to recast this insidiously used pronoun) don’t is the only response Troy ever receives. No matter how much times may have changed, opportunity denied remains the epigram of Troy’s life written by the irrational hand of racism. The one pitch no one can hit is the pitch you never get a chance to swing at. Those of us not subject to racism’s corrosive assault may understand this, but we must recognize that it is quite different to live it.

In The Making of Modern Drama, Richard Gilman offers a wonderful analysis of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. In part, Gilman contends that Hedda’s baffling destructiveness arises from her complete lack of suitable and fulfilling outlets for her intellect and energy. Creativity turned in on itself, Gilman notes, inevitably becomes destructive—to self, to family, to those loved and those simply standing by. To try to understand how Troy could deny Cory the opportunity he himself was denied, we must consider the man. Troy is a man of energy, a man of action, a man of ambition. He is a leader and fighter who, as Lyons points out, “hit the ball over the grandstand. Right out there in Homestead Field. He wasn’t satisfied hitting the seats . . . he wanted to hit over everything.” All that power and no place to put it—in Fences Wilson lays out the consequences: the price paid by the father, the cost to the son, generations denied by the monumental irrationality racism.

Throughout their careers, Henry Aaron and Willie Mays were often criticized harshly for not taking more outspoken and active roles in the Civil Rights movement. Each chose a different path. Aaron pursued singular greatness with quiet dignity befitting his reticent personality. Mays played with infectious exuberance and joy, and as he puts it, led by example by living a clean life, no smoking, no drinking. Both are forever enshrined among the greats in a sport that would have spurned them had they, like Troy, “come along too early. “

-Joseph Whelan, Publications Director, Syracuse Stage

Photo: James A. Williams in August Wilson's Fences. Photo: Chris Bennion.