August Wilson at School

SMOKED HAM ON A HOLIDAY

In that other life, an earlier one, with young people, we’d gather in a circle and pass out the skinny books, asking, Who wants to play Rose? Who wants to play Troy Maxson. Who wants Cory. Bono? Lyons doesn’t come in today. Good choice, though. The play, called Fences, and it has everything. August Wilson wrote it. Young men who still held dreams of playing baseball all their lives liked it. They run into a father and son—tell you that. It has sex and booze and violence. It even has an angel. Boys and girls no longer boys and girls would take parts they knew about, even while believing these same thoughts had nothing to do with school. Anger, the one thing they did know about, more than love that brought them here, all of it walled off in deep freezers, packed behind clothes, and phones and headphones, all the protecting gear promising to defend and conceal them. They could read words denied them. Word prohibited, taboo. Beyond the beyond to prohibition itself. Feelings. Where no one would get to. If they could get to their feelings they wouldn’t come. And here they were. Reading tentatively, then, almost in whispers, not getting there. The little by little working on them. Tiny breakthroughs. Words reverberating in bed at night as they tried to get to sleep. Stuff they knew. What never gets encountered in school. They knew humor and its cruelty. This was different. As different and as fresh as garden produce. Farmer’s Market innocence. One day, then. Maybe one of the young women will say, I’ll take Troy. Another will say, I’ll be Rose. I read ahead. I’ll be Gabriel. These ones have found it. They’ve gone beyond anger. Moving towards outrage. Finding what they know. What they learned at home and didn’t have a word for. Still didn’t for that matter. Moving now. Moving towards who they want to become.

Jim Bodeen

14 May 2018