50 pages • 1 hour read
Father Comes Home From the Wars
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Themes
The Struggle for Freedom in an Unjust System
Content Warning: The source text and the guide discuss enslavement, racialized physical abuse, racism, and rape. The guide quotes and obscures the author’s use of racial slurs.
In Part 1 of the play, Hero is given a difficult choice: The Colonel tells him he will give Hero his freedom if he fights with the Colonel for the Confederate Army in the Civil War. Thus, Hero’s individual freedom hinges on him fighting for the “wrong side,” as he calls it, indirectly aiding in the continued enslavement of many others. Ultimately, Hero tries to negotiate what freedom means to him as he fights for freedom in an unjust system defined by systemic racism.
While Hero believes the Colonel’s promise that he will set him free if he goes to war, Homer understands that enslavement is an unjust system and that the Colonel is not obligated or likely to keep his word. In Part 1 of the play, Hero debates the two options that the Colonel has given him: He can either fight for the Confederacy and be freed, or remain and stay enslaved. However, Homer urges him to make a third choice for himself, which relates to the theme of Making New Choices Versus Repeating Old Stories. Homer recognizes that “That man will never free [Hero]. Ever” (42). Hero counts on the Colonel to keep his word, but Homer recognizes that an enslaver’s word is not trustworthy. Homer knows this because Hero was promised freedom once before for turning over Homer’s whereabouts to the Colonel when Homer tried to escape; the Colonel withdrew the offer after Homer was found.
The ethics of Hero’s decisions are complex and nuanced, which makes his path to freedom more complicated. One of the reasons Hero gives in Part 1 for both betraying Homer and refusing to escape with him in the first place is that he thinks running from the Colonel would be “stealing;” he is determined to gain freedom in a way he considers more legitimate. While enslavers considered the people they enslaved their “property,” people like Homer do not perceive themselves in this way. However, Hero has bought into the notion that he is the Colonel’s property. He says, “I belong to the Colonel,” and since he is “worth something”—that is, since the Colonel values him at a certain price—“running off would be like stealing” (96). When Smith insists that Hero’s “got a right to steal [himself]” (96), Hero won’t commit to an answer. Hero thinks “stealing” himself would be unethical, and he doesn’t want his freedom compromised. On the other hand, he considers it a viable pathway to freedom to betray Homer to the Colonel and chop off Homer’s foot, and to fight for the Confederate Army. Hero has only known a system that treats him as property and values him as an object, so he is unable to perceive of himself as an individual with a right to his own freedom, though he nevertheless yearns for this.
The play does not make determinations about whose behavior is truly ethical; under the dehumanizing and unjust system of slavery, simple questions and simple answers are impossible.
Making New Choices Versus Repeating Old Stories
The characters and plotlines of Parks’s play are heavily influenced by the classic Ancient Greek epics, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. An epic is usually a long narrative poem that recounts the deeds of a hero. The Iliad and the Odyssey are often considered pre-eminent examples—even prototypes—of the epic narrative mode, spawning cycles of Iliad- and Odyssey-influenced epics throughout the European Middle Ages, early modern period, and beyond. As such, they also represent a hegemonic narrative mode undertaken by largely white, male, affluent authors throughout these time periods. The Chorus of “Runaways” in Father Comes Home From the Wars calls them “old stories,” and they represent what the author Toni Morrison has called the “Master Narrative.” She says that such stories focus on “white male life” and repeat “whatever ideological script […] is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else” (“The Master Narrative Defined.” Ida B. Wells: Disrupting the Master Narrative Fund, 2024). Throughout this play, characters have a choice between repeating “old stories” and their “Master Narratives,” thus enabling the status quo, or making new choices and creating new narratives: In practice, this choice looks like following the plot for their corresponding character in the Odyssey or deviating from it.
The character in the play who strikingly departs from the her namesake’s choices is Penny. The members of the Chorus urge her to “break the chain” of wronged women before her (152), who in traditional, patriarchal literary legacies are often expected to put up with whatever abuse is leveled at them and remain faithful and virtuous. While the Ancient Greek Penelope forgives her husband’s transgressions and stays with him, Penny decides to follow her own happiness and freedom by leaving Hero/Ulysses. In this way, she breaks the mold for wives in patriarchal literature, showing that new choices can be made in this new time.
In comparison to Penny, who deviates from the choices made by the Greek Penelope, Hero’s choices are very similar to the Ancient Greek Odysseus’s: he leaves home for war despite his reticence, he plays his expected role in that war and denies temptation to stray from his quest, and he returns after having been unfaithful to his wife. His alignment with Odysseus’s choices is so complete that the name he chooses for himself after the Colonel’s death is “Ulysses,” which is the Roman version of the Greek Odysseus. This name has a double meaning, since it is also—like Homer observes in Part 3—“Like the Union General” (138), Ulysses S. Grant.
