Father Figures and Absence in August Wilson's Fences

Introduction: The Missing Father in Black Family Life

August Wilson's award-winning play Fences takes as one of its central themes the shimmering figure of the African American father. That person is so often missing from actual Black families, where women head households generation after generation as the fathers of their children become increasingly alienated, disenfranchising themselves even as a number of forces push them away from their families. Wilson reminds us that simply because a father is missing does not mean that the vacuum so created does not bend everything in its path.

Both Troy and Bono tell stories from their Southern childhoods — stories that twist and turn around the fathers who have disappointed them in different ways, even as those fathers continue to compel their children's love. Wilson writes about the ways in which children and fathers hurt and forgive each other:

When the sins of our fathers visit us
We do not have to play host.
We can banish them with forgiveness
As God, in his Largeness and Laws.

Troy and Bono spend Act One, Scene Four talking to Lyons about the particular sins of their particular fathers. Their stories underscore how the pains and loves faced by different generations of men share key similarities, but are even more distinctly marked by their differences. While the stories of Black men in the decades since Reconstruction are filled with many of the same hardships and strains in familial relationships, the lives of each generation bend in unique ways. The stories of each man reflect the history of his generation.

Troy's Father: Cruelty, Control, and Abandonment

Troy's father is, like so many Black men of his generation, a man who tried and failed as a sharecropper — a line of work that is, even at its best, an admission of having failed to find a secure place for oneself and one's family in society.

Troy's portrait of this father is of a man so cruel and so lacking in basic virtue that women refused to stay with him for any length of time. His father drove away woman after woman who might have been a mother to Troy. In many ways, Troy was orphaned through a combination of his father's cruelty and the absence of any consistent female figure. When Troy allows a mule in his care to wander off and his father comes looking for him, Troy learns that his father is even more cruel and conscienceless than he had imagined. Troy's father beats his fourteen-year-old son and then rapes the boy's companion.

Troy understands in that moment that the cruelty in his life is embodied by men. Part of the real evil he sees as emanating from men is that they destroy women and drive them away. Troy witnesses the genuine harm his father has done to women. And yet he also struggles to understand how a man capable of such viciousness toward women could simultaneously strive to support his children. What Troy does not seem to grasp — even as he becomes the financial provider for his own family — is that the abuse and the role of breadwinner are in fact closely linked. The man who controls all the household's money and the rapist are both men who control those around them.

Bono's Father: The Walking Blues and the Great Migration

Bono's father is also absent in important ways. Bono describes him as being plagued by "the walking blues" — a condition that meant he could not, or would not, settle down in any one place with any one woman. Bono's attachment to his father is so thin that he barely recognizes him. Bono's father is drawn by the siren call of the "New Land," swept up in the Great Migration that carried many Black Americans — mostly men — to states north of the Mason-Dixon line.

Conclusion: Ghosts, Chains, and Generational Legacy

The sons in this play do better than their fathers, but both the sins and the ghosts of those fathers drag them down as surely as Marley's chains and locks. "Life don't owe you nothing," Wilson tells us. But parents do owe their children a great deal, and the fact that the fathers in this play do not understand or admit this means that their sons are far less free than they deserve. The generational weight of neglect, cruelty, and restlessness does not simply vanish when the next generation arrives — it must be actively confronted and, as Wilson's verse suggests, banished through the difficult work of forgiveness.