Joe Turner's Come and Gone

We see in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone that for many African Americans living in a dominant and oppressive White culture, the search for self-affirmation is crucial to self-actualization. The African American must struggle with two identities, one that is African and one that is African American and often undermined in a racist and oppressive White society. We see this struggle that creates a double-consciousness in African Americans most clearly in Wilson's characterization of Herald Loomis, an African American male who cannot become whole until he reconnects with his African self.

The double-consciousness and dualism of identity African Americans are confronted with when living as a minority in a dominant and racist White society is clearly exhibited in Wilson's characterization of Loomis. Loomis is bitter and resentful over the oppression experienced by African Americans at the hands of Whites. This makes him reject his American self because it is a self that must acquiesce to Whites. We see this rejection and bitterness when Loomis maintains, "Great big old white man�your Mr. Jesus Christ. Standing there with a whip in one hand and tote board in another, and them niggers swimming in a sea of cotton. And he counting. He tallying up the cotton" (Wilson 92).

Loomis maintains he has seen things he has no words to describe, primarily abuses against African Americans. He cannot reconcile his past experiences wi

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m hopes to find when he encounters another shiny man. Bynum maintains that he has seen people leave each other in a manner that dooms African Americans in their united quest for identity and self-expression. As Bynum tells us, "I take the power of my song and binds them together. Been binding people ever since�Just like glue I sticks people together" (Wilson 10). Too many African Americans are unable to reach the spiritual awareness it takes to resolve the dilemma of double-consciousness that plagues their formation of a whole identity that is true to their individual expression. Mills (3) points out that many of the characters in Wilson's dramas, like those who pass through the boarding house, are displaced souls in search of fulfillment, "The theater of August Wilson bears witness to the ceaseless wandering of African Americans in search of major aspects of their identity. The most trivial of errands becomes an initiation and transports the action to confirms of the sacred." Loomis' time on Joe Turner's chain gang have made him turn away from the spiritual quest he needs to embark on to regain a sense of wholeness and real identity. He becomes angry with Bynum's efforts to bind him. He does not believe in religion since

Category: Literature - J