Symbolism and Justice in August Wilson's Fences

Introduction: Domestic Symbols and the Theme of Justice

August Wilson's Fences allows the ordinary objects of domestic life to acquire a larger symbolic significance through their dramatic use. The play uses these symbols to dramatize a crucial moment in African-American history: the 1950s, when the great advances of the Civil Rights era are taking place, but when an audience might well question what tangible effect they had on the lives of actual African-Americans. In presenting the story of Troy Maxson, Wilson predominantly dramatizes a story about justice — and, arguably, all of the play's symbols relate to this central theme.

Baseball: Segregation, Injustice, and Jackie Robinson

The chief symbol that encapsulates the play's central themes of justice is, of course, baseball. Troy Maxson — in his fifties at the time of the play — is presented as having been a magnificent baseball player in his youth. Troy's friend Bono suggests only "two men ever played baseball as good as you. That's Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson" (Wilson 9). Wilson, however, relies upon his audience to know the crucial role that mid-century baseball played in the public drama of African-American civil rights. The fact that Babe Ruth's name remains more famous than Josh Gibson's reminds the audience that baseball was a segregated sport, with separate playing leagues for Black Americans. To know who Josh Gibson was requires knowledge of the best players in baseball's so-called "negro leagues."

The play also uses baseball to refer — in a surprising way — to the most famous race-related baseball event contemporary to its action: the breaking of baseball's color line, when Branch Rickey hired Jackie Robinson to play for a white team. Jackie Robinson's example is popularly regarded as an instance of long-delayed justice for African-Americans. However, Wilson crucially does not use Robinson as a symbol for justice, but as a vehicle through which Troy Maxson can argue about the limitations of justice:

TROY: I done seen a hundred niggers play baseball better than Jackie Robinson. Hell, I know some teams Jackie Robinson couldn't even make! What you talking about Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson wasn't nobody. 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. (TROY takes a long drink from the bottle). (Wilson 10)

Football: The Future Troy Will Never Experience

Troy's trash-talking about Jackie Robinson is consistent with his characterization throughout the play — its self-aggrandizement and provocative tale-telling — but Wilson is making a crucial point. Jackie Robinson's breaking of the color line came too late for a man of Troy's age. Troy cannot relate to the younger athlete's increased opportunities with solidarity or vicarious joy; he can only reflect, somewhat bitterly, on the illogic of the original injustice he suffered. This is a play that makes clear that the advent of civil rights for Black Americans did not have some miraculous, overwhelming effect of gratitude. In reality, the astonishingly belated concession of these rights by white America is more likely to provoke Troy's mix of resentment, frustration, and anger. There is not much for Troy to do but state the obvious truth and then have another drink.

This is why football also becomes a crucial symbol in the play, closely related to baseball. Part of its importance is that Wilson is dramatizing history itself. The centrality of football to American life is something that would emerge after the period the play depicts — Fences takes place between roughly 1957 and 1965, while the first Super Bowl did not occur until 1967. Football, in other words, is a sport in which there were never negro leagues, and it would overtake baseball as the most popular sport in America — one in which a preponderance of players were Black — at around the time of Troy Maxson's death. As a result, football stands as a symbol of the future that Troy will never get to experience. His refusal to sign the papers granting permission for his son Cory to accept a football scholarship reveals the surprising way in which injustice perpetuates itself. White America has been unjust to Troy Maxson — and Troy, in turn, is unjust to his own son, falsely extrapolating from his own experience. It is Cory's own Black father who insists he "quit the football team. You've got to take the crookeds with the straights" (Wilson 37). We are meant to understand this as the resentment of a man who was forced by society to "take the crookeds," and who insists on inflicting them on his own family at the very moment society seems to be realigning itself toward justice.

Conclusion: Redeeming Troy Maxson

What Fences uses its symbolism to dramatize is the complexity of a real African-American life like Troy Maxson's, blighted by the personal experience of injustice in an age remembered historically for the late advent of justice. Baseball and football are used as powerful symbols for the injustice Troy suffered, but also for the injustice that he — through his own injury — inflicts upon his own son in consequence. The scholarship that Troy refuses to endorse seems like an expression of a father's resentment. The garden that Troy carefully cultivates and hopes to fence off seems like a deliberate response to the injustice his own parents suffered as sharecroppers, cultivating land that was not theirs for diminishing financial returns. But finally, the trumpet of the injured Gabe — whose war experience is itself a profound symbol of racial injustice, given that he was permanently disabled while fighting in World War Two for a US Army not yet desegregated by President Truman — is intended as a symbol of transcendent or divine justice. The fact that we hear nothing when Gabriel blows is seemingly ambiguous: either the advent of real justice is anticlimactic, or it is a sign that real justice has not yet arrived. But we are meant to believe that in death, Troy's baffled, bitter life might somehow be comprehended in full, and his status as both victim and perpetrator of different kinds of injustice weighed in the balance — until our own sense of history redeems him.