Troy, the central character in Fences, is a 53-year-old man who was once a major player in the Negro baseball league. Because Major League Baseball was segregated during the peak of his career, he was never able to advance into a serious professional career. As a result, he is bitter, angry, and obsessed with his own unfulfilled potential as well as the less talented White men who succeeded in his place. Troy has had a difficult life, raised by an abusive father alongside 10 siblings after his mother left and never returned. Troy had to leave home at age 14, initiated into manhood when his father beat him up to take his girlfriend. Troy spent 15 years in prison for murder during a robbery, a crime he committed while he was desperate for money to feed his newborn son. Troy shows how trauma and violence from a parent can shape someone as they become a parent themselves.

Troy seems villainous, but he is also complex and damaged. Troy was denied many opportunities throughout his life due to racism, and he imagines that he might still become a professional baseball player. He enacts the abuse and control that he learned from his father onto his own son, destroying Cory’s chance to play college football.