[1 of 5] Joe Turner's Come and Gone, Act One, Scene 1, by August Wilson
Author: August Wilson
Wilson, August. "Act One, Scene 1," Joe Turner's Come and Gone. Signet, 1988.
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Preface to the Play
Mill Hand’s Lunch Bucket (Pittsburgh Memories)
Artist: Romare Bearden (American, b.1911, d.1988), artist
Date: 1978
Medium: collage of cut paper and fabric with watercolor, graphite pencil, gouache, and felt-tip pen on Masonite
Measurements: 13 11/16 x 18 1/16 in.
(34.8 x 45.9 cm)
Classification: Painting
Museum: Cincinnati Art Museum
Department: American Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings
Museum Purchase: The Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial and the John J. Emery Endowment
Rights: © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Accession No: 2011.7
Asset Copyright: © WQED Multimedia and THIRTEEN Productions LLC.
All Rights Reserved.
Media CreditsAugust Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand is a co-production of WQED and THIRTEEN PRODUCTIONS LLC’S American Masters for WNET.
Source:This media asset is from American Masters—August Wilson: The Ground on Which I Stand
Visit the American Masters Collection for additional resources on August Wilson and other American writers.
Project funded by: PNC Bank
THE AUGUST WILSON CENTURY CYCLE
JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE
1911
August Wilson
FOREWORD BY ROMULUS LINNEY
CHARACTERS
SETH HOLLY, owner of the boardinghouse.|
BERTHA HOLLY, his wife.
BYNUM WALKER, a rootworker.
RUTHERFORD SELIG, a peddler.
JEREMY FURLOW, a resident.
HERALD LOOMIS, a resident.
ZONIA LOOMIS, his daughter.
MATTIE CAMPBELL, a resident.
REUBEN MERCER, boy who lives next door.
MOLLY CUNNINGHAM, a resident.
MARTHA LOOMIS PENTECOST, Herald Loomis’s wife.
SETTING
August 1911.
A boardinghouse in Pittsburgh.
At right is a kitchen.
Two doors open off the kitchen.
One leads to the outhouse and Seth’s workshop.
The other to Seth’s and Bertha’s bed-room.
At left is a parlor.
The front door opens into the parlor, which gives access to the stairs leading to the upstairs rooms.
There is a small outside playing area.
THE 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 countless 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 the gods and only guessing at their faces, they arrive dazed and stunned, their heart kicking in their chest with a song worth singing.
They arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope, marked men and women seeking to scrape from the narrow, crooked cobbles and the fiery blasts of the coke furnace a way of bludgeoning and shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth.
Foreigners in a strange land, they carry as part and parcel of their baggage a long line of separation and dispersement which informs their sensibilities and marks their conduct as they search for ways to reconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy.
Source: Joe Turner’s Come and Gone Full Vimeo Uploader: Anna Bean Uploaded: Thursday, August 20, 2020 at 8:11 PM
Act One
SCENE 1
The lights come up on the kitchen. Bertha busies herself with breakfast preparations. Seth stands looking out the window at Bynum in the yard. Seth is in his early fifties. Born of Northern free parents, a skilled craftsman and owner of the boardinghouse, he has a stability that none of the other characters have Bertha is five years his junior. Married for over iwenty-five years, she has learned how to negotiate around Seth’s apparent orneriness.
SETH (At the window, laughing): If that ain’t the damndest thing I seen. Look here, Bertha.
BERTHA: I done seen Bynum out there with them pigeons before.
SETH: Naw . .. naw … look at this. That pigeon flopped out of Bynums hand and he about to have a fit (Bertha crosses over to the window.) He down there on his hands and knees behind that bush looking all over for that pigeon and it on the other side of the yard. See it over there?
BERTHA: Come on and get your breakfast and leave that man alone.
SETH: Look at him … he still looking. He ain’t seen it yet. All that old mumbo jumbo nonsense. I don’t know why I put up with it.
BERTHA: You don’t say nothing when he bless the house.
SETH: I just go along with that ’cause of you. You around here sprinkling salt all over the place … got pennies lined up across the threshold . .. all that heebie-jebie stuff. I just put up with that ’cause of you. I don’t pay that kind of stuff no mind. And you going down there to the church and wanna come come home and sprinkle salt all over the place.
