Swinging for ‘Fences’ and missing
Freddy Kittel was slightly older than lawyer Faith Fox’s son, Jamel, when he dropped out of the ninth grade at Central Catholic before the end of the academic school year.
Freddy was a voracious reader, but not a disciplined student. He was a child of poverty in a town that assumed he wouldn’t amount to much. Because there were no other Blacks in his homeroom, he became the target of racist bullying. In 1960, there wasn’t a lot of racial comity in either Catholic or public schools in Pittsburgh, so Freddy earned frequent suspensions for fighting.
Most schools in the city were “Blackboard Jungles” to borrow the title of a 1954 film that made Sidney Poitier a star years earlier. Central Catholic wasn’t the only school young Freddy Kittel walked away from in his midteens. There was also Connelley Vocational High School in the Hill District and Gladstone High School in Hazelwood.
It was at Gladstone where a white teacher accused him of either plagiarizing a 20-page paper on Napoleon or of having written it with assistance. He was given an “F” for his trouble. Freddy had had enough. The man who would become one of America’s most celebrated playwrights in two decades knew instinctively that he would be better off wandering the stacks of the Carnegie Library in Oakland for an education that didn’t treat a Black boy’s broken spirit as acceptable collateral damage.
Lost among the books, Freddy could enter into a dialogue with great minds who wouldn’t judge him as unworthy or incapable of understanding the world. It was in splendid truancy at the main branch of the Carnegie Library that August Wilson was born.
In 1987, August Wilson, the autodidact who never finished high school, won the first of two Pulitzer Prizes for “Fences,” a play he wrote about life in Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the 1950s.
“Fences” is a searing drama about a frustrated former Negro League baseball star’s struggle to hold his family together as his personal failures mounted. Troy Maxson’s fight for dignity as a garbage man wasn’t going well and his marriage to Rose was fraying because of an unexpected betrayal.
The play’s central conflict is
between Troy and his baseball crazy son Cory, a promising athlete who craves his father’s love and blessing to pursue his dream, but gets neither. It is a tale of generational conflict and desperate attempts to maintain honor despite the limitations imposed on Black lives by the larger society.
“Fences” broke all box office records, transformed Broadway’s expectations about the commercial viability of Black voices in theater and introduced a way of examining the complexity, struggles and drama of Black life that went beyond the cliches of social justice narratives.
“Fences” is simultaneously raw and lyrical. The language reflects the playful idioms of Pittsburgh’s Black working class in all of its poetic glory. That means the “n-word” is ever present in “Fences” because the play would lack all credibility if it strove for verisimilitude while ignoring the one slur that was taken for granted on both sides of the color line in Jim Crow America.
This is where Charlotte, N.C.based lawyer Faith Fox and her 14-year-old son, Jamel Van Rensalier, enter the story. Ms. Fox, a single mother, has provided Jamel with a comfortable life. From kindergarten to ninth grade, Jamel has attended Providence Day School, an exclusive private school for Charlotte’s most privileged.
Since 2017, the year the Denzel Washington-directed movie based on the play came out, Providence Day School has included “Fences” as part of its reading curriculum for ninth grade at the insistence of Black faculty and administrators. They argued that the play, a recognized American classic, is relatable enough to cut through the complacency and casual racism of
the school’s majority white student population.
Add to this months of “Black Lives Matter” protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police officers and suddenly there is an urgency to incorporate the Black experience into the larger American narrative taught in school.
Not so fast! Ms. Fox, who agrees that there is a place for teaching “Fences” in high school, nonetheless argues that her Black son and his white peers in the ninth grade are too young and immature to be exposed to a play where the “nword” is used so frequently.
She insisted that Jamel’s selfesteem would be adversely affected by hearing white kids use the word, including the substitute word they were instructed to use in class discussions.
For his part, Jamel, who had just made the private school’s basketball team, confessed he was “dreading” the class reading of “Fences” because, as the only Black student in his class, he feared all eyes would be on him during Zoom sessions.
Ms. Fox believes the enlightenment of white students at the expense of her son’s comfort isn’t worth it. The school offered Jamel an alternate lesson, but Ms. Fox refused to back down.
Whether Jamel is present for the “Fences” discussions or not, she didn’t want privileged white kids reading a play that, in her opinion, perpetuates negative stereotypes about Black family life. It would hurt Jamel in the long run and “destroy the confidence” of the Black students who attend the school, she argued. Black kids are 7% of the population of 1,780.
August Wilson, who died in 2005 at 60 from liver cancer, would’ve appreciated the irony of his most accessible play being rejected by a Black mother whose deference to a grotesque form of respectability politics blinds her to the play’s power and ability to enlighten.
As Wilson himself said about “Fences” many years ago: “I think the play offers [white Americans] a different way to look at Black Americans. For instance, in ‘Fences,’ they see a garbage man, a person they don’t really look at, although they see a garbage man every day.
“By looking at Troy’s life, white people find out that the content of this black garbage man’s life is affected by the same things — love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives.”
Very straightforward — and true. Still, Ms. Fox escalated the conflict to the point of allegedly insulting the Black faculty who supported the continued use of the play as a teaching tool, despite all of the supplementary material that is used to put the “n-word” into context.
Ms. Fox also sent multiple emails to Nadia Johnson, the school’s Black director of equity and inclusion, calling her out as “a disgrace to the Black community.” As a result, Ms. Fox received a letter from the school the day after Thanksgiving informing her that Jamel’s enrollment at Providence Day had been “terminated.” As a private school, that is its prerogative, especially when a member of the faculty feels she is the victim of bullying and harassment by a parent.
Though outraged, Ms. Fox has no legal recourse. The school will continue teaching “Fences” while she scrambles to find a public high school in the area with educational opportunities as rich as those provided to her son his entire life. Meanwhile, whatever school Jamel enrolls in next will not be a place where use of the “nword” is politely debated. It will most likely be a school where words far worse than that are taken for granted and used by the entire student body. August Wilson, who knew irony when he saw it, would’ve loved crafting a dark, satirical monologue based on that exquisite drama.