BACKGROUND OF FENCES

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 and 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 1960s, Wilson got himself involved in the black power movement while he worked on his poetry and short stories. Eventually, in the sixties, Wilson re-invented 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.

Wilson took it upon himself the responsibility to write a play about black experiences in the United States for every decade of the 20th century. Fences is his play about blacks in the 1950s. 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.

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 reaped 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.

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'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 affect 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.

The Negro Leagues and their linkage to Fences

In August Wilson's Fences, Troy Maxson is a former Negro League baseball player who narrowly missed the opportunity to play in the Major Leagues. When he was a young player at the top of his game, Major League Baseball was segregated. The first African-American baseball players were not recruited to the majors until Troy was already too old to be a viable team member. This experience leaves Troy cold and bitter, and it influences his relationship with his son, Cory, who has aspirations of playing college football.

This experience was not an uncommon one for the scores of African-American baseball players who played in the Negro Leagues. Only now, approximately fifty years after the dissolution of the last

Negro League teams, are the skills and talent of these Negro League players beginning to be honoured by modern day baseball. A look at the history of Negro League baseball offers a glimpse into a world of segregation, but it also offers a look at an elite group of skilled players representing their communities on a national stage.

Until the 1950s, baseball in America mirrored the broader racial culture. In baseball, the all-white National and American Leagues reaped most of the money, prestige, and attention for professional sports fans. African-American baseball players played in the Negro Leagues. The Negro Leagues had their beginnings in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century with the organization of the first professional paid teams of baseball players. These teams would participate in circuits, called

Bamstormer leagues, where teams would travel across the United States playing in large cities and small towns or anywhere else that provided a field and fans. In 1920 the first professional league of black baseball teams was organized by Rube Foster, a baseball pitcher and manager. The league was named the Negro National League. It consisted of eight teams: The Chicago American Giants, Chicago Giants, Dayton Marcos, Detroit Stars, Indianapolis ABC's, Kansas City Monarchs, St. Louis Giants, and the Cuban Stars.

The history of Negro League baseball is best seen through the careers of famous Negro legends Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson (both are mentioned in Wilson's play). Paige is considered to be not just one of the best Negro League pitchers ever but also one of the greatest pitchers in the history of the entire game of baseball. Paige suffered a rough childhood, he was born into poverty and resorted to stealing by the time he was a boy. He was sent to Mt. Meigs Juvenile detention centre as a child. It was here that Paige first learned the game of baseball and learned that he had a special talent for pitching.

In the Negro League World Series of 1942, Paige claimed that he intentionally loaded the bases just so that he could pitch to Josh Gibson, the league's best batter, and strike him out on three straight pitches.

Gibson himself is, perhaps, a model for Troy Maxson in Fences. Gibson was known as the best hitter in Negro League baseball. According to the Baseball Hall of Fame, into which Gibson was inducted in

1972, Gibson hit almost 800 home runs in his career.

Like Troy Maxson in Fences, Josh Gibson would never play in the white Major Leagues. This fact haunted Gibson for much of his life. Later in his life, he is reported to have suffered from alcoholism

and depression, diseases that his former teammates and friends say were brought on by his frustration and disappointment with the game. Gibson died of a stroke in 1947, just months before baseball was

integrated when Jackie Robinson signed a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Satchel Paige, on the other hand, would get the chance to play in the Major Leagues. At the age of 42, Paige was signed by the Cleveland Indians to pitch from their bullpen during the pennant race of 1948 Though his pitching was not as electric as it had been in his younger days, Paige played a crucial role in helping the Indians win the American League pennant that year. In 1965, in what was considered

a gimmick promotion, Paige was brought on to pitch in a game for the Kansas City Royals. He thus became the oldest man to ever pitch or play in the Major Leagues

The Negro Leagues, as seen through the lives of its players, is remembered as a symbol of both great injustice and great achievement. Several of its players, including Jackie Robinson and Hank Aaron, would go on to legendary careers in the Major Leagues. Most of the League's great players, however, were denied the chance to compete against their white counterparts. Players such as Gibson

and Paige, including other great stars like Monte Irvin, Cool Papa Bell, and Judy Johnson, are not only fondly remembered for their individual achievements but also for the way they ushered in a golden era

of black baseball. Through such distinguished players, baseball was not just white America's game, but a game for all Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball America's pastime and its history of segregation shape Fences's protagonist, Troy Maxson. From the days after the Civil War, African-Americans and whites played professional baseball, together and separately. In 1890, however, a “gentleman's agreement" among team owners effectively barred African-Americans from playing in the major leagues. The Negro National League was established in 1920 and featured some extraordinary talents, notably Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Salaries, however, were generally less than those in Major League Baseball. Then came Jackie Robinson. In 1946, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, determined to integrate baseball, searched for an African-American player who would "have the guts not to fight back" against the racial slurs from players and fans. Robinson made, and held to this agreement. After one year in the minor

leagues, the second baseman joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and broke the colour barrier, eventually winning over his teammates and the fans. Robinson paved the way for other African-American players and Hispanic players to follow in his footsteps. Robinson is mentioned in Act I, Scene I of Fences (see pp. 11 & 12). Rose says he broke the colour line and "they got a lot of colored baseball players

now" (p. 12). Troy is not convinced, and he doesn't think much of Robinson's talent. Robinson and his achievement, however, had already changed the sporting world by 1957, even if Troy doesn't see or

acknowledge it. Civil rights movement

A key issue in Fences is the generation gap between Troy and Cory. Troy is stuck in a past dominated by Jim Crow laws and segregation. As the child of a sharecropper, these bitter legacies of slavery shaped Troy's childhood and young adulthood. When Troy leaves his father's small plot of land for Pittsburgh,

he had had no education and no legitimate way to survive in the city. Once out of jail, Troy tries to make a living using the one skill he has - playing baseball. But this path is blocked, mainly because he comes out of jail a middle-aged man.

Troy's experience leaves him embittered and blinded to the changes around him. The action in the play begins in 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education led to the desegregation of public schools, and the same year Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, was forcibly integrated. Troy is unable to see how these changes could make a life for his son that is very different from his own. Other characters in Fences see these changes and want to live their lives according to a new set of rules. August Wilson's setting the play in this period enhances Troy's internal conflict and his conflict with Cory. 

The Pittsburgh Cycle

Fences is part of a 10-play cycle known as the Pittsburgh Cycle or the Century Cycle, in which Wilson addresses important issues African-Americans faced between the 1900s and the 1990s. Fences represents the decade of the 1950s. Wilson set all but one of the plays in Pittsburgh, not just because he grew up

there but also because he thought the city epitomized black America. Wilson didn't write the plays in chronological order. The first in the cycle, Jitney (1982), is set in the 1970s. Jitneys were unlicensed cabs that operated in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, where legal cabs would not go. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), the second play written in the cycle, is the only one not based in Pittsburgh's Hill District, unfolding instead in 1920s Chicago. Fences, the third play written in the cycle, focuses on Pittsburgh in the 1950s. The plays are not meant to be a serial, but they are unified by their themes: "My plays are ultimately about love, honor, duty, betrayal," said Wilson. They also feature recurring characters, settings, and motifs, such as blues and jazz.