When I first read the play "Fences" by August Wilson, it was 1993 and I had been given a second book contract to write a companion volume to my first book, "I Know What the Red Clay Looks." The companion volume would be with black men writers, and I gave it the title "Swing Low" -- an homage to the Negro spiritual, of course, but also because at that time, I very much thought about black maleness as the missing quantity in my life (I was adopted by a white family at birth, and reunited with my white birthmother when I was 11). When I thought of what that missing quantity might sound like, what I heard was a dark, honeyed hum -- a chariot chorus in the distance, coming to carry me home to the black identity I was still then creating.
"Fences," the title being a central metaphor throughout the play for walls and difficult choices, integrity and conviction, tells the story of a black family in 1950s Pittsburg led by patriarch Troy Maxson, a tragic hero whose life of highs and lows can perhaps best be summed up in this passage, with Troy trying to explain himself to his wife:
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