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Play Review
Joe Turner’s Come And Gone, August Wilson, New American Library, New York, 1988
The first couple of paragraphs of this review have been used as introduction to other August Wilson Century Cycle plays as well.
Okay, blame it on the recently departed Studs Terkel and his damn interview books. I had just been reading his "The Spectator", a compilation of some of his interviews of various authors, actors and other celebrities from his long-running Chicago radio program when I came across an interview that he had with the playwright under review here, August Wilson. Of course, that interview dealt with things near and dear to their hearts on the cultural front and mine as well. Our mutual love of the blues, our concerns about the history and fate of black people and the other oppressed of capitalist society and our need to express ourselves politically in the best way we can. For Studs it was the incessant interviews, for me it is incessant political activity and for the late August Wilson it was his incessant devotion to his century cycle of ten plays that covered a range of black experiences over the 20th century.
The old blues song "Joe Turner's Come and Gone" is a familiar one to me. I have heard it in many versions, some where Joe is a good guy and others, as here with August Wilson's concept of Joe, bad. Bad, indeed, for black people who tried in the second decade of the 20th century to try to make a decent life for themselves and their families. The specific case highlighted in the play is the fate of one Herald Loomis (and his daughter). Herald, having come up against Joe Turner's justice (read white Jim Crow justice) and paid the price with the lost of his wife, as well as part of his sanity, is searching to find his roots.
In the opening play of this series "Gem of the Ocean" we find the characters there trying to figure out what to do with their new found freedom. Here were are involved in a search to find meaning for the black family, the black man and anyone else who is confounded by the race question, circa 1910. One of the most dramatic lines in the whole play is when one of the boarders at Seth's Holly's house, Molly, who is about to go off with fellow boarder Jeremy for parts unknown in order to have fun or just to get a fresh start. She says- "I will go anywhere with you-except the South". That, my friends, says as much about this play as anything else. Of course, as always with Wilson one gets a deep dialogue, a very real feel for the confined space that the whites, North or South have left for blacks and with the exception of the link with the white travelling salesman Selig are not part of the flow of national capitalist society. Yes, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone", circa 1911 style, is gone but are we so sure that he is gone for good? As always, kudos, Brother Wilson.
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