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Fences Where Have All The Essay

Troy's father beats his fourteen-year-old son and then rapes the boy's friend. Troy understands in this moment that the cruelty in his life is represented by men. And part of the real evil that he seems as emanating from men is that they destroy women and drive them away. Troy sees the real harm that his father has done to women. And yet he also struggles to understand how a man who could be so vicious to women could also struggle to support his children. What Troy does not seem to understand -- even as he becomes the financial support of his own family -- that the abuse and the position of breadwinner are in fact closely linked to each other. The man who provides all of the money that his father has and the rapist are both men who control those around them.

Bono's father is also absent in important ways from Bono's life. Bono describes his father as being plagued by "the walking blues." This condition meant that he could not -- would not -- settle down in any one place with any one woman. Bono's attachment to his father is so...

Bono's father is drawn by the siren call of the "New Land," part of the Great Migration that many blacks (mostly men) took to states north of the Mason-Dixon line.
Life calls to both of these fathers in a key of liberty. Denied the basic freedoms for so long, both Bono's and Troy's fathers grabbed what freedom they could in their world. To the sorrow of their sons (and the women in their lives), the men carved out freedom from the niches in their families, stole chances for themselves away from their sons' futures. Men with no joy in their past will be careless about the joy that they share with others.

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.

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