Draft chapters for my American Century Cycle study group workbook - Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Syllabus

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1984) Synopsis: Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the ensemble play includes characters who were former slaves and examines the residents’ experiences with racism and discrimination.

– Article on convict leasing programs: https://www.thoughtco.com/convict-leasing-4160457

– Romare Bearden: The Prevalence of Ritual – https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/09/06/the-prevalence-of-ritual-on-romare-beardens-projections/

Hurston, Zora Neale. High John de Conquer. https://augustwilsonstudygroup.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/highjohntheconqueror.pdf

– Maslow on Self-Transcendence. https://reasonandmeaning.com/2017/01/18/summary-of-maslow-on-self-transcendence/

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/maslow-self-transcendence/

– Maslow got it wrong – https://www.pacesconnection.com/g/tribal-communities-of-northern-california/blog/ravilochan-maslow-got-it-wrong

– Full play pdf: https://wp.me/a4gJ6W-qe

– YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Lvs-e_eIXaWJ0J5IXBUUpwoVe-klNmc

– Notes from the last session: https://augustwilsonstudygroup.wordpress.com/2021/10/29/week-4-joe-turners-come-and-gone-notes-10-28-2021/

* * * * *

I began this week’s reading with Joan Herrington’s “I Ain’t Sorry For Nothin’ I Done: August Wilson’s Process of Playwriting.” Her chapter on Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (she also has chapters on Fences, Jitney, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) is appropriately titled “The Cultural Connection: The Development of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.” As one of Wilson’s principal dramaturges during the period, Herrington’s book takes us through many of the back stories as the play was conceived and drafted, and the changes it went through in rehearsals and performances on its path to Broadway.

At one point in going through various references I told my wife, “I might not read the play this time. I’ve already read it through over ten sessions.” But I knew I was deceiving myself. I knew I couldn’t wait to read the actual play, if only to see what might spring out at me that I missed in previous readings. As it turned out, I would not be disappointed. But first some backstories . . .

The play began its life as a picture Wilson saw in a National Geographic magazine spread of Bearden’s paintings and collages. After seeing the Bearden work, Old Mill Hands Lunch Bucket, Wilson was inspired to write a poem (we don’t have access to the poem, but we know that there are “thousands of poems” in his archived papers, scheduled to be available to the public at U Pitt in early 2023). The poem grew into a short story. Then, sixteen pages into the short story, Wilson decided to convert it into a play. The rest is history. The process gives us an interesting bird’s-eye view into Wilson’s creative process.

Here’s Wilson’s statement on Bearden from a foreword he wrote to a book about Bearden:

In Bearden I found my artistic mentor and sought, and still aspire, to make my plays the equal of his canvasses. In two instances his paintings have been direct inspirations. My play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was inspired by Bearden’s Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, a boardinghouse setting Pittsburgh. I tried to incorporate all the elements of the painting in the play, most notably the haunting and brooding figure at its center, whom I named Herald Loomis. The names of the characters, Seth and Bertha, were taken from another Bearden painting, Mr. Seth and Miss Bertha. The title of my play The Piano Lesson was taken from a painting of the same title.

I never had the privilege of meeting Romare Bearden. Once I stood outside 357 Canal Street in silent homage, daring myself to knock on his door. I am sorry I didn’t, for I have never looked back from that moment when I first encountered his art. He showed me a doorway. A road marked with signposts, with sharp and sure directions, charting a path through what D.H. Lawrence called the “dark forest of the soul.”

From Schwartzman, Myron. Romare: His Life and Art.

The character Bynum is named for Wilson’s grandfather, Bynum Cutler, who we first hear about in a poem Wilson recited among his friends, Poem to My Grandfather (transcription in the YouTube comments).

The character, Zonia, is named for Wilson’s grandmother, Zonia Wilson, who, legend has it, traveled by foot from Spear, NC to Pittsburgh, a distance of 437 miles. Zonia is also the name of a species of butterflies in the family Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies) named the Hesperiidae.

But back to Herrington. Herrington describes the play as a “call to establish cultural relationships.” We see those relationships and the effort to re-establish them, whether after slavery (represented by the seven years Loomis spent in forced servitude to Joe Turner) or after the dissolution of prior relationships. In fact, we can make a list: Herald with Martha; Martha with Zonia; Zonia with Reuben; Jeremy with just about anybody, Bynum with his Shiny Man. And others. On a subsurface level, we can see Loomis’s struggle to connect with his ancestry, the Africans cast overboard during the middle passage whose bones emerge and take on flesh in Loomis’s vision. His initial attempt to connect fails – he sees them and he sees himself as one of them, but his “legs won’t walk,” i.e., he refuses to see the true connection. Later in the play, he makes (and accepts) the connection to his ancestral roots, resulting in his proclamation, “I’m standing! My legs stood up! I’m standing now!”

There is a recurring phrase used. My daddy taught me, my mama taught me, over and over again. Bynum’s father taught him how to look at a man and see his song (and how to use his special binding skill), Seth’s father taught him how to make pots. Molly’s mother taught her how not to get pregnant. This inter-generational transmission of knowledge may get overlooked but it is an essential part of the message of this play.

One more thing that I’ve never mentioned in any of the previous sessions. Eugene is a boy Reuben talks about. In the play, Reuben raised pigeons and sold them to Bynum for his voodoo practices. Eugene asked Reuben to free his birds after he died. But Reuben did not fulfill the promise he made.

But in real life, Eugene was the name of a crippled boy (sounds like polio) who hung out at the boarding house Bearden’s grandparents ran in Pittsburgh. Romare and Eugene became friends and Eugene showed Romare how to draw the scenes he (Eugene) had seen in the neighborhood, especially erotic drawings of things he had seen at a nearby brothel where he lived with his mother. This was the beginning of Romare’s inspiration to draw things. Eugene also raised doves in cages in his backyard.

When Eugene died, they were both barely teenagers. One of Bearden’s paintings depicts Eugene’s funeral, “Farewell Eugene,” and shows his doves fluttering above the mourners, freed from their cages:

Farewell Eugene, 1978.

