rise as a manufacturer of small household utensils, and the story of how Loomis' daughter, Zonia, befriends a lonely neighborhood boy. A character named Bynum, who practices voodoo, functions as a sort of Greek chorus, commenting upon the action and its meaning, occasionally playing a small part in the different plots.
From a reading of this play, one can determine that the major theme of Joe Turner's Come and Gone has to do with the disenfranchisement of the African-American identity. The play is set in 1911; it is clear that the memory of slavery is still real and recent. A character such as Bynum, the old conjure-man, was born into slavery and remembers it well. Boardinghouse owner Seth Holly and his wife Bertha are in their late forties/early fifties and, though children of Northern freedmen, would still have the reality of slavery burned into their earliest childhood memories. The only white character in the play, the peddler Selig, openly talks with nostalgia about the institution:
My great grand-daddy used to bring Nigras across the ocean on ships... Me and my daddy have found plenty Nigras. My daddy, rest his soul,used to find runaway slaves for the plantation bosses. He was the best there was at it... After Abraham Lincoln...we started finding Nigras for Nigras. Of course, it don't pay as much (1410).
Slavery hasn't ended with the Emancipation in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, however, for August Wilson keeps the idea of loss of freedom alive with his play's title name. Joe Turner was an infamous bounty hunter, one who was n
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