Two Trains Running

Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1993

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Summary

Act Summaries & Analyses

Act I

Act II

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Black Masculinity and Power

Among Wilson’s plays, Two Trains Running has often been called Wilson’s most overt social commentary. His characters always live their lives in their historical moments, enduring the injustices and hardships that come along with being Black in a certain time period, but they rarely discuss direct social action. Wilson’s choice to set his 1960s play in the last year of the decade indicates his personal commitment to the Black Power movement, which reached its peak at this moment. After Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965 and Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, the Civil Rights movement found itself rudderless. After King’s death, riots and civil disturbances erupted in 110 cities across the country. Notably, the riot in Pittsburgh, which occurred in April of 1968, started in the Hill District when a group of rioters broke into a meat market—a moment that echoes in the last moments of Two Trains Running, when Sterling breaks into Lutz’s Meat Market to seize a small and specific piece of direct social justice. The Black Power movement was focused on self-determination rather than assimilation, and the celebration of Black pride as a radical act in a society that insisted that Black people were lesser.

Wilson’s plays particularly explore Black masculinity, what that means in a moment in history, and how racial oppression parlays into gender roles that add weight to the experiences of Black men. Two Trains Running is certainly centered on masculinity, with a cast of six men and only one woman. Each of the men in the play represents disempowerment, both personally and in terms of the larger movement toward empowerment. Memphis, for instance, has an individualistic outlook. He will fight hard for what benefits him personally, but he won’t help Hambone because he believes that Hambone should have done a better job looking out for his own interests, regardless of his capabilities. Holloway has given up the fight, preferring instead to sink into the comfortability of his spiritual beliefs. West is wealthy. If speculation in the play is correct, he’s a multimillionaire, which is no small fortune in 1969. After his wife died, West devoted himself entirely to the pursuit of accumulating money, but he won’t use any of that money to improve his own life, much less the lives of his community. And Hambone, after a singular instance of injustice, is now consumed by it as the only thought that seems to stick in his brain. Hambone is the embodiment of relentless but polite non-violent protest: He goes faithfully every day, but he is ineffective and unwilling or incapable of changing his tactics. What finally gets the ham is when Sterling breaks windows.

The men discuss the idea of Black Power when Sterling brings the flier for the rally honoring Malcolm X’s birthday. Memphis, who points out that Malcolm X isn’t having any more birthdays, sees the movement as foolish because he doesn’t believe in justice. He also criticizes young Black people for talking a big game in rallies and protests but flagging and giving up when faced with the work involved in fighting for change. Memphis says, “Freedom is heavy. You got to put your shoulder to freedom” (40). But the play also critiques these characters, because one of the fundamental issues that caused the Civil Rights movement to fall apart was that there were no heirs to take up leadership after Martin Luther King was murdered. By focusing on their individual desires, the men close themselves off to creating heirs—literal or spiritual—to continue fighting the larger battles. Aunt Ester tells Memphis that when someone drops the ball, they must pick it up or it never makes it to the endzone. She tells Sterling to focus on improving what he has instead of pursuing what he can’t have. Through Aunt Ester’s wisdom, Wilson suggests that it’s never too late to pick up the ball and that it’s better to start small and create real (if minute) change than to look only at the big picture and decide that change is impossible.

Death and the Race Against Time

Death is omnipresent in the play. The play starts and ends with funerals, beginning with Prophet Samuel, one of the most prominent members of the community, and concluding with Hambone, who is largely unknown within the community. Prophet Samuel has people fighting and clamoring to see his body, willing to pay admission and breaking rules for the chance to cry over his casket and rub his head. Hambone’s viewing was barely attended, with only a few names in the guestbook. Prophet Samuel is laid out with $100 bills (if only two), and Hambone is in a pauper’s casket—yet both men are equally dead. Throughout the play, the characters constantly allude to new people in the community who have died. Black men in particular have consistently had a lower life expectancy than women and white men throughout United States history. Holloway talks about his grandfather, whom he wanted to kill, but he was relieved because nature did the job. Nevertheless, it’s notable that he died without medical care because he had no insurance; poverty has always meant that life itself is a luxury. One of the deceased persons whom the characters mention had his number come up in the lottery twice—but because he was dead, he wasn’t around to play it. Over the course of a few days, the characters mention people who die suddenly of drug overdoses, strokes, and gun violence. The pervasive specter of death keeps the men reaching with a sense of urgency for the things that they want before they die.

When talking about the deaths of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the men recognize that they became martyrs when they became saints; once they were too big to contain, their murders were inevitable. Memphis sees following Malcolm X as a foolish choice because, he claims, it was obvious that the only place Malcolm X was going was to the graveyard. Memphis also highlights the finality of death by reminding everyone that Malcolm X no longer has a birthday to celebrate. Of course, the reason that Malcolm X is still being celebrated is that he was immortalized through his work. He became an idea that lived longer than the man, and his martyrdom gives his death meaning. One of the issues that left the Civil Rights movement fragmented after King died was that there was no leader waiting to step up and put their own life on the line as the face of the fight. For the characters in the play, there is almost no chance that they will achieve this type of immortality. Even Sterling, who tries to hand off some of the sentiments of the movement to Hambone, is sharing his activist endeavor with someone who will immediately forget the words. This illustrates that it is infinitely hard to leave a mark on the world.

