Responsibility and Debt in August Wilson’s “Fences”

 A STUDY OF TROY MAXSON

Troy Maxson’s life is all about recognizing responsibility.  It’s that big word that turns his life around.  It puts the brakes on his life of crime, gets him to find a decent job with the sanitation department, a decent home and a decent family.  With all these in place, he forms very definite views on who owes what and to whom. The baseball team had owed him a place in it; his father had owed him care.  His employer, Mr. Rand, owes him a driver’s job. Cory, his son, owes him obedience and Troy owes him responsibility, and finally, he even thinks he owes himself an affair.  Where did it all go wrong for him?  In his wife Rose’s words, “You always talking about what you give… and what you don’t have to give.  But you take too.  You take…and you don’t even knownobody’s giving !” (II, i; page 71)

As long as he is battling racism, an outside enemy, the audience is proud to know Troy.  His fight with the management and the subsequent promotion from a garbage lifter to a garbage truck driver (a position heretofore reserved for the whites) is the fulfillment of the Black American dream.  They may have kept him out of the baseball leagues (although age more than race might have been a factor) but he sure bounces back with this victory.  The audience is also proud of Troy for leaving a life of crime and for his firm views on duties and responsibilities. “I done learned my mistake and learned to do what’s right by it.  You still trying to get something for nothing.  Life don’t owe you nothing.  You owe it to yourself”, he lectures his older son Lyons. (I,i; page18)  The audience falls in love with his energy, vitality, his stories and his endearing family and friends. Troy jokingly claims he keeps the devil away by paying him ten dollars a month.  That clinches the connection the audience has with him.  Not only is he now an upright citizen he is also a god-fearing man doing the best he can to take care of his family.

However, when he is stubborn enough to deny happiness to people around him—when he is insensitive to the needs of his family, the audience realizes that this hero has, in fact, feet of clay.   His past, we see, has left a lot of scars on him and he begins to take decisions for others.  Little by little the layers of paint peel away, revealing all of Troy’s all too human failings. And slowly but surely, the fence begins to take shape.  He is a changed man since prison, but he refuses to believe the world around him has changed.  He is unhappy with Lyons’s choice of a career as a musician.  It is too easy an occupation—it is just not physical enough, not arduous enough.  If Lyons enjoys doing it, it cannot be work.  It does not pay much either if Lyons keeps asking to borrow money.  He has ideas of self-importance that have to be firmly squashed by the father.  “I am just supposed to haul people’s rubbish and give my money to you cause you too lazy to work. You too lazy to work and wanna know why ain’t got what I got.”(I,i; page 17)  Troy doesn’t recognize Lyons’s elemental need to be happy doing what he wants to do. “I need something that gonna help me to get out of the bed in the morning.  Make me feel like I belong in the world.  I don’t bother nobody.  I just stay with my music cause that’s the only way I can find to live in the world. Otherwise there ain’t no telling what I might do.” (I,i; page 18) 

Troy hasn’t heard of all the changes in the baseball leagues either.  He still thinks “they get colored on the team and don’t use them” and won’t acknowledge “they got some white guys on the team that don’t play everyday.” He has fooled himself for such a long time that he was rejected from the major leagues because of his color that he wants his son to have nothing to do with sports.  “Don’t come telling me I was too old.  I just wasn’t the right color”, Troy insists to Rose’s, “Why don’t you admit you was too old to play in the major leagues?  For once...why don’t you admit that?”  (I,iii; page 39) He is especially harsh towards Cory.  Maybe Cory was right when he cries out in frustration, “You ain’t never gave me nothing!  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.”  Cory was better educated, got good grades, worked a job in A&P and still found time to practice football.  He certainly had better prospects than Troy had growing up.  Still, Troy was not proud of Cory. He couldn’t bring himself to say “Good job, son”.  He was not a nurturing parent. 

“A man got to take care of his family.  You live in my house…sleep you behind on my bedclothes…fill you belly up with my food…cause you my son.  You my flesh and blood.  Not ‘cause I like you! Cause it’s my duty to take care of you.  I owe a responsibility to you!  Let’s get this straight right here…before it go along any further…I ain’t got to like you.  Mr.Rand don’t give me any money come payday cause he likes me.  He gives me cause he owe me.  I done give you everything I had to give you.  I gave you your life!  Me and your mama worked that out between us.  And liking your black ass wasn’t part of the bargain.  Don’t you try and go through life worrying about if somebody like you or not.  You best be making sure they doing right by you.  You understand what I’m saying, boy?”  (I, iii;  page38)

Cory did not understand.  He is bewildered and unhappy at this outburst.  Troy is never affectionate and now he is downright unreasonable. The scene in which they fight with the baseball bat in their backyard is especially poignant because it makes a mockery of the stereotypical American father-son relationship, of the image of the parent bonding with a child while playing baseball. This discord is the legacy of Troy’s father -- Cory leaves home just as Troy did.  When Cory tells Rose at Troy's funeral that he has not been able to shake off the shadow of Troy, “the shadow digging in your flesh. Trying to crawl in. Trying to live through you.  Everywhere I looked, Troy Maxson was staring at me”, she tells him that he is Troy Maxson all over again, that he would never be free of that shadow.  “You either grow into it or cut it down to fit you.  But that’s all you got to make life with”. (II, v; page 97)  Cory then accepts his share of responsibility in making the choices he did and his acceptance of who he is complete when he shares Troy's song with his sister Raynell.


Cory is able to understand his situation a little better, and is better equipped to handle it simply because he is a little more educated. And the years away from Troy have been put to good use in the Marines.  But Lyons is doomed to repeat Troy's mistakes. Troy missed most of Lyons’s childhood when he was in prison.  Lyons is quick to point out that Troy just wasn’t there when he was growing up. “You can’t change me, Pop.  I’m thirty-four years old.  If you wanted to change me, you should have been there when I was growing up.”  (I,i; page 18)  Lyons world falls apart just as his father’s did—in the final act, we hear that he has been caught for stealing and serving a prison sentence, has been divorced for four years but is still playing his music. 

Troy didn’t measure up.  He saw that Bono was disappointed in him for betraying Rose.  “You’s in control…that’s what you tell me all the time.  You responsible for what you do” (II, i; page 63), Bono reminds him.  But Troy wasn’t in control—he could have borrowed Lyons words.  “It’s just…She gives me a different idea…a different understanding about myself.  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.  I can just be a part of myself that I ain’t ever been.” (II, i; page 69)  In other words, Troy Maxson couldn’t sustain, couldn’t endure and he ran away from those very duties and responsibilities that he had given so much importance to.  Bono was mistaken; he was sure “Rose’ll keep you straight.  You get off the track, she’ll straighten you up.” (I, iv; page 55)  Rose was not Troy’s conscience. Troy alone was responsible for his actions.




Wilson, August.  Fences. Plume/Penguin USA Inc., New York. 1986
(I used the page numbers from this edition.  It had no line numbers)