Meanwhile, back to the play. The ghost of Seth’s mother, Miss Mabel, haunts Reuben. The implication is that Eugene cannot enter heaven until Reuben frees his pigeons:

Reuben: She says, “Didn’t you promise Eugene something?” Then she hit me with her cane. She say, “Let them pigeons go.” Then she hit me again.

And later, “Say he couldn’t go back home until I let them go. I couldn’t get to the door to the coop fast enough.”

Act 2, Scene 4.

Why all this going on about Eugene? Well, a better question might be “Why does Wilson include his story in the play?” It’s the ultimate cultural connection, perhaps, the tie between the living and the dead.

* * * * *

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone lacks an epigram. Most other plays in the Cycle have one. But it is a play named exclusively for a blues song, so maybe that suffices. In fact, it is named for two separate blues songs, the song about the 1892 flood, and the song about the brother of the Tennessee governor who runs an extrajudicial peonage system. We tease that out in an earlier session notes, here.

I am most interested in this play in the character development of Herald Loomis. He arrives at the boarding house from a questionable past we can only piece together from the horrors he describes during his periods of “other-worldly” trances, also describable as generally bad behavior. This would be his experiences during his seven years of forced incarceration, his virtual return to slavery. At one point in Act 1, Scene 4, Loomis, after a period of speaking on tongues and dancing, says,

“You don’t know what I seen, Herald Loomis done seen some things he ain’t got words to tell you.”

I, for one, believe him. Loomis apparently experienced indescribable pain and suffering during his time of imprisonment. As we discussed, during actual slavery, at least the slavemaster had some vested interest in preserving the health of his property, if for no other reason than to contribute his labor another day. Joe Turner, apparently, worked his prisoners to death!

So we are going to use Dante’s The Divine Comedy to describe Loomis as a pilgrim passing through three stages. We will refer to his seven years in the prison industrial labor camp as his descent into Hell, or the Inferno. We don’t really know much about that time, so we will have to make inferences from what Loomis tells us. The second stage covers his release, his return home to find his family, and his search across the countryside for his wife. Let’s label that stage Loomis’s Purgatorio. Finally, there is his reunion with his wife, Martha, the reunification of his family, and his exit with Mattie Campbell. Let’s call that stage his Paradiso or paradise.

We know that during his period of imprisonment, Herald Loomis “lost his song,” which is to say, he lost his meaning in life, his reason for being. It must have been extremely traumatic, especially considering that Loomis has never known slavery and all this was new to him. We also know Loomis lost his “religion” during his period of imprisonment. Loomis says “Joe Turner turned the world upside down.” In my margin notes I wrote “Loomis gives Joe Turner too much credit, too much agency.” Easy enough for me to say. Right? What Herald Loomis lacks during his incarceration Hell is a tour guide like Dante had in Virgil, someone to show him the ropes, so to speak.

Side note: using this level of analysis in no way suggests that Wilson was aware or not aware of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Upon his release from imprisonment, Loomis’s search takes on a different complexion. He is free to move about, free to remember and to search. He returns home. No one is there. He goes to his mother-in-law’s place. His daughter is there but his wife is long gone, headed north with her church congregation to escape oppression. He and his daughter, Zonia, begin their search for her mother and his wife, Martha. This is a discovery stage in more ways than one. Loomis must become reacquainted with his daughter. She was just a baby when he was captured. She must become reacquainted with him. They must “re-become” a family. This process is difficult in the best conditions and that difficulty is magnified in their life together “on the road.” But somehow they pull it off. By the time they reach Pittsburgh you can sense they share real affection for each other.

The final stage, Paradiso, is as yet unwritten. What we do know is Bynum has found his Shiney Man in Loomis, which speaks for development of both Bynum and Loomis. In the end, both reach a level of fulfillment, skipping right to the top of the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs pyramid to self-transcendence, which, according to Maslow, “brings the individual what he termed “peak experiences” in which they transcend their own personal concerns and see from a higher perspective.” See more on Maslow here: https://www.pacesconnection.com/g/tribal-communities-of-northern-california/blog/ravilochan-maslow-got-it-wrong.

* * * * *

Have I discovered in Borges a source explaining Bynum’s Shiny Man in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone?

Wilson introduces the concept of Bynum’s shiny man early in Act 1 Scene 1. In short, Bynum, the roots man of the boarding house, has paid Selig a dollar to help him find his shiny man, a being he met walking down a road. In a dream/vision, Bynum’s father told him the shiny man was The One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way and that if he ever he were to see the shiny man again he would know that he had reached a heightened level of spiritual fulfillment. At the end of the play, Bynum declares that, in fact, Herald Loomis is the shiny man he had sought and his fulfillment is achieved.

Wilson said on many occasions that his primary influences were what he referred to as his 4 B’s, the blues, Bearden, Baraka, and Borges. A lot is said about the first two, the blues and Bearden, a bit less about Baraka, and even less about Borges. It is in Borges, however, that we find clues about and indications of the existence of a protypical shiny man.

Borges penned a series of short stories in 1941, The Garden of Forking Paths. I was reading The Garden of Forking Paths in a study group, looking for examples of multiform narratives to apply to Wilson plays in a general sense when I came across The Approach to Al-Mu’Tasim, a story Borges reports second hand about a law student from Bombay. The plot involves the law student, who finds himself surrounded by a lower class of people, and assimilates with them. The law student finds some redeeming qualities in one of his new comrades and concludes that this man, perhaps a vile man, bears a reflection of a friend, or a friend of a friend, a reflection that gives him a different perspective on things. The law student arrives at a conclusion:

“Somewhere in the world there is a man from whom this clarity, this brightness, emanates; somewhere there is a man who is equal to this brightness.”

The law student devotes his life to finding this man. The man, called Al-Mu’tasim, is a type of divinity who influences all he comes across through mirrored reflections of his divine attributes. Al-Mu’tasim means “one who goes in quest of aid.” The short story ends with the law student never finding his shiny man.

