AHSU+ASSIGNMENT+2


 * ASSIGNMENT 2**
 * 1) Discuss how racial discrimination is presented in the play, using examples as they occur throughout the work. How does it effect the characters and how do they respond to it? Please be specific.

Someone who has forgotten his song, Herald Loomis is an African American who survives in a time between two ideas: Slavery and freedom. August Wilson’s __Joe Turner’s Come and Gone__, is a play set during an uncertain age when slavery was recently abolished. The play highlights, through its characters, the damage slavery had already caused and the prevalent problem: racial discrimination. Out of all the characters, Harold Loomis’s past, present, and future was affected the most by slavery. He enters the play a marked man. He is “…unable to harmonize the forces that swirl around him, and seeks to recreate the world into on the that contains his image…” (65). Loomis’s family and identity was torn apart by slavery. Even after his release, he felt that the only thing he could do was to look for his missing wife, and from there he could get “a starting place in the world” (87). His release after he finds her is symbolized by the slash across his chest, as if he was cutting the chains of the past that bound his soul. Even after slavery was abolished, society was slow to change as many felt racial discrimination. Jeremy is first heard as a drunk who was arrested, but later the play reveals that racism was the cause of his arrest. He explains that, “…They snatched hold of us to get that two dollars…” (65) before he started drinking although he was arrested for causing trouble as a drunk. In another scene, Jeremy loses his job because a “white fellow come by told me to give him fifty cents if I wanted to keep working...I kept hold to mine and they fired me” (84). In addition, Seth’s comment on the migration of the newly freed African Americans alludes to discrimination: “White fellows come over and in six months got more than what I got. But these niggars keep on coming…(62). Finally, while Martha is explaining her reason for disappearing, racial discrimination is apparent. She claims that the reverend “wanted to move the church up North ‘cause of all the trouble the colored folks was having down there” (93). Even in the North, which supported freedom of African Americans, problems between the two races occurred. August Wilson exposes that after slavery, society’s problems were not fixed. Slavery had left a deep scar in America and racial discrimination remained an immense dilemma that was generally avoided during that time.