Tag: Male Identity

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. 1877. Trans. Richard Pevear. Deckle Edge, 2004.

Summary of Work
The Oblonsky family is in tatters over adultery: Dolly caught her husband, Stiva, having an affair with their children’s former governess, and she is seriously considering leaving him. Stiva can’t comprehend quite why his wife is so upset, but he is sad that his actions have upset her this badly. He has his sister Anna come to mediate the situation, and she successfully convinces Dolly to stay with him. At the same time, Dolly’s youngest sister is being courted by two men: Konstantin Levin, a wealthy landowner in the country who is incredibly awkward in his manners, and Alexei Vronsky, a military man with great career potential. Kitty’s mother tells her that she must turn down Levin in order to accept Vronsky, but after she does so and they go to a ball, Vronsky falls in love with Anna. This leaves Kitty ill over the loss of both suitors, and Anna runs away to St. Petersburg.

Vronsky follows Anna there, and she ends up falling in love with him and starting an affair, and her husband, government official Karenin, does not seem to realize the situation he is in, which causes the entirety of their social society to gossip. Anna nearly abandons her old social circles and starts spending time with Betsy Tverskaya and her friends so she can be close to Vronsky more often. One evening when she has a particularly private and long conversation with Vronsky at Betsy’s home, Karenin takes notice. Vronsky, in that conversation, revealed his love for her. When Karenin confronts her about the conversation, she curtly responds and dismisses his concerns as silly.

The affair gets more heated, and on the day of the military officers’ horse race, Anna tells Vronsky that she is pregnant with his child. They are both uncertain as of what to do, and Anna loves her son too much to get a divorce and leave him. When Vronsky participates in the race, he makes a riding mistake that breaks his horse’s back, and the horse has to be shot. Anna is so visibly upset over the accident that Karenin notices, and when he takes her home, she tells him of her affair and her hatred for him and love for Vronsky.

Kitty, meanwhile, has taken a trip abroad to Germany to recover from her loss, and she meets a Russian woman and her ward and caretaker, Varenka. Kitty becomes enamored with her, and she tries to do good just like them, and this much revives her. She also meets Levin’s infamous and sick brother, Nikolai, who is trying to recover from illness at the same spa.

Levin, having gone home to the country to mourn his failure and recover and move on, is visited by his brother Sergei Koznyshev, who criticizes him for quitting his post in the local government and having no faith in the council there. Levin cannot find a way to explain to his brother how useless he finds the work, so instead he decides to work with the peasants on his estate to try and better the crops and the situation, but is continually frustrated by the lack of interest or even resistance to new agricultural technology that would increase yields. At this time, he also spends some time with Stiva, who has gone to the country to sell some of his wife’s land inheritance for money, since they are severely in debt. Dolly also takes a summer in the country with the children, and Levin goes to visit her at Stiva’s request. He offers his services, but when she suggests that he take another chance to have a relationship with Kitty, he never visits again. He also sees his brother Nikolai several times, and he struggles to know how to keep a relationship with him and help him through his sickness into death.

When Levin goes back to town to visit and to conduct some business, he is invited to the Oblonsky’s home for dinner, and he meets Kitty again and falls in love. They quickly become engaged, to everyone’s happiness. While all of this is occurring, Karenin does not know how to best handle the situation, knowing that it will be bad for him socially and politically to get a divorce. He determines to not allow a divorce, but to instead let Anna continue the affair as long as she does not bring Vronsky into his home. They must keep up appearances. She spends some time in the country, and sees Vronsky often. Vronsky is struggling to choose between his military career and Anna, and yet his opportunities are passed by for the military in his effort to be near her. When Karenin finds Vronsky at his home one day, he decides that they must get a divorce because he cannot take the insult.

However, when Anna goes into labor and nearly dies, he changes his mind. He runs home from town and cancels his beginning the divorce proceedings, and he stays by her side; Vronsky is there as well. Anna begs for Karenin’s forgiveness, and he gives it to her and tells her that she can decide if she wants the divorce or not. His generosity bothers Anna, and so she does not get a divorce, but instead leaves him and goes with her child and Vronsky to Italy, where they do essentially nothing, and Vronsky takes up painting. A famous Russian painter paints a gorgeously stunning portrait of her that Vronsky keeps with them and hangs wherever they stay. When they return to Russia, however, they are outcasts from society because of their position. Vronsky keeps begging Anna to get a divorce, but she will not. She visits Karenin’s home on her son’s birthday, and she is forced to see her husband. She does not return, and forgets to give her son his gifts. At this point, she has become jealous of Vronsky’s freedom because he can go out in society while she must stay in the house because of her social position.

Levin is surprised at the difficulties of married life and the lack of freedom he suddenly has, and this is even more apparent when he gets a message that Nikolai is dying and Kitty refuses to let him go alone. He is at first angry, but then lets her come along. He regrets it when they get to the hotel that Nikolai is staying in because of the poor accommodations, but then immediately changes his position when he sees how good Kitty is at helping the dying man and making him comfortable as possible during his final days of life. Soon after that, Kitty learns she is pregnant, and she is joined by Dolly and her children for the summer at Levin’s estate. While there, Dolly decides to go visit Anna in the country, and finds her happy but somewhat bipolar as she switches from happiness to worry over her situation and her isolation and position in society. She is particularly worried that Anna is using strong sedatives to sleep, and she is wholly dependent on them. Furthermore, she realizes that Anna does not love her baby daughter, and it is apparent by her not knowing anything about her, but rather leaving her to the nurses to take care of. Vronsky’s place in the country is extravagant, and despite the comforts, Dolly is glad for the excuse of her children to go back to Levin’s. Stiva comes to visit them and brings a young male friend who is a cousin to Kitty with him. The young man flirts with Kitty, making Levin jealous to the point that he is unkind to his wife, and together they determine that in order to solve the problem, Levin needs to ask the man to leave. This insults Stiva, but nothing can be done about it.

When Kitty is close to her due date, Dolly and her mother insist that Kitty give birth in the city, and so they move to Moscow temporarily. Levin can’t believe how expensive it is to live in the city, and even Kitty laments that she misses home and wishes she could have had the child in the country. Levin has to take a trip to the provinces to take care of some business, and he takes part in the local elections there, where the liberals are victorious. He meets Vronsky there, and he agrees to go with Stiva to see Anna, who enchants Levin with her charm and the portrait of her. And Levin’s adoration only serves to make Anna more unhappy with Vronsky. When he returns and tells Kitty about his trip, she becomes jealous, worried that Anna has again stolen away her lover. Levin realizes that he has hurt her, and he tries to comfort her. When Kitty goes into labor, he is worried she might die, and he has feelings of resentment toward the child and then doesn’t know quite how to feel about his son.

Stiva leaves and goes to meet Karenin, who has a woman who has helped him raise his child and essentially be a wife to him. Stiva tries to get Karenin to agree to a divorce, but the woman has such a hold on him that he doesn’t make a decision without her and their psychic. When Stiva sees his nephew, he talks to him and he learns that his father and the woman have told him that his mother is dead. When they finally are able to meet with the psychic, Stiva cannot believe what is going on and he leaves the room. The psychic tells Karenin not to get a divorce. Meanwhile, Anna has become more and more frantic, accusing Vronsky of not loving her and of cheating, and no matter how accommodating he is to Anna, she will have fits of rage and insensibility. When she says she wants to go to the country again, Vronsky agrees, but not at the date she wants to go, and suggests they wait a few more days when his business is finished in town. When Vronsky goes out to run an errand, Anna is tormented about her behavior and writes a letter apologizing and asking him to come back, but he replies that he cannot come home until the evening when his business is concluded. She runs to say goodbye to Dolly and then catches a carriage to the train station, where she throws herself under a train and dies (just like a man had when she came into Moscow and first met Vronsky).

Two months later, Levin’s brother Sergei’s book has been published, but it has gone unnoticed. Sergei tries to stifle disappointment by getting in on the patriotism for Russian involvement in the Turkish-Slavic war. When he and Levin talk of it, Levin is uncertain about the motives behind the Slavic cause and Russian support, again to Sergei’s exasperation. Sergei boards a train to Serbia to assist, and Vronsky is also going, having enlisted and paid for an entire regiment himself in order to go to die after the loss of Anna.

Kitty and Levin go back to the country, and Levin becomes depressed even to the point of thinking about suicide, because he is unable to discern the meaning of life and what he should be doing. He then receives advice from a peasant that serving God and being good are the points of life, and Levin has a revelatory experience about those points, determining he will change his life as he has found faith. Later, he, Kitty, Dolly, and the children go out in the woods for a walk and to see some of the buildings and the work going on, and they are caught in a thunderstorm on the way back. When they are hiding under a tree waiting for it to pass, Levin realizes Kitty is not with them, and he runs to find her in the woods, coming upon an oak tree struck by lightening. He worries for them, thinking they may be dead, but finds them safe, his wife having stopped to take care of the child and then getting caught in the storm. He realizes how much he loves them, especially his son, and this change of attitude pleases Kitty. He determines that his life is very good, and the meaning of his life will be the good he can do while he is alive.

Discussion of Work
This work reminded me very much of a novel of manners like Jane Austen’s work. It explores expectations based on social class and gender in Russia before the communist revolution there. Women’s situation as dependent upon marriage and family for respectability is very clear, especially in the contrast between Anna and Kitty. Anna is highly educated and seemingly has it all. She has a child and a husband, but is unhappy and unable to change her state even with her intelligence. Vronsky is regularly surprised by her knowledge and expertise in many fields, but she is unable to use those skills and that knowledge to better her position once she has chosen to leave her husband and become a social outcast. Kitty, on the other hand, is very focused on purely domestic issues–marriage, children, housekeeping, and religion. She stays in the domestic sphere, and this causes her to be solely dependent upon the men in her life: first her father, and then Levin. Her situation in comparison with Dolly’s and Nikolai’s lover show that women were lucky if they had a situation like Kitty’s with a caring and faithful and loving husband who did well by her materially as well as emotionally. Even Anna is bound by this situation, and it is largely what brings her misery. Even these situations, however, are in flux, as Tolstoy writes in his work of a large discussion about how marriages should be arranged and if marriage and God were even socially necessary.

