on to the Commissioner's office.
From a strictly historical perspective we have a Troy caught in the middle of momentous change. His native South is beginning to reverberate with Civil Rights demonstrations, which one day will affect Pittsburgh. As Lloyd Richards writes in the play's introduction "Fences encompasses the 1950s and a black family trying to put down roots in the slag slippery hills of a middle American urban industrial city that one might correctly mistake for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania" (p. vii).
The Fifties were not an easy time for Blacks, North and South. One wonders, what would have happened to Troy, had he lived and worked in Alabama, rather than Pennsylvania? Would he have dared complain about racial prejudice to his boss at the garbage dump? Would he have been able to afford a nice home, and spend carefree payday evenings drinking -- just enough? Would Troy have done, as Rosa Parks did, and refuse to move to the back of the Montgomery bus? Would he have sent Cory to pass the gauntlet of National Guardsmen in order to go
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