Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Literary Elements

Dramatic play/African-American literature

A rooming house in Pittsburgh. August, 1911

The play features no narrator nor singular perspective.

Apocalyptic and transient.

Protagonists: Survivors of the extensive ravages of slavery. Antagonist: The racist consequences of slavery in post-abolition America.

Herald Loomis’s search for his missing wife versus the truth that she has long since moved on.

The violent climax in the wake of Herald’s reunion with his missing wife, his ritualistic cleansing, and his salvation as he stands up and “shines.”

When Loomis has his visions of the bones rising from the depths and walking across the water, his words eventually foreshadow the closing dialogue of the play: “My legs won’t stand up.”

Joe Turner’s presence looms over the entire play though he appears on stage, thus becoming an understated symbol of the looming presence of white authority over African-American society.

References made to working on the construction of a road by the Brady Street Bridge within the context of the play being set in 1911 is an allusion to the events being on the precipice of an epochal population shift in America known as the Great Migration. Historians conventionally identify this mass exodus of blacks from the rural south to the urban centers of the north as beginning in 1916.

The imagery of being hassled for no reason by white police officers who then compound the injury by stealing money from their innocent black victims is one that continues to resonate but that at least, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, has resonance that is no longer confined merely to the African-American population used to experiencing it.

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Cotton is used throughout the play as a metonymic metaphor for slavery.

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