West, as the funeral director, represents their fear of death and erasure. Throughout the first act, West doesn’t appear onstage save for a short scene near the end, but the characters talk about him constantly, shaping him as the personification of death itself. Wolf even says that he wants a stranger to bury him rather than to allow West to do it. In actuality, West has been face-to-face with a lot of death and has a pragmatic view of it. He sees the permanence of death, and he only questioned the notions of heaven and the afterlife when he lost his wife. This suggests that it is impossible to fully inoculate yourself from the fear and questioning that comes with facing death. West talks about his clients, who bring things to put in caskets and are very particular about them, as if they don’t understand that their loved ones are dead and don’t see or care. Lutz, too, goes to pay his respects to Hambone as if he didn’t spend the last 10 years of his life disrespecting him over a ham. There is no appeasing or repairing the dead. However, at the end of the play, Sterling steals the ham as an act of social justice. It can no longer benefit Hambone, even when placed in his casket, but it’s symbolic. Sterling risks his life and freedom to make a statement that perhaps he should have made while Hambone was alive, but the gesture still has meaning. As Wilson urges audiences with this play—particularly young Black people—it’s never too late to pick up the ball and run with it.

Property, Money, and Gambling

The Hill District is an impoverished area in Pittsburgh, and its residents are primarily poor. Their lives and interpersonal systems of power all fit into the overarching systems of power created by white people. No matter what agency they create for themselves, they all eventually come up against these power structures. By default, the courts protect white interests even in cases of Black property ownership. Memphis owned property in Mississippi, but although he had (and still has) the deed in his possession, the white people who sold it maintained rights over it in the event that it ever proved to have worth (in this case, if water was found). Of course, this situation also included white men intimidating Memphis and brutally killing his mule, which meant that trying to fight in court wasn’t much of an option, either. Now, even while Memphis owns the building that houses his restaurant, the city not only has the right to buy it any time by way of eminent domain, but they’ve included a clause that allows them to name the price. In both instances, Memphis was only allowed to buy land with the caveat that the white people in power could choose to snatch it back. This suggests that Black people can’t truly own land or have full rights to what they bought.

For a Black person to get anywhere in 1969, they needed not only ingenuity and a strong work ethic but also money and a heavy stroke of luck. Compared to the rest of the characters (aside from West), Memphis is lucky. In the instance of Memphis buying his building, he was even luckier and more ingenious than West. He exploited his personal connection with the previous owner, which gave him an advantage over West who doesn’t seem to forge personal connections at all. For the other characters, money is a day-to-day question. This is why the numbers game is so popular in the play and why it was popular in the real-life African American community from the start of the 20th century until the 1970s. By the 1920s, winning numbers were pulled from the New York Stock Exchange to avoid tampering, which draws a telling connection between the predominantly white and white-collar gambling that is stock trading and the predominantly Black and blue-collar gambling of the illegal numbers game. The drawback of the numbers game is that since it’s illegal, it’s entirely unregulated. Therefore, the white owners of the game—the Alberts in this case—can just decide to cut the numbers if they are going to lose too much money, limiting the real potential for the players’ success. Risa sees the numbers game as a waste of money, but the men see it as a chance to get that stroke of luck they need. In truth, it is mostly a waste of money, particularly when they frequently give their last $2 or pocket change.

West has made his fortune through ingenuity and hard work, plus the stroke of luck by which he saw all the death around him and realized that he could not only stomach death but also monetize it. When Holloway talks about his grandfather, who died at home of pneumonia because the hospitals wouldn’t take him without health insurance, the play shows how life is also monetized. West makes money because funerals are a service that everyone will need eventually but no one wants to provide. Still, even West must play games within the white system to keep his fortune. He mentions fighting with the insurance company over two of his buildings that burned down. Later in the play, the pharmacy down the street burns down, undoubtedly for insurance payout—but real insurance is too expensive for someone like Memphis, and it doesn’t cover the little things like work agreements about hams or getting cheated in the numbers game. Memphis is therefore terrified of fire. Fire could swallow everything he has and leave him with nothing, just as he watched a fire burn what he had worked for in Jackson. Firearms, however, are a different matter. Those, the men can obtain. For Wolf, it seems to be a matter of self-protection. He runs numbers for a white family who would treat him as disposable if anything happened to him. Sterling, who has robbed a bank before, procures a gun and implies that he might use it as a replacement for a job. Desperation means willingness to possibly trade lives for capital.