Wilson provides a resolution to this search. Transplanting the quest to 1910 Pittsburgh, Bynum role plays the young Bombay law student. Herald Loomis, finally freed from seven years of peonage and forced servitude, seeks to unite his family. He has been subjected to untold horrible experiences during his period of enslavement on Joe Turner’s farm. Upon his release, he finds his daughter left behind with his wife’s mother, as his wife has joined a congregation that has fled north to the Pittsburgh area in the Great Migration.

Viewed through this lens, we see the reflection Loomis casts on everybody with whom he comes in contact, especially Bynum. We have a better understanding of his infrequent moodiness, his mutual attraction to Mattie Campbell, and his charismatic impact on all the residences of the boarding house. Borges’ Bombay law student never finds his shiny man, but Wilson’s Bynum the roots man finds his. Most importantly, Herald Loomis, the shiny man himself, finds himself and finds redemption. Near the end of the story, Borges writes,

“….the idea that the Almighty is also in search of Someone, and that Someone, in search of a yet superior (or perhaps simply necessary, albeit equal) Someone, and so on, to the End – or better yet, the Endlessness – of Time.”

* * * * *

I can’t sleep, or I don’t sleep well on these Joe-Turner’s-Come-And-Gone (JTCG) weeks. (It might be the mid-afternoon tea.) This week has been no exception. The imagery and the action of the play are so alive it sets my imagination into overdrive. I can’t sleep until I’ve finished and until we’ve met to discuss it, although I already know (also Borgesian) the ending like the back of my hand.

First of all, JTCG is the second of the plays in what I like to call the Bearden period, the three August Wilson plays inspired by Romare Bearden collages. See excerpts from the three day short course that focus on the Bearden collaboration here: https://raymondmaxwell.substack.com/p/august-wilson-american-century-cycle-f1d

The play was originally named for the Bearden collage which inspired it, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket. The play’s title was changed in the third draft to reflect Herald Loomis’ period of court-ordered peonage at the turn of the century, just 35 years after emancipation.

There were two blues personalities with the name Joe Turner. There was the song about the benevolent Santa Claus-like Pennsylvania figure, Jim Turner, who brought wood and fuel to houses after flooding and fire wiped out a western Pennsylvania town. And there was Joe Tunney, brother of Tennessee governor Pete Tunney, who would capture “vagrant” black men and use court proceedings to lock them up and force them to do farm work for seven years. You have to listen carefully to both blues songs (see the playlist for both versions - compare the W.C. Handy versions at the top of the playlist to the Big Bill Broonzy version that follows). It’s almost a “double-consciousness” thing, and definitely a play on words that requires digging beneath the surface of things.

I want to say just a few words about Seth Holley. Entrepreneur and craftsman, Holley was born to free blacks in Pennsylvania who accumulated enough capital to build and run a three story boarding house, which he inherited. The boarding house becomes a meeting place and a transfer point for blacks migrating from the South to the North during the Great Migration. It also serves as the setting for the play. Seth warns tenants in a couple of places that “this is a respectful house.” We will hear a similar refrain much later in Gem of the Ocean, set one decade earlier about Aunt Ester’s home, “a peaceful house.” While Seth may be far removed from southern culture, though, he is the one who initiates the Juba on Sunday afternoons after dinner, demonstrating that the down home culture is still in his DNA.

Bynum plays the role of the oracle, the spirit man, but a person still in search of his own personal fulfillment. It’s why I included those Maslow articles in the syllabus. Dialing the clock back a few decades, which happens often, thematically, in JTCG, an enslaved person could never attain self-actualization, because he was a slave. But he (or she) could reach a state of self-transcendence, which is why it is so important to understand how Maslow readers got it wrong and how Maslow tried to fix things in his later writings. It is a different conversation, but an important one in understanding the depth of Bynum’s character development.

By the way, I think Bynum has some of the most poetic lines in all of August Wilson’s plays. My suspicion is that Wilson identifies closely with Bynum in his search for his “Shiny Man.”

Herald Loomis is foreshadowed in a conversation between Bynum and Selig about the meaning of life. Bynum relates a story his father told him about the “Shiny Man,” referred to as “One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way.” Isn’t that the meaning of “herald?” Also sounds like John the Baptist. But that’s a much different story.

“Heralds are messengers sent by monarchs or noblemen to convey messages or proclamations—in this sense being the predecessors of modern diplomats.” Perhaps a different angle from which to understand the Loomis character.

So when we meet Herald Loomis later in Act 1, we know by his name that he is going to be someone special with respect to Bynum, and by extension, to the plot development of the whole play. Loomis wears a long black coat, just like Solly Two Kings, the retired underground railroad conductor who continues smuggling family members from down South in Gem of the Ocean. Herald is recovering from unspeakable horrors during his kidnapping and forced servitude on Joe Turner’s farm for seven years. He seeks to reunite his family and especially, to reunite his daughter with her mother. He is a strange bird, always moody, always in a funk. Wouldn’t you be if you had seen the world through his eyes? But Herald Loomis becomes Bynum’s project, and through him, Bynum figures out the true “meaning of life.”

Selig is an interesting character. Seller of house wares door to door, Selig travels throughout the region. On his travels out of town, he often carries folks with him to nearby destinations. Bertha is convinced that’s how he knows people’s locations and can find them for other people. Selig, however, says he is in the People Finding business, claims there is an art to it, and rationalizes charging a fee for doing it. Selig also claims connections to blacks through his father who worked with slaveowners to find and capture runaways, and through his great-grandfather, who was a crewmember on trans-Atlantic slave trade ships.

The biggest known secret in the whole play is that everybody knows the woman Herald Loomis is looking for, and her location, but nobody will tell Herald. I suspect Herald has figured that out before the end of Act 1, and I suspect that is why he acts up at the act’s closing, both acts, though no one mentions that he may have a hidden cause for his behavior because then they’d all be caught in their collective lie.