However, unlike Jane Austen’s work, Tolstoy’s work deals heavily in the economic and social situations that men dealt with during the time period, especially with the contrast between Levin and Sergei: Levin is the traditional nobleman who owns land and expects to be able to help the peasants he hires by finding ways for them to invest (through a form of sharecropping) and ways for them to increase yields. He is unable to see the use of democracy for anyone, especially the peasants, and he also sees no need to formally educate them when it will do them no good in their work life. Sergei, on the other hand, is the philosopher who believes in the democratic process, even if it doesn’t at first seem to get things done. He has a set of ideals and deals with those ideals in the written word, believing that the way forward is to allow everyone the chance to participate in government and to have and education to gain more economic opportunities. The many arguments that they get into, and that others in their company also engage in, show the struggle between the old Russian nobility and the newly emerging system. Many of these men live constantly in debt, like Stiva, putting further pressure on an already struggling economic system.

Life philosophies are largely put in stark contrast of one another, with Sergei, Anna, Vronsky, and Nikolai representing “newer” philosophies and Dolly, Stiva, Levin, and Kitty representing older ones. Both have their problems: terminal illness, struggles with satisfaction, struggles with relationships (both romantic and general social relationships), and economic struggles. However, Kitty and Levin represent the ideal in this work, as they stick with the old system and try to make slight modifications to it as befits their situation, and ultimately the old system prevails when Levin turns from secularism to God to live his life in goodness and faith. Religion in this book seems to be the key in what is otherwise a rather godless society.

by bluesyjune

Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Kushner, Tony. Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

Theater Communication Group, 2013.

 

Summary of Work
Set in New York City in the 1980s during the Reagan years, this play centers around the judicial system: Roy M. Cohn, a power broker and successful lawyer, is trying to talk a head judicial clerk by the name of Joe Pitt into taking a job in Washington, D.C. Cohn is talking to Pitt and at the same time answering many phone calls, including one from a client from whom he took a half million dollars; she wants her money back. Cohn is using the Lord’s name in vain, and Joe gets very uncomfortable over it and asks Cohn to stop. He asks him why he doesn’t want to hear it, and Joe says that he’s Mormon and it is against his beliefs and values to use such language. At the same time, Joe tells him that he’ll have to talk to his wife about it. Cohn urges him to take the position, saying that it won’t stay available for long.

Meanwhile, Joe’s wife, Harper, is coming out of a valium high. She has dreams and hallucinations on the drugs, and she doesn’t leave the apartment. Joe gets home to talk to her, and she says she doesn’t want to go to Washington, D.C., stating all sorts of superficial reasons for not wanting to go, and at the same time starting arguments over his lack of sexual interest in her. He leaves her be and goes out for a walk. She gets back to her hallucination of selecting a vacation to go on with Mr. Lies.

In another part of town, Louis Ironson and Prior Walter sit together after the funeral of Louis’ grandmother Sarah. They argue over the loss of a cat, and then Prior tells Louis that he has been diagnosed with AIDs and he’s having to be seen for it. Louis cannot handle the news and he seriously considers leaving Prior. Even though he loves Prior and has told him that he can handle everything with Prior, he finds himself incapable.

The next day, Joe runs into Louis crying in the bathroom. He asks him how he’s doing and if he wants to talk, and Louis tells him thank you for noticing and insinuates that Joe is gay. Joe is very offended at first, but then they get talking about how Joe voted for Reagan and is Republican, and Louis, very much disliking both Reagan and Republicans, starts teasing him. Meanwhile, Harper is high on valium again, and she hallucinates Prior in her dream; she and he talk about unhappiness, and he suggests to her that her husband is gay. When Joe gets home from the office, she confronts him about it, causing a huge fight.

Roy Cohn is next seen in the doctor’s office, and he has just been diagnosed with AIDS. He insists to his doctor that he has slept with men, but is not gay, and no one can know that he has AIDS because he doesn’t have AIDS and his doctor should call it liver cancer. The doctor tells him that he can call himself and the disease whatever he wants, but it won’t change the fact that he does, in fact, have AIDS.

When Prior gets sick enough to be defecating blood on the floor in the bathroom, Louis calls an ambulance and gets him to the hospital even though Prior is insistent that he can’t go because they’ll never let him out of the hospital again. After he starts to get better but then has another episode, Louis tells the nurse to tell Prior he is sorry, but he just can’t stay. He goes to Central Park and sleeps with a man there to deal with the pain. Prior is very upset but expected it to happen, and he confides in his friend and nurse, Belize, who is a black gay man who regularly performs in drag. She makes sure he stays on the medication he wants, because it makes him hard, and he wants to experience orgasm. When he experiences this, he starts seeing past relatives and then hearing voices, who tell him that he will soon be visited by an angel.

Joe talks to Cohn and tells him that he can’t take the job, and Cohn gets upset because he wants him in Washington so that he can have someone on the inside to influence decisions and potentially court case decisions. Joe is mortified at the statement, but Cohn says that he’s been doing it in the past, and it was the reason that the last person he had executed was executed. Another politician comes in to talk, and Cohn tries to explain to Joe that power is to have people across the political spectrum at your beck and call, just like he has. He tries to tell Joe that he is throwing away his chance at greatness and he should just go to Washington and forget about what his wife wants. Joe refuses and leaves. The politician then tells Cohn that he is under investigation for his misconduct with the woman he took half a million dollars from. Cohn says that it won’t matter, that they can’t get him.

Harper and Joe fight again over Washington. She wants him to leave and she wants to leave him. They both get upset, and Joe leaves. On Sunday, he goes to the office and finds Louis there. They talk about what’s going on with Louis and then, moving past the sexual tension, they both leave. Joe goes and gets drunk and calls his mother, Hannah, in Salt Lake City to say that he and Harper aren’t fine and that he is gay. Hannah refuses to believe him, and she states that he needs to get ahold of himself. Hannah proceeds to sell her home in Utah and move to New York City to be with her son and daughter-in-law. Joe has some sort of ulcer or injury, and he has to go to the hospital.

Louis goes back to Prior to tell him that he is moving out, which infuriates Prior. He goes to talk to Belize about it and says some pretty racist things about the state of relations between black people and Jewish people in America, and it infuriates him so that Belize leaves him to his thoughts and goes back to work at the hospital to work. Prior has been sent back home because he is doing well enough, and while he is trying to sleep at home, he sees an angel come down and destroy the ceiling and speak to him and force him to go get a book of prophecy out of his kitchen floor.

Louis and Joe meet again, and after some conversation, Joe and Louis go home together, and Harper has disappeared into the city in a valium high. She has left the apartment and thinks she is in Antartica with Mr. Lies. She spends days outside in the winter cold without proper clothing, and she cuts down a tree and gets arrested for it. Hannah has just gotten into town, and she is lost in the Bronx when she should be in Brooklyn. She is upset that she has had to navigate her way around town because Joe was supposed to come get her from the airport. When she finally gets to the Pitt apartment and pays to be let in by the building manager, she receives a phone call from the police department letting her know that they are going to take Harper to the hospital to put in the mental ward, because she thinks she was in Antarctica cutting trees down with her teeth. Hannah insists that they leave her alone and she’ll be over to get her.

Prior keeps seeing angels and they keep having sex with him and telling him things that he will prophesy to the people. He goes to a funeral with Belize for a fellow drag queen, and Prior is upset and grumpy. He talks to Belize and tells him about the visions he’s been having and what is going on. Belize tries to get Prior to think that he doesn’t think he’s crazy, but somewhat fails. Prior has also been overdoing it, and is causing his health to decline even though he had been doing well getting rest in his home. Prior talks specifically about how the angel told him that the prophecy is that he should stop progressing. It scares him.

Roy Cohn ends up in the hospital after having had an episode and seeing the woman, Ethel, he had sentenced to death for being communist. Belize is his nurse, and he sees that Cohn actually has AIDS, not liver cancer. Even though he absolutely hates Cohn, he tells him that he shouldn’t let them give him radiation because it would destroy t-cells he can’t afford to lose. Cohn, both homophobic and racist, tells Belize to do his job and get out. Belize continues to talk to Cohn, telling him that the research study he’s been able to get in on for the AIDS drug is double blind, meaning that he may not be able to actually get treated, and he’ll die anyway because he’ll be given a placebo. When Belize leaves, Cohn makes a phone call to get the drug AZT, which is in experimental stages, to his hospital room. He is given a very large amount, enough to last more than his lifetime.

Prior goes to the Mormon Visitors’ Center, and Hannah is working there as a volunteer. She takes him in to see the visitor center show, and Harper is there, eating junk food even though there is no food or drink allowed in the theater. He sits by her and she says that she’s waiting for the woman in the show to talk, since the mannequin never does even though all the men do. She also says that the man in the show looks like her husband. As they watch together, they both have the vision of Louis and Joe together talking and they are talking about Mormonism in Louis’ apartment. Prior leaves, and Harper realizes that she knew the man sitting next to her because he was in one of her hallucinations.

Prior takes Belize to the courthouse and they both get a look at Joe. Prior can’t believe just how good looking and large he is. Belize realizes that he knows Joe from having seen him in Cohn’s hospital room. Joe confronts them, and they find a way to skirt out of the awkward situation. Louis and Joe are together at the beach, and Louis has just told Joe that he wants to go try and repair his relationship with Prior. Joe rips off his temple garments on the beach and yells that Louis will come back to him eventually, and Louis helps him get some clothing back on, but does leave. Prior then confronts Louis, who has come to apologize, and he tells him that he shouldn’t come back until there are literal cuts and bruises on him.

Not knowing where else to go, Joe goes back to Cohn and confides in him that he is gay. Cohn discusses ideas about father figures and disappointments and then goes into a coughing fit and Joe gets sprayed with blood on his shirt. Belize tells him to get out and to throw away the shirt because it will make him sick. Joe has just come to the realization that Cohn has AIDS, and he is upset over the deception. That evening, Cohn and Belize talk about heaven and hell, and Belize constructs the image of a more nature-like San Francisco as heaven. Cohn laughs and slings insults.

When Louis comes and talks to Belize about what has happened between him and Prior, he goes off on Louis and tells him that Joe is good friends with none other than Roy Cohn and that he stands against everything that they are. Louis at first doesn’t believe it, but then goes and pulls court decisions and files, and he realizes that Joe is the one who has written decisions that have affected LGBT rights, specifically the anti-discrimination laws. He again breaks up with Joe over it, and Joe beats Louis.