BERTHA: It don’t hurt none. I can’t say if it help … but it don’t hurt none.
SETH: Look at him. He done found that pigeon and now he’s talking to it.
BERTHA: These biscuits be ready in a minute.
SETH: He done drew a big circle with that stick and now he’s dancing around. I know he’d better not … (Bolts from the window and rushes to the back door) Hey, Bynum! Don’t be hopping around stepping in my vegetables. Hey, Bynum .. Watch where you stepping!
BERTHA: Seth, leave that man alone.
SETH (Coming back into the house): I don’t care how much he be dancing around… Just don’t be stepping in my vegetables. Man got my garden all messed up now … planting them weeds out there . .. burying them pigeons and whatnot.
BERTHA: Bynum don’t bother nobody. He ain’t even thinking about your vegetables.
SETH: I know he ain’t! That’s why he out there stepping on them.
BERTHA: What Mr. Johnson say down there?
SETH: I told him if I had the tools I could go out here and find me four or five fellows and open up my own shop instead of working for Mr. Olowski. Get me four or five fellows and teach them how to make pots and pans. One man making ten pots is five men making fifty. He told me hed think about it.
BERTHA: Well, maybe he’ll come to see it your way.
SETH: He wanted me to sign over the house to him. You know what I thought of that idea.
BERTHA: He’ll come to see you’re right.
SETH: I’m going up and talk to Sam Green.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat.
I’m going up and talk to him.
See if he got more sense than Mr. Johnson.
I can’t get nowhere working for Mr. Olowski and selling Selig five or six pots on the side.
I’m going up and see Sam Green.
See if he loan me the money.
(Crosses back to the window) Now he got that cup.
He done killed that pigeon and now he’s putting its blood in that little cup.
I believe he drink that blood.
BERTHA: Seth Holly, what is wrong with you this morning? Come on and get your breakfast so you can go to bed. You know Bynum don’t be drinking no pigeon blood.
SETH: I don’t know what he do.
BERTHA: Well, watch him, then. Hé’s gonna dig a little hole and bury that pigeon. Then he’s gonna pray over that blood . .. pour it on top … mark out his circle and come on into the house.
SETH: That’s what he doing . .. he pouring that blood on top.
BERTHA: When they gonna put you back working daytime? Told me two months ago he was gonna put you back working daytime.
SETH: That’s what Mr. Olowski told me. I got to wait till he say when. He tell me what to do. I don’t tell him. Drive me crazy to speculate on the man’s wishes when he don’t know what he want to do himself.
BERTHA: Well, I wish he go ahead and put you back working daytime. This working all hours of the night don’t make no sense.
SETH: It don’t make no sense for that boy to run out of here and get drunk so they lock him up either.
BERTHA: Who? Who they got locked up for being drunk?
SETH: That boy that’s staying upstairs . . . Jeremy. I stopped down there on Logan Street on my way home from work and one of the fellows told me about it. Say he seen it when they arrested him.
BERTHA: I was wondering why I ain’t seen him this morning.
SETH: You know I don’t put up with that. I told him when he came. . .
(Bynum enters from the yard carrying some plants. He is a short, round man in his early sixties. A conjure man, or rootworker, he gives the impression of always being in control of everything. Nothing ever bothers him. He seems to be lost in a world of his own making and to swallow any adversity or interference with his grand design.)
What you doing bringing them weeds in my house? Out there stepping on my vegetables and now wanna carry them weeds in my house.
BYNUM: Morning, Seth. Morning, Sister Bertha.
SETH: Messing up my garden growing them things out there. I ought to go out there and pull up all them weeds.
BERTHA: Some gal was by here to see you this morning, Bynum. You was out there in the yard . .. I told her to come back later.
BYNUM (To Seth): You look sick. What’s the matter, you ain’t eating right?
SETH: What if I was sick? You ain’t getting near me with none of that stuff.
(Bertha sets a plate of biscuits on the table.)
BYNUM: My … my … Bertha, your biscuits getting fatter and fatter. (Takes a biscuit and begins to eat) Where Jeremy? I don’t see him around this morning. He usually be around riffing and raffing on Saturday morning.
SETH: I know where he at. I know just where he at. They got him down there in the jail. Getting drunk and acting a fool. He down there where he belong with all that foolishness.