Going slightly below the surface, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is a tale about people in motion and transition. There are no static characters in this play. There is forward motion and backwards motion, there are combinations formed and recombinations. And yet, there are no drama queens in this, the largest ensemble of any Wilson play. There are no divas. The lack of a central protagonist, like Troy Maxson in Fences, may cause theater-goers to see this as a rather boring story. But they would be mistaken. This play seethes and overflows with elements of real human drama, the stuff, Shakespeare would say, “that dreams are made of.”

p.s. It’s not easy arranging your schedule to find time to sit down and read a play each week for ten weeks. But I think it is worth it, “vale a pena” as the Portuguese would say. First, you get important bragging rights for the rest of your life. Just like me reading all 100 Cantos of The Divine Comedy. But most important of all, you get initiated into this August Wilson view of the world, which, in these times, I believe, is both a meditation and a medication for our ills, or as Wilson says in The Play, “a song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy!” Please stick with it. And with us.

* * * * *

We talked about how Herald Loomis and Martha Pentacost hardly exchanged words when they were united. It was obvious that both had moved on. Based on their obvious distance with one another, perhaps their separation began before Loomis’ kidnapping. We noticed how, when Loomis began to “act up” at the play’s end, Martha tried to talk him down and back from the edge, using biblical scripture, the 23rd Psalm, but to no avail. But revealingly, Martha showed no fear of Loomis, even after he brandished a knife. Perhaps she was accustomed to that type behavior from him. Meanwhile, even before Martha’s return, Loomis made a strong play for Mattie Campbell, demonstrating again his willingness to move on.

* * * * *

Romulus Linney, who wrote the forward to the boxed version of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (JTCG), has roots in North Carolina, which explains why Appalachian State University has his personal papers. And good on the Mountaineers for using Omeka (a software and presentation package familiar to archivists) to make items digitally available (says the archivist in me). August Wilson also has North Carolina roots. Romare Bearden has North Carolina roots.

The legend goes that Wilson’s mother and grandmother walked to Pittsburgh from their small hometown in North Carolina. It is also not giving anything away to mention that Aunt Ester’s bill of sale in GOTO was issued in Guilford County, NC, my own birthplace.

Linney wore 85 plays. He knows something about playwriting. He writes in the foreword to JTCG,

“A creator expressing love in art is treacherous business. Love is easy to overdo. It can be well-meaning but amateurish. It must be disciplined by honesty and truth. Here a great writer shows us how it is done. He sets excitement aside. His characters and his audiences live for a while in that calm, unpretentious affection that we, poor humans, at our best, can have for one another. This is not thrilling action. It is life at its most beautiful.”

Below is an excerpt of a letter Wilson wrote to Linney (courtesy of ASU Archives):

“I think you know me well enough to know I’m not trying to rewrite your play. I think it’s fine as it is. I think it can be better and I want to see you nail this. I love the concept, the themes, the subject matter. I think it is an important statement about art and artists. As you know, there are six hundred and forty two ways to write any scene. The artist chooses one. That is the first task of the artist, to choose and arrange. The best writers make those choices with their heart. And their head. An entwining that aligns their kinship with that gods and leads through the dark night of the soul. For me, the best art has come out of there, that place, which is a terrifying place to stand and almost impossible to navigate. Each journey you learn something about yourself to prepare you for the next journey. That is why I like boxing so much. I see the drama of life in it. Every fight is the making of the fighter. He is being fashioned right before your eyes. Some are beautiful creations. The boxer is in constant state of preparation for the next fight even as he is fighting this one. Each fight he learns something about himself, his will, his daring. Every fight is a test of his abilities, his craft, his technique. I think it is the same for the playwright or any artist. That is what makes it so goddamn exciting. And terrifying. And joyful. I always try to leave some blood on the page. I think if it’s going to be any good it has to cost something. I’ve never seen anybody get it for free. I have witnessed, in all the arts, the price, sometimes huge, which artists have paid for their art. Some have paid with their lives. I have long marveled over their willingness to do battle. This is one of the things that intrigues me about Delmore Schwartz. Anyway I’m just throwing this out, trying to give you my honest response to a play I like.”

In an earlier session, I refer to Wilson’s The Play as a Yoruba Hymn to Ogun, god of iron and steel. A recording of the text: for educational purposes only.

What follows is a harvesting of marginalia from successive reads of the play.

Bynum is a Stoic, like Troy in Fences. Stoicism gets an unfair rap because it was contemporary with the early days of Christianity and historians (and philosophers) present the two was a binary choice. It is Bynum’s Stoicism that Seth is attracted to, his independence of mind and his indifference to external appearances. Troy had the same or a similar way of looking at things, i.e. “you’ve got to take the crooked with the straights.”

Seth is a craftsman, a maker of things with his hands. He is at least a second generation free man and a property owner, though he finds himself and his productivity hemmed in by distribution and banking systems. Seth doesn’t trust Loomis, but he tolerates Bynum because he feels Bynum is too old to be a threat. Speaking of Bynum, whenever he speaks, check out who is in the room and who might be within ear range. Bynum speaks on and to multiple levels whenever he talks.

Bynum’s Shiney Man is a prototype of John the Baptist, i.e., going before and showing the way. See the Da Vinci painting, Virgin of the Rocks, in my Jitney post. The Shiney Man self-baptizes with his own blood, transformational through his own sense of agency. Bynum pays Selig a dollar to find his Shiney Man, but Bynum knows that is just pro forma – he has to find him on his own. Selig, now that he is mentioned, and drawing from Wilson’s Black Muslim exposure, reminds one of W.D. Fard, the mystery man who sold pots and pans door to door in Detroit as he propagated a new religion. Selig isn’t selling religion with his pots and pans, but he is selling faith, a hope that people will someday be reunited with family they have lost in the transition from bondage to freedom.

After emancipation, many freed former slaves scoured the southern states looking for family members who had been sold away during bondage. Churches formed homecoming celebrations during the summer for folks to return who fled during the Great Migration. HBCU’s still observe “homecoming” for alumni to return. Family reunions are part of the same impulse to “help me find my people.”

