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Joe Turner’s Come and Gone was the first play Wilson wrote after he committed himself to this reexamination of history, and it was a turning point in Wilson’s work. He set Joe Turner in 1911, during the Great Migration. Wilson chose the year because he believed that Black Americans then still held onto African beliefs and practices. As millions moved from the South to the North, his works argue The Great Migration brought about not only a geographical displacement but a cultural one. 

Joe Turner also represents a change in style, from the realism of the first three plays to allegory, or, more precisely, “magic realism.” The chief characters, Rutherford Selig, Bynum, and Herald Loomis are symbols for elements of the play’s theme. Selig, the son and grandson of slavers, atones for his ancestors’ sins by serving as a Finder, who unites separated family members.

Loomis is a Seeker. He is wandering the North searching for his wife; Bynum, the Guide or enabler, demonstrates that Loomis is actually seeking to restore his own integrity. Loomis’s restoration comes about through a revelation; Loomis has a vision of the bones of enslaved people who perished in the Middle Passage rising and taking on flesh. The revelation—suggested by Ezekiel 37—connects Loomis’ restoration with the recovery of a broader Black identity. 

In his next play, The Piano Lesson, Wilson explores how the second generation born free had to reconcile their identities and family histories with the psychic effects of slavery. Berniece has settled in Pittsburgh; in her parlor she keeps the piano that their enslaved grandfather carved with totem-like images of his ancestors. Her brother, Boy Willie, wants to sell the piano and use his share to add to the farm he is buying back in Mississippi.

However, Berniece regards the piano as the repository of the family’s history. She can’t bear to play it, but she can’t give it up. 

As he did in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Wilson uses spiritual forces to resolve the issue. Boy Willie takes on the ghost of the piano’s white owner, the heir of slavery, and defeats him in a Jacob-like struggle. Berniece can play the piano again—perhaps she will make money by giving lessons. Boy Willie returns to the South, evidently to expand his farm without the proceeds from the piano.

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone and The Piano Lesson end on optimistic notes, but the outlook in the succeeding plays gets bleaker and bleaker. In Two Trains Running, Seven Guitars, the revised Jitney, and King Hedley II, Wilson returns to the Hill District of Pittsburgh between 1945 and 1985. This was a period of remarkable progress for Black Americans, but that progress has bypassed Wilson’s characters entirely. 

Wilson intended the “two trains” in Two Trains Running to symbolize the two options: assimilate to white culture or establish a thoroughly Black one. Originally Wilson was going to include a character who had assimilated. However, he couldn’t find such a character in the Hill District; the individuals who were willing and able to assimilate had left long ago. The only successful Black people in the play are the late Prophet Samuel, who used religion to exploit his people, and West, the undertaker who has figured out how to profit from an upcoming urban redevelopment project.

Collectively, the characters in this group of plays seem trapped, like the characters of Chekhov or Beckett. In Two Trains, Memphis holds out for his price for the restaurant and Hambone endlessly demands his ham. Floyd Barton, in Seven Guitars, talks about going to Chicago, but puts his energy into seducing Vera. In fact, Seven Guitars introduces a blood feud that continues in King Hedley II; the characters in these two plays are so completely isolated from the larger society and from each other that they have nothing to do but kill each other over trifles.

In Wilson’s view, the Great Migration did not lead to civil equality and economic opportunity; instead, it led Black Americans into a losing competition with whites and with each other. As early as 1988, when he was working on Two Trains Running, Wilson told Bill Moyers “We should have stayed in the South. We attempted to transplant what in essence was an emerging culture… If we had stayed in the South, we could have strengthened the culture.” 

Wilson makes the point most clearly at the end of King Hedley II. When Ruby accidentally shoots King, the prophet Stool Pigeon breaks out in a song of praise to the Lord because he realizes that King’s death is a sacrifice for the evils he, Pigeon, has been warning his people about throughout the play. Like the Hebrews who neglected the Lord and served strange gods, Wilson suggests Black Americans had lost their cultural history and homeland and served the god of white materialism. Recovery would call for an awakening and reestablishment of African-American culture. 

The allegorical character of Aunt Ester symbolizes this culture. She is first mentioned in Two Trains Running and appears as a character in Gem of the Ocean.  The other characters believe that Aunt Ester was born in 1619, when the first slaves were brought to America; in the 20th century she serves as a repository of memory and wisdom. In that capacity she restores strength and courage to people who are uncertain and fearful, such as Memphis and Sterling in Two Trains Running and Citizen Barlow in Gem of the Ocean. 

Wilson’s final play, Radio Golf—set in the 1990s—may look forward to a compromise between separatism and assimilation. In it, Wilson returns to the realism of his earlier plays. As he is about to clear the site for his biggest project yet, Black real estate developer, Harmond Wilks, discovers one house is inhabited by an elderly Black man who refuses to sell it. Wilks tries to preserve the house, but his business partner, Roosevelt Hicks, claims his efforts are endangering the entire project. Hicks is an appealing character, and his arguments are strong.

Unlike most of Wilson’s plays, Radio Golf ends with a resolution on legal grounds rather than a revelation: Hicks exercises his right to buy out Wilks. Wilks wins a moral victory, but the play leaves one wondering which outcome is really the better for this Pittsburgh community: development or preserving the house.

This interplay between development and preservation seems apt, as we consider Wilson’s works today. He may not have intended to write history, but through his characters—their struggles and redemptions—Wilson has chronicled the multifaceted impacts of racial inequity and class division in the US across the 20th century. He also advocated for the singularity and moral integrity of Black culture. Revisiting Wilson’s play cycle now feels particularly gravitational, if coincidentally so, with Kamala Harris stepping into the spotlight as the United States’ first Black female presidential nominee. If only Wilson were still here, sitting at the edge of the seat beside our own, as the last act of 2024 unfolds. 

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone runs Sept. 20-Oct 13, 2024 at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company. Keep updated on the schedule and venues for the Baltimore August Wilson Celebration of the American Century Cycle HERE.

Header image: Kenya Mitchell and Josh Wilder as Zonia Loomis and Herald Loomis in Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Photo by Keston De Coteau of Keystone Productions.