August Wilson: Fences

 

 “Fences” stars Denzell Washington who also directed this 2016 film adaptation of the stage play of the same name by August Wilson. Actually, “Fences” is one of a series of ten stage plays by Wilson about life in a Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Wilson wrote the screenplay for this film and received a nomination for best screenplay despite having died in 2005.*

Denzell Washington does a great job as the lead character Troy, a garbage man for the city of Pittsburgh, who has never gotten over the fact that he was born too early to break the Major League Baseball color barrier. He is angry and bitter despite the devotion of his loving wife, played beautifully by Viola Davis. 

Troy also has two grown sons neither of whom is he able to appreciate or even understand. The eldest son, the product of his first marriage, is a  musician whom the father will never go to hear. The other son is a seventeen-year old high school football standout who is being recruited to play in college, an idea totally opposed by his father. Troy has toiled for years to support his wife and children, as well as a brother who was permanently mentally damaged by a head wound while serving in WW II. Troy is a man who understands his responsibilities despite the fact that he ran away from home in Alabama at the age of 14 after a brutal beating by his own father. 

Watching the story play out on the screen I could not help but think that the situation of Troy in Pittsburgh was not much different from my own father’s in New York City’s borough of Queens back in 1956. Like Troy my father had somehow managed to buy a home in a poor to lower middle-class neighborhood. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment with one tiny bathroom. There was a kitchen with an old table where we had our meals. There was no dining room. It makes me laugh today when I watch home shows on TV where the young people insist on granite or better countertops. We had no counters at all. 

My father was born about the same time as Troy to parents who had migrated to New York City from impoverished, rural Italy. He was of that second generation that had one foot in the old world and one in the new. In a sense, Troy’s situation was similar. He was an immigrant to industrial Pittsburgh from rural Alabama. After running away from home Troy turned to robbery to survive but wound up in prison where he learned to play baseball.

But August Wilson’s Troy is a man who was never able to fulfill his baseball dream. He is a strong talented man but still winds up in Pittsburgh working on a garbage truck. My father was a mechanical genius who could fix practically anything but never even got through grade school. He was working in his father’s grocery store when he got married but went to work in a defense plant when WWII broke out. After the war he became a shop supervisor or foreman, and even invented a couple of valuable processes for which he got little reward or recognition. 

There were so many things about Troy that reminded me of my father. He was outgoing and sociable. He had many friends with whom he talked, drank, and played cards. They all liked him. My mother died when I was just 11 and though my father would never forget her, he soon found another caring woman in much the same way as Troy did.

I was 17 in 1956, the same age as Troy’s younger son. I was not an athlete but I was an outstanding student. In both cases our teachers were expecting and urging us to go to college, something our fathers did not value or understand. Troy’s son became a Marine but I went to Fordham University the same school that Denzell Washington attended.

August Wilson’s film is about the Black experience in America but Wilson also claimed that he wrote to show Whites that Blacks experienced many of the same things as they did. He wrote,

I think my plays offer (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans," … "For instance, in Fences they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things – love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives.

He certainly succeeded in "Fences." The film did not win the Best Picture award, but could have. Denzell Washington did not win the Academy Award for Best Actor but his performance was also good enough to win. Viola Davis should have won the award for Best Actress but apparently she and her advisors decided to seek only the nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

 

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* Wilson was from a bi-racial family. His father was a German immigrant but Wilson took his Black mother's name after the father walked out.

The Killers

An article in the Wall Street Journal this week about young black men caught my eye. Barry Latzer, an emeritus Professor of criminal justice at New York’s John Jay college, traced the alarming increase in murder rates in the United States to a combination of “big cities, guns, and young black men.” 

Latzer noted new statistics that showed that while violent crimes like rape, robbery, and assault declined somewhat during the pandemic, the murder rate skyrocketed especially among young black men. Black males were victims of homicide at a rate five times that of white or Hispanic men, and the great majority of these murders were committed by other young black men. Often, the killings seemed to be over trivial matters, or affronts to “honor.”

 

Latzer attributed this type of killing to a holdover from Southern culture of 150 years ago, that blacks have carried into Northern cities. I trained as a historian many years ago, and one of the things I learned was to look for proximate causes of events, that is, causes closest in time to the event. I don’t think there is a need to go back a hundred years or more to find an explanation of why young black men are killing each other at alarming rates today. I think we have only to look at the education these young men received in their own brief lifetimes.

 

I am not referring to the formal education they have received in school. In my opinion, the low scores and poor results black young men achieve in school are not due to a lack of brain power but to a lack of motivation. Outside of school they have been educated to distrust and despise school. Their real education takes place on the street or on their phones. What do they learn there?

 

In a recent news story in my local newspaper, a Bridgeport gang member pleaded guilty to racketeering charges. He was a member of a notorious gang that “robbed drug dealers, customers and others, sold narcotics, and stole cars from inside and outside Connecticut, often using the cars to commit crimes.” In addition, they “frequently used social media to promote and coordinate their criminal activities.” Social media posts and text messages revealed that he “possessed firearms, including firearms with extended magazines, and that he sold a variety of drugs. … he also participated in the theft and possession of stolen vehicles, some of which were used to commit shootings.”

 

Over his 20 years this young man had obviously acquired the considerable education and skills necessary to compete in his chosen profession. He was part of a skilled band with their own code of ethics. His formal education in school must have seemed like mere child’s play, totally irrelevant to life in the real world. In other words, he and others like him are uncivilized. They are ruthless barbarians. 

