Joe Turner’s Come and Gone: Act Two: Scene Five Summary & Analysis

Once again, transience and migration come to the forefront of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, this time manifesting in the way Herald wraps his head around being forced to leave the boarding house. Indeed, he embraces that he and Zonia must leave, asserting almost optimistically—or at least not particularly begrudgingly—that they’re going to “see where the road take[s]” them. For a man who’s traveled for four years in search of his wife, the prospect of taking to the road again is natural, thus showing that transience is something to which a person can become accustomed.

Bertha again emerges as a well-balanced person who’s in touch with both the practical side of life and the emotional and spiritual elements of existence. She doesn’t commit herself to just one way of being like Seth or Bynum, but rather allows herself to draw upon a range of belief, thereby absorbing life and finding herself capable of making it into a “celebration” of sorts. Wilson indicates this when he says that she blesses the kitchen with her “own magic,” suggesting that while somebody like Bynum borrows his craft from a folk tradition, Bertha creates a unique blend of her own, one naturally embedded in the “muscles of her heart.”

Finally, Herald has found Martha and is able to look upon her face, thus beginning the process of making his “own world.” And although the audience might expect him to be overjoyed in this moment, he doesn’t embrace his long-lost wife. In fact, he speaks rather resentfully, accusing her of running away and not waiting for him to be released from the captivity of Joe Turner. As such, it slowly becomes clear that Loomis’s goal of seeing Martha’s face and making his “own world” most likely has nothing to do with simply enabling him to pick up where he left off in his old life—rather, he seems to want closure before moving on with the rest of his life.

The fact that Herald accuses Martha of leaving Zonia “motherless in the world” only further supports the notion that his desire to reunite with his wife has nothing to do with wanting to happily resume their married life. This, it seems, is not a blissful encounter, but a confrontation, one in which Herald can finally settle the matters that have clearly been plaguing his mind since he escaped Joe Turner.

Martha’s harsh words surely must cut straight to Herald’s core, since her ability to move on from the painful past is essentially an example of the kind of emotional reparation Herald himself is trying to undergo. Indeed, she “killed” him in her heart so that she could thrive in her present reality, something he needs to do for himself in order to unburden himself from a personal history of oppression. Of course, racism and hate aren’t so easily erased, something Herald most likely knows, considering that he’s had so much trouble putting his life back together after Joe Turner violated his supposedly inalienable human rights. It’s also worth noting that Martha compares carrying Herald’s memory around to dragging a “sack of cotton,” as this image is charged with the history of slavery, since slaves often labored in cotton fields. As such, Martha conflates the burden of romantic memory with the ugly history of slavery and oppression.

When Zonia says, “Take me with you till we keep searching and never finding,” she illustrates how a lifestyle of transience and constant migration often regenerates itself, creating a never-ending cycle of travel. In turn, the process of searching becomes more important than the actual process of finding. Indeed, Zonia wants to “keep searching and never finding” because this is the way she has lived the past four years—years that have clearly formed her worldview and instilled in her a desire to roam from town to town with her beloved (if misunderstood) father.

In this moment, Herald interprets Bynum’s ability to unite people with one another as a restrictive and oppressive practice, something that inhibits his sense of freedom. Interestingly enough, he accuses Bynum not of binding him to Martha, but to the road, suggesting that he resents the restless travel and endless searching he’s had to indulge for the past four years. However, Bynum points out that Herald is actually the one keeping himself “bound” up, since he’s seemingly inextricably linked to his song—a song he can’t manage to “stand up and sing.” It isn’t until Herald finally manages to “harmonize” this song with the external world that he’ll be able to stop searching for it.

During his conversation with Martha, Herald once again expresses his skepticism about religion and his strong aversion to God’s almightiness. Railing against Jesus and God by emphasizing their white and domineering qualities, he frames Christianity as something used to subordinate black people. Throughout this argument, it becomes overwhelmingly apparent how different he and Martha have become. Although Herald was presumably a devoted Christian at one point in his life—judging by the fact that he was a deacon before Joe Turner captured him—he now can’t stand the mere idea of submitting himself to religion. Martha, on the other hand, has remained faithful to the church, and their differences emphasize just how much Herald’s experience as one of Joe Turner’s captives has changed him. 

When Herald slashes himself across the chest and rubs blood over himself, the audience is reminded of Bynum’s story of the shiny man, who made Bynum hold out his hands and smear blood over his body before he finally had his vision. This, the shiny man had explained to him, was a way of cleansing himself. As such, Herald seems to have cleansed himself with his own blood, thereby gaining a sense of agency that allows him to finally “stand” (seemingly a reference to his earlier vision, in which he was unable to get up). In turn, he validates his own claim that he doesn’t need Jesus to bleed for him, since his sudden epiphany comes as the result of his decision to bleed for himself, an act of autonomy and self-possession.

In keeping with his assertion that he has finally managed to stand on his own two legs, Herald Loomis manages in this moment to attain a sense of “self-sufficiency,” which enables him to free himself from “encumbrance[s]” like the memory of Joe Turner. Metaphorically speaking, the fact that Herald is able to stand suggests that he has, after all this time, found a foothold in the chaotic new world order brought on by the fall of slavery, a significant accomplishment considering that he was previously so scarred by America’s racist history and his own embattled past that he couldn’t even remember how to “touch” another human. In addition, when Bynum yells out that Herald is “shining,” the audience learns why these two men have had such a close spiritual connection throughout the play: Herald is one of the shiny men Bynum has been searching for ever since his father told him that seeing another shiny man would mean that his (Bynum’s) song had been accepted. Now that he’s met Herald, then, he knows he can lie down and die a happy man.