Joe goes back home to Hannah and his wife and discusses why Hannah came to New York City, and he suggests that he has everything under control and that she should leave. She doesn’t tell him that she sold her house and can’t go back to Salt Lake City. They realize that Harper has once again escaped the house, and they go out to find her. Joe and Hannah split up, and Joe is the first to find Harper, shoeless and running around. He wraps her in his arms and takes her home. Prior is also out in the rain, and he runs into Hannah and starts talking to her. When he gets so sick he needs help, Hannah goes with him to the hospital.

Prior asks Hannah to stay with him at the hospital, and despite her discomfort over his homosexuality, she promises to stay until he’s asleep. They talk and he tells her that he’s a prophet and has seen angels, and Hannah at first thinks he’s crazy, but then talks to him about how their church believes in continuing revelation so he may have actually seen an angel. When he says what should I do if I don’t want to be forced to do what the angel did, and she tells him that like a prophet of old, he should wrestle with it and not let go. Then, later that night, she sees the angel he spoke of, and watches him wrestle with it and win. Then, he climbs a ladder into heaven. She has an orgasm and then doesn’t remember anything more.

When Prior reaches heaven, which looks just as Belize described, he learns that God has left heaven and the angels don’t know why. They are listening to the radio and hearing about Chernobyl, and he tells them that they only see fear and pain and suffering because they don’t understand life or see the larger picture. He gives them their seeing stones and book back and says that Earth doesn’t want the prophecy. He also says that he will not give up and that he wants life no matter how painful it is. They allow him to go back to Earth.

Roy Cohn learns that he is disbarred for his actions just before he dies, and Ethel is the one to tell it to him. She has wanted to be able to forgive him but cannot, and instead has wanted some sort of revenge, and has been able to get it by watching his pain. Belize is with him when he dies. Belize, knowing that the medicine will be taken back since he is dead, opens up the container that holds it and takes many bottles

Joe and Harper have sex one more time, but then she determines she will be leaving him. She gets dressed and leaves him in the apartment. She goes to San Francisco. Louis returns to Prior once more, beaten up and bloodied, and Prior tells him that while he cannot let him move back in, they may be able to see each other. The play ends a year later with Hannah, Prior, Louis, and Belize are sitting at the Bethesda fountain in the park, and Prior is still alive and functioning with the aid of the drug. When Prior starts talking about the history of the Bethesda fountain, Hannah states that when the fountain becomes a living fountain again, she will take Prior to bathe him in it and heal him.

Discussion of Work
This work nearly seamlessly blends Catholic, Mormon, and Jewish belief systems and thoughts to show the complex relationships that LGBT people experience with those religions and religious concepts. The religious-secular tension of the LGBT experience is embodied in Joe, who ultimately stays still and never moves forward because of his inability to fully come to terms with both his religion and his sexuality. The language of the angels in the work is almost Shakespearean when they talk about the great unraveling of heavenly design.

Prior and Cohn are foils of each other: one wants to make sure he’s remembered as heterosexual and powerful, a lawyer of the most memorable kind, but Prior wants to remain living and experiencing the pain and pleasures of life while admitting his true identity. Hannah shows the most character growth, coming to recognize that perhaps her belief system isn’t as whole as she thought it was.

The play also contains information about a historical moment: the AIDS crisis during the Reagan era. Cohn was also a real person who did illegal things, although his character is not a perfect representation of Cohn but rather a different character and person. It does a good job of exploring how LGBT people felt during that time period and the dangers of not just the physical illness, but the societal dangers of being out in the open about non-heteronormative sexuality.

by bluesyjune

August Wilson, The Piano Lesson

Wilson, August. The Piano Lesson. 1990 Plume, 2013.

Summary of Work
Boy Willie and his friend Lymon go North to visit Boy Willie’s sister Berniece and to sell a truck full of watermelons. They intend to take a family heirloom, a piano, from her so they can sell it to buy land that was previously owned by the family who had enslaved their family. Sutter, the landowner, was said to have died by the hands of ghosts. But Berniece won’t sell the piano, even though she won’t play the piano either. The piano has been in their family for over a hundred years, when the first Boy Willie carved the faces of his son and wife into the piano after the Sutters had sold them to buy it. He also carved their family history from Africa forward into the wood. Decades afterward, the boys of the family—Wining Boy, Doaker, and Boy Charles—decided to steal the piano rather than let it remain with the Sutter family. The family history carved into it represented the family’s soul, and they could not leave it in the hands of their former slavers. They got the piano, but not before Sutter caught up to them and burned Boy Charles and for traveling hobos alive in a train car. Boy Charles and the hobos became ghosts and avenged themselves on white bullies. The piano went to Boy Charles’ wife, Mama Ola, and when she died, she passed it on to both her children.

Berniece is being courted by a preacher named Avery, but she won’t give him the time of day. Lymon gets through her rough nature, however, and it causes him to have doubts about Boy Willie’s plans to steal the piano from her since she won’t willingly give it to him. As Boy Willie and Lymon try to move the piano, they encounter Sutter’s ghost, who has been haunting the space and the piano in particular, and Lymon and Boy Willie are thwarted in their plans. They determine that the only way to be able to do anything at all with the piano and to be able to live in the house, they must perform an exorcism. They call the preacher Avery to come perform the exorcism, and the ghost Sutter appears. Boy Willie starts to attack the ghost, but nothing is working. Everyone is losing. In desperation, Berniece decides to try to exorcise the ghost through playing the piano. She starts playing the piano, and it summons her ancestors who are carved into its wood; they attack Sutter’s ghost and it flees.

Having played the piano, Berniece has a change of heart about it and the history it holds, believing even more strongly that it cannot be sold, but must be allowed to be a living representation of their family history and ancestry. Boy Willie finally accepts that he will not be able to sell the piano, and he leaves the house.

Discussion of Work
In retelling and centering a marginalized black history, August Wilson seeks to show the importance of family heritage and family history as a powerful form of resistance to white oppression. The piano itself is the living embodiment of that history, housing the spirits and images of the family genealogical line from Africa forward to when Boy Willie carved the piano. Since Voudon so strongly relies on knowing one’s ancestors in order to retain balance and peace between the worlds of the living and the dead, the piano, when not played, becomes a forgotten artifact, and therefore a forgotten family. The imbalance leads to the struggles that Berniece and her brother, Boy Willie, have in their lives.

The effects of slavery are very apparent generations down the family line. Many men, promised 40 acres and a mule to be able to work their land with, never had that dream realized when they were emancipated. Boy Willie’s desire to sell the piano for that land then becomes rooted in the historical significance and economic power of black people holding land as reparations for centuries of enslavement. Yet the sale is not just of a piano, but a selling of family history and legacy, something that even not fully understood or appreciated, Berniece cannot let him do. The conflict is then set up as more than just the sale of a piano, but the conflict of remembering family heritage and yet still finding ways to move forward and succeed. This conflict is embodied in Sutter’s ghost, who haunts the space. Sutter, the ghost of white supremacy, oppression, and ownership, cannot be ousted until the family heritage is claimed, and a selling of the piano is simply a strengthening of Sutter’s ghost, because it allows him ownership over the family once again by owning the family spirits and genealogy. As long as the piano stays in the hands of the black family, no one owns them; they are free from ownership in death.

The imbalance is corrected upon the physical use of the piano, a release of all the cultural and family heritage and knowledge upon the white oppressor. The music coming from Berniece’s piano playing, much like the blues, carries with it all of the knowledge of survival and living that are necessary to avoid a second enslavement. Berniece accepts her role as matriarch of the family at the point she starts playing the piano; she becomes the family griot that holds the authority of the family line. Boy Willie recognizes this change in her, and while he still dreams of economic success through land ownership, he comes to recognize how important Berniece’s role of preservation is to their family line.

by bluesyjune

James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and

Other Writings. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007.

Summary of Work
The unnamed narrator of this novel starts out discussing his life from early childhood. Raised by a single mother in Georgia, they soon move to Connecticut and he starts going to public school there. He shows talent as a piano prodigy, and enjoys time with his white friend “Red.” He finds himself fascinated with the black students in his school, particularly “Shiny,” the very dark black boy who is the smartest kid in the class. While in school one day, the principal comes into the classroom and asks the white students to stand. When he stands, he is asked to sit down, and this is how he discovers that he is, in fact, an African American. He confronts his mother about it, who tells him that she is African American and that his father is a white man of acclaim. He does get to see his father one more time (he had occasionally visited them in Georgia), and the meeting is awkward. He sends his son a piano, and then never visits again. The narrator devotes himself to learning music and reading, and has a short crush on a violinist.

The narrator still struggles with race, and he and his mother have a long talk about it, and she will never criticize his father even though he left her, married a white woman, and won’t acknowledge his son. Still confused about how he should feel, he continues school, graduates, and then starts thinking about college, Shiny’s graduation speech still fresh on his mind. He raises money for college through his music, and is thinking about going to an Ivy League school when his mother unexpectedly dies, and he decides to return to Georgia and enroll in Atlanta University. However, when he gets to Atlanta, he has all of his money stolen and rather than go to the Dean to talk about it, he decides not to enter college and find work all around the South. He starts working in hotels in Florida and then ends up working as a cigar maker and a reader (a person who reads books and newspapers aloud to the cigar-workers). While there, he starts thinking of the different types of black people, and decides that there are the very poor and desperate black people, the middle class of domestic servants, and the educated.

He decides that he is of the educated class, and so when the cigar factory shuts down, he heads to NYC with some other men. They go to a gambling house, and the narrator becomes addicted to it. He is also introduced to ragtime music, which he ends up learning to play in order to make ends meet because he needs employment and he feels he might as well be employed at the club. His playing catches the attention of a rich white man, who starts inviting him to play for dinner parties at his house. Soon he is employed by the white man full time, and he finds himself with more free time. He meets a rich white widow, and he starts flirting with her, but her black companion gets upset and jealous and ends up shooting the woman in the head, killing her. The narrator worries he will be implicated in the death, and he tells his employer, who offers him the opportunity to escape with him to Europe.

He takes the offer, and their first stop is Paris. The narrator takes time to learn the language through reading newspapers and he falls in love with the city. Then, they head to London, which he finds charming as well, and then they head to Germany to visit two cities. In Berlin, he hears ragtime turned into a classical concert piece, and he desires to head back to America and start composing music. The white man tries to talk him out of it, saying that he could be a successful man in Europe and pass as white, whereas he will find all sorts of problems waiting for him in America if he goes back and claims his black blood and heritage. But the narrator does not listen to the white man, and goes back to the South to look for inspiration from the black community.