BYNUM: Mr. Piney’s boys got him, huh? They ain’t gonna do nothing but hold on to him for a little while. He’s gonna be back here hungrier than a mule directly.
SETH: I don’t go for all that carrying on and such. This is a respectable house. I don’t have no drunkards or fools around here.
BYNUM: That boy got a lot of country in him. He ain’t been up here but two weeks. Its gonna take a while before he can work that country out of him.
SETH: These niggers coming up here with that old backward country style of living. It’s hard enough now without all that ignorant kind of acting. Ever since slavery got over with there ain’t been nothing but foolish-acting niggers. Word get out they need men to work in the mill and put in these roads. . . and niggers drop everything and head North looking for freedom. They don’t know the white fellows looking too. White fellows coming from all over the world. White fellow come over and in six months got more than what I got. But these niggers keep on coming. Walking . . . riding . . . carrying their Bibles. That boy done carried a guitar all the way from North Carolina. What he gonna find out? What he gonna do with that guitar? This the city.
(There is a knock on the door.)
Niggers coming up here from the backwoods . . . coming up here from the country carrying Bibles and guitars looking for freedom. They got a rude awakening.
(Seth goes to answer the door. Rutherford Selig enters. About Seth’s age, he is a thin white man with greasy hair. A peddler, he supplies Seth with the raw materials to make pots and pans which he then peddles door to door in the mill towns along the river. He keeps a list of his customers as they move about and is known in the various communities as the People Finder. He carries squares of sheet metal under his arm.)
Ho! Forgot you was coming today. Come on in.
BYNUM: If it ain’t Kusherford Selig. . . the People Finder himself.
SELIG: What say there, Bynum?
BYNUM: I say about my shiny man. You got to tell me something. I done give you my dollar. . . I’m looking to get a report.
SELIG: I got eight here, Seth.
SETH (Taking the sheet metal): What is this? What you giving me here? What I’m gonna do with this?
SELIG: I need some dustpans. Everybody asking me about dustpans.
SETH: Gonna cost you fifteen cents apiece. And ten cents to put a handle on them.
SELIG: I’ll give you twenty cents apiece with the handles.
SETH: All right. But I ain’t gonna give you but fifteen cents for the sheet metal.
SELIG: It’s twenty-five cents apiece for the metal. That’s what we agreed on.
SETH: This low-grade sheet metal. They ain’t worth but a dime. I’m doing you a favor giving you fifteen cents. You know this metal ain’t worth no twenty-five cents. Don’t come talking that twenty-five cent stuff to me over no low-grade sheet metal.
SELIG: All right, fifteen cents apiece. Just make me some dustpans out of them.
(Seth exits with the sheet metal out the back door.)
BERTHA: Sit on down there, Selig. Get you a cup of coffee and a biscuit.
BYNUM: Where you coming from this time?
SELIG: I been upriver. All along the Monongahela. Past Rankin and all up around Little Washington.
BYNUM: Did you find anybody?
SELIG: I found Sadie Jackson up in Braddock. Her mother’s staying down there in Scotchbottom say she hadn’t heard from her and she didn’t know where she was at. I found her up in Braddock on Enoch Street. She bought a frying pan from me.
BYNUM: You around here finding everybody how come you ain’t found my shiny man?
SELIG: The only shiny man I saw was the Nigras working on the road gang with the sweat glistening on them.
BYNUM: Naw, you’d be able to tell this fellow. He shine like new money.
SELIG: Well, I done told you I can’t find nobody without a name.
BERTHA: Here go one of these hot biscuits, Selig.
BYNUM: This fellow don’t have no name. I call him Tohn ’cause it was up around Johnstown where I seen him. I ain’t even so sure he’s one special fellow. That shine could pass on to anybody. He could be anybody shining.
SELIG: Well, what’s he look like besides being shiny? There’s lots of shiny Nigras.
BYNUM: He’s just a man I seen out on the road. He ain’t had no special look. Just a man walking toward me on the road. He come up and asked me which way the road went. I told him everything I knew about the road, where it went and all, and he asked me did I have anything to eat ’cause he was hungry. Say he ain’t had nothing to eat in three days. Well, I never be out there on the road without a piece of dried meat. Or an orange or an apple. So I give this fellow an orange. He take and eat that orange and told me to come and go along the road a little ways with him, that he had something he wanted to show me. He had a look about him made me wanna go with him, see what he gonna show me. We walked on a bit and it’s getting kind of far from where I met him when it come up on me all of a sudden, we wasn’t going the way he had come from, we was going back my way. Since he said he ain’t knew nothing about the road, I asked him about this. He say he had a voice inside him telling him which way to go and if I come and go along with him he was gonna show me the Secret of Life. Quite naturally I followed him. A fellow that’s gonna show you the Secret of Life ain’t to be taken lightly. We get near this bend in the road.