 

 I do not say this is so because they are black. I think the color of their skin, or their race has little to do with it. After all, there is only one race, the human race, and we all have the same human nature. We can find examples of uncivilized young men all over the world today. Just look at images of members of Mexican drug cartels wielding AK-47s while ferrying migrants over our southern border. Remember the young men of ISIS cutting off the heads of captive victims. Are the Taliban in Afghanistan any different? Looking back on our own history, every wave of immigrants brought with it young, uncivilized young men who formed gangs and thought nothing of killing to avenge the slightest insult.

 

For thousands of years it has been parents, family, religion, customs and traditions that have civilized young men. The breakdown of these institutions in the past 50 years has been catastrophic in America. Coincidentally, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop music. In the same week that Professor Latzer bemoaned the high murder rate among young black men, Jason Riley, a black man who is a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal, bemoaned the effects of the musical genre that has been the most powerful educational tool among young black men.

 

“A-list hip-hop artists… became fabulously wealthy trafficking in racist gutter lyrics and ugly stereotypes about black people. For decades, black parents have devoted an inordinate amount of time—with mixed success—to shielding their children from the materialism, drugs, promiscuous sex and thuggery behavior that pervades the songs of some of hip-hops most popular artists. ... decades of glorifying the gangsta-rap lifestyle and, worse, presenting it as the only authentic black experience, have come at a cost.”

 

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Black History Matters

As part of its program for Black History month, Turner Classic Movies (TCM) recently showed “Stars in My Crown,” a 1950 film that dealt with a small Southern town right after the Civil War. The film was based on a  1947 novel of the same name by Joe David Brown, a writer from Alabama who is best known for “Paper Moon,” another novel that became an even more successful film. 

In viewing this  film, it seemed obvious that its creators, back in 1950, included an indictment of racial prejudice and violence. Nevertheless, in an interview after the showing on TCM, a black critic claimed that the film was itself racist, a claim that the host did not dispute. Why is it racist?

 “Stars in My Crown” is the story of an ex-Confederate soldier who becomes a preacher after the war and takes up duties in a small Southern town that resembles a movie Western frontier town in its lawlessness and lack of religion. Joe David Brown claimed that the preacher was based on the life of his Alabama grandfather. 

Initially, the preacher, played imposingly by Joel McCrae, uses his guns and physical presence to gain the attention and respect of the townspeople, but then puts away his guns and relies on his spiritual strength to gain a respected place. He marries one of the townswomen, and even adopts her orphaned nephew. Much of the film is seen through the eyes of this boy. Together they establish a congregation and build a church. 

TCM presented the film as part of Black History month because one of its core conflicts concerns the one black man in the town. He is an elderly ex-slave, Uncle Famous, played by Juano Hernandez, who had apparently been given his freedom as well as a small farmstead by his former white master. 

Actually, he lives outside of town and supports himself with the produce of his garden, animals, and fish from a nearby stream. His skill as a fisherman is legendary and he has instructed  most of the white boys in the town in the fine art of fishing. He is revered and respected by all. All is well until a local businessman tries to buy his property in order to continue a mica mining project that employs many of the townsmen.

The old man rejects the offer. He explains that he  is self-sufficient and doesn’t need the money, and that he would have nowhere to go if he left his small farm. The businessman then launches a campaign of harassment against the old black man, and has thugs destroy his crops. When that fails to move him, the businessman forms a gang, complete with Klan costumes, that rides out to lynch the old man. Only the intervention of the white preacher saves the old man.  He reminds the members of the lynch mob of all that Uncle Famous has done for them and their children over the years, and the shamed mob disperses.

Why is the film racist? If I can remember correctly, there were two reasons. First, the critic did not like the portrayal of the old man as friendly, fatherly, kindly, wise, and generous. He was not angry or bitter. He was even thankful that his old master had emancipated him. He was even grateful for his small farm and never considered it a kind of reparation for his years in slavery. In other words, he was not a modern Black Lives Matter protestor.

I am not an expert on American Reconstruction history, but I have read “Up from Slavery,” the autobiography of Booker T. Washington, a former slave who went on to become one of the most famous and esteemed figures in America during his lifetime. His life no longer matters today, and I did not see one mention of him during this Black History month.

Like Uncle Famous, Booker T. Washington is the wrong kind of Black man. He was only a child when the Civil war ended. Even though emancipated, most slaves were uneducated, illiterate, and knew no other world than the plantation on which they had served. Although they were free to leave, most former slaves chose to remain on the plantations that still needed their labor. I doubt if they are covered in black history classes. 

Booker T. Washington was among the first to leave when members of his family sought work in the mines of West Virginia. He was a child laborer but passionately anxious to learn how to read and write. His first tutor was an older black boy and once he learned to read there was no stopping him. On his way he  continued his education in schools founded by white Northerners to educate the emancipated slaves. He became a famous educator himself and founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In his autobiography, I recall no bitterness or anger. Rather, there was thankfulness for the help he had received on the way, and for the great opportunity that America had given him. 

The film is also considered racist today because its sympathetic portrayal  of the white preacher and other white people in town does not fit a modern systemic racist narrative. The film was based on a real-life story. To make everyone a stereotype, in fiction or in real life, is to do a disservice to individuals, white or black, and to falsify history.  

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