50 pages • 1 hour read
Father Comes Home From the Wars
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Part 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1 Summary: “A Measure of a Man”
Content Warning: The source text and the guide discuss enslavement, racialized physical abuse, and racism.
In early spring of 1862, in a remote cabin in west Texas, a “Chorus” of enslaved peoples debate whether their fellow enslaved person, Hero, will join their enslaver, the Colonel, in the Confederate Army. The chorus’s “Leader” lists all the unsavory tasks Hero would have to undertake while serving the Colonel in the war, so he doubts whether Hero will do it. The Leader’s Second bets that Hero will follow the Colonel to the war to pursue “greatness.”
Other members of the Chorus enter. Third bets that Hero will go to war. Fourth bets that Hero will stay. Old Man—another enslaved person who is like a father to Hero—enters; he has been looking for Hero’s dog, Odd-See (Odyssey Dog). Old Man says Hero kicked Odyssey Dog, and the dog ran off: Both actions are out of character, since the two have a deep bond. The dog is Hero’s good luck charm; without him, Old Man won’t place a bet on Hero’s decision.
Hero enters, carrying a Confederate Army uniform. He is still trying to decide whether to go with the Colonel. He is worried about Odyssey Dog, but he sits and rests with the Chorus while his wife, Penny, looks for the dog. After a while, the Chorus joins the search. Hero asks Old Man whether he’d prefer Hero to go or stay. Old Man wants Hero to choose his own future in a life where “Rightful Freedom” has been denied them all by the Colonel. Old Man admits that a part of him wants Hero to stay: Though he and Hero aren’t related by blood, Old Man thinks of him as a son and wouldn’t want a son to go to war. However, Old Man also wants Hero to go: The Colonel promised Hero freedom if he went to war, and Old Man wants his “son” to be free.
Hero is sickened at the thought of fighting for “the wrong side” (21). He’s longed daily for the Colonel’s murder and doesn’t know how he’ll go to war with him “without doing the same or worse” (21). He also doesn’t know if the Colonel will keep his promise about granting him freedom, since the Colonel promised him freedom once before but went back on his word. Old Man thinks this promise is “more promising” (23). Hero agrees to try and win his freedom again and promises to help everyone else when he returns.
Hero puts on the Confederate uniform the Colonel gave him. Penny enters and Hero asks what she thinks; she avoids answering. When Hero tells her he’s going to war, she protests. Just that morning, Hero told her he didn’t want to go. She thinks the others have unfairly influenced his decision and the Colonel will revoke his promise.
The Chorus returns. They still haven’t found Odyssey Dog. Hero fears the dog is dead, but the Chorus say they saw tracks that faded away. Hero tells them he’s changed his mind and will stay; they fear the Colonel will beat them all for his decision. They decide to hurt Hero and claim it was “an accident” so the Colonel won’t be angry that Hero won’t accompany him to the war. Hero asks them to cut off his foot.
As Old Man prepares to cut Hero’s foot, Homer, another enslaved man, enters. He says if they’re really going to take Hero’s foot, they need rags and buckets. Old Man’s conviction wavers and he says he cannot do it. Hero prepares to cut off his own foot but can’t. Homer says he can’t take his foot because he hasn’t truly made his choice. Homer won’t bet on Hero’s choice. He thinks that “both choices are / Nothing more than the same coin / Flipped over and over” (42). He thinks Hero should run away, taking the choice out of the Colonel’s hands.
When Homer tried to run to freedom, he was caught and the Colonel forced Hero to chop off Homer’s foot by promising him freedom, which the Colonel then revoked. Homer doesn’t understand how Hero can believe the Colonel now. Hero doesn’t want “stolen” freedom, but Homer says Hero is “A dog what follows his Master no questions asked” (47). Homer tells the Chorus that Hero betrayed him to the Colonel when he pursued his own freedom. The Colonel was drunk and confused Homer for Hero; he said that if Hero went to war, he wouldn’t revoke his promise of freedom like he did the last time, when he promised Hero freedom if he told the Colonel where Homer had gone.
Hero and Penny confirm the truth of the story. Old Man can no longer call Hero “son,” and the Chorus can’t call him “Hero.” Hero makes up his mind to go to war, now that he is a “non-Hero.” Alone, Old Man laments “losing a son before he leaves” (53).
Part 1 Analysis
With a main character named “Hero” and a plot and cast of characters highly influenced by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Father Comes Home From the Wars makes a clear allusion to a popular story template called “the hero’s journey.” The three main steps of the hero’s journey correspond to the three acts of the play, though ultimately there is a Subversion of the Hero’s Journey. Part 1 of the play corresponds to “the departure” section of the hero’s journey, which in turn has five sub-steps: the call to adventure, refusal of the call, supernatural aid, crossing the threshold, and belly of the whale (“Writing 101: What Is the Hero’s Journey? 2 Hero’s Journey Examples in Film.” MasterClass, 2021). As Hero goes through these steps, the play draws parallels between its characters and their Ancient Greek counterparts. The characteristics and tropes associated with the Ancient Greek versions of the characters highly influence how this play’s characters act, as well as the questions and themes they ponder.
