A Wilson Depicts Black Anomalies in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
August Wilson is one of the great Black Writers who
showcases the encumbrance which the
Blacks were chocked in—the white tyranny of slavery. Though slavery was already abolished, the tyrannical torments were still all the vogue down the decades.
Wilson not only witnessed the great Migration, but was himself the very part of the trauma. He was the son of an African American woman subjugated to menial works and born and brought up in ethnically divided societies. The Blacks moved to the North cities in Pittsburgh in order “to leave the bondages of the South behind” and seek their own identity both as individuals and as a community.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is the lively testimony to this Migration and a fractured society where the tinge of the slavery and racism is all the prevailing. Moreover the play scales an extra mile by exploring a high dream with all civil rights secured to the Blacks.
Seth Holly, an African American in his fifties, is a skilled metal worker earning his living in the society of the 1910s in Pittsburgh makes pets and pans. For running his own business he needs a loan but his white employer Selig does not help him as it would grant Holly economic
freedom. Rather Selig earns on Holly’s labor by selling his articles and pay him the mite with which he is not content.
Subsequently Holly’s hatred increases when he knows the truth that Selig belongs to the family which brought bounded slaves to America as well as captured runaway slaves.
The Blacks were subjected to not only social and economic disparity they suffered from housing problem—they did not have proper housing which might have guaranteed the freedom of spirit and allow them a free air to breathe. Many people used to encumber a small room.
This play delineates the stereotypes through the characters Bynum a con man who spells people, two women of different interests, a guitarist country boy, Loomis, his wife and an eleven year old daughter etc all have to share a single room.
This reminds August Wilson’s childhood days when his mother had to room with others. In Wilson’s own words: “I’m taking each decade and looking back at one of the most important questions that blacks confronted in that decade and writing a play about it….Put them all together and you have a history”.
Wilson believes in “the blues” and it is what the cornerstone is in the settings of most of his plays. Loomis is separated from Martha as he is imprisoned for seven years by Joe Turner, brother of the governor of Tennessee, one of the Slave-states. But when Martha is brought back to Loomis arranged by Selig the duo quarrel on who betrayed whom: a hint at the traumatized alienated mind.
Loomis’s denouncing Jesus and slashing his chest with a knife and rubbing blood on his face is all a bold “attempt to rediscover, repose and redefine themselves (the blacks) historically and socially as free citizens”.
Loomis’s song the ‘Binding Song’ is a metaphor with which he finds a joy and asserts himself whenever he feels lonely. It is a “song of self-sufficiency” by which he discovers his independent selfhood. It accompanies him everywhere he goes for he believes that it is the song the Blacks would need “to get a starting in the world”, which Bynum too asserts.
With this song Loomis is “fully-resurrected, cleansed and given breathe” and why not this song helps his voice rent above others’ and dumb the pain of his heart and the body. It showcases the abject conditions of the African-Americans as well as brings solace to their quest and lets an air of freedom in.
By employing this song Wilson efforts to discover his character’s African roots which had an oral tradition than a long written history. To him the song creates the value of African American culture and Black Nationalism in the mind of them. The songs have the musings of “the blues” Wilson was influenced by in his writings to put the entire philosophical upheaval—the suffering, the trauma, the reassertion of the Black-ism and the ultimate freedom of the Blacks at works. These songs thus are “both a wail and a whelp of joy”.