However, Hero’s story, too, is ultimately different from the “old story” of Homer’s Odyssey. In the Odyssey, there is a complex interaction between fate, the will of the gods, and the effect of people’s actions. Fate is also a theme in this play, as Hero contemplates whether he has free will in choosing to go to war or whether he has no choice in the matter—in other words, he is fated to go. This play aligns the notion of fate with his situation as an enslaved man who cannot make his own choices. As Hero meets Smith and then finds his way home, he continuously tries to understand what “freedom” means. When he returns home, it isn’t to a happy wife, family, and nation, like Odysseus, highlighting that The Struggle for Freedom in an Unjust System sets Hero apart from the Ancient Greek hero in a “master narrative.” In the end, Hero’s conduct has driven everyone away except Odyssey Dog; however, he has found a form of freedom that works for him. While he buries the Colonel alone, he notes that at least he is doing so of his own volition, saying, “These are my hands now” (159). This freedom to choose what to do with his hands refers back to a wish Old Man had for Hero in Part 1: “I want you to decide your own self” (19). For Hero, the freedom to break the “master narrative” set by old stories involves being free to make his own choices.
Subversion of the Hero’s Journey
This play first uses and then subverts the structuring device of the classic “hero’s journey.” The hero’s journey is a common story template that involves “a hero who goes on an adventure, learns a lesson, wins a victory with that newfound knowledge, and then returns home transformed” (“Writing 101: What Is the Hero’s Journey?” MasterClass, 2021). This narrative template is the defining template for many literary works in the Western canon. It is so pervasive that it is sometimes called the “monomyth.” The hero’s journey story template has many steps that fall into three broad categories: departure, initiation, and return. Each of the play’s Parts correspond to one of these categories. By Making New Choices Versus Repeating Old Stories, characters either uphold or subvert this monomyth. Each part of the play subverts the hero’s journey in some way.
In Part 1, like the traditional hero’s journey, Hero’s “departure” involves a “refusal of the call” and a consultation with a mentor figure (“Writing 101”). Classical hero’s journeys, like in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, usually involve a hero responding to a call that will bring them fame, glory, honor, or renown, but they initially refuse the call because it means they must leave the comfort of the familiar. Hero’s “departure” subverts this in two ways. First, Hero’s “regular” day-to-day life as an enslaved person is not one of comfort but of “working in [the Colonel’s] fields” doing hard labor and being treated as the Colonel’s property rather than as a human being (21). Second, Hero never has a true choice about going with the Colonel to war: Old Man calls it a “crumb of choice” (19). The Colonel asked Hero because he knew Hero would never say no to a promise of freedom, even if the Colonel never intended on following through.
In Part 2, Hero undergoes the second big part of the hero’s journey: initiation. He is faced with trials and a temptation “to abandon or stray from his quest” (“Writing 101”). Usually, this temptation involves an antagonist swaying the hero from his path, but the play subverts this by putting Smith in the position of the tempter. He has Hero try on the Union coat, saying, “Try it on. I won’t tell no one you wore it. Go ahead […] Looks good on you” (97). These attempts to get Hero to put himself in the position of a Union man lead into Smith “tempting” Hero with the coat a second time, this time offering Hero the opportunity to escape to the Union Army with Smith. Smith tells Hero: “You’re coming with me. Put it on,” (102). In this scene, which parallels the first time Smith offered Hero the coat, Hero denies the temptation and Smith flees alone. While Hero technically adheres to the trajectory of the hero’s quest by denying temptation, in this “American Odyssey” recast in the Civil War, the so-called temptation Hero denies actually leads to freedom, while resisting that temptation means remaining enslaved.
In Part 3, Hero comes back to the Colonel’s property, though the Colonel is dead. This corresponds to the “return” in the traditional hero’s journey, where the hero “makes a successful return to the ordinary world” and achieves “a balance between who he was before his journey and who he is now” (“Writing 101). Hero’s return does have the trappings of success: He has chosen his own name, Ulysses, and he has presents for Penny, Homer, and the Chorus. Unbeknownst to them, he also has the Emancipation Proclamation in his pocket and knows they are all free, according to its tenets. However, Hero is neither happy nor at peace. He tells Homer his fears about becoming too much like the Colonel and says that to “find a way to breathe” while at war, “I went and I cut out my soul. / I cut my soul out of myself. / And I gave it up to him” (156). To get to where he is today, Hero feels like he has compromised himself and his soul. This subverts the usual peace found at the end of the hero’s journey and emphasizes the theme of The Struggle for Freedom in an Unjust System.
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By Suzan-Lori Parks