He spends time in churches, talking to doctors, teachers, and others in the black communities in Georgia, thinking upon the differences between Northerners and Southerners as well as what black people spend their time ruminating on or obsessing or passionate about, particularly when that topic is race. Then, one evening in Macon he witnesses a lynching and burning of a black man, and it scares him so badly that he determines that since he can pass as white, he will in order to avoid the same fate. He goes back to NYC and after some time unemployed, manages to find work at a business college, where his Spanish speaking skills come in handy and help him move up into a better career position. He builds a fortune through real estate, and life seems to be going perfectly for him, until he falls in love with a white woman, and he is forced to confront the issue of his race again.

The narrator determines that he wants to marry this woman, but also decides that he must tell her about his race first so that he is entering the situation honestly and so she can make her own decision. When he tells her, it breaks her heart, and she doesn’t answer his proposal and leaves NYC for the summer. He remains in agony over not knowing how the situation will end or what she will say to others or what she will do, but she comes back in the Fall and accepts his marriage proposal. They start a family, and they all live happily because both him and the kids pass as white. However, tragedy strikes when his wife dies in childbirth during the birth of their second child. Raising the kids alone, he determines that he is happy for the most part that he chose to pass as white, especially to help his children. But still, he wonders if he didn’t sell his birthright for something worthless or of less worth in the end.

Discussion of Work
The main, and obvious, exploration in this work is that of passing. What does it say about race that people can pass as white? It brings to light the fact that we tend to stereotype race as one specific skin color or look, when in fact skin color within cultural groups is quite diverse; it also, much like in Nella Larsen’s Passing, reveals just how much race is a social construct that works against specific minority groups in order to allow for the power structures of white supremacy to rule. Themes of identity are also very important to this novel, as it is the realization that his constructed identity in childhood was not reality that drives the struggle he has with his biracial identity; he belongs in neither space fully, because he identifies with neither culture fully. The theme of identity allows readers to explore the nature of decision-making processes about identity and race as well: many of the narrator’s actions stem from his belief (founded in the reality of a society that believes if a person has any African American blood, they are black and cannot be anything else) that he can only accept one portion of his family heritage. He struggles to choose between his mother’s heritage and his father’s, fully recognizing that socioeconomic privilege comes from one, where oppression and lack of opportunity comes with the other because of the racism in the USA.

Outside of his own community, he can pass as white, but he struggles with a moral question whenever he considers taking that privilege: is it right to lie to people about my heritage in order to gain economic and social privilege, and if I do, am I betraying the black race? In a society that often robbed black people of economic freedom by denying them jobs, paying them unfair wages, and by forcing them into poorer neighborhoods which were not kept to health and safety codes and had higher crime rates, being black became a social status that severely limited economic prosperity. For black people who had light enough skin to pass as white, there was real incentive to deny their heritage in favor of the privileges inherent in whiteness: while black people were limited in the colleges they could attend, the professions they could enter, and the places they could live, white people could enter any college, take any job they were qualified for, and live where they could afford.

Such disadvantages and privileges based on race weren’t simply apparent to the black people in the US, but also to the white people. Johnson’s narrator describes the way white people discuss the Negro Problem as not just a passing conversational topic, but an obsession, a dangerous subject that if unaddressed, would lead to intermixing of the races and destruction of white superiority and purity. It was economically and socially essential for white people to find solutions to this racial problem, to create racial separation and barriers in order to keep the white political patriarchy in power. Allowing blacks the same privileges as white people would introduce more competition into the markets, both economic and social, and potentially reverse the political, social, and economic hierarchy that whites had enjoyed sitting at the top of for centuries in America.

The narrator highlights this hierarchy and the efforts to maintain it as he interacts with a variety of people from different races, culminating in the philosophy of the Millionaire: there is no helping an entire race, only individual people, and that if a black man looks white enough, he should do what’s best for him, and assume whiteness rather than struggle his whole life to inevitably fail in the quest for equal rights for his race. The Millionaire, basing his belief in economic and social class knowledge, highlights what is possibly the most important discussion that needs to be had about race in America: how economics and social class influences the way marginalized groups are seen and treated, how they are limited in their ability to prosper economically and socially because they are seen as a threat to the majority race. The shame the narrator feels about his defection to the white race in order to gain social and economic prosperity should make readers consider that whiteness is privilege, both economic and social, and that turning our backs less privileged groups will not make the problem disappear.

by bluesyjune

bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End P, 1992.

Summary of Work
In her work, bell hooks discusses how image plays a large role in determining how a group of people are represented, and that because of that fact, images and representations are inherently ideological. She discusses how loving blackness is an important and underrepresented part of bringing about social equality, and how loving blackness becomes a dangerous position when put in opposition with white supremacist social structures. She also posits that reverse racism doesn’t exist because while racial prejudice certainly does exist, minorities are not in positions of power to use that prejudice to oppress other ethnic groups. She discusses how this rears its head when white people decide to become friends with black people, and yet they still refuse to let go of their learned racist habits. She also analyzes Nella Larsen’s novel “Passing” in this context, suggesting that it is because Clare Kendry decided to love blackness that she was murdered: both her white husband and her black friend could not accept the fact that it was possible to love blackness, that there wasn’t something inherently wrong with a darker skin color.

hooks also examines how blackness has been commodified, making it a selling point of pop culture: white men want to sleep with as many darker skinned women as they can; movies and stories offer blackness as a primitivism that can appease disgruntled whites in a post-imperialist society; cultural appropriation makes up for a perceived or real lack in white dominate culture. Fashion magazines and other advertising industries utilize blackness as a backdrop to sell their products. She discusses this commoditization within the context of a couple of films including Heart Condition, a film about a black man and a white man in love with the same woman; the black man wins the love of the white woman, but he is dying, and when he donates his heart to the dying white man, the white man is then able to win the love of the white woman. Thus, there is a physical transfer or appropriation that labels blackness as erotic, able to provide sexual pleasure and presence that whiteness cannot. The taking is problematic for not only the images it creates, but for the lack of credit it gives to people of color when the things taken are art forms or non-stereotypical representations.

Using Audre Lorde’s article about black womanhood as a structure, hooks talks about how black women are set in a stereotype of violence—on themselves and their children—that they play out. She believes that the narrative can be changed, but that it is hard and it first requires black women to accept that they can buck the trend. She discusses the ways that black women can change their narrative by discussing black literature and showing that simply journeying to find oneself or to escape one type of violence does not guarantee that they actually become self-agents and break the trend. She says that this is the case for characters like Celie in “The Color Purple,” where she gets away from an abusive situation but goes right back to being a dependent housewife by the end of the novel. Other women in books, like Sula, become pariahs because of their radical behaviors, and hooks does not see that as the ideal option either. What these fiction writers are doing, however, regardless of the end result of their characters, is breaking “new ground in that it clearly names the ways structures of domination, racism, sexism, and class exploitation, oppress and make it practically impossible for black women to survive if they do not engage in meaningful resistance on some level” (50). She identifies Angela Davis as a real world example of a black woman who resisted through political action and education to become a full agent and to resist the violent cycle; she also identifies Shirley Chisholm as an example of breaking the trend and resisting the cycle. However, many women are afraid to have their daughters and themselves follow in Davis’ example because of her prison sentence for political resistance, making her lack a community that is necessary to pass her knowledge and experience on to break the trend of violence. People of color, especially women of color, need to engage in feminism and in the “decolonizing of our minds” in order to center “social change that will address the diversity of our experiences and our needs” (60).

She continues the discussion of black womanhood by stating that black women in film and other mediums are objectified and seen only as objects, not as people, causing problems in white-black relations, but particularly causes problems in the way black women view themselves: they either vehemently oppose the pop culture representations or quietly absorb the stereotypes and objectification. Citing Tina Turner as an example, she states that objectification creates easy avenues for abuse and violence against black women, who must be seen as lust-driven and sexually free-spirited in order to be successful in entertainment. The conversation about black womanhood is continued as hooks discusses the racist and sexist actions of Madonna, a woman who belittles her coworkers and employees, especially if they are people of color, by saying she is a “mother figure” to them, much as white colonialists looked at themselves as saviors and parents to supposedly lesser races. In hooks’ eyes, Madonna is not only racist, but one of the worst appropriators of black culture. She also discusses this objectification and the problems it causes by focusing on the Clarence Thomas case, when a Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment. Her passive manner in which she engaged the committee, and the images of black womanhood dominating the white committee’s minds, served as a reminder that the images of black womanhood strongly influence people’s decisions about how they look at and handle harassment and assault of black women.

hooks builds a discussion of black masculinity within this discussion about gender, stating that black men are supposed to, under cultural understanding and stereotypes, be unemotional and strong and financially successful, whereas women are taught to be quiet and obey but are allowed to have a full range of emotions. She points out that much of the discourse around black male sexuality is the discussion of how black men really want to be white men, and their inability to be so makes the violent. To hold such misogynistic and phallocentric views of black masculinity is to deny men the full range of emotional and physical development that would allow them to become good fathers, loving husbands, and successful men.

