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

“Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” is an old blues song written in the years after slavery about the black men who disappeared after having been framed and captured by a renegade law enforcer capitalizing on the South’s racism. By singing this, Bynum evokes the tension running rampant throughout the South after the fall of slavery. The fact that this song draws Herald into the parlor suggests once again that he and Bynum occupy a similar spiritual wavelength, as Bynum seems to know something about Herald. In this moment, it’s rather clear that Bynum is trying to get to the bottom of Herald’s personal history and his experience in the South. Of course, Seth appears utterly unaware of Bynum’s efforts and is merely proud to be able to claim that he has never picked cotton in his life.

Bynum provides some insight into why people often are so drawn to lives of migration and transience, suggesting that the desire to travel often arises from a feeling of “dissatisf[action],” some kind of abstract discontentment that keeps a person moving from in search of something to give life meaning. This meaningful thing everyone is searching for, Bynum upholds, is a “song” that will solidify a person’s purpose. A person without a song, he says, must go “off in search of it.” At the end of his brief monologue, he says he can tell that Loomis was a victim of Joe Turner, revealing what the audience has no doubt already suspected: that he does in fact know more than Herald would expect about his life.

Herald’s backstory aligns with the actual history of Joe Turner, a man also known as Joe Turney, who was indeed the brother of the Governor of Tennessee. In charge of transporting prisoners to the penitentiary, Joe Turney would purposefully frame black men for crimes—such as gambling—so that he could then have total control over them as prisoners without rights. On his route to the penitentiary he often sold these prisoners to farms and plantations along the Mississippi River. The blues song that originates from his name is called “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” because this is what people used to say when somebody would ask why all of the black men in a given town had disappeared.

When Herald says he’s been “wandering a long time in somebody else’s world,” he reinforces Wilson’s original notion that Loomis is unable to “harmonize” his “song” with the external world, which he wants to “recreate” so that it “contains his image.” Indeed, the world doesn’t contain his image because it is “somebody else’s”: Joe Turner’s. Because Joe Turner so flagrantly derailed Herald’s life, his influence looms large even after he released the poor man, so large that Herald feels like he’s still living in Turner’s world. By seeing his wife’s face, then, he will essentially be able to pick up where he left off, thereby making his own world.

Bynum’s assertion that Joe Turner has Herald “bound up” is interesting, considering that Bynum himself binds people together. But whereas Bynum binds people to others in an attempt to forge unification and love, Joe Turner binds people in a more literally inhibiting sense, preventing somebody like Herald from being free and singing his “song.” Furthermore, when Herald says that Bynum is “one of them bones people,” he finally acknowledges that he and Bynum share a spiritual connection, since the “bones people” are the ones he saw in his vision. This is perhaps why Bynum was able to partake in the telling of this vision—after all, he seems to have lived it himself.