Joe Turner
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...
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