Two Trains Running

“The numbers give you an opportunity.” 

Most of the men play the numbers, but Wolf runs them. In a sense, this line is a sales pitch, because his livelihood depends on people making bets. He is articulating the way the people who play constantly feel about the game: It’s a potential lifeline with low odds, but a chance to improve their circumstances if they win. For most of the characters, it doesn’t seem like there’s any chance to change their lives unless they suddenly get lucky.

“Everybody know West got money. He get more business. More people dying than getting saved.”

Holloway has latched onto the idea of religion and spirituality as the things that give him peace before he dies, but he’s repeating a sentiment that is already floating in the consciousness of everyone there: They will all die. Their deaths are inevitable, and time is limited. This is part of what bothers all of them about West. He has started a business on this premise, setting his foundation on something that scares them all.

“West been wearing the same pair of shoes for three years. Got the heels all run over and everything. He do keep them shined. I’ll say that for him. I ain’t never seen him without his shoes shined.”

Memphis resents West for being so much more successful than he himself is, especially because West has tried over and over to buy Memphis’s building. Memphis sees his building as a manifestation of his own dignity, which he reclaimed after he lost his first piece of land. While he sees West as a miser who is hoarding money and unwilling to spread it around, West is essentially stuck. West keeps asking for the sugar and then stopping himself. He doesn’t seem to feel like he is allowed to enjoy anything.

“That’s what the people say. Say they look better than when they was living. That’s why the people like West.”

Wolf’s statement reveals a lot about the fear of death in those around him. Death means no longer having a chance to do anything they wanted to do. It means that their final actions are done and their lives will never improve. Still, there is comfort in the idea that at your last viewing, you might look not only lifelike but even better than you did in life.

“You believe in luck? I was born with it. I was born with seven cents. My mama swallowed a nickel and two pennies and I come out with the nickel in one hand and the two pennies in the other. They say I was born with luck but they didn’t say what kind. I think it was bad luck.”

Sterling hasn’t had much control in his life. He had a rough childhood as an orphan and made the unfortunate choice to rob a bank. Then he spent five years in prison. Also, notably, the woman who gave birth to him gave him up, so this isn’t even a story that she would have told him growing up. Without agency in his life, Sterling banks on his luck changing, since that seems like the only chance he has.

“Aunt Ester give you more than money. She make you right with yourself. You ain’t got to go far. She live at 1839 Wylie. In the back. Go up there and you’ll see a red door.”

Holloway feels very strongly about proselytizing for Aunt Ester. He repeats the directions to find her multiple times during the play. What Aunt Ester offers isn’t tangible. It takes faith, and the peace that Holloway feels might only be the placebo effect. Aunt Ester tests that faith by telling people to throw money in the river. If the numbers game is metaphorically throwing money away, what Aunt Ester asks is literal. For some, like West, it’s a line too far to cross.

“She look like she five hundred. You be surprised when she say she ain’t but three hundred and twenty-two. Don’t ask me how she lived that long. I don’t know. Look like death scared of her. Every time he come around her he just get up and get on away. Ask West about her. He’ll tell you. He done went up there to see her. He’s been waiting to bury her since he saw her. Even told the people there in the house that he’d do it for free.”

Holloway is contributing to the lore that frames West as the embodiment of death. First, he assigns West the authority to vouch for Aunt Ester’s age. Second, he paints him with the ghoulishness of actually waiting for the woman to die, of almost encouraging her death by promising a free burial. And in truth, even if Aunt Ester appears very old, it’s hard to say what someone would look like if they were actually over 300. Holloway is overselling because he likes the idea of attaching himself to someone who scares death away.

“I don’t know. He might be more in his right mind than you are. He might have more sense than any of us.”

The others dismiss Hambone as incapable of understanding what he’s doing, but Holloway recognizes that while Hambone may have an intellectual disability, his singular focus is very purposeful. Hambone won’t simply accept the chicken, because the chicken will only make him feel cheated. It won’t taste good because it will remind him of the way he was humiliated. By continuing to pursue a single direct action, there’s a chance that one day it will pay off.

“That’s why I say he might have more sense than me and you. ‘Cause he ain’t willing to accept whatever the white man throw at him. It be easier. But he say he don’t mind getting out of bed in the morning to go at what’s right. I don’t believe you and me got that much.”

