Joe turner's Come and Gone - Center Stage

“[T]hat’s my workshed. I go out there…
take these hands and make something
out of nothing. Take that metal and
bend and twist it whatever way I want.”
—Seth, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
“All my life I been looking for somebody
to stop and stay with me…I take Jack
Carper’s hand and it feel so rough and
strong. Seem like he’s the strongest
man in the world the way he hold me.
Like he’s bigger than the whole world
and can’t nothing bad get to me.”
— Mattie, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
“I looked over and seen my daddy
standing there. He was the same size
he always was, except for his hands
and his mouth…his hands were as big
as hams. Look like they was too big to
carry around.”
—Bynum, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
going to leave. The man is going to work, and the woman
is going shopping, and the kid is going to drink the milk
and go out, and this man is going to be left in there in
this posture. And what he needs most is human contact.”
And then I began to wonder who he was and why he was
sitting there like that, and I said, “I am going to animate
this boarding house and make the boarding house come
alive and give these characters names and find out who
this guy is and what is his story.” 3
At this same time, Wilson was working on a collection
of poems, “Restoring the House.” In this series, Wilson
chronicled the story of a freed man searching for his
enslaved wife who had been sold from Mississippi to a
plantation in Georgia a few years before Emancipation.
Struck by the idea of characters searching for one another,
and the need for someone to “heal them and bind them
together,” the storyline for Joe Turner’s Come and Gone
began to crystallize.
A true Bearden aficionado, Wilson was not only influenced
by the artist’s collages but also derived inspiration from
Bearden’s life experiences. In Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,
for example, Wilson’s vision of the Holly boarding house
was partly formed by memories of his grandmother’s
boarding house, but it was also informed by the drawings
Bearden had made of his grandmother’s Pennsylvania
boarding house. Furthermore, Wilson pays homage to
Bearden’s life by actually representing Bearden through
the young character of Reuben in Joe Turner. Like Reuben,
Bearden had a sickly, childhood friend named Eugene who
collected pigeons. The terminally ill Eugene made young
Bearden promise that when Eugene died Bearden would set
his pigeons free—a promise kept in Wilson’s play as it was
in real life.
While Bearden’s influence appears in the broad strokes of
Wilson’s dramaturgy and inspiration, common elements
can also be found in the finer details. For example, both
artists are known for embracing—and repeatedly returning
to—a particular set of motifs and images. These include the
Blues, migration, trains, guitars, and out-of-scale physicality.
As noted by Wilson scholar Joan Herrington, both men use
“simple images and symbols, but [endow them] with great
significance.” 4 Wilson himself observed that Bearden’s
work often depicts “a huge oversized hand on a small
body,” 5 and his plays follow suit, repeatedly emphasizing
the skills, strength, and size of their characters’ hands. In
Fences, for instance, Wilson describes Troy as having “thick
heavy hands;” in The Piano Lesson, Boy Willie remarks on his
father’s “big old hands;” in Gem of the Ocean, Aunt
Ester recalls that her son, Junebug, “Had big hands;” and
in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Reuben tells Zonia about
seeing a ghost who “just had on that white dress and
them big hands.”
Of course, it would be erroneous to suggest that the
fullness of Wilson’s characters or plays could be gleaned
merely from a textual study of hands. Nevertheless, we
can certainly gain a more nuanced understanding of
Wilson’s playwriting by examining how he uses the
imagery of hands—and, more broadly, draws on the life and
artistic vision of Romare Bearden—to enrich his dramatic
explorations of labor, love, and legacy within the African
American experience. Finding in Bearden’s work a world
that depicts “men with huge hands and hearts, pressing
on life until it gave back something in kinship,” 6 August
Wilson also found his own inspiration: he, too, animates
characters who press on through life’s hardships, held
together by their sense of community and guided by the
hands of their ancestors. •
1
Many scholars and artists, including Wilson himself, cite the
Bearden collage Piano Lesson (1983) as the inspiration for
Wilson’s play of the same name. Others, however, credit the
strikingly similar lithograph Homage to Mary Lou (1984) as
the original inspiration.
2
Mark William Rocha: “August Wilson and the
Four B’s: Influences,” in August Wilson: A Case Study, ed.
Marilyn Elkins, pp. 10-11.
3
August Wilson, Conversations With August Wilson, p. 111.
4
Joan Herrington, I Ain’t Sorry for Nothin’ I Done, p. 24.
5
Rocha, p. 11.
6
August Wilson, “Foreword,” in Romare Bearden: His Life & Art,
ed. Myron Schwartzman, p. 9.
Top left: Two details from Romare Bearden’s Miss Bertha and Mr. Seth
(1978). Upper right: Details from Bearden’s The Family Dinner (1968) and
Evening Meal of the Prophet Peterson (1964).
Next Stage: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone |