Two Trains Running

Wolf runs numbers for the illegal lottery game, and he also purports to be constantly juggling several relationships with women because he is disinterested in settling down. All of this contributes to the image he cultivates to live up to his name. Still, Wolf demonstrates that he has feelings for Risa, although he is very tentative about showing her. Despite his superficial attempt to fit the alpha-wolf image, Wolf sees Sterling as a better man than he is, and he ultimately respects Risa’s choice for Sterling by voicing his support instead of still trying to pursue her.

Wolf is even-tempered and opts to respectfully walk away from a fight when someone else becomes aggressive, which is what he does when Memphis gets angry at him for receiving calls at the restaurant. His gun lives at the pawn shop, suggesting that at some point, he decided that he didn’t need to have it ready at all times. He only retrieves the gun when he fears that he needs to protect his life. As the face of the numbers game that people see in the community, he enjoys the respect and popularity he receives, but he admits that his experience of the world is all about wanting what others already have.

Marisa, or Risa, is the sole cook and server in the diner. Although Memphis owns the restaurant, she is the only character who is ever actually working in the play. Risa is also the only woman, and she constantly puts up with Memphis’s terse commands while endlessly serving the men—if at her own pace. Risa is an attractive young woman who deliberately scarred her legs with a razorblade as a teen in an effort to avert the constant male gaze she endured even at the age of 12 when men started sexualizing her and expecting her to have sex with them. Although the men in the play see the scars as marring an otherwise lovely body, the scars also allude to the West African tradition of scarification.

Risa is cryptic and holds her secrets close while the men in the play gush forth with monologues about their lives and their angst. She is discussed more than she discusses herself. For example, Risa falls for Sterling but also doesn’t fully open herself up. She also tells Sterling to play 781 because she has seven scars on one leg and eight on the other, but she won’t tell him what the one represents and never does. She was also a devout follower of Prophet Samuel and mourns quietly but intensely when he dies. Just as Aunt Ester is the wise, mystical older woman who is full of secrets, Risa has her own mysticism as the only onstage woman in the play. 

At 65, Holloway, a regular customer at the restaurant, has found peace and complacency in spirituality. He routinely goes to Aunt Ester to have his soul washed and finds contentment in that. Holloway also had an opportunity to follow Malcolm X, having met him before he was famous; he sees that activist path as a destructive one, but in the larger system of social justice, it means that he gave up the fight. Wilson describes Holloway as “a man who all his life has voiced his outrage at injustice with little effect. His belief in the supernatural has enabled him to accept his inability to effect change and continue to pursue life with zest and vigor” (10).

Holloway represents Wilson’s criticism of Black men who have allowed religion to soothe them as a replacement for continuing the pursuit of rights: a generation that dropped the ball. Instead of acting, Holloway watches; he stands on the street corner instead of trying to intervene when Hambone asks for his ham. He refuses to help mitigate the conflict that might arise when Sterling learns that his winnings are halved. Holloway helps the others by referring them to Aunt Ester but fails to see that Aunt Ester’s advice is meant to be accompanied by action.

Sterling, who is 30, is the new arrival in the group, although he grew up in the neighborhood. Sterling has just been released after five years in prison for robbing a bank and then reportedly being caught when he tried to spend the money immediately afterward. When Memphis tells this story, he implies that Sterling must be stupid for this as well as lazy for not wanting to work any low-paying job he can get. However, Sterling is impatient, not stupid, and his impatience sometimes makes him impulsive. He is tired of eating beans and ready to get what he thinks he deserves in life. He’s looking for a job, but the jobs available aren’t enough for him—and this carries the play’s theme of wanting. Likewise, Sterling has big dreams about wealth and Cadillacs, and he wants a woman, so he asks God to send him an angel.

Nevertheless, his desire for more prevents him from taking reasonable action that would allow him to move forward. Sterling pursues Risa with an excessive level of urgency and intensity, pushing her to marry him immediately. While it’s understandable to reject the low-paying job that he quit before the play starts, his need for a certain kind of job keeps him frozen and unemployed. Sterling is desperate, perhaps because he lost five years of his life to prison. He’s willing to work, but only toward the life he wants. Like with Memphis, Sterling’s redemptive change of course occurs through Aunt Ester, who tells him to focus on what he has and making that better. Upon hearing this, he goes back and approaches Risa as a person rather than a substitute for an angel. At the end of the play, he finally achieves a small measure of social justice by stealing a ham for Hambone. 

Hambone’s intellectual disability is a condition that isn’t named but is apparently degenerative. Wilson describes it, “His mental condition has deteriorated to such a point that he can only say two phrases” (17), and these phrases become a comical mantra, a bizarrely specific but nevertheless well-reasoned notion of justice that becomes the sole organizing force for the character’s life. The disability, however, also seems to be a fatal condition, since Hambone is in his mid-forties and dies of natural causes. There’s almost no discussion about Hambone’s behavior or personality prior to his developing the condition, and no one knows his real name, even though he most likely picked up the nickname almost 10 years ago after the incident with Lutz.

Like Risa, Hambone is a mysterious character. West discovers that Hambone’s body is covered in scars for reasons that are unknowable and therefore not revealed. Everyone treats Hambone as if he is senseless, but Risa believes he knows everything that’s happening around him. Hambone’s disability, though seemingly degenerative, is at once a pure need for justice (and perhaps a pure awareness of it, an awareness the other characters don’t fully possess, as Holloway points out in Act I, Scene 2). He has a singular obsession with the ham he was wrongly denied. Lutz is a white man who never appears onstage, but he represents how the whims of those in power can become the lives of those they oppress. Lutz could easily give Hambone the ham he deserves and not even feel the loss, but he refuses; his denial is purely a means to exert his own power. This situation demonstrates that the men in the story are stagnant in the fight for rights, but Hambone is also a litmus test for the other characters: It would be simple to stand up for Hambone, but no one will do it. Memphis agrees with Lutz because Memphis wants to see himself as similarly successful; Holloway stands back and doesn’t interfere; Wolf talks about the injustice but doesn’t step forward. Sterling finally takes the first action, even if it only happens after Hambone is dead. By breaking into the meat shop, he shows that while injustice can be handed out on a whim, justice requires fighting and the willingness to smash glass.