Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Study Guide

The fourth of six children, Wilson was raised in a poor neighborhood of Pittsburgh predominately populated by black Americans, as well as Italian and Jewish immigrants. Upon the divorce of his mother and father in the 1950s, Wilson and his family moved to Hazelwood—a mainly white, working-class section of Pittsburgh where their appearance, as a black family, wasn’t met with open arms. Facing racist rage—their Hazelwood home had bricks thrown through its windows—they soon moved to a new home. Dropping out of high school in the tenth grade after being falsely accused of plagiarizing a twenty-page paper on Napoleon I, Wilson worked odd jobs and made great use of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. The gifted Wilson had learned to read at age four, and ultimately received an honorary high school diploma from the library for the precocious extent to which he educated himself with its books. Best known for his plays Fences, The Piano Lesson (both of which won the Pulitzer Prize), Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Wilson once said that his work was most influenced by “four B’s”—blues music, the writers Jorge Luis Borges and Amiri Baraka, and Romare Bearden, a painter. Wilson ultimately wrote sixteen plays, ten of which comprised what is called his Pittsburgh Cycle (or Century Cycle), as nine of them take place in the city’s Hill District, an African-American neighborhood. Wilson died at the age of 60 in Seattle, from liver cancer, leaving a legacy behind him as one of the twenty century’s most prominent playwrights.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone takes place nearly 50 years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves legally free. Because the Civil War didn’t end until 1865, though, the full effects of this legal action weren’t immediately brought to bear on the nation. Even when the Union finally defeated the Confederacy—thereby enforcing the abolition of slavery throughout all of the United States rather than just in the North—African Americans still faced strong forms of systematized racism. For example, a man known as Joe Turney (or Joe Turner), the brother of the governor of Tennessee, was employed by law enforcement to travel with and deliver convicts to a prison in Nashville, but he often sold black prisoners—many of whom had only committed petty crimes—to farmers along the Mississippi who needed workers. Often times, black men were even framed as having broken the law for this exact purpose. One common way Turney’s men framed them was by staging gambling games on the roadside and manipulating African Americans to join as they passed. Once the passerby started playing, officers would descend on the scene and round up the supposed lawbreakers, eventually turning them over to Turney. This piece of history is what Wilson bases Herald Loomis’s backstory on, as Loomis explains that he stopped to preach to several gamblers and was suddenly taken hostage by Joe Turner. In fact, Joe Turner’s influence on the South was so pervasive that a blues song circulated about him, based on what people would say when somebody asked why the majority of a town’s black men were missing: “They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone.” 

August Wilson wrote a series of plays called The Pittsburgh Cycle. This collection of pieces—also known as The Century Cycle—consists of ten plays, all of which document the nature of African-American life in a given decade of the twentieth century. The first play that Wilson wrote in this cycle is Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which takes place in the 1920s and is the only piece in the entire group that isn’t set in Pittsburgh. The rest, including Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (documenting the 1910s), take place in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. Furthermore, some plays in the cycle—which includes famous works like Fences and The Piano Lesson—even share several of the same characters and specific locations.