Joe turner's Come and Gone - Center Stage

Staging a “Mistake”
August Wilson on the Great Migration
by Dr. Sandra G. Shannon, Howard University
The Great Migration refers to a period [beginning in the
early 20 th Century] when millions of African Americans
moved out of the rural South to large industrial cities—
such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago,
St. Louis, and Los Angeles—as well as to many smaller ones.
Whether traveling by foot, by wagon, or by rail; whether
moving in the safety of small groups or entire families; or
whether risking the trip alone, streams of men, women, and
children left the South in huge numbers on their way to the
supposed “Promised Land” of the North.
August Wilson regarded this mass exodus of African
Americans from the cotton and tobacco fields of the
South as a huge mistake. In the wake of the South’s
failing economy, deceptive advertising campaigns fueled
wild rumors about the North having plentiful and better
paying jobs as well as excellent opportunities for an overall
improvement in the quality of life. Such lies enticed hordes
of skilled and unskilled laborers to
join the human highway going North.
Unfortunately, many would wind up
homeless, poor, hungry, and out of work.
Wilson told one journalist,
We came to the North, and we’re still
victims of discrimination and oppression in
the North. The real reason that the people left
was a search for jobs, because the agriculture, cotton
agriculture in particular, could no longer support us. But
the move to the cities has not been a good move. Today…
we still don’t have jobs. The last time blacks in America
were working was during the Second World War, when
there was a need for labor, and it did not matter what
color you were. 1
To some extent, each installment of Wilson’s ten-play cycle
underscores lingering ramifications of this mistake. Many
of his transplanted Southern characters are tormented,
restless nomads who desperately try to escape their
traumatic past, only to make their way North—where
they suffer from a host of psychic and physical wounds,
even death. Set in either Pittsburgh or Chicago, each play
captures the bluesy impulses of the Southern Negro’s
initiation into the Northern way of life.
NorthSouth
A close examination of these plays reveals that Wilson’s
migrants who commit the unforgivable mistake of leaving
their Southern homes suffer from an extensive catalogue
of physical and psychological maladies: propensities toward
self-mutilation and scarring; unexplained convulsions;
muted speech; recurring nightmarish visions; kidnapping
and prolonged periods of incarceration; insurmountable
family strife caused by infidelity, abuse, and abandonment;
splintering and dissolution of the nuclear family structure;
deferred dreams; and various manifestations of mental
trauma, such as schizophrenia, incoherent speech, or
dementia. Wilson described the afflicted ones as “foreigners
in a strange land,” as “the sons and daughters of newly
freed slaves,” and as “marked men and
women seeking to scrape from the
narrow, crooked cobbles…a way of
bludgeoning and shaping the
malleable parts of themselves
into a new identity as free men
of definite and sincere worth.” 2
In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
in particular, the impact of the
Great Migration is pervasive.
The play demonstrates the
profound and lasting negative
impact that fragmentation
has had on both African
American culture in general and
on the African American family
in particular. For example, Seth and
Bertha Holly’s 1911 boarding house
serves both as a business establishment
for laborers who find work at nearby steel
mills and as a way station or halfway house for
the seemingly endless flow of tormented, restless, and
Above left: Jacob Lawrence, panel 3 of
the Migration Series, 1940-1941.
Above right: A family just arrived
in Chicago from the rural South.
Next Stage: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone | 10