TSMS_Assignment2

**Theresa Stratmann** **Question 2:** Discussion of the stories used //in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone//
 * Assignment 2 - Regarding //Joe Turner's Come and Gone//**

In //Joe Turner’s Come and Gone// the playwright, August Wilson, introduces us to an assortment of characters thrown together at a boarding house in Pittsburg. Although each has their own unique history, the characters are unified by their migration North in search for a life after slavery. To introduce this motley crew, Wilson often has them tell stories from their life. In this manner we hear from Bynum (pg. 63), Jeremy (pg. 66), Selig (pg. 75), Molly (pg. 83), Loomis (pg. 87, 94), and Martha (pg 93). Each story is poignant and rich in imagery. Martha’s was particularly important in conveying her character. Throughout the play she is mentioned as the holy grail of Loomis’s search. We see what the search has done to Loomis, but we know nothing about her and how she has been coping with the loss of her husband. It is not until the last act of the play, in the emotional reunion of the separated couple, that Martha is allowed to talk and so becomes a concrete being. Martha’s story begins on page 93. From it we learn that she waited five years for Loomis to return, even though after two months of his absence she was kicked off the land they sharecropped. She stayed with her mother and waited, but after five years she decided to pick up her shattered life and move on. To her he was dead – whether actually dead, or just a dead part of her life. So she moved North with the church to try to make a new life, because there was no more sense in her wasting her youth. Very factual, this story is nonetheless riddled with imagery conveying Martha’s pain. When they took Loomis away she says, “It was like I had poured it [her life] in a cracked jar and it all leaked out the bottom.” These words show how her life just fell apart – she lost the person who was holding her life together and it left her exposed and alone. And then she tells how “I killed you in my heart. I buried you. I mourned you.” Kill and bury are very dark words, but juxtaposed to the word mourn, they describe a horrible decision that was wrenching to make, but had to be carried out as efficiently as the succinct sentences that describe it. The short sentences and loaded words make these statements very frank and so we realize that Martha has indeed moved on. Yet through the imagery of her last sentence Martha begs Loomis to understand that decision because “I couldn’t drag you behind me like a sack of cotton.” Waiting for Loomis had become a form of enslavement for her. Her life was dominated by the need to wait for him, and she finally realizes she has to free herself from that burden. In choosing to use images of slavery Martha knows she can reach Loomis. He has actually been enslaved, but probably never thought how his enslavement was her bondage, too. He is in his own struggle to move past his years of enslavement, so how can he refuse her the same? A succinct emotional summary of the past seven years, this story simultaneously introduces Martha while providing Loomis with the facts he needs to move on. It is at this point that Loomis realizes Martha has come to terms with their horrible separation. In her heart their relationship is over, and so now Loomis can end it in his heart too and move on. He needed to see her to figure out how he should proceed with his life – could they continue their old life or had the circumstances made that impossible? Martha’s story therefore is the catalyst for the climax of the play when Loomis slashes his chest and as Bynum says, finds his song.