Reuben promised Eugene he would free his pigeons when Eugene died. Eugene died, but Reuben kept his pigeons in captivity, maintaining them to sell to Bynum for his ritual animal sacrifices. Might this be a metaphor for slaveowners who put it in their wills that their enslaved workers should be freed upon their death? But the families refused to honor the last will and testimony request, keeping the people enslaved.

Jeremy, recently immigrated from North Carolina, goes after all the girls. He even breaks the top rule: never date two girls who live in the same house. Jeremy gets picked up and thrown into jail on the weekends. With his drinking and hanging out at clubs to play his guitar, he is trouble. Jeremy knows a good line when he hears one – he repeats Bynum’s line about berries and water in a pickup line to Molly C.

Read carefully the dialogue between Bynum and Herald Loomis at the end of Act 1. What readers refer to as a cathartic “call and response” may be more accurately described as a conversation between a psychotherapist and his patient. Compare it to the conversation between Bynum, Seth and Selig in Scene 1 when Bynum first tells us about his Shiney Man. Bynum’s father was also a mystic and a healer so this is the family business just as it was with Selig’s father’s and grandfather’s people-finding service.

There is obvious chemistry between Mattie and Herald, even before their first collision. Both are lost in love, but not defeated, and both still see the possibility of a relationship in the future. The junior romance between Reuben and Zonia is as sweet as the day is long.

* * * * *

Samuel A. Hay, in his essay Joe Turner's Come and Gone in The Cambridge Companion to August Wilson, outlines seven principles Bynum advocates with various members of the boardinghouse.

"Some things are worth taking the chance going to jail about." In a conversation with Bertha and Jeremy.

"People should be very clear about what they want fixed before seeking people to fix it." Conversation with Mattie and Jeremy.

"Then both of you be lost and trapped outside of life and ain't no way for you to get back to it." If a person is in he wrong place with the wrong person, then both people are lost. Conversation with Mattie and Jeremy.

Spread the word about your salvation. Bynum conversation with Selig and Seth about the Shiny Man.

"A woman is everything a man needs." A man needs a woman to make something of himself. Bynum talk with Jeremy.

"I ain't bind you, Herald Loomis. You can't bind what don't cling." Nobody can bind you to anything you don't cling to. Bynum talking with Martha and Herald.

Your song of worth and self-sufficiency is in your throat. You just have to sing it.

Hay also cites the Nigerian playwright Soyinka and makes references to the Igbo tradition in Nigeria and the Akan tradition in Ghana as sources for interpreting both Bynum and events in the play that seem supernatural. Other references have been made to the Yoruba tradition in explaining August Wilson. His influences are a rich genetic pool.

In our group discussion we talked about references to shoes in the play. Bynum knows Loomis is not a gambler because he wears clodhoppers, not nice shoes. And the place where the migrant congregation, including Martha, built a new church, used to be Wolf's shoe store. In "The Meaning of Shoes,” Giorgio Riello writes,

“Footwear is more than a simple wrapping or protection for the foot. The notion that shoes indicate a great deal about a person’s taste (or disdain for such things) and identity – national, regional, professional – class status and gender, is not an invention of modernity. Shoes have, for centuries, given hints about a person’s character, social and cultural place, even sexual preference.1 Shoes are powerful “things”, as they take control over the physical and human space in which we live. They allow us to move in and experience the environment. They are the principle intersection between body and physical space. The psychologist Nicola Squicciarino has called this “extensions on the corporeal ego.” Shoes, then, are always more than simple garments allowing us to walk, stroll and run on streets, parks and fields. They are tools that amplify our bodies’ capacities. Everyday shoes allow us to walk to work, to run for the bus, to look smart at a party. High-tech shoes have permitted the demonstrable improvement of the world record for the 100 meters during the last hundred years (in conjunction with training and nutritional regimes). Shoes thus extend our social and emotional capacities, as well as our physical capacity.” https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/knowledge-archive/arts/shoes/

I emphasis this here because shoes as symbols comes up again and again in Wilson's plays.

* * * * *.

Like Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (JTCG) begins with a statement, except it is more like a scene setter than a prologue. And in similarity to Gem’s allusion to the Tuesday divinity in the Yoruba religion, Ogun, JTCG opens with a subtle yet direct hymn to the deity, Ogun, also known as the God of Iron, with repeated references to steel, steel mills, and the steel-like nature of the human soul, malleable, shapable, adaptable. As such, JTCG is a tragedy, a near-Greek tragedy, with a character, Herald Loomis, who is brought to total destruction and ruin, almost, nearly. And the scene setter is a sort of Greek chorus, almost. Yet Loomis survives, and is redeemed and transformed, more in keeping with Judeo-Christian tragedy. We will continue to track these traces of Greek, Judeo-Christian, AND Yoruba dramatic elements as we proceed through the cycle.

All the literature on JTCG mentions as a central theme in the play the false promise of emancipation. Loomis gets caught up in the system of peonage, a type of court-sanctioned return to slavery. Without committing any crime, he gets swept away and forced to do hard labor for seven years in a kidnapping/sharecropping system that basically prolonged involuntary servitude. So much for emancipation. Upon completion of his term, he seeks to regather the far flung pieces of his life. An incredible challenge awaits him as he seeks to reunite his family.

The boarding house run by Seth and Bertha is slightly reminiscent of Hope’s bar in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. The two plays get compared from time to time, but the similarity is only superficial (the name, Joe Mott, a character from Iceman, does show up in Radio Golf, the final play in the cycle). Yet, each resident has his or her story, the individual plot lines intersect or intertwine at times, and each resident benefits from the experiences of every other resident. And every resident, though temporary, is a part of the great migration North after emancipation. In that regard, the house is a sort of archeion, housing the records and data, through human stories, narratives, and lived lives, of the Great Migration.