Holloway demonstrates multiple times his clear awareness of the world’s injustices and what others are doing to fight them. When he had the chance, he decided not to follow Malcolm X and join the fight. He created his own idea of peacefulness by investing himself in faith and Aunt Ester, but he admires Hambone for his persistent action, even at such a small level. Holloway also acknowledges that his life doesn’t feel as purposeful as Hambone’s certainly does.

“All I got to do is find my way down to the train depot. They got two trains running every day. I used to know the schedule. They might have changed it… but if they did, they got it posted up on the board.”

It has been almost four decades since Memphis left Jackson, Mississippi. The injustice he suffered there has weighed on him and shaped him as a person. Memphis is deeply concerned with receiving personal justice and being treated fairly. Rather than letting the incident go and moving on, he has placated the shame he feels by reassuring himself that the option to go back is always available. There are two trains running, which means he has two options, two chances every day to decide to go. This way, he can tell himself that he will.

“That’s what the problem is… you trying to figure out where to put her. I know Risa. She one of them gals that matured quick. And every man that seen her since she was twelve years old think she ought to go lay up with them somewhere. She don’t want that. She figure if she made her legs ugly that would force everybody to look at her and see what kind of personality she is.”

Holloway is the only one of the three men who can look at Risa and see that she is being purposeful. Memphis and Wolf can’t imagine not wanting attention from the opposite sex, nor do they understand what it’s like to be a Black woman in the world and to be hypersexualized, objectified, and preyed on. Memphis himself struggles with his broken marriage, in which he also didn’t understand that a woman needs more than someone buying things for her. Risa sliced her legs to take some control over the way men were trying to use her body.

“If it wasn’t for you the white man would be poor. Every little bit he got he got standing on top of you. That’s why he could reach so high.”

Holloway explains Sterling’s attitude to Memphis because Memphis is a bit myopic when it comes to understanding young Black men and their attitudes toward work. Memphis believes that someone who needs work should be willing to take any job, no matter how hard or exploitative, because anything less is asking for a handout. However, Holloway points out that it’s not asking for a handout for Black men to want their fair share of the country they were forced to build.

“Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back hold up. And if you around here looking for justice, you got a long wait. Ain’t no justice. That’s why they got that statue of her and got her blindfolded. Common sense would tell you if anybody need to see she do.”

Memphis explains his issue with the Black Power movement. He sees these young activists going to rallies and protests but losing steam quickly when they are faced with addressing a real situation and can’t get what they want. Nothing will ever happen if they just wait; it takes sacrifice and work. In Memphis’s case, no justice will ever be served in Mississippi unless he goes down to serve it himself, no matter what the cost.

“I robbed a bank. I was tired of waking up every day with no money. I figure a man supposed to have money sometime. Everybody else seem like they got it. Seem like I’m the only one ain’t got no money. I figure I’d get my money where Mellon get his from.”

Sterling explains that he robbed the bank because he felt that was never going to have money any other way. He wanted to experience what (in his estimation) everyone else experiences, but of course, many people never experience what it is like to have money. If Memphis’s story is true and Sterling was caught spending it right after the robbery, it seems as if Sterling just decided that being able to spend money for once was worth losing five years of his life in prison.

“I started to go over there and get his ham for him. But then he wouldn’t have nothing to do in the morning. I didn’t want to take that away from him. He have more cause to get up out of the bed in the morning than I do.”

Sterling points out that taking away Hambone’s need to go after the ham might have the effect of making feel like he has no more purpose. On the one hand, it seems clear that he will never get it on his own, but since Hambone has been working toward this goal every day for nearly 10 years, it might be better to let him keep reaching than to cross the finish line for him. After Hambone dies and can no longer pursue his goal, Sterling takes up the cause and does it for him. He becomes the heir in Hambone’s cause.

“If I can’t find no job I might have to find me a gun.”

The other characters keep predicting that Sterling will end up back in prison, but Sterling doesn’t want to commit crimes so much as to correct the inequalities that affect him by circumventing the law. He can’t find a job that will pay him a living wage, and rather than settle for less, he’s most likely considering a gun to go out and take money. Rather than leaving prison humbled by the experience, he left with an even greater hunger for more. It’s not until he speaks to Aunt Ester that he learns to focus on what he has.