Focusing on paths of resistance that black people can and have taken against racism, hooks talks about how the black gaze upon white people can be a powerful tool of survival and resistance. Black people were often looked at as objects owned or controlled by white people, and white people never took a second thought about the idea that black people could look at them and observe and resist; similarly, black women could look and gaze upon misogynist structures and recognize them, creating a form of resistance as they identify other parts of narratives that represented them in the public eye. The resistant gaze is a way for black people to “imagine new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity” (130).

hooks also believes that a discussion of black views on whiteness are important. Mentioning that black people have come a long way from viewing white people as a group of dangerous ghosts, many black people have integrated white beliefs about hating black people. They are also still terrified, even if they cannot explicitly say so, by the dangers of being labeled a “reverse racist” for discussing whiteness and their experiences with whiteness. But black people observing whiteness has also created stereotypes, and when they express those stereotypes to white people, many white people are outraged, upset that they are being stereotyped under the name of observation and data; yet white people see no correlation between what they do to black people and what is happening to them. Whiteness functions as a power source and a place of privilege, in hooks mind, only as long as white people are regularly able to insist that their race is mysterious and undefinable, that it is the neutral that everyone should accept as the base for cultural exchange.

hooks ends her work with a discussion of black-native relations, honing in on the need for interracial minority engagement to promote equality and reparations. She states that Native Americans are the only race of people that are forced to watch their genocide played out as entertainment to this very day through Westerns, games of cowboys and Indians, and other media formats. She points out the strong historical ties between black people and Native Americans, both through blood relation by intermarriage and cultural heritage: when Africans came to the New World before white people, the two cultures were able to harmoniously exist and exchange gifts and ideas. White people find that history dangerous, because their belief system functions on the idea that all people come to new worlds to conquer, and a symbiotic relationship between cultures destroys that image, and therefore white superiority and justification. Since the deterioration of black-native relations, Native Americans have had to resort to techniques of forgetting and forsaking their culture in order to live in a world that has swept their genocide under the rug other than to play it for entertainment: dealing with the history and having to try and convince both white and black people that it is unjust would destroy them. In order for all people of color to reach social equality, the two cultures need to work to “affirm the times of the past, the bonds of the present . . . relearn our history, nurture the shared sensibility that has been retained in the present” (194). Only then can domination be eradicated and society transformed.

Discussion of Work
While I agree with much of what bell hooks has to say, I wonder about the evolution of these arguments in this decade. While we still have a long way to go for proper representation of black people, and particularly black women, as agents and individuals outside of cinematic stereotypes, there are being strides made, as can be seen with films such as Hidden Figures and Black Panther. Films such as these focus on black achievement rather than black failures or trauma: women in Hidden Figures not only assert themselves as experts in rocket science in a white world, but they assert themselves as valuable members of their community who eschew violence and demand respect from their husbands; they also demand that their husbands take on multiple roles that require them to take on more feminine traits, making the men more whole and self-agents as well. Since Hidden Figures is based on a true story, it makes me wonder if there are actually many instances where this is the case, but they have simply been obscured from the mainstream discussions of history, making hooks’ arguments about image and womanhood and masculinity important, but part of a more complex historical and communal discussion. Black Panther, completely fictional, creates another space where nearly the entire cast is black, and the focus is black achievement and innovation rather than tragedy and violence. The people of Wakanda represent a society where blackness has evolved as a culture largely free (although not completely) of white supremacy and oppression. Their culture holds on to old African traditions, but also has evolved into an elite technological society. I do wonder if one concern might be that the technological ideal looks somewhat like white cultural ideals: however, the overly enthusiastic and warm reception of the film in black communities speaks to the fact that black people are actively looking for positive images and representations of them which are free from the stereotypical cliches that exist throughout our media. While there has been progress, there is still work to be done, and hooks’ work is still important in deciding upon ways to progress. However, based on film evidence (to follow hooks’ structuring of culture discussion) in Black Panther, it is fair to say that the idea of loving blackness is no longer a fringe idea, but very much centered in the public—black and white—imagination.

The discussion of Native American and black relations hit close to home, as hooks described something very painful regarding my own heritage. And yet, it opens up our eyes to a blind spot in our critical discussion: the struggle for social equality extends past racial boundaries, and must include all POC in order to make for a successful resistance and push for change. To ignore the representation of other minority groups in media is to neglect those groups of people and their needs.

by bluesyjune

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Diaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 2007. Riverhead Books, 2008.

Summary of Work
Yunior, the late boyfriend of Lola de León, narrates the story of Lola’s brother Oscar, who is the victim of what Yunior calls a fukú, a curse of death or destruction in the New World. He states that the whole curse is connected directly with the Trujillo regime, particularly Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. The only way to ward of the curse is to create a zafa, and Yunior, believing the curse has passed to him, wants his storytelling to be his zafa.

When Oscar was little, his family lived in new Jersey, and they were very proud of their beautiful son. He had two girlfriends, a true Dominican boy, but soon the threesome falls apart. From then on, Oscar cannot get a girlfriend, and he descends into eating and becomes morbidly obese. He has two friends, but even they leave him out when they get girlfriends. Despite his sister Lola and his Uncle Rudolfo trying to get him to lose more weight and participate in masculine activities so he can get a girlfriend, Oscar decides to focus on science fiction and writing, and he goes to Santo Domingo to be with his Nena Inca for a time.

When he gets home from his visit, he meets Ana Obregón, a smart girl in his SAT prep class. He immediately falls in love, but they never date. They grow to be good friends, but when her boyfriend Manny gets back from the Army, their relationship ends. Oscar gets into Rutgers, and he hopes that he will be able to turn his life around when he is in college. However, he quickly finds out that since he didn’t change anything about himself, life is still miserable and he is still a loser.

The story then turns to Lola’s past, and she narrates. Lola always felt controlled by her mother and then always made a point to find ways to be defiant, but after her mother Belicia is diagnosed with cancer, Lola feels powerless. To regain a feeling of power, she cuts off her hair and she runs away to be with her boyfriend Aldo, and she loses her virginity to him. She finds that living with Aldo and his father is not any better than her previous situation, and when she calls Oscar to meet with him, he brings the entire family. She is caught, and she is forced to go to Santo Domingo and live with La Inca. There, she is able to feel free and happy after awhile, and she joins the high school track team and starts dating someone. She also gets to learn about her family’s past, and this helps her to find some relief from the bruja feeling that she regularly encounters.

Yunior discusses the history of the de León family, starting with Belicia. La Inca took Beli in after having lived a terrible life with an adoptive family. La Inca strives to give her a better life than what she had experienced as a child, and sends her to a private school. Her behavior causes all the children to be afraid of her, and Beli makes no friends. However, when she becomes a teenager, she starts to develop a body that men go crazy for. She decides that she will use this as a way to attract attention from her crush Jack Pujols, and they have sex in a broom closet and get caught. It comes out that Pujols is already engaged to a girl from a wealthy family, and Beli is crushed when Pujols is sent to the army. Pujols was also closely connected to the Trujillo regime, placing her in a dangerous spot even if she didn’t realize it.

After that affair, she refuses to go to school and she gets a job as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant. Beli has a couple of men interested in her at that time, but she doesn’t get involved with either of them. Then, out dancing one night, Beli meets the Gangster, another person with direct contact to Trujillo and influence in his regime. She falls in love with him and becomes pregnant, but because the Gangster is married to Trujillo’s sister and Beli is only the mistress, the pregnancy causes his wife to take revenge by beating her near to death and causing a miscarriage. Nearly dead in the cane field she was beaten in, Beli sees a Mongoose with lion’s eyes and it leads her out to the road. When she gets well enough to travel, La Inca sends her to New York City, knowing that if Beli stays, she will most likely be killed by the Trujillos. On the airplane, she meets the man who will be the father of her children.

While at Rutgers, Oscar has tried to commit suicide, and Lola ask Yunior to look after him while at college, and he shares a dorm room with him. At first he has little interest in Oscar because he is far too busy with dating multiple women, but when his girlfriend dumps him over infidelity, he puts a lot of effort into helping Oscar. At first Oscar tries to work out and do what Yunior suggests so he can get fit and get a girlfriend, but because he is constantly made fun of, he quits. Yunior is angry and leaves Oscar alone. But then Oscar falls inlove with a Puerto Rican girl, and they start spending a lot of time together. But when she finds a boyfriend, she stops spending time with her. Oscar gets so angry that he rips things off her walls and yells at her for leaving him, and then he tries to commit suicide again by jumping off a bridge onto the freeway. However, he is saved by the same Golden Mongoose that his mother saw, and he hits the median of the road rather than the road itself. The next year, Yunior leaves, but after he starts dating Lola, he moves back in with Oscar for the Spring semester. Lola left Santo Domingo and in her pain over having to leave, broke contact with her boyfriend and all friends, slept with an older man for $2000, and then when her boyfriend died in an accident, gave the money to his family before she left.

Yunior then tells the story of Abelard Luis Cabral, Belicia’s father. He was a successful doctor, and he had two daughters with his wife. They are rich and socialize with the Trujillos. But when his oldest daughter Jacquelyn hits puberty and becomes a beautiful woman, Abelard worries that Trujillo will want to sleep with her, as he had done that with many other girls from prominent families. He decides they will stop going to parties and social occasions, at least leaving Jacquelyn behind. His wife, his mistress, and his friend all give their opinions, but he doesn’t act on them. Then, when Trujillo asks Abelard to bring Jacquelyn to a party and Abelard outright disobeys the order, Trujillo has Abelard arrested for speaking ill of him. Abelard is sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison, and it is there that he finds out that his wife is pregnant with another daughter. When Beli is born, her mother dies in an accident and she is adopted by her mother’s relatives, only to then be sent to be a slave to another family. Her two other sisters die mysteriously, and her father dies in prison. La Inca, Abelard’s sister, finds Beli living in a chicken coop with a horrible burn on her back, given to her when she disobeyed an order.

All of the de León family goes to visit La Inca in La Capital, and Oscar loves it. He stays a month longer than the rest of his family, and he falls in love with a prostitute. He is good friends with her but never gets to have sex with her, just like all his other relationships. Ybón, the prostitute, has a boyfriend, the head of the police force. When he gets pulled over with Ybón drunk in the car one night, Ybón kisses him in front of her boyfriend; he takes Oscar to a cane field and nearly beats him to death. When Oscar is healing, Ybón, who had been beaten as well, tells him that she will be marrying the Captain, and Beli books a flight for Oscar so he can get out of Santo Domingo. However, when Oscar gets back, he borrows money from Yunior and flies back to the Dominican Republic. He spends another month pursuing Ybón, and he also does research about his family and the Trujillos and writes a book about it. he sends the manuscript off before he is murdered in a cane field by the Captain’s men.

Yunior and Lola break up after Oscar dies, and within a year Beli also dies of cancer. Nearly a year after Oscar’s death, Lola receives a package. It contains a manuscript and a letter: the manuscript is a space opera, and the letter tells Lola that she should expect another manuscript in the mail that will detail how to rid the family of the fukú that forever haunts them. However, the package never arrives in the mail. For Yunior, the only bright note in the end of Oscar’s long and sad life is that he eventually sleeps with Ybón and finally gets the romantic relationship he always wanted before he died.