I noticed an interplay of the words “bind,” “bound,” and “bond.” Bynum “binds” together those who cling. Jeremy gets his “bond” paid when he is thrown into jail for public drunkenness. And “bound” is the past participle of bind, an action completed in the past, but also related to “bondage,” which is how characters refer to the previous period of enslavement. In a possible connection to Wilson’s brief experiment with the Islamic religion, the first revelation in the Holy Qur’an, A Clot of Blood, is also translated as “a clinging thing,” in reference to the clot of congealed blood that becomes an embryo and illustrates humankind’s humble origin. But that may be a stretch!

Loomis, though formerly a church deacon, has decidedly rejected traditional religious faith. At the end of both Act 1 (Holy Ghost) and Act 2 (Jesus) Loomis demonstrates his disdain for Christian faith and beliefs. It’s almost like two bookends and it is almost as if Wilson wants to send this message in a very strong way.

Early in the play Bynum references the cleansing power of blood and bleeding and Herald Loomis makes a similar reference at the end of the play. A cleansing ritual. Again, bookends almost. I don’t know what it means beyond the Christian representation of communion and the imbibing of Jesus’ blood and his flesh in a sacred ritual. But I do know Wilson included it and placed it where he did, twice, for a reason.

Finally, just a note on Romare Bearden, whose painting, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket, was a piece in The Prevalence of Ritual exhibition that provided Wilson the inspiration for JTCG.

Wilson wrote, in the Foreword to Myron Schwartzmann’s “Romare: His Life and Art,”

“My friend Claude Purdy had purchased a copy of The Prevalence of Ritual, and one night, in the Fall of 1977, after dinner and much talk, he laid it open on the table before me. “Look at this,” he said. “Look at this.” The book lay open on the table. I looked. What for me had been so difficult, Bearden made seem so simple, so easy. What I saw was black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness, in a language that was vibrant and which, made attendant to everyday life, ennobled it, affirmed its value, and exalted its presence. It was the art of a large and generous spirit that defined not only the character of black American life, but also its conscience. I don’t recall what I said as I looked at it. My response was visceral. I was looking at myself in ways I hadn’t thought of before and have never ceased to think of since.”

p.s. How did I leave out Wilson’s memorialization of the 23rd Psalm in the final scene, as Martha Loomis (now Pentecost) recites it trying unsuccessfully talk down her husband, Herald, from hurting someone with the knife he has drawn. Luckily, Bynum helps Loomis back down on his own in a way that is reminiscent of Toledo’s description of “African conceptualization” in Ma Rainey (next week) and Berneice’s calling on the ancestor spirits in Piano Lesson (two weeks hence).

Two characters from GEM reappear or are mentioned. Selig, the pot seller and people finder shows up in both. Still trying to figure out the big deal about dustpans. I heard a story once about how, in the slave quarters, they would use brooms to sweep the ground down to a hard surface to prevent the growth of weeds and that it kept rats away. Maybe that practice migrated North.

Rev. Tolliver is another name that repeats, performing the funeral for Garret Brown in GEM, and leading the congregation in its move North in JTCG.

* * * * *

NMAAHC Week #9 – Discussion of “Slavery By Another Name”

Old Joe Turner got my man and gone

At least three of the plays in the August Wilson American Century Cycle are based on this concept of failed emancipation, peonage, forced servitude and mass incarceration. I am thinking, as popular as these plays are these days, that it might be an excellent way to discuss these issues in a tour.

In Gem of the Ocean, the plot revolves around a man who commits suicide rather than confess to a crime he did not commit, choosing that option rather than getting swept up by a system of convict labor and forced servitude. The subplot deals with the spiritual struggle of the person who actually committed the crime and got away with it.

In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a father and husband gets caught up in the net of Joe Turner, the brother of the Governor of Tennessee, who routinely captures black men on roads and streets, charges then with vagrancy, then condemns them to seven years of hard labor. The play takes a wholesale look, through a single example, at what happens to the family of a man who is captured and re-enslaved, with no notification to the family, especially in the midst of the Great Migration north, and what that man must endure to reunite his family at the end of the seven year period, notwithstanding his own personal traumatization from the enslavement and stigmatization as an ex-convict.

And in the fourth play of the cycle, The Piano Lesson, four middle-aged men in a nuclear family find an opportunity to reflect on the time they all served at Louisiana’s famed Parchmann Farm for charges of petty burglary and vagrancy, casting forced servitude, convict labor and peonage as a sort of a Black Male initiation or a rite of passage.

These dramatic presentations and representations all indicate the extent to which emancipation and freedom never lived up to their advanced billing, so to speak, and the degree to which forced servitude, convict labor, and in the current day, mass incarceration all weave their way into the institutions of the black family and the black community and result in a kind of psychic disequilibrium in the souls of normal, everyday African American people.

Despite knowing this history, the movie had tremendous shock value. I was not aware of the failures of the Theodore Roosevelt administration to correct the existence of peonage because of the political ramifications. It made me feel quite depressed because for many there was just no way out. The only way out seemed to be to collect your family, what was left of it, and take the trek North. Most black families remained in the south, as mine did, and over the years things got better while certain conditions deteriorated for the black poor in the Northern ghettoes.

* * * * *

Pre-class notes. First, I’d like to draw everybody’s attention to the scenesetter at the beginning, called “The Play.” Gem of the Ocean began with a short prologue that set the stage for the play. Joe Turner opens with a short essay that constructs a framework for an era in time. Gem’s opening prepares us to look backward for guidance, for a message, while postponing the present to a time in the future (Tuesday). Joe Turner’s opening analyses the present and sets forth future options. If you get the chance, please compare the two for discussion.

We learn some things in Scene 1. Seth is a landlord and an owner, the son of free blacks, and a craftsman. He has little regard for Bynum’s “heebie-jeebie stuff,” i.e., African/southern spiritual traditions. He reminds me a bit of Caesar Wilks, he has little patience with what he considers backwardness.

Bynum, based on his description in the play notes, is essentially a Stoic. He is not bothered by outward appearances of things. He tends to his garden and completes his daily rituals centered in nature, whose practice, we later learn, he has inherited from his father. The first interaction in the play is between Bynum and Seth, the traditional vs. the proto-modern, moderated by Bertha, Seth’s wife, who straddles both worlds.

