Fences 1161which he takes for granted despite Bono’s loyalty
to him. Troy also feels let down by Lyons, his son
from a previous marriage, who he thinks visits him
only to ask for money; and by his developmentally
disabled brother Gabriel, who he feels has shunned
him by moving to a rooming house. What Troy
does not acknowledge in his resentment, however,
is that he was an absentee father during Lyons’s
childhood and that he “swooped down” on the
money given to Gabriel by the army after his
World War II injury. While it is true that Troy has
been abused, both by the white society that keeps
him in a dead-end job and by his own father, he
fails to fully recognize that he in turn uses and
abuses those who love him. The play explores the
family’s life through such themes as success, rejec-
tion, abandonment, and family.
Jennifer McClinton-Temple
reJectIon in Fences
Troy Maxson is a rejected child grown into a bit-
ter man who distances himself from those whom
he loves. He describes his father as a man who felt
nothing for his many children, providing the basic
necessities of life for them only out of a sense of
duty. He believes his father felt “trapped” by life,
with 11 children and an inability to move beyond his
life as a farmer. He says “A kid to him was nothing.
All he wanted was for you to learn how to walk so he
could start you to working” (1.4). Troy feels rejected
by his mother, as well, as she abandoned her family
when Troy was eight. Although he knows that his
mother was leaving to get away from her husband,
he still feels the pain of her rejection, saying she
“[t]old me she was coming back for me. I ain’t never
seen her no more” (1.4). These early rejections play a
large part in forming Troy’s adult character, as by his
own admission, he turns into a version of his father.
He says he can feel him “kicking in [his] blood,” and
that the only thing that separates them is the “matter
of a few years” (1.4).
Troy thus systematically perpetrates his own
acts of rejection upon those closest to him. Lyons,
his oldest son, laments that Troy was not around
as he was growing up. Indeed, Troy admits that he
saw a wife and child as a burden, stole from oth-
ers to support them, and wound up in jail for 15
years when he killed a man who had attacked him.
He has his chance to accept Lyons as an adult, but
again he rejects that possibility, accusing Lyons of
coming to visit only to beg his father for money
and refusing to watch him perform as a musician,
his passion in life.
His rejection of Cory, his younger son, is even
more painful. Both Rose and Lyons tell Troy that
Cory wants very much to emulate his father, but
Troy is barely willing to engage Cory in conversa-
tion. He rejects Cory’s attempts to discuss baseball,
one of Troy’s favorite subjects, claiming that play-
ers such as Hank Aaron are “nothing.” He will
give Cory no ground, either in small talk or in the
more important subject of football, which Cory is
being recruited to play on the college level. Troy
refuses to even consider this possibility, claiming
that whites will never really let Cory play and that
a job at the A&P is Cory’s best bet in life. Clearly,
he does not want Cory to follow the same path he
followed in life, and to him, sports are a shaky way
to achieve success in the world. However, because
he treats Cory with disdain and a sometimes dis-
missive, sometimes violent hand, Cory sees this as
rejection, plain and simple. He even goes so far as
to ask his father, “How come you ain’t never liked
me?” (1.3).
Of all the people in his life, Troy seems to have
the most affection for his wife, Rose. However, he
cheats on her with Alberta, explaining his affair by
saying only that he can “laugh” with Alberta in a
way he cannot at home. Rose is appalled not only by
the affair and the child, but by that explanation as
well, saying that Troy should have held “tight” to her,
as she did to him. She seems to be saying that she
has embraced their life, the good and the bad, while
he has rejected it in favor of a relationship with no
responsibilities. Toward the end of the play, Troy
even rejects his brother Gabriel, signing him into a
mental institution.
In Fences, the rejection characters face is symp-
tomatic of the larger pattern of rejection experienced
by African Americans in the cities of the mid-20th
century. In his preface to the play, Wilson notes that
while European immigrants were absorbed into the
cities at the turn of the century, ultimately working,
growing, and thriving along with these industrial