Brief Note on Themes
This work is a diasporic novel and a work of magical realism. Díaz mixes US pop culture with Latin American pop culture, creating a world that is mixed culturally and through genre: things that might happen only in the world of fiction and pop culture, such as the mongoose episodes, make their way into reality, blurring the line between reality and the mystical, a perfect example of magical realism. Díaz also explicitly references works such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is a work of magical realism. The characters in Díaz’s novel also parallel those in Márquez’s novel, with the children not being able to break free from the curses of the parents. Storytelling to rebuild the past plays a large part of the magical realism, as Yunior makes up events that he does not have information for. It also allows for a larger discussion of the terror of the Trujillo regime during its years of power in the Dominican Republic.

Human sexuality, particularly sexual roles in Dominican culture, runs throughout the book. Dominican men are supposed to be hypermasculine, sleeping with many women and being unfaithful to their wives, always having a mistress or another woman to run after. Trujillo, in a place of power, becomes the most virile Dominican man, sleeping with the most beautiful women in the country whenever he wants to. Women are then characterized as objects of sexual desire, but their sexuality is also a freeing power for them, as when they use their sexuality to defy the societal expectation and standard, they gain freedom and agency. Similarly, love and family life play a large part of this story: love for people seems to bring about the violence of the curse, and the two seem to regularly work against each other, although it might also be argued that it is the combination of the two things that leads to a zafa to ward off the family curse by the end of the novel.

The novel itself, representing diaspora, shows the embodiment of immigration: Belicia is the first generation, Beli doubly so because she is first placed in a school where she doesn’t fit in with the culture, and then again when she moves to New York City and must remake herself again. She is outside of her home country, and has escaped from death, and yet has lost a space to belong. Similarly, Oscar is an outsider because he does not fit cultural standards from either culture he belongs to, US or Dominican culture. He stands in a liminal space between cultures and also stands as an intermediary between family members, and he regularly fails at achieving any success in either sphere. Lola experiences similar troubles, especially as she is torn from the US, only to not long later be torn from the Dominican Republic, where she feels much more at home, back to the US, where she feels less connected to an identity or culture.

by bluesyjune

Gloria Naylor, Bailey’s Cafe

Naylor, Gloria. Bailey’s Cafe. Vintage Books, 1992.

Summary of Work
Bailey’s Cafe is a novel about people who have had a series of life struggles and are in need of a way station to put their lives back together. The unnamed narrator of the novel, the owner of the cafe who goes by the name Bailey because people assume his name is the same as his restaurant, introduces all the characters and tells their stories (except for Mariam, who his wife Nadine introduces). Bailey is a WWII veteran who spent time in Japan and saw the aftermath of the atomic bombs. It is that aftermath that leads him to question the moral quality of America and its leadership. Before the war, he met his wife Nadine. He saw her at a baseball game (he is a huge fan of baseball, both the MLB and the Negro Leagues), and he followed her and spilled a raspberry ice on her. Nadine rarely laughs and does not smile often; she is a practical, realist woman, even telling her husband that if he died in the war, she was going to marry the butcher. She helps Bailey run the restaurant. Bailey was a cook in the navy, and although his cooking skills aren’t great, he does cook. There is one menu item each day, and then on Saturdays people can order anything they want. Occasionally, Nadine makes peach cobbler. The cafe itself is said to not be grounded in space, making its way wherever people need to walk in from.

Sadie, a homeless prostitute and alcoholic, is a regular customer. The daughter of a prostitute, she always tried to be very good, but was regularly beaten and treated poorly for making noise or even just asking what her name was. At age 13, her mother starts whoring her out, and she gets pregnant very young, and the abortion her mother has her attain destroys her ability to have children. When her mother dies, she takes a job as a cleaning lady at a whore house, and when that is closed down during the war, she marries a man 30 years her senior. He is also an alcoholic, like her mother was, and she tries to make sure the house they live in is pristine in order to please him. When he dies, his daughters won’t let her stay in the house if she won’t buy it from them, and in her desperation to make money, she turns to prostitution, is arrested, loses her home, and when she gets out, turns to prostitution and drinking for survival. At the diner, a man who sells ice for a living, known as Iceman at the cafe, takes a liking to her and wants to give her a better life. He tells her stories about how he sells ice and that it is always the person on the top floor that wants the most ice. He tells a tall story about having his ice used to put out a fire, and it makes her laugh. When Iceman asks her to marry him, she wants to, but backs out because she thinks the dream is too good to be true and that she doesn’t deserve it.

Eve runs a home that some people think is a whorehouse and others know as a way station to get well from traumatic wounds. She helps many women in a several story house, and she is always making sure that she is choosy about who she allows in. When men come to see the women, they always have to bring flowers or purchase them from Eve, who always keeps flowers in bloom no matter the season. Eve’s life story is that she was saved and raised by a preacher, but he caught her with her dress up to her thighs and a boy stomping around her while she lay on the ground, and he made her burn her clothes, throw up all the food he had given her, and leave the house. She walked all the way to New Orleans and earned a living, and then moved North, a rich woman who supposedly had never whored for her living. She bought a home and always asked women who wanted to live there if they knew the dust of the Delta, the dust that she would always carry with her from her difficult journey. As women come in looking for Eve’s place, Bailey always directs them there.

Sister Carrie, a devout, self-righteous zealot, also frequents the cafe. She uses the Bible to denounce the women of the household, and is regularly upset when Eve, who was raised by a preacher, can use the Bible to make arguments better than she can.

Ester lives in the basement of Eve’s home. She hates the light. As a child, her brother “married” her to a local white man, who kept her in a room with a nice bed and then forced her down into the cellar to perform unnatural acts in the dark with him. She was twelve when her brother sent her, and she knew that her brother was receiving monetary compensation for her being there, and so she stayed twelve years in order to pay her debt to her brother, and then left. She loves white flowers because they show in the dark and she can watch them die.

Mary, also known as Peaches, came from a privileged home where she was offered many things, but she always saw herself in the mirror and felt that she was a whore, and that’s what she chose to become. When she was mistress to a rich man with a club foot, she was still seeing other men, and when he told her that he would kill the next man she was with, she tried to stay in for two weeks, and then mutilated herself with a bottle opener from her cheek down to her chin on the right side. The authorities thought he did it, but she wouldn’t accuse him, and she wouldn’t take any offers to have a plastic surgeon fix the scar because she knew she’d just do it again.

Jessie Bell married into the very wealthy King family, even though her family came from the docks. She struggled with her husband’s father and how he tried to run everything, and when she had a child, Ely got into her life and destroyed it, alienating both her from her son and her family from her son. She descended into heroine addiction, regularly going to lesbian parties to enjoy the company of her “special friend.” One night a party gets raided and she is caught in it, and Ely uses it as a reason to have his son divorce her. After the divorce, she descends further into addiction, and makes her way to Bailey’s Cafe and Eve. Eve helps her sober up and then forces her to get addicted again and go through the process one more time. Jessie hates Eve for that. She is the only one of the women outside of Eve who will regularly come to the cafe to talk, play cards, and eat.

Gabe is a Russian Jew who owns the pawn shop connected to Bailey’s Cafe. He and Bailey do not get along, but when Mariam comes to his shop, he takes her directly to Bailey’s so that Eve can help her. Mariam comes from a small African village. Her mother had her circumcised in order to ensure her virginity before marriage, but she gets pregnant anyway, even though no man has touched her. Her village throws her out, and she makes her way out of the village looking for someone to take her in. Eve takes her in, but they are all worried about the girl and the pain it is going to cause her to have a child after the genital mutilation. None of the men will engage with her because they can’t deal with her story.

Miss Maple is a cross dresser. His real name is Stanley Beckwourth Booker T. Washington Carver, and he was born and raised in Southern California. When he is about to go to school, his father orders him an expensive copy of the collected works of Shakespeare, and when they go to get it, the white men in town confront his father about the clothes he wears. They had already regularly slashed his tires of his nice cars, and they start to beat them and rip their clothes, forcing them to strip naked. They find women’s clothes in the store, and they walk out in those. At college, he attains a PhD in marketing, but cannot find a job anywhere. He spends some time in jail because he was a conscientious objector and refused to fight in the war. He starts dressing in women’s clothing because as he is going many places to search for jobs, the weather is unbearable and he finds women’s clothes cooler and more comfortable. He finally accepts a job as a housekeeper and bouncer for Eve, and he intends to save up enough money to be able to go back and start up his own company.

At the end of all of these stories, Mariam’s child is born. It is a baby boy, and the whole of Eve’s house and the people in the cafe sing spirituals for hours in happiness over the successful birth. Mariam follows Jewish customs, and Gabe comes in and does the Jewish communal rites for the child. Bailey is named Godfather, and together, Gabe and Bailey name the baby George, after their own fathers. The story ends there, not because there aren’t more stories to tell, but because Bailey chooses to end the tale on a happy note.

Brief Note on Themes
This book is structured as almost a set of interrelated short stories, connected by a common theme of tragedy. This ultimately creates a story that functions like a blues and jazz song, with the stories being tragic blues stories and each person getting time to riff or be the main melody to tell their story, like a jazz musician. There is a touch of magical realism in that the cafe is everywhere and nowhere, with the back of the cafe leading into infinity or into death, and the front of the cafe offering an entrance into a liminal space for healing. Eve becomes a form of griot, both pariah and savior, one who knows more than everyone else in the area and community. The women’s stories are mainly featured, offering a variety of stories about what it means to be a woman and female experience. Eve can perhaps be seen as the first woman, founding a space for other women, who are always and only seen as sex objects despite their major potential outside of their physical bodies. Having a cross dressing man also brings up discussions of gender fluidity and what it really means to be feminine or masculine.

by bluesyjune

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 1937. Penguin, 2002.

Summary of Work
George and Lennie are sitting in the brush by a small pool in the evening light. A bus driver dropped them off too many miles away from the ranch they were headed to, and so George decides they will stop and spend the night by the pool. Lennie is mentally retarded, a big burly man with the mind of a small child. He has a mouse in his pocket which he has killed and is petting, and George makes him throw it away. They have been run out of town because Lennie wouldn’t let go of a woman’s dress, and she said he raped her. They had to hide in order to save Lennie’s life. George tells Lennie that he isn’t to do any talking when they get to the new ranch and he isn’t to do anything bad again so they can get their money for a month’s work and go head out to get their dream land, where Lennie can help raise rabbits and they can put up their own crop. He tells him that if anything bad happens, Lennie is to go back to this spot and to hide until George came for him.

