History Theme Analysis

Lincoln and Booth are in many ways similar to the men after whom their characters are named. With his cocky bravado and trigger-happy sensibility, Booth’s personality recalls John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and Confederate sympathizer who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 in the hopes of defeating the Union, winning the Civil War, and thereby ensuring the continuation of slavery. Likewise, his brother’s levelheadedness and patience resemble Abraham Lincoln’s reputation as a thoughtful man with a strong moral conscience. By naming these characters after such famous historical figures, Parks immediately foreshadows the play’s ending, in which Booth shoots Lincoln. She also implies that these two men have fundamentally different worldviews, as was the case with the real Lincoln and Booth, who were on opposing sides of the Civil War. More importantly, Topdog/Underdog’s engagement with history isn’t only a reference to President Lincoln’s assassination, but also a way of examining the relationship these two brothers have with their own pasts. In turn, Parks explores how Lincoln and Booth take cues from history—both personal and otherwise—to make sense of their lives. 

Lincoln and Booth think about history mostly in terms of their own pasts. Since Booth is uncomfortable acknowledging the painfulness of his own personal history, he wants to erase his past. He reveals this desire when he lies about Grace while bragging to his brother. “She wants me back so bad she wiped her hand over the past where we wasn’t together just so she could say we aint never been apart,” he says. This optimistic statement seems like wishful thinking, considering that Booth later reveals he has killed Grace, indicating that she most likely didn’t want him back. Nonetheless, the statement itself provides a convenient window into the way Booth thinks about the difficulties of his past: he wants to simply “wipe” them away. He even announces to Lincoln in the first scene of the play that he wants to change his name from Booth to 3-Card. This is ultimately an attempt to erase part of his childhood, which left him scarred after the painful departure of his parents. To his credit, Lincoln accepts the idea of this name change, even suggesting that Booth assume an African name, something many black people have done as a way of “wiping away” the white slave owners who oppressed their ancestors and gave them Anglicized names. But Booth is interested in changing his name for more personal reasons, and wants to be called 3-Card—a name that has no basis in the past and which he hasn’t earned (considering that he has yet to establish himself as a card dealer). In this way, Booth emerges as a character constantly looking into an unrealistic future. Refusing to reckon with his past, he instead projects himself into a make-believe world in which he’s a successful dealer named 3-Card. Of course, he never properly learns to play Three-Card Monte, and the fact that he fails miserably suggests that Parks believes no future is possible that depends on the erasure or ignorance of history.

Lincoln and Booth’s family history is another perfect illustration of how these two men are profoundly affected by the past. Metaphorically speaking, the ghosts of their parents hang over them throughout the entire play. This is made especially clear by Booth’s reluctance (until the play’s end) to spend the $500 his mother gave him before leaving when he was a child. After all these years, he hasn’t spent a penny of this money. In fact, he even steals from department stores and other establishments in order to avoid using any of this cash, which obviously represents to him the last thing he has left of his mother. Even the fact that he and Lincoln refer to this money as an “inheritance” in the first place says something about the way they view their family history—after all, an inheritance is usually bequeathed unto somebody by a loved one who has died. Even though Booth’s mother merely left to start a new life, he acts as if she has died, treating the $500 as an inheritance rather than a parting gift. In this sense, the money becomes a family heirloom of sorts, un-spendable because it has too much significance. As much as Booth tries to “wipe away” his past in other ways, he inadvertently lets the memory of his mother follow him wherever he goes.

It is unclear whether Booth is aware of the emotional significance of his inheritance money. Lincoln, however, is certainly cognizant of the idea that a person’s haunting past can follow him or her throughout life. This, he argues, is precisely what must have happened to their parents; “Each of them had a special something that they was struggling against,” he says. “Moms had hers. Pops had his. And they was struggling.” He explains that their parents bought a new house and thought that doing so would help them escape their problems, which they hoped “would see thuh house and be impressed and just leave them be.” As he says this, Lincoln presents his parents’ mindset as naïve, insinuating that it was foolish for them to have thought they could outrun their past simply by moving to a new house. He himself has tried to efface history by burning his father’s clothes after the old man left the family behind, but of course this did nothing to diminish the pain Lincoln felt. Thus, he now understands that a person must live with his or her own history. Any measures to blot out bygone eras are pointless, and only lead to increased suffering.

When Booth tells Lincoln to spruce up his Abraham Lincoln act by screaming and writhing when the customers shoot the gun, Lincoln seizes the opportunity to explain to his brother that a person can’t intervene in history in this way. “People are funny about they Lincoln shit. Its historical,” he says. “People like they historical shit in a certain way. They like it to unfold the way they folded it up. Neatly like a book. Not raggedy and bloody and screaming.” And yet, as Booth’s killing of Lincoln at the end of play demonstrates, history often does repeat itself, unfolding in ways that are “raggedy and bloody and screaming” rather than “neatly like book.” In this way, Lincoln seems to acknowledge that, despite people’s attempts to erase or dispel the traumas of history, the past has a way of repeating itself, and unresolved issues have a way of rearing their heads in unexpected and ugly ways. Thus, when Booth shoots Lincoln at the very end of the play, it’s as though he is not only reenacting the shared historical trauma of President Lincoln’s assassination and the legacy of slavery, but also the age-old story of brotherly competition, as well as the very painful personal history of his parents’ abandonment. In Parks’ play, then, the only way move forward in life is to face the past, however painful that process may be.