(Seth enters with an assortment of pots.)
SETH: I got six here, Selig.
SELIG: Wait a minute, Seth. Bynum’s telling me about the secret of life. Go ahead, Bynum. I wanna hear this.
(Seth sets the pots down and exits out the back.)
BYNUM: We get near this bend in the road and he told me to hold out my hands. Then he rubbed them together with his and I looked down and see they got blood on them. Told me to take and rub it all over me. . . say that was a way of cleaning myself. Then we went around the bend in that road. Got around that bend and it seem like all of a sudden we ain’t in the same place. Turn around that bend and everything look like it was twice as big as it was. The trees and everything bigger than life! Sparrows big as eagles! I turned around to look at this fellow and he had this light coming out of him. I had to cover up my eyes to keep from being blinded. He shining like new money with that light. He shined until all the light seemed like it seeped out of him and then he was gone and I was by myself in this strange place where everything was bigger than life.
I wandered around there looking for that road, trying to find my way back from this big place . .. and I looked over and seen my daddy standing there. He was the same size he always was, except for his hands and his mouth. He had a great big old mouth that look like it took up his whole face and his hands were as big as hams. Look like they was too big to carry around. My daddy called me to him. Said he had been thinking about me and it grieved him to see me in the world carrying other people’s songs and not having one of my own. Told me he was gonna show me how to find my song. Then he carried me further into this big place until we come to this ocean. Then he showed me something I ain’t yot words to tell you. But if you stand to witness it, you done seen something there. I stayed in that place a while and my daddy taught me the meaning of this thing that I had seen and showed me how to find my song. I asked him about the shiny man and he told me he was the One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way. Said there was lots of shiny men and if I ever saw one again before I died then I would know that my song had been accepted and worked its full power in the world and I could lay down and die a happy man. A man who done left his mark on life. On the way people cling to each other out of the truth they find in themselves. Then he showed me how to get back to the road. I came out to where everything was its own size and I had my song. I had the Binding Song. I choose that song because that’s what I seen most when I was traveling. . . people walking away and leaving one another. So I takes the power of my song and binds them together.
(Seth enters from the yard carrying cabbages and tomatoes.)
Been binding people ever since.
That’s why they call me Bynum.
Just like glue I sticks people together.
SETH: Maybe they ain’t supposed to be stuck sometimes. You ever think of that?
BYNUM: Oh, I don’t do it lightly. It cost me a piece of myself every time I do. I’m a Binder of What Clings. You got to find out if they cling first. You can’t bind what don’t cling.
SELIG: Well, how is that the Secret of Life? I thought you said he was gonna show you the secret of life. That’s what I’m waiting to find out.
BYNUM: Oh, he showed me all right. But you still got to figure it out. Can’t nobody figure it out for you. You got to come to it on your own. That’s why I’m looking for the shiny man.SELIG: Well, I’ll keep my eye out for him. What you got there, Seth?
SETH: Here go some cabbage and tomatoes. I got some green beans coming in real nice. I’m gonna take and start me a grapevine out there next year. Butera says he gonna give me a piece of his vine and I’m gonna start that out there.
SELIG: How many of them pots you got?
SETH: I got six. That’s six dollars minus eight on top of fifteen for the sheet metal come to a dollar twenty out the six dollars leave me four dollars and eighty cents.
SELIG (Counting out the money): There’s four dollars. . . and. . . eighty cents.
SETH: How many of them dustpans you want?
SELIG: As many as you can make out them sheets.
SETH: You can use that many? I get to cutting on them sheets figuring how to make them dustpans. . . ain’t no telling how many I’m liable to come up with.
SELIG: I can use them and you can make me some more next time.
SETH: All right, I’m gonna hold you to that, now.
SELIG: Thanks for the biscuit, Bertha.
BERTHA: You know you welcome anytime, Selig.