Selig, introduced in Gem of the Ocean as a trader, gets identified racially in Scene 1. We assumed his race in Gem from his name and mannerisms – now we know for certain. Selig buys manufactured housewares from Seth wholesale, then peddles them retail to the public. From his retail work, door to door, Selig knows where people are located and becomes known as a People Finder. Bynum is looking for a shiny man and solicits Selig’s assistance. From their dialogue, we learn the details of Bynum’s vision.

We meet ne’er-do-well Jeremy. We meet Loomis and Zonia and Mattie and Reuben. Jeremy is looking for love, Mattie is looking for lost love, Loomis is looking for Martha, his wife and Zonia’s mother. Selig, the People Finder is ready to help. That’s a lot of action for one scene, but it sets the framework for the rest of the play.

There are some interesting repetitive occurrences in the play and between Joe Turner and Gem of the Ocean. Seth says seven times words to the effect that something is not right about Loomis. Seven times! Jeremy hangs out with Roper Lee, and Citizen Barlow hung out with a Roper Lee earlier in Gem. Loomis makes a reference to tongues on fire when he comes in during the Juba and Citizen Barlow sees people with tongues on fire in the City of Bones.

While Loomis appears to be the star of the ensemble, it is Bynum who, in discovering his Shiny Man (Loomis), achieves transcendence and completion. At best, then, Loomis is Best Supporting Actor to Bynum’s Best Actor, in my estimation.

More discussion points – Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

1. Largest ensemble cast of any Wilson play. 12 characters, counting the ever-present Joe Turner, 15 with appearance of Miss Mabel, plus the unseen Eugene, plus Jack Carper.

2. Said to be Wilson’s favorite play in the cycle. Based on Bearden painting, Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket.

3. Herald Loomis is the Wilson Warrior, but Bynum and Bertha play significant supporting roles (not so sure about this anymore. In fact, the reverse. Let’s discuss.)

4. Themes that recur:

Blood as a means of cleansing, baptism, lifting the veil.

Finding one’s song is finding one’s voice, discovering a sense of agency.

The relationship between Bynum’s Shiny Man, called One Who Goes before and Shows the Way, a sort of First Man, and Loomis’s first name, Herald, i.e., a messenger, a sign that something is about to happen.

Selig, the white “trader.” Buys and sells pots (sustenance, basic necessity) and finds lost people (only because he carried them away in the first place). (Martha started at the Holly house and was carried away by Selig. That is why Loomis said he could smell her there and knew she wasn’t dead)

Bynum’s spirituality helps people, but still doesn’t give him his song completely, until he witnesses the return of the Shiny Man who self-baptizes.

5. Play Structure

Exposition: Scene 1: the boardinghouse; Bynum’s spirituality; Seth’s superiority complex; Selig, the trader

Rising action: Arrival of Herald Loomis, Seth’s distrust.

Climax: End of Scene 1. The Juba dance scene, Loomis’s disapproval and the performance of his own “act” within and via the old slave and minstrel celebration, aided by Bynum.

Falling action: Seth’s growing distrust and decision to evict Loomis; the Mollie/Mattie/Jeremy love triangle.

Resolution: Loomis fails to romance Mattie; future prospects for Reuben and Zonia; Loomis departs the House (but we feel him watching from a distance)

Denouement: Martha Loomis returns to the House and reunites with Zonia; Loomis self-baptizes and self delivers; Bynum sees Shiny Man (in Loomis) and finds his agency at last.

* * * * *

In my first reading, I overlooked that the character Seth, the boarding house owner descended from free blacks and married to Bertha, has an interesting name with Hebrew and Egyptian antecedents. The Bible Seth was the third son of Adam and Eve, the direct linear ancestor of Noah. The Egyptian mythology Seth was the god of chaos and represented everything that threatened harmony.

Seth rejects Bynum’s way of understanding the world. He is an entrepreneur, a landlord and a craftsman, but he is hemmed in by the structure of the economy and his world, i.e., he can’t get a bank loan to expand his business without putting up his only asset as collateral, he works for Mr. Olowskoi where he has little say about the direction of his efforts, and he depends on Selig to pay him a fair price for his wares, the pots and pans he makes. Yet, he constantly rejects the cultural traditions (mostly) of the very people whose misfortunes and temporary homelessness create a demand for housing that gives him some measure of economic freedom. Nonetheless, he plays harmonica for the Juba on Sunday afternoon, so there is hope for him.

(NOTE: Selig Polyscope was the name of an early motion picture company founded by William Selig in Chicago in 1896. It eventually moved to Los Angeles but folded in 1918, selling its assets to Louis Mayer, who later formed the parent company of MGM)

Skipping around, I also focused in this reading on the Act 2 Scene 4 (a continuation of their first conversation upon meeting at the end of Act 1 Scene 1) a tenderness and a sweetness of the burgeoning relationship between Zonia and Reuben, two children who find themselves in this human orbit through no choice of their own. I love the way they share secrets about the pigeons and the ghost of Miss Mabel, the way they kiss on the lips twice, a second time because of meaning attached to the first time. Reuben takes the lead, names Zonia, Spider, and proposes marriage to her at some time in their future. She rejects the name but accepts the proposal and in the audience we feel there is a chance for redemption in the future.

(NOTE: Zonia is a genus of skippers (butterflies) of the family, Hesperiidae, of the Lepidoptera species of insects.)

Then there is the kitchen conversation between Bertha and Mattie late in Act 2 Scene 5. Just after Mattie does something “motherly” for Zonia, tying a ribbon on her hair, Loomis and Zonia leave and Bertha gives Mattie some motherly advice, noticing, perhaps, the energy exchange between Mattie and Loomis (there is definitely chemistry there).

