The Freedom Mythology of <i>Father Comes Home from the Wars</i>

This article analyses how Suzan-Lori Parks’s trilogy Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2, &amp; 3) remakes American Civil War mythology and interrogates the enduring myth of American freedom. Parks, I argue, combines Greek mythology with Black American history to create a new, Parksian mode of myth-making. First, I highlight Parks’s exploration of the paradoxes underneath the Lost Cause myth (in the Barthesian sense of the word) that Black men willingly fought for the Confederacy. Next, I probe the trilogy’s treatment of American freedom more broadly, assessing freedom’s historical and philosophical complicity with property and bondage. Finally, I examine how Parks envisions in Father a version of a freedom grounded not in property but performativity—a freedom that has propelled struggles for Black equality from pre–Civil War slavery to the present day.