Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Conversations that are Mythical

"Wilson is in the business of expanding--within established patterns--what African American folklore means and what it does. Like [Henry] Dumas and [Toni] Morrison, he is as much a mythmaker as he is a reflector of the cultural strands of the lore he uses."

---Trudier Harris

"[August] Wilson and [Romare] Bearden have addressed what Wole Soyinka describes as the "deep-seated need of creative man to recover this archetypal consciousness," and their art, which shares many characteristics, shares most of all its ability to speak across racial and cultural lines."

---Joan Fishman

Joe Turner's Come and Gone opens with Bynum, who, according to Seth Holly, is standing in the yard drawing "a big circle with that stick and now he's dancing around". Bynum then proceeds to kill a pigeon and put its blood into a cup. This blood ritual literally sets the stage for the many mythological conversions which occur in the play. In an article entitled, "August Wilson's Folk Traditions," Trudier Harris argues that Bynum's ritual is akin to converting the bird in the sky into a bird on the ground, thereby reconciling heaven and earth and, by extension, mother and daughter. Harris writes,

By pouring pigeon blood into the ground, the power of flight inherent in the bird is reversed, grounded so to speak, in a way that will ensure the eventual gathering of the separated mother and daughter at the boarding house. Loomis is almost coincidental to the binding that Bynum has effected with Martha and Zonia, but Bynum nevertheless has him under a spell to the extent that he feels obligated to bring his daughter to her mother.

In addition to setting a chain of mythological events into motion on the stage, Bynum's ritual also serves to draw the audience into Wilson's developing mythological realm. By witnessing this powerful blood ritual, the audience is immediately connected to ancient, subconscious rituals and thereby transported into the realm of myth. The ritualistic letting of blood--through the sacrifice of the pigeon--reaches deep into the audience's collective psyche. Within Gatesian thought, this is no accident, as Wilson once again fulfills the "black poet's mythopoeic function" which is to "create, by definition, reality for the members of his or her community, to allow them to perceive their universe in a distinctively new way". As such a cultural mythmaker, Wilson works to reconstruct and celebrate a meaningful social mythology by incorporating such a mythic motif as Bynum's blood ritual.

As one might expect, Joe Turner's Come and Gone may be Wilson's most overtly "mythic" play. I say "overtly" mythic because, in addition to the opening scene involving the sacrifice of the pigeon, Wilson incorporates into Joe Turner such powerfully mythic motifs as Bynum's baptism of blood, dream visions as experienced by Bynum and Loomis, Bynum's "binding song," and the ritual scarification Herald Loomis, not to mention the direct identification of such characters as "the shiny man," and Rutherford Selig as "the people finder." These direct invocations of literary metaphor--where one sign system serves for and is eventually converted into another sign system--are direct evidence of the mythicality of Joe Turner and serve as axioms for Wilson's mythological conversions from stereotype to archetype.

In Joe Turner's Come and Gone, the conversions from racial stereotype to mythological archetype are as abundant and as fully realized as they