When they get to the ranch, the ranch hand gets them set up and the ranch owner tells them they’ll start putting up grain in the evening since they missed going out in the morning. Then Curley, the rancher’s son, comes in and is looking for his wife. He sees Lennie and gets upset that he won’t answer him when he speaks, and George defends him, but Curley is upset and then gone. Candy, an old man with an old sheep dog, tells them that Curley was one of the best welter weight fighters in the area and he’s always looking for a fight. And George tells Lennie to steer clear of him. Then, when the men come in, they meet Seth, who is the head thresher and one of the main ranch hands. They get talking, and they learn that Seth’s dog has had puppies. He had to drown four of the nine because the mother couldn’t take care of all of them. Lennie gets excited about puppies, and Seth lets him have one. He is always in petting the puppies and picking them up, and he has to be told to put his back with its mother so it doesn’t die.

Seth talks to George about Lennie and learns about his condition and what he’s done in the past. George knew Lennie from childhood through Lennie’s Aunt Clara, and had always taken care of him after her passing, even though at first he was always playing jokes and being mean to Lennie because Lennie couldn’t tell what was going on. Seth respects George. That evening, when Candy and his dog come in, Carlson, another ranch hand, tells Candy that he needs to shoot his old dog and he can get a puppy from Seth. Seth says that he can, and not seeing any way that the dog won’t be shot, he lets Carlson take the old dog outside and shoot him. He is devastated, but doesn’t let anyone see.

Throughout the day, Curley’s wife has come in “looking for Curley,” but is in fact looking for men to talk to and flirt with. All the ranch hands know she’s trouble. Curley comes in after Seth has left to tar a broken shoe on a mule, and asks where his wife is. He thinks Seth is with her, so he goes out to get him, and the other men, minus Lennie, George, and Candy, follow. George and Lennie aren’t aware Candy hasn’t left, and they start talking about their dream land. Candy asks if it is real, and offers to front over half the money to get the land. They let Candy in on the scheme, and they plan to finish the month out and then write to the owners of the land for purchase. Curley comes back with Seth, upset that Seth got the better of him, and he sees Lennie smiling and attacks him. George tells him to get him, and Lennie, after being beaten in the face and then the stomach, grabs Curley’s left hand and crushes all the bones in it. Seth tells Curley that he will take him to the doctor, but he is not to get Lennie fired.

One evening George goes to town with the men to the whore house, and he leaves Lennie at the ranch. Lennie first went to go pet the dogs but was told that he couldn’t keep doing that or they’d die. So he goes into the one black man on the ranch’s home, a man by the name of Crooks. Crooks at first is upset he is in there, but then gets talking about his situation. Lennie can’t let up about talking about the ranch and rabbits, and Crooks asks Lennie to suppose that George never came back, that George died or left. This upsets Lennie to the point where he goes to attack Crooks, but Crooks is able to calm him down. Then Candy comes in and they start talking more about the ranch and the rabbits. When Crooks realizes they are serious, he says he’d love to just be able to come work there if he could just live on the land. Then Curley’s wife walks in, and after horning in for so long, Crooks tells her she’s not wanted. But she gets upset and tells him that she has power over him, that she can get him lynched on a single word. It cows him into submission, and when Candy speaks up to say that they’d stop her, she tells him that no one would believe him either. She sees that Lennie has never stopped looking at her, and she talks a little bit to him about how she knows he is the one that hurt Curley and then leaves. George comes home and tells them to get out of Crooks’ cabin.

Then one afternoon, Lennie goes in to play with his puppy and kills it because it bit him and he threw it to the ground. He is upset because he believes that now he will not get to tend to any rabbits. He contemplates hiding the dog or telling George he was already dead when he went to see him, but knows George will know the truth. Then Curley’s wife comes in and starts talking to him, and she talks to him about the dead puppy and why he killed it. He says it was an accident and that he just likes to pet soft things. He tells her about the ranch and the rabbits as well. Then he talks about how his Aunt Clara got him a piece of red velvet and he wishes he still had it, it was so soft. She lets him touch her hair, and he keeps petting it, more and more violently, until she gets scared and tells him to stop. This scares him, and he grabs ahold of her hair and won’t let go. When she starts to scream, he covers her mouth and then starts to shake her, breaking her neck. He panics, covers her partially with hay, takes the dead dog, and runs and hides in the spot that George told him to.

Candy comes in soon after—all the men had been playing horseshoes—and finds the dead woman. He calls in George, and George says that they’ll have to either kill him or put him in jail this time, and there’s no way around it. George has Candy go get the other men and George acts like he is seeing the body for the first time as well, and Curley goes to get his shotgun to kill Lennie. Carlson also goes to get his pistol, but cannot find it. They figure Lennie has taken it. They all go out to find him, and George goes to the pond and finds Lennie there. They talk, with Lennie thinking George is mad at him, and George comforts Lennie by telling him the story of the ranch. He has him look out at the horizon so he can picture the ranch out there, and while Lennie is looking out, George takes out Carlson’s pistol and shoots him in the head, severing the spine at the neck. Then he throws the gun away. The other men come in on the scene and see him dead, and Seth walks away with George, saddened. Curley and Carlson don’t understand why George and Seth are sad.

Brief Note on Themes
Friendship and brotherhood, male bonds, are the main theme throughout this work. The main bond is Lennie and George, where George is both caretaker and friend, if not essentially a brother, to the mentally retarded Lennie. Seth and George and Candy and George also have bonds of fellowship, with Seth being the boss that is a leader and friend, and Candy being another ward of George’s. The various types of masculinity are embodied in these men: George is a strong family man; Seth is the cool and calm, but strong, leader; Curley is the fighter who embodies traditional ideas of masculinity, as is Carlson; Candy is the kind-hearted man, as is Lennie.

The American Dream, particularly the dream of land ownership in the American West, runs throughout the book. Lower-class economic life in the West is another topic that runs through this work, with the men always dreaming of saving enough money to buy land but never able to work out of their situation as it stands. The American West, always seen as wild, untamed, a place for a man to make his mark, is seen as much more domesticated, but still untamed enough for space to grow and cultivate a new life.

Race relations also feature as a theme in this book, with Crooks being the only black man on the ranch or anywhere around for miles and miles. He knows his place among white men is considered lesser, and it makes him bitter and isolated. He has been worked so hard he is arthritic and has a bad back. Those race relations are even more prominent when Curley’s wife comes in and threatens lynching when he tells her to get away from all the men.

Morality and justifiable murder are also themes, with Carlson first killing Candy’s dog because the dog is old and decrepit, and then George killing Lennie the exact same way because Lennie killed Curley’s wife. Questions arise about accountability and life: Should animals be killed simply because they are old? Should mentally retarded men who commit a crime they cannot mentally understand or be responsible for be murdered in kind for those crimes? What other ways of discipline are there, and can different modes be applied to different people according to their mental capacity?

by bluesyjune

August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

Wilson, August. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Plume, 1985.

Summary of Work
The play opens in a recording studio, with two men, Sturdyvant and Irvin, discussing Ma Rainey’s work. Sturdyvant, the owner of the recording studio, thinks that Ma Rainey is a diva, and he’s upset that her last recording didn’t sell as well as he wanted in the North, even though it sold in the South. He wants nothing to do with talking with the black people in the studio, and leaves Irvin to take car of that. He also requests that Levee, the horn player, have more of a role in the music because that is what is the new sound that’s selling. Aftewards, the band sets up for rehearsal. Levee is late because he is buying new shoes. When he arrives, he immediately starts bantering with the other band members: first about the price of his shoes and how Cutler helped him pay for them; then about how to spell the word music, and then about how the songs should be played. Levee wants to add more of a jazz feel to the music, and he doesn’t want to rehearse songs they’ve played numerous times.

They start rehearsing, but are regularly interrupted by arguments between Levee and Toledo, who reads books and has a lot to say about race relations and black entertainment and advancement. Slow Drag, a man who’s as laid back as his name implies, keeps trying to divert discussion so they can get back to rehearsing, but he fails. In the meantime, Ma Rainey has still not shown up, and Irvin is nervous about it. Just as Sturdyvant is getting angry, Ma Rainey, her girlfriend Dussie Mae, and her nephew Sylvester walk into the recording studio, escorted by a policeman. The policeman tells Irvin that she had hit another car with her car and then tried to run away in a cab, and then assaulted the cab driver when he wouldn’t take her. Irvin tells Ma he will handle it, and he slips the police officer some money for him to forget about taking her to the precinct.

Since the production of the record is delayed from the incident, Irvin gets sandwiches for the band, and while eating, they discuss their pasts. Cutler tells about how Slow Drag, dancing in a competition with a woman one evening, nearly got knifed for dancing with her when the woman’s boyfriend saw them. He talked the guy out of knifing him by saying that he was trying to help the girl win the competition so she could buy him a gold watch. After that, all the women wanted to Slow Drag with him, which is how Slow Drag got his name.

Toledo discusses how black people are the “leftovers” (57) in America, and after a brief discussion about race relations, they start to rehearse Levee’s version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Ma hears it from upstairs and confronts Irvin about it, who tries to convince her that it’s the style people want, but she’s not hearing it. She goes downstairs and tells them what they will be playing, and tells them that Sylvester will do the speaking part at the beginning of the song. Afterwards, Levee goes off, and in his anger, tells the story of watching his mother get gang raped by white men, and how he tried to stop them by getting a kitchen knife and cutting them, and they took the knife and sliced his chest open, nearly killing him. Then he tells about his father selling the home to one of the white rapists so they could get out of town.

Act Two opens with Irvin and the band discussing how Sylvester can’t do the part, and Irvin tells them to stick with Levee’s version of the song and he’ll work it out with Ma. Ma goes to record and sees there’s no coke to drink, and she will not record until she gets one. She waits, and tells Cutler that she knows that she doesn’t mean anything but money to these white men. She says that because of that, she’s going to do everything she can to ensure that they treat her how she wants to be treated even if it kills the white men. She talks about how the blues are a more than a form of expression for her, they are a form of survival, a way to understand life. Meanwhile Levee starts seriously flirting with Dussie Mae.

