August Wilson's "Joe Turner's Come and Gone"
This work is a part of Wilson's 10-play cycle that explores the African American experience, decade by decade, over the course of the twentieth century. Wilson was born in 1945 and died in 2005. "Joe Turner" takes place in 1911, in Pittsburg, where most of the plays take an inhabitation and a name. The playwright's note gives a clear idea of his aims in this play: It is August in Pittsburgh, 1911. The sun falls out of heaven like a stone. The fires of the steel mill rage with a combined sense of industry and progress. Barges loaded with coal and iron ore trudge up the river to the mill towns that dot the Monongahela and return with fresh, hard, gleaming steel. The city flexes its muscles. men throw countess bridges across the rivers, lay roads and carve tunnels through the hills sprouting with houses. From the deep and the near South the sons and daughters of newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory, having forgotten the names of ...