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Fences: Troy Maxson [ISTJ]

Functional Order: Si-Te-Fi-Ne Perceiving Functional Axis:

Introverted Sensing (Si) / Extroverted Intuition (Ne)

Troy’s family and friends often complain that he has not noticed “the world done moved on” from his own personal experiences. Fact is, all of Troy’s subjective experiences have prejudiced him against outside influences. If his son has a different experience from his own, and a…

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#8w7 #black history month #enneagram #enneagram 8 #fences #istj #mbti #istj x 8w7 #c: 8w7 #c: istj #m: istj #official typing #character typing #troy maxson

I took all my feelings, my wants and needs and 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..

#but it wasn't never gonna bloom #you let me down #Fences #Rose Maxson #Troy Maxson #i planted myself inside you and waited to bloom #i waited in vain...

Ship that makes you sad: 💔

Ship that makes you sad: Troy/Rose, from August Wilson’s play, Fences. Fences is part of Wilson’s “Pittsburgh Cycle.” Taking place in Pittsburgh in the late 1950′s–and, briefly, the early 1960′s–it’s a look into the life of a former Negro League player, Troy Maxson, who works as a garbageman. The plot deals with how his bitterness with life, and his fear of death, push away all his loved ones, putting a metaphorical fence between himself and them.

I first learned of the play when I was proofreading my brother’s essays on it for a class in high school. Then I picked up the play and read it for myself. It’s since become one of my favorite plays, and the movie Denzel Washington made based on it is a must-see! But damn, is it depressing. Not grimdark or devoid of hope or humor, but still depressing, for many reasons. One of them, the one I’m focusing on, is Troy and Rose Maxson’s marriage, and its deterioration.

When he and Rose are first introduced together, they seem like any other married couple who’s been together for almost two decades. And they are! They bicker, they poke fun at each other, they advise each other though they don’t always listen, and sometimes they even flirt (with Troy by far the more aggressive one!). It has its bright spots, but it’s not at all an ideal relationship. It’s messy and disappointing and sometimes ugly and achingly real.

We quickly learn that Troy is having a secret affair with Alberta, a woman he met at his favorite bar who we never get to see. At first, Rose is ignorant of the whole thing. Troy’s best friend, Jim Bono, has noticed it and repeatedly tries to warn Troy in private to end it before it ruins his life, to no avail. Rose eventually finds out about the affair from Troy himself, who is forced to confess to it after Alberta becomes pregnant with his baby. Everything that follows is just heartbreaking!

Troy insists that the affair is not Rose’s fault, and I believe him. She’s as good as they come: loving, nurturing, firm, true. I believe he does love Rose. But love doesn’t always make someone a better person, at least not in a significant way. Love alone can’t stop someone from going astray. He cheats on her for the same reason many people cheat: a dangerous cocktail of resentment, self-serving illusions, existential boredom and dread. He’s so frustrated with how his life has turned out that he seeks out Alberta as a means of escape–even though, all things considered, he’s in a fairly good place; he even wins his discrimination case against waste management.

To his credit, he immediately claims responsibility for their baby, a girl they name Raynell. Not that he could have avoided it even if he wanted to, since Alberta dies in childbirth, and Alberta’s family presumably wants nothing to do with the child. Rose is compassionate enough to take Raynell and raise her like her own daughter, but things are never the same between her and Troy, after that. Though they continue to live together until Troy’s death, they are estranged in every other sense.

Once the head of the house, Troy now finds himself an unwanted presence. His disabled brother, Gabriel, is the only one left by the play’s end who doesn’t look at him with any disdain.

I guess Rose didn’t think it was worth it to get a divorce. But wow! Where do you find the strength to raise your spouse’s love-child? How can anyone still believe in love when you can be the best possible partner you can be and you’ll still be cheated on just because your partner is bored with life? How is it that some people can find the determination to stay even though they know you’re a disappointment, and some people can’t? Should they stay?

How do you keep living under the same roof with someone for years after your love grows that cold, when you have no more trust or respect for them?

I could probably ask my mother the same thing about her and my father. He hasn’t fathered children with other women that I’m aware of, but Troy and Rose’s dynamic makes me think a lot of my parents. Maybe that’s why it makes me so sad?

While Troy does have some sympathetic qualities–he couldn’t be a tragic hero if he didn’t–I find myself feeling more for Rose. She could have gone on a downward spiral like him, but she doesn’t. This is what she has to say in response to Troy telling her he’s been “standing in the same place for eighteen years:”

I been standing with you! I been right here with you, Troy. I got a life too. I gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot with you. Don’t you think I ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me. Don’t you think it ever crossed my mind to want to know other men? That I wanted to lay up somewhere and forget about my responsibilities? That I wanted someone to make me laugh so I could feel good? You not the only one who’s got wants and needs.

But I held on to you, 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.

But I held on to you, Troy. I held you tighter. You was my husband. I owed you everything I had. Every part of me I could find to give you. And upstairs in that room…with the darkness falling in on me…I gave everything I had to try and erase the doubt that you wasn't the finest man in the world. And wherever you was going…I wanted to be there with you. Cause you was my husband. Cause that’s the only way I was gonna survive as your wife. You always talking about what you give…and what you don’t have to give. But you take too. You take…and don’t even know nobody’s giving!

In the play’s epilogue, she speaks to their son, Cory, more in depth about her relationship with Troy, time and his passing softening her grudge against him. That, plus the addition of Raynell to the family. Besides the above, I think the following is my favorite verse of the entire play. She says it much better than I could.

Your daddy wanted you to be everything he wasn’t…and at the same time he tried to make you into everything he was. I don’t know if he was right or wrong…but I do know he meant to do more good than he meant to do harm. He wasn’t always right. Sometimes when he touched he bruised. And sometimes when he took me in his arms he cut.

When I first met your daddy I thought: Here is a man I can lay down with and make a baby. That’s the first thing I thought when I seen him. I was thirty years old and had done seen my share of men. But when he walked up to me and said, “I can dance a waltz that’ll make you dizzy,” I thought, Rose Lee, here is a man that you can open yourself up to and be filled to bursting. Here is a man that can fill all them empty spaces you been tipping around the edges of. One of them empty spaces was being somebody’s mother.

I married your daddy and settled down to cooking his supper and keeping clean sheets on the bed. When your daddy walked through the house he was so big he filled it up. That was my first mistake. Not to make him leave some room for me. For my part in the matter. But at that time I wanted that. I wanted a house that I could sing in. And that’s what your daddy gave me. I didn’t know to keep up his strength I had to give up little pieces of mine. I did that. I took on his life as mine and mixed up the pieces so that you couldn’t hardly tell which was which anymore. It was my choice. It was my life and I didn’t have to live it like that. But that’s what life offered me in the way of being a woman and I took it. I grabbed hold of it with both hands.

By the time Raynell came into the house, me and your daddy had done lost touch with one another. I didn’t want to make my blessing off of nobody’s misfortune…but I took on to Raynell like she was all them babies I had wanted and never had. Like I’d been blessed to relive a part of my life.

And if the Lord see fit to keep up my strength…I’m gonna do her just like your daddy did you…I’m gonna give her the best of what’s in me.

Pure and simple poetry! There’s a reason Rose is one of the inspirations for Aina.

#yippee a visitor!#august wilson #fences #troy maxson #rose maxson

Denzel Washington (Troy Maxson) and Stephen Henderson (Jim Bono) in Fences (2016)

#Fences #Denzel Washington #Stephen Henderson #Jim Bono #Troy Maxson