Joe Turner's Come and Gone

Joe Turner's Come and Gone is a play demonstrating the movement of African Americans to freedom in 1910. The play is set in a boarding house which is a transitional place for newly freed African American to harbor while they adjust their newly-found freedom. The Images of travel and the use of the phrase "the road" interposes on the different transitions each character has during the play; the play examines how African Americans' search for their cultural identity, following the repression of slavery. For many this involved the physical migration from the South to the North in an attempt to find a new start: " In an effort to flee the discriminations they faced in the south and hoping to find financial success, many blacks migrated to Pittsburgh in the 1910's searching for a new life and their own identity..."

( Mathers 13).

Joe Turner's Come and Gone symbolize how African Americans moved toward their independence in the 1910's:

" From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city...isolated, cut off from memory...they arrive stunned with a song worth singing..their pockets lined with fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow..shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as a free man of definite and sincere worth.

( P. 1303).

Characters in the play show a great difficult finding who they are due to the fact that they have never been given an opportunity to be anything more than just slaves; because of this we the audience sees how different characters relate to this problem: " Each Character has their own way of dealing with their self-identity issue..some look for lost love o...

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... to find his wife..as characters find what they are looking for they leave the boarding house..thus the audience can predict what's going to happen as they read.." ( Ross 37).

Joe Turner's Come and Gone establishes the struggles of African Americans finding themselves and their culture. The play reinforces self-identity, self-worth and self- acceptance; the use of the metaphor such as the road or someone traveling gives the audience a visualization of what the character is going through, and also helps the audience to identity with the issues being presented. Although it was written in a different time frame the concept of finding one's self is still applicable for today's society: " One could say that the moral of Joe Turner's Come and Gone is about finding who you are and accepting that person..something any time period can relate to." ( Sinclair 98).