The worst mistake a parent can make is to try to protect their child from the world instead of prepare them for it. In August Wilson’s Fences, our main character Troy Maxson is the father of two boys, Cory and Lyons. Lyons, the older brother, is an aspiring jazz musician trying to follow his dreams. His brother Cory is only a senior in high school with serious skills in the game of football and is even being scouted by big name colleges. Troy has a tough love relationship with these boys, because that’s how his father raised him and it’s all he knows.
Troy’s inability to move on from the past leads him to abandon his dreams, and in turn, drag down the dreams of everyone else along with him. When Troy is first notified of the college coach coming to see him on behalf of Cory, he is sitting talking to his friend and co-worker Mr. Bono after their payday like they do every week. Though this seems like an amazing offer, Troy disapproves. He claims that it’s “the white man” that’s going to keep Cory from putting together any type of a career playing football. Rose and Bono try to tell Troy that the game has changed: “Times have changed since you was playing baseball, Troy.
That was before the war. Times have changed a lot since then” (Act I, Scene i, page 9).
This statement gets Troy very riled up about his playing career in the Negro Leagues, in which he felt he deserved to play in the Majors. This segregation, however, is long past, but Troy is unwilling to see it because he cannot accept that he was never able to live his dream. Now that Cory is being recruited, Troy is being obstructive because he doesn’t realize, or doesn’t want to realize, that black players can be successful at all levels of the game.
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Another thing Troy fails to realize is that along with getting recruited for football, Cory will also be able to afford much better education due to the scholarship he is getting. If Troy really just wanted to protect Cory from being denied from professional sports, he would make sure that he picks up a trade in college alongside the football, so that if the whole professional football player dream fell through, he would be able to fall back on another career. Rose tries to make this point clear to Troy when she says, “He ain’t talking about making no living playing football.
It’s just something the boys in school do” (Act I, Scene i, page 8).
Troy’s obstructionist attitude towards the future of his son makes him seem selfish. The fact that he won’t allow Cory to get a good education and maybe even become a professional athlete shows his desire to protect Cory from a tough world he should be preparing him for. Cory is not the only one who seems to be having their dreams thwarted by Troy. Lyons, the jazz musician, also has to deal with Troy when it comes to doing what he loves.
Though what Lyons did with his life was out of Troy’s control while he was in prison, it’s almost certain that he would have been reluctant to let Lyons become a musician. Even now, he does not approve of the life Lyons is leading. He says about Lyons being a musician, “I don’t know why he don’t go and get him a decent job and take care of that woman he got” (Act I, Scene i, page 19).
To Troy, these are the only important things in life at this point. He is too old to want anything else, but this is not the case for his children.
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His children still have time to fulfill their dreams, and in this case, though Lyons is 34, he still is a promising musician who has potential left to make something of his talent. Lastly, Troy manages to spoil the only dream he has left to spoil: his wife’s. All Rose had dreamed of was having a husband she could count on and kids she could be proud of. But, fittingly, Troy has been having an affair with another woman, whom he has impregnated. When he fesses up to Rose about the affair, she is heartbroken, as expected. She says to Troy, “I took all my feelings, my wants and needs, my dreams… and I buried them inside you.
I planted a seed and watched and prayed over it. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom. And it didn’t take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky and it wasn’t never gonna bloom” (Act II, Scene i, page 71).
Troy was the catalyst to Rose’s dreams. He was a necessary part of her plan: to grow old with a man that she loved and who loved her back. By being unfaithful, he forever sullied his image in the eyes of Rose. And now, Troy has an accident baby on the way, no wife, and rebellious son. I can’t imagine this is what he wanted with his life.
Troy’s tendency to put down the dreams of his loved ones stems from his past experiences with having dreams destroyed, such as his dream of being a professional baseball player. I want to believe that had Troy lived to see Cory grow up to be a military man, he would be extremely proud of his boy. Deep down, all Troy wanted was for Cory to be successful and have a life he can be content with, he just didn’t realize that there was no need to try to protect him from failure. All he should have tried to do was prepare him for it.