“But I learned a lot from that. I learned to watch where I was going at all times. ‘Cause you always under attack.”

Wolf recounts being arrested when a police officer ran into him on the street while chasing a suspect. He had simply been unlucky to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and even though the case was dismissed, he waited in jail for three months to see a judge. Wolf knows first-hand that the justice system isn’t in his (or any Black man’s) favor and that going to prison doesn’t mean that someone is a bad person. He learned that he must be on the defensive because he never knows when he will find himself in the wrong place again.

“Hell, a flower’s a flower. They gonna be dead in a minute if you don’t put them in some water. They gonna be dead in two or three days even if you do. Go on and put them in a glass and enjoy them. Prophet Samuel can’t smell them. He don’t even know they there. People throwing all that money away buying flowers.”

Sterling brings Risa flowers that he took from one of the many stands and bouquets for Prophet Samuel. Risa is like the people who insist to West that certain things need to go in their loved one’s caskets; she works hard to try and convince West to give Hambone a nicer casket, and she also won’t go to either Prophet Samuel’s or Hambone’s viewings because she doesn’t want to see them dead. However, Sterling knows that life is fleeting. People are like flowers that will die, and life might be stretched a little longer with proper care, but not necessarily. For Sterling, life is for the living, and buying things for the dead is a waste of money.

“I figure everybody supposed to drive a Cadillac at least once before they die.” 

Sterling tries to convince West to give him a job either driving or washing his Cadillacs. This, like having money, is one of the things that Sterling thinks a person ought to experience just because they are a person. Sterling also wants to either learn from the man who has managed to earn so much money or possibly steal from him. But his idea of experiences that everyone deserves to have is what keeps Sterling always wanting more.

“That coffin get to talking and you know that this here… this what we call life ain’t nothing. You can blow it away with a blink of an eye. But death… you can’t blow away death. It lasts forever. I didn’t understand about it till my wife died. Before that it was just a job. Then when she died I come to understand it. You can live to be a hundred and fifty and you’ll never have a greater moment than when you breathe your last breath. Ain’t nothing you can do in life compared to it. See, right then you done something. You became a part of everything that come before. And that’s a great thing.” 

West doesn’t really seem to have spiritual beliefs, as evidenced by his decision to ask Aunt Ester about heaven, but unwillingness to part with a $20 bill to get any answers. Still, he views death differently from the others. Life is short and death is permanent. Even though he’s accomplished a lot in his life, West believes that none of those individual accomplishments matter when compared to joining something so much bigger than oneself as to encompass everything. In a way, West is endorsing the anti-individualism that he can’t seem to uphold in action.

“He couldn’t wait to die to get up in heaven to pick cotton.”

Holloway hated his grandfather to the point of wanting to kill him. He saw his grandfather as a traitor to Black men. His grandfather worshiped the white man and constantly sold out other Black men to beg for their favor, only ever receiving some bacon for his trouble, which his wife threw out anyway. Holloway wanted peace from that anger, so he attributes his grandfather’s natural death to Aunt Ester’s magic rather than recognizing that his grandfather, who died at home because the hospital turned him away because he didn’t have medical insurance, finally became a victim of the system he tried so badly to uphold. 

“People don’t care nothing about you till you dead. Then they walk around and tell everybody how well they knew you and that make them special for a day or two. You always have more followers when you dead than when you living.” 

focused on themselves and their desires, and there is often very little left over to take care of others who need it. In death, people are honored in ways that they are never honored in life, and for those who are desperate to feel significant, basking in someone else’s honor is a way to experience that momentarily. No one can experience this honor when it’s their own death. Similarly, people tend to treat the dead better and only speak well of the dead, if only for their own peace of mind because they don’t want to be slandered when it’s their turn. Lutz proves this by paying his respects at Hambone’s funeral, despite the endless angst that Lutz willfully caused him in life.

“If it do be the end of the world, what you gonna do? You can’t do nothing but go down with it. It’s foolish to worry about something like that. Something you ain’t got no control over.”

Memphis is very concerned about controlling what he can, and he expects others to do the same. In one sense, this keeps him from seeing the big picture of oppression and racism, which causes him to focus only on his own self-interest. On the other hand, Holloway sees the big picture and it has made him feel the need to find other ways to be at peace, which means that he isn’t doing anything for the cause either.