SETH: Which way you heading?
SELIG: Going down to Wheeling. All through West Virginia there. I’ll be back Saturday. They putting in new roads down that way. Makes traveling easier.
SETH: That’s what I hear. All up around here too. Got a fellow staying here working on that road by the Brady Street Bridge.
SELIG: Yeah, it’s gonna make traveling real nice. Thanks for the cabbage, Seth. I’ll see you on Saturday.
(Selig exits.)
SETH (To Bynum): Why you wanna start all that nonsense talk with that man? All that shiny man nonsense.
BYNUM: You know it ain’t no nonsense. Bertha know it aint no nonsense. I don’t know if Selig know or not.
BERTHA: Seth, when you get to making them dustpans make me a coffeepot.
SETH: What’s the matter with your coffee? Ain’t nothing wrong with your coffee. Don’t she make some good coffee, Bynum?
BYNUM: I ain’t worried about the coffee. I know she makes some good biscuits.
SETH: I ain’t studying no coffeepot, woman.
You heard me tell the man I was gonna cut as many dustpans as them sheets will make … and all of a sudden you want a coffeepot.
BERTHA: Man, hush up and go on and make me that coffeepot.
(Jeremy enters through the front door. About twenty-five, he gives the impression that he has the world in his hand, that he can meet life’s challenges head on. He smiles a lot. He is a proficient guitar player, though his spirit has yet to be molded into song.)
BYNUM: I hear Mr. Piney’s boys had you.
JEREMY: Fined me two dollars for nothing! Ain’t done nothing.
SETH: I told you when you come on here everybody know my house. Know these is respectable quarters. I don’t put up with no foolishness. Everybody know Seth Holly keep a good house. Was my daddy’s house. This house been a decent house for a long time.
JEREMY: I ain’t done nothing. Mr. Seth. I stopped by the Workmen’s Club and got me a bottle. Me and Roper Lee from Alabama. Had us a half pint. We was fixing to cur that half in two wher they came up on us. Asked us if we was working. We told them we was putting in the road over yonder and that it was our payday. They snatched hold of us to get that two dollars. Me and Roper Lee ain’t even had a chance to take a drink when they grabbed us.
SETH: I don’t go for all that kind of carrying on.
BERTHA: Leave the boy alone, Seth. You know the police do that. Figure there’s too many people out on the street they take some of them off. You know that.
SETH: I ain’t gonna have folks talking.
BERTHA: Aint nobody talking nothing, That’s all in your head. You want some grits and biscuits. Jeremy
JEREMY: Thank you, Miss Bertha. They didn’t give us a thing to eat last night. I’ll take one of them big bowls if you don’t mind.
(There is a knock at the door.
Seth goes to answer it.
Enter Herald Loomis and his eleven-year-old daughter, Zonia.
Herald Loomis is thirty-two years old.
He is at times possessed.
A man driven not by the hellhounds that seemingly bay at his heels, but by his search for a world that speaks to something about himself.
He is unable to harmonize the forces that swirl around him, and seeks to re-create the world into one that contains his image.
He wears a hat and a long wool coat.)
LOOMIS: Me and my daughter looking for a place to stay, mister.
You got a sign say you got rooms.
(Seth stares at Loomis, sizing him up.)
Mister, if you ain’t got no rooms we can go somewhere else.
SETH: How long you plan on staying?
LOOMIS: Don’t know. Two weeks or more maybe.
SETH: It’s two dollars a week for the room. We serve meals twice a day. It’s two dollars for room and board. Pay up in advance.
(Loomis reaches into his pocket.)
It’s a dollar extra for the girl.
LOOMIS: The girl sleep in the same room.
SETH: Well, do she eat off the same plate? We serve meals twice a day. That’s a dollar extra for food.
LOOMIS: Ain’t got no extra dollar. I was planning on asking your missus if she could help out with the cooking and cleaning and whatnot.SETH: Her helping out don’t put no food on the table. I need that dollar to buy some food.
LOOMIS: I’ll give you fifty cents extra. She don’t eat much.
SETH: Okay. . . but fifty cents don’t buy but half a portion.
BERTHA: Seth, she can help me out. Let her help me out. I can use some help.
SETH: Well, that’s two dollars for the week. Pay up in advance. Saturday to Saturday. You wanna stay on then it’s two more come Saturday.
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