King Hedley II

This set of scenes is weighty and emotionally charged. Act II opens, as Act I did, with King tending to his seeds. It is revealed that King’s father, who died as a result of a violent act, was also the perpetrator of violent acts. King and Mister undertake their robbery, and Stool Pigeon is the victim of a brutal mugging. Elmore does some serious self-reflection. Much of the action in this portion of the play builds toward King’s final moments of self-reflection, and Wilson foregrounds complex characters in several key moments of dialogue during the first part of Act II.

King, wanting to safeguard his seeds from predators, installs a barbed wire fence around them. There is a sad irony to this action because the truth is that it is the soil itself that threatens King’s seeds. Ruby has noted repeatedly that the yard will not support life, but King disagrees with her. Again, the seeds represent the Hill District’s inhabitants, and the harsh soil represents the area’s under-resourced status as compared to the city’s whiter and more affluent neighborhoods. It should also be noted that King never gives up on his seeds. He remains a hopeful figure throughout the course of the play’s action.

A conversation between King and Stool Pigeon highlights Masculinity and the Cycle of Violence. Stool Pigeon reveals King’s supposed father to have been both the perpetrator and victim of violence, and through this he indicates that retributive violence has plagued multiple generations in the area. Because the men in their fathers’ generations solved their disputes with violence, King and Mister learned to do so as well. Their role models taught them a series of behaviors that have actually done them a great disservice. King will ultimately come to understand this fact, but at this point in the narrative, he is still stuck in a mindset that associates honor with retribution. Violence is portrayed as a difficult-to-escape intergenerational trauma.

Although the cycle of violence proves difficult to escape, Elmore has a series of revelations in this portion of the play that gesture toward the possibility of redemption and reconciliation. He realizes that the man he killed was a complex person, deserving of life. He comes to understand that the man’s crimes against him had been paltry, undeserving of such violence. This is a dramatic change of heart, and it shows the complexity of his character. Elmore realizes that the cycle of violence robs men of the ability to see one another with grace, through the lens of their shared humanity. He begins to understand that the moral code that he and King live by is corrupted and that he no longer needs to resort to violence as a problem-solving tool. Although Elmore is shown to be dishonest and unreliable, he is also the first character to show real inner growth, and his ability to reframe his experiences and look at his life from a new perspective speaks to Wilson’s understanding of Black masculinity in flux.

The damage caused by the neighborhood’s cycle of violence is further on display through Stool Pigeon’s brutal beating and King and Mister’s robbery. Stool Pigeon, who understands the neighborhood’s decline on a deeper level than any of the other characters, is himself the victim of violence. That anyone would victimize the neighborhood truth sayer, a respected elder, shocks and appalls King, Mister, and Elmore, and there is a way in which this act of violence sets the wheels in motion for King’s self-reflection. King and Mister go through with their robbery plan, although they do not earn as much money as they’d hoped: Legal means of earning an honest income are difficult to access, but this section of the play indicates that crime also “doesn’t pay.”