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Joe Turner's Come and Gone | Introduction

August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, first produced in 1986 by the Yale Repertory Theatre, was published in the United States in 1988. The play was inspired both by the 1978 Romare Bearden artwork Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket and the blues song "Joe Turner’s Come and Gone." The song, which was recorded by legendary blues artist W. C. Handy, was first sung by many estranged black women who had lost their husbands, fathers, and sons to Joe Turner—a plantation owner who illegally enslaved blacks in the early twentieth century. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is the third play in Wilson’s ten-play historical cycle, in which the playwright is chronicling the African-American experience in the twentieth century by devoting a play to each decade. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone represents the 1910s.

Set in a Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911, the play examines African Americans’ search for their cultural identity following the repression of American slavery. For Herald Loomis, this search involves the physical migration from the South to Pittsburgh in an attempt to find his wife. Pittsburgh was one of the many urban areas in the North that other blacks migrated to in the 1910s in an effort to flee the discrimination they faced in the South, while attempting to find financial success in the North. Herald’s search for his identity, represented as his song, is unsuccessful until he has embraced the pain of both his own past and the past of his ancestors and moved on to self-sufficiency. A copy of the play can be found in August Wilson: Three Plays, published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 1994.

Joe Turner's Come and Gone Summary

Act I, Scene 1
When Joe Turner’s Come and Gone opens, Seth is complaining to his wife Bertha about Bynum, a tenant in their Pittsburgh boardinghouse who kills pigeons for his African rituals. Seth and Bertha also talk about Seth’s night job at the steel mill, and his third job as a tinsmith, making items out of the sheet metal sold to him by the white peddler, Rutherford Selig. Seth would go into the tinsmithing business by himself but cannot get approved for a loan unless he signs over their boardinghouse, which he refuses to do.

Selig stops by for his weekly Saturday business visit, buys some pots from Seth, and puts in an order for some dustpans. Bynum asks Selig about the shiny man that he paid Selig—a people finder—to find for him. Selig asks Bynum for a better description, and Bynum tells him about the strange man who gave him the vision in which he acquired the power of the Binding Song. Bynum is now able to bind people together so that they can find each other if they are separated. Selig leaves. Jeremy, a young tenant, comes in and tells everybody how the police locked him up so they could steal money from him. Herald Loomis and his daughter, Zonia, arrive and rent a room from Seth. Herald is looking for his wife, Martha, and Bynum tells him that he should talk to Selig on his next Saturday visit. Seth shows Herald to his room. Bynum encourages Jeremy to take his guitar to the nightly contest at Seefus’s bar, a black gambling house, but Jeremy is leery of contests after a bad experience with a white contest sponsor.

Seth comes in and says that Herald must be looking for Martha Pentecost, a woman he knows, because Zonia resembles her. However, Seth will not tell Herald this because he does not trust Herald. Mattie Campbell, a young woman, stops by to talk to Bynum and ask him to bind her old boyfriend, Jack Carper, to her. Bynum says that Carper is bound to somebody else and that Mattie should move on, although he gives Mattie a small good luck charm to put under her pillow. Jeremy asks Mattie out on a date, and she reluctantly agrees. Outside, Zonia plays in the yard and meets Reuben, the boy next door. Zonia tells him that they are searching for her mother, who ran away when a man named Joe Turner did something to her father. Reuben says that his only other friend, Eugene, died, and that against Eugene’s dying wish, Reuben keeps Eugene’s pigeons in captivity, selling the pigeons to Bynum to use in... » Complete Joe Turner's Come and Gone Summary