Finally, Martha arrives and Loomis returns for a mild but meaningful confrontation. Both have moved on, in a manner of speaking, following Loomis’ kidnapping and seven year imprisonment. Harsh though it may seem, true love can fade depending on the circumstances. Loomis hands his daughter over to her mother after a long separation and we are led to believe he ends up with Mattie. Not quite the ending we may have anticipated, but a suitable one, nonetheless.

* * * * *

Explaining the end of the play.

It can be argued that the end of the play is a bit whacked, poorly constructed, or just plain flawed. I propose that taking such a position would be both inaccurate and incorrect. Of course, we would love to see Martha and Herald reunited and marching off into the sunset with their darling little girl, Zonia. But I contend that the play was never intended to be about Martha and Herald, but about Herald (the Wilson Warrior) and his development and, take a deep breath, about Bynum and his final fulfillment.  Let’s set the scene.

In Act 1 scene 1, Bynum told Selig, the trader and People Finder, about a man he was looking for, a Shiny Man he met on a road who once shared with him the Secret of Life. Bynum said the man asked for his hands, then rubbed Bynum’s hands between his own hands that had blood on them and said the blood was a way of cleaning himself. Soon the road changed, the surroundings changed and “everything look[ed] like it was twice as big as it was.” The cleaning with blood was clearly also a type of enlightenment, a baptism of sorts, preparing Bynum for a future task. During the same experience, Bynum saw his father, who told him he would show him how to “find my song,” and explained that the Shiny Man Bynum had earlier seen was “the One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way and that he

“Said there was lots of shiny men and if I ever saw one again before I died then I would know that my song had been accepted and worked its full power and I could lay down and die a happy man. A man who done left his mark on life.”

OK. Hold on to that thought . . .

Skipping forward to the end of Act 1 scene 4, the House folks have come together on a Sunday evening after dinner to do a Juba, an African cultural celebration that involves dancing, singing, and invoking the Holy Spirit. Everybody from the boarding house is there and participating except Herald. When Herald arrives, he goes off the deep edge, questioning the existence of God and the Holy Ghost. He goes off into a bit of an other-worldly experience, “dancing and speaking in tongues.” he then says,

“You all don’t know nothing about me. You don’t know what I done seen. Herald Loomis done seen some things he ain’t got words to tell you.”

       Bynum comes to his aid, walks him through his exposition of the vision he has seen, learns about his vision, and walks him back from the edge, so to speak, and back to this world and sanity. We won’t go into the details of that vision here, but suffice it to say that elements of the vision are significant, the bones rising and walking on the water, the bones sinking all together all at once and forming a tidal wave that washes the bones, now clothed with flesh, black flesh, ashore, but still inanimate. Then a wind enters the bodies and brings them to life, and Herald Loomis is one of those bodies come to life, except at that point, unlike all the others, Loomis cannot stand up, or as he says it “My legs won’t stand up.” At that point, I think Bynum knew spiritually and at some level that he had found, at least potentially, his shiny man. But that more development would be required.

(Note: this part of the Wilson play reminds me of the 11,500 American prisoners of war who perished aboard British prison ships during the Revolutionary War, whose bodies was cast overboard, and whose bones eventually washed ashore. See more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Ship_Martyrs%27_Monument#Dedication).

OK, moving forward to the end of Act 2 scene 5 (the stuff in the middle is not insignificant, but we can come back to it later if we have to), Martha returns to the House, Loomis returns, and Martha thanks Bynum for reuniting her with her daughter Zonia. Loomis takes offense at that and accuses Bynum of “binding” him to the road, to a life of wandering around and dissatisfaction. Bynum denies it, and at this point, Loomis draws his knife, followed by a type of call and response that tells us with finality there is not going to be a future with Martha and Loomis together. Their apartness has developed them into different people than they were before when they were together. As Herald says, “Joe Turner’s come and gone.”

Then at the height of the exchange, Loomis draws the knife across his chest, drawing blood, then rubs that blood over his face, replicating, in some ways, the same blood cleaning and self-baptism that Bynum experienced in Act 1 with the original shiny man. Similarly, Loomis comes to a new awareness as a result of the blood baptism. Finally, he is standing and he proclaims “I am standing! My legs stood up! I’m standing now.”

This is the completion that Loomis sought. He bids Martha farewell, and Mattie rushes out to be at his side. The stage directions Wilson inserts here are pure poetry:

Having found his song,
the song of self-sufficiency,
fully resurrected, cleansed and given breath,
free from any encumbrance
other than the workings of his own heart
and the bonds of the flesh,
having accepted the responsibility
for his presence in the world,
he is free to soar above the environ
that weighed and pushed his spirit
into terrifying contractions.

       At this point, Bynum realizes fully that Loomis is his shiny man, that his song has been accepted, and that he has lived a life of meaning.

So, Loomis is complete. He has Mattie at his side for his next journey. And Bynum can peacefully rest. Q.E.D.

* * * * *

Yes. I think Bynum is a central character, although Loomis is definitely and definitively the Wilson warrior in this play. We relate personally to whichever character we will and that is one of the human functions of all the dramatic arts, to engage the audience, one by one. But we also have to keep in mind the suggestion made in class, i.e., putting it mildly, that creative people are less focused on their audience and more focused on externalizing their creative impulse. I wrote a poem once, a sonnet, that I thought was exclusively focused on a somewhat complicated rhyming scheme, yet at the end, the whole poem had meaning for me (and perhaps, for any one else who read it), the rhyming scheme notwithstanding.

A friend the other day called my attention to a painting, The Choice of Hercules. The painting (could be a play or a poem) has four human characters, and people who gaze on the masterpiece are subliminally left to choose one to relate to (though forcing that choice may not have been the artistic intent of the painter, Carracci). It’s a bit of a tangent, but it is true, we can’t all be Hercules.

The Choice of Hercules (https://www.wga.hu/html_m/c/carracci/annibale/1/heracles.html)

Wilson is using his plays to build a history of a century, but he is also creating a mythology, and a philosophy. That is why these plays will last and last. And yes, he is developing a psychology, a code for human behavior, perhaps a universal code. It will be fascinating to see how it all unwinds in the remaining plays.