Famously, in Homer’s Iliad, Odysseus did not want to answer the “call to adventure” and join the Trojan War, as a prophecy “had explicitly predicted the suffering of the return journey, the loss of friends and that Odysseus, unrecognized by his own people, would come back home after 20 years” (Gartziou-Tatti, Ariadni. “Prophecy and Time in the ‘Odyssey’.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica, Vol. 96, No. 3, 2010, pp. 11-28, 14). Similarly, in this play, the Leader of the Chorus predicts the “suffering” Hero will have to face on his own journey, acting as a “servant-slave” to the Colonel (5), undertaking demeaning tasks like “Scrubbing the horse […] Then scrubbing Boss-Master” (6). Hero goes back and forth on his “call” to either “go to the War” or “stay” (19). Penny reveals to the Chorus and Old Man that Hero has already undertaken a “refusal of the call:”
But you don’t want to go.
You don’t want to.
You told me so.
Hero, just this morning.
We woke together.
At the same time. In the same breath like we often do.
You breathed it out and I breathed it in (28).
Like the Ancient Greek Odysseus, who does not want to leave his wife Penelope and their child behind, Hero refuses the call for the sake of his wife Penny and his community.
The third sub-step of the first part of the hero’s journey, “supernatural aid,” usually involves a “mentor figure” who “gives the hero the tools and inspiration they need to accept the call to adventure” (“Writing 101”). In this play, Hero’s mentor figure is Old Man. Hero and Old Man don’t have “the luxury of blood” between them (20), but they consider each other family. As enslaved people, Hero was likely sold away from his family, and any children Old Man had were likely sold away from him; very few enslaved people had the “luxury” of staying with their blood families, but they nonetheless formed family communities. Hero consults with Old Man about his decision, asking his opinion. Old Man’s answer makes Hero think about what this choice denotes about the nature of “freedom,” thereby addressing The Struggle for Freedom in an Unjust System. Old Man says that the Colonel “figures his freedom of choice is gonna somehow / Take the place of the Rightful Freedom that he’s been denying you. / Like he figures that his gift, his little crumb of choice, / Will somehow save his soul when the Judgement Day comes” (19). Old Man realizes that Hero does not really have the freedom to choose whether or not to answer the call to go to war since he is an enslaved person and is therefore not truly “free.” In this way, the play takes the classic Greek themes of prophecy, freedom of choice, and fate and recasts them in the context of American chattel enslavement, where any pretense of choice given to enslaved people is only a “crumb,” as Old Man says. When Homer weighs in on the so-called “freedom” of Hero’s choice later, he affirms Old Man’s words, saying that “both choices” are “[t]wo sides of the same coin / And the coin ain’t even in your pocket” (42). In this way, Homer emphasizes the powerlessness of Hero’s situation.
Like all heroes on the hero’s journey, Hero must ultimately “cross the threshold” by embracing his quest and enter “the belly of the whale” by encountering his first major obstacle (“Writing 101”). In the play, Hero’s first obstacle is when his friends find out that the Colonel promised Hero “Freedom in exchange for breaking the bond of trust” Homer showed him when he told Hero where he was running away to (50). Hero told the Colonel where to find Homer when Homer tried to become a fugitive from slavery. Like the prophecy received by Homer’s Odysseus, wherein he is fated to become “unrecognized by his own people” (Gartziou-Tatti 14), Hero’s friends no longer recognize him after this truth comes out. Old Man says, “I can’t call you son anymore,” and the Chorus’s Leader says, “And we can’t call you Hero” (51). Hero has “crosse[d] the point of no return” now that his friends disavow him (“Writing 101: The Hero’s Journey”).
Hero’s attempts at winning his freedom within the unjust system of enslavement strike Homer as being weak and pitiful. Homer mocks Hero’s choice to follow the Colonel, comparing his actions to that of Odyssey Dog. Throughout Part 1, Odyssey Dog is missing because Hero kicked him and he ran away. As Hero debates going to war, Homer says, “You’re no better than a dog / Or worse than your own dog / Who at least had the sense to run off / When his Master kicked” (47). Enslaved people were regularly dehumanized by the exploitative and violently racist system of chattel enslavement. Enslavers would compare “enslaved groups of people to dogs [as] a part of the dehumanization process” (Ottley, Carter. “Dogs and Dehumanization.” Utah State University), creating the fiction of enslaved people who will “follo[w] [their] Master no questions asked” (47), as Homer says of Hero.
Homer further antagonizes Hero by saying that his diffidence compromises the kind of man Hero is. Part 1’s title, “A Measure of a Man,” is thus fitting as the play explores what type of man Hero is and what animates his values. At the end of Part 1, Hero decides he has no choice but to follow the Colonel, now that he is a “non-Hero” and is no longer recognized as “Hero” by his friends. Homer’s revelation of his former betrayal casts Hero in a distinctly non-heroic light.
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