When they finally get to recording, they first have problems with Sylvester getting the line right. When he finally does, they don’t get it recorded due to technical difficulties with the sound equipment. Ma threatens to leave, and Irvin hurries to get the issues fixed. While they are waiting, the other men in the band tell Levee to lay off Ma’s girl, and try to tell him the problems that it will bring him to meddle with women who are involved already. They also try to tell him that the way he dresses won’t change anything in the eyes of white people, and that they even know black preachers who, very well dressed, were publicly humiliated and harassed by white people. Levee gets angry and says he isn’t an “imitation white man” (94), and he starts in about how he is going to be successful with his music once Sturdyvant lets him record. When Cutler tries again to talk to him about God, he insults Cutler and says that his God, if he is real, can strike him down.

Finally, the issues are fixed, and they finish recording. Afterward, Ma confronts Levee about his playing and tells him that he is to play his horn in a way that fits her music style for the band. When he gets upset at Ma, she fires him. Figuring he doesn’t need the job anyway, he goes to talk to Sturdyvant about his music, and he finds out that Sturdyvant will buy his songs for a few dollars, but won’t let him record. With no job and no prospects, he is upset, and as the band is getting ready to leave, Toledo accidentally steps on Levee’s shoes. Levee, in a rage, stabs and kills Toledo.

Brief Note on Themes
This play is the only one of Wilson’s Century Cycle plays to be based on a historical figure, although he insisted that Ma Rainey was not a researched character. The play itself deals with how the music and entertainment industry treated its black artists, who sold very well and yet were terribly treated and underpaid. Issues of segregation, how popular music is marketed, race relations, economic opportunity, educational opportunity, and black rage brought on by systemic injustice and oppression feature throughout the play. One distinct example is the altercation with the police, where only a white man can pay off the white police officer to keep Rainey out of jail. Still, the power black entertainers held was more than the average black person: Rainey describes being able to be forceful and get what she wants from white men in the business when otherwise she has no power to command respect, or if not respect, then decent treatment.

Music plays a big part of this play, the first of Wilson’s Century Cycle. The purpose of the blues is a theme running through the work. Blues is one of Wilson’s main influences for his work (he stated this many times in interviews during his lifetime). While Rainey outright states how she feels about it, the blues also feature as each of the characters tell their stories of sadness, travel, and life experience. Recording technologies are explored, as glitches occur throughout the process (a known problem for Paramount, since their recordings were regularly poor quality). The recorded and unrecorded blues songs can stand in as a form of cultural memory, music that passes on important information from one generation of listeners to the next.

by bluesyjune

August Wilson, Fences

Wilson, August. Fences. Plume, 1986.

Summary of Work
Troy Maxson and his friend Jim Bono are at Troy’s home after working at the Sanitation Company, and they are discussing Troy’s recent decision to apply for a job driving the garbage truck rather than staying on the back and lifting the bins. Bono thinks that he is going to get himself and other black men fired, but Troy disagrees, and says that what he’s after is to have them change the job description so everyone can drive the truck. His wife comes in and they start discussing the past and then their son, and Troy is upset that his son Cory is being recruited to play football at college. Troy remembers back when he played baseball (it’s how he met his wife Rose) and was denied the chance to play professionally due to segregation and injustice. Rose tries to tell him that times have changed, but he won’t hear it. As he rants about Selkirk and Jackie Robinson, he gets drunker and drunker, and when his wife tells him that he’ll drink himself to death, he speaks the famous line “Death ain’t nothing but a fastball on the outside corner” (10) as he tells about when he had pneumonia and beat death.

His older son Lyons stops by and asks for ten dollars, and Troy, after being upset at Lyons and telling him that he needs to get his life in order rather than just playing music and relying on others, he hands all the money from his paycheck to Rose, and she gives Lyons ten dollars from the money. The next morning, when Troy comes down wanting to have Cory work with him on the fence, Rose tells him that Cory is at football practice, and Troy is upset again. He’s also upset that his wife is playing the numbers. Then Gabriel, Troy’s brother who was injured in the war and is now mentally ill, walks up carrying his trumpet and basket of fruits and vegetables that he tries to sell. He thinks Troy is mad at him for moving out, but Troy insists to Gabe he isn’t upset. Rose tries to feed Gabe, and he tells Troy that he knows Saint Peter has Troy’s name in the book but not his own. When he leaves, Troy starts feeling guilty again about taking the disability money Gabriel got so they could buy the house.

When Cory gets home, Troy starts in arguing with him. Cory asks if they can get a TV, and Troy lectures Cory on how much money it takes to roof the house and to keep it up and make sure that everyone is fed and taken care of. Then, when they start talking about Cory’s football scholarship chances, Troy tells him to forget it because the white people aren’t going to let him get anywhere, so instead he should be focusing on his job at the A&P so he could actually earn a living doing something. Two weeks later, Cory is still more concerned with football than chores and work, and takes off to play. Just after, Troy comes back with Bono, ecstatic because he just got the job as a driver for the Sanitation company. Bono asks him if he even has a license, and Troy states that he doesn’t need a license.

Lyons comes back to return the ten dollars he borrowed, but Troy won’t take it, telling him to save it for the next time he needs to borrow money. So Lyons gives the money to Rose. Gabriel also comes in, having been he thinks, in his mentally ill state, chasing Hellhounds away from St. Peter’s gates. He asks for a sandwich, and when Troy starts up again about family matters, Rose shuts him down and says that Troy is to stop it about Gabe and his landlord Miss Pearl and about Cory, and he is to sign the papers allowing Cory to play when the college recruiters come, and that’s the end of it. Then they get talking about parents, and Troy tells of how he was from a family of eleven, and his mother ran off from her evil husband, who was a sharecropper. Troy was just eight and thought his mother would come back for him, but he didn’t. When he was 14, he had a girlfriend, and he was going to sleep with her in a field, when his father came upon them and whipped him badly. Troy, thinking that he was done, went looking for his father after that and found his father having sex with the girl, so he got upset with his father, and his father beat him unconscious. He awoke to the family dog Blue licking him, but he couldn’t see anything. After that, he figured he couldn’t go back home, so he walked all the way to Mobile and started stealing to survive. It landed him in jail for fifteen years, and that’s where he learned to play baseball and where he met Bono.

When Cory comes back home, Troy tells him that he’s in trouble because he found out that he quit his job at the A&P and he hasn’t been keeping his chores up. Cory tries to explain that he can’t do both work and football practice, and Troy tells him that’s his first mistake, strike one. He is to go and get his job back and quit the football team. Cory refuses, and tells his mom so. That afternoon, when Troy and Bono and Cory are out, they say they don’t know why Rose wants the fence put up. Bono suggests she wants it up to keep everyone close to her. When Cory leaves into the house to get something, Bono confronts Troy about his affair he is having, saying that Rose is a good woman and he shouldn’t be doing it. Troy, says he loves rose but can’t shake this other girl loose, and Bono replies that he doesn’t want to see Rose hurt.

They’ve had to go get Gabe out of jail for disturbing the peace, and it cost 50 dollars. During the time that Troy is explaining this to Rose, he also lets her know that he is going to be a father: the woman he is having an affair with is pregnant. To get Gabe away from the situation, she tells him to go get the watermelon in the fridge that he can eat and sell. Rose, upset that after eighteen years of love and work in the marriage, even knowing it was tough and wanting to give up often, Troy would cheat on her.  He tries to explain that he felt like he was standing in the same place for eighteen years and wanted a change, and she tells him that she’s felt the same way but never acted on it. Troy goes to hit Rose, and Cory sees and grabs Troy from behind and hits him. Troy tells him that that’s strike two.

Six months later, Rose confronts Troy about having signed a form to put Gabe in the hospital, and tells him that he’ll have to pay for that. And she also tells him that Alberta, the woman with whom he had the affair, died in childbirth. Troy leaves and comes back with his daughter, asking Rose to help him raise the child. She tells him she will raise the child, but that he no longer has a wife. Two months after that Troy comes into the house one day and when Cory tries to get past him without saying excuse me, an all out fight ensues. Troy tells Cory that he’s raised him and given him all he has because it is his responsibility, and when Cory gets upset and says that he’s done nothing but bully everyone and abuse them into fear of him, Troy gets ready to beat him. Cory picks up Troy’s bat and starts swinging it at him, but cannot bring himself to hit his father even as he is backed into a corner. They fight over the bat, and Troy is stronger than Cory. He gets it and tells him to get out of the house and never come back. Troy starts talking about death and preps to swing the bat at that fastball on the outside corner.

The final scene is the family getting ready to go to Troy’s funeral. Cory is a corporal in the marines, Lyons is just out of jail for the funeral before he has to do nine more months, and Gabriel is still in the hospital. Raynell, Troy’s daughter, is elementary school aged now. When Cory tells his mother that he doesn’t think he’ll go to the funeral because he can’t have his father still hanging over him, she tells him he will go and that he is just like his father, that for all that he did wrong, Troy was a good man and that he should respect him and recognize that he gave the best he had to him. She says that she loved him and lost touch with him, but Raynell is a saving grace and she intends to give her the best she has to offer as well. Afterwards, when Cory goes out, Raynell follows him and they sing the song their dad used to sing, Dog Named Blue, together. When they all walk outside together, Gabriel tries to blow his horn, which has no mouthpiece now, to open the gates of heaven for Troy. When no sound comes out, he does a ritual dance and tells Troy that it’s the way to go.

Brief Discussion of Themes
The Pittsburgh Cycle of plays is an attempt to center marginalized black history and experience. This play explores what it is like to live in the North in a city where black people are better off than in the South, but still not allowed full participation in society. Jim Crow laws are fully seen in the play with the discussion of baseball and segregation as well as Troy trying to get a promotion. The struggles of employment and poverty stem from this, which is evidenced by Troy’s discussion of his thieving in order to survive in the North until after he went to prison for fifteen years. The struggles of black family life are also a focus, with not just Troy’s family in the North, but his young family life in the South. Troy’s pride is that he has a good job and owns his home for his family to live in, and he guards money viciously because of his knowledge of what it is like to be without. That fear is what drives him to treat his son the way he does and to deny him the opportunity to attend college on scholarship: he doesn’t believe that anything has changed or will changed in white-black relations. It is a similar fear, a fear of staying in the same place, that leads Troy to be unfaithful, and it costs him everything. The plays end shows a recognition of human weakness and a recognition of the love and progress that is being made from generation to generation, as the struggle is passed on and the history of that struggle lives on through Troy’s children.

For a discussion of Jim Crow laws in Fences, see the study guide I am published in through the August Wilson Society.

 

by bluesyjune