King Hedley II

Content Warning: This section of the guide describes and discusses the source text’s treatment of racism.

King’s seeds, which he plants at the very beginning of the play in a patch of dirt that Ruby is sure will prove inhospitable, are a symbol of his hopes and dreams for the future. He tends to them at various points in the action, and he even goes so far as to try to protect them with barbed wire. Tonya, too, hopes that the seeds grow into beautiful flowers, and in her reaction to the seeds, it becomes evident that she too hopes for more from King’s future than she saw in his past. Whether or not King’s future will bear out his hopes and dreams becomes one of the play’s central questions, and the seeds thus speak to several of its themes.

In that King struggles to achieve economic success because of the lack of opportunities for Black men, especially those who have been incarcerated, the seeds help to illustrate the theme of Structural Racism and the American Dream. King would prefer steady, legal work, and is only forced into the illicit economy through circumstance.