"Don't nobody wanna be locked up": The Black Disabled Veteran in Toni Morrison's Sula and August Wilson's Fences

War operates as a central theme in the vast literature that the novelist Toni Morrison and playwright August Wilson have produced. While framing specific historical moments in U.S. History, Wilson uses war as a backdrop in many of the plays contained in The American Century Cycle.² For example, war looms large in the background of Jitney, which features veterans of the Vietnam and Korean Wars. Additionally, published in 1984 as an ode to African American life in that decade, Joe Turner's Come and Gone centers on the lives of formerly enslaved people and their descendants, and their struggles seeking new opportunities in the North decades after the Civil War.

Toni Morrison also is concerned with the aftermath of war and its traumatic effects on Black individuals and communities. Home (2012), Morrison's tenth novel, follows the journey of Frank Money, an African American Korean War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), likely a direct consequence of his service in an integrated army, and who returns to the United States only to battle segregation at home. Additionally, in order to foreground the numerous gender, racial, and community conflicts interwoven throughout the final installment of her trilogy chronicling African American history, Morrison originally floated the title War, but she instead opted for the title Paradise.³ Throughout their work, both authors emphasize war as one of the pivotal historical epicenters in which rich representations of African American history and cultural experiences emerge.

Two texts, Morrison's novel Sula (1973) and Wilson's play Fences (1986), link specific political and economic problems in the United States to consequences of the war experience abroad, such as issues of rehabilitation and reentry, commodification, profiteering, and racial discrimination. Sula tells the story of friendship, love, betrayal, and growth between Sula Peace and Nel Wright, two residents of "The Bottom," a small, tight-knit Black community in Medallion, Ohio. Through a lively and colorful cast of characters that anchors Sula, the novel also illuminates the circular history of the town and its inhabitants as they not only confront hardships and tragedy, but also pursue joy, communal healing, and survival. Set in 1950s Pittsburgh, Fences centers the life of Troy Maxson, a sanitation worker and ex-baseball player, as he struggles to provide for his family and come to terms with his town's racist past. Both the novel and the play feature Black male characters who become physically and psychologically injured as a result of war. Each text emphasizes the ways in which American democracy has failed Black and disabled persons; thus, by chronicling the local Black community's communal, institutional, and individual responses to these failures, the author's literary representations served to highlight the material concerns of disabled Black veterans historically. As Jennifer James maintains in her insightful work regarding African American war literature, Black Americans engage the subject of war in two ways: 1) to demonstrate how the United States is a nation "made by war"; and 2) to indict the United States as inherently violent, citing racial injustice as a "narrative of racial strife, a war within a war."⁴ In Sula and Fences, several secondary characters help to reveal the ways in which African American authors engage the subject of war along these modes of reasoning, though most scholars have primarily focused their attention on the more central characters. In the following essay, I contend that, by centralizing these secondary roles in the texts, not only do Morrison and Wilson adopt the two modes that James describes, they also help to expose the failures of American democracy and the trauma and pain of both the individual and collective Black psyche.

Through writing history as fiction, Wilson and Morrison situate a litany of voices that represent the varied and multi-layered aspects of African American life during times of war, including specifically, the experience of Black disabled veterans. In Sula, Morrison creates Shadrack, a socially marginalized World War I veteran who has experienced the intense trauma of witnessing violence and death...