Imagine that you were kidnapped and held hostage for seven years, treated as a slave and then released. What effect would that have on the rest of your life? An experience unique to you that took away seven years of life you will never get back. You survived physically, yes, but were left shattered emotionally and mentally by the ordeal. Compromising the attempt to return to normal is the fact that it is a unique experience to you; nobody existed in your daily life for seven years but you and your captors. It would be a nightmare.
But now imagine the same scenario with one vital difference. Everything is the same as described except that instead of just you being held enslaved, there were others who came and went over the course of those seven years. Once you are released, the nightmare is little changed but it is no longer just yours alone. You are not unique, but part of a collective nightmare of lives stolen and transformed forever. You are now no longer known by just your name, you are also know as part of “them.” This, in a nutshell, is the story of Herald Loomis, an important character in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. And his experience is a microcosmic metaphor for the entire experience of slavery. Instead of just one person being abducted and instead of maybe a dozen, part of the identity of any single person who was ever forced into bondage in America is that of being part of the “slave race.”
It is a harsh, bitter truth, but it is not entirely accurate. No one who was sold into slavery during the American slave trade should ever be dismissively referred to by that term. They were free human beings who lived lives and had completely separate identities who were made slaves by evil people. Call those Americans slaveholders, but do not refer to the human beings they “owned” as slaves. It is an inhumane normalization of an act of abominable malevolence. Any person who connected to slave ownership in even the most tenuous of terms should be collective dismissed as slaveholders, but the African natives and their offspring whose lives they co-opted should not be subject to such further deprivation of their innate humanity.
Joe Turner is the name of a man who long after abolition felt no compunction about abducting completely free and emancipated blacks in America and forcing them into servitude before releasing them after seven years. It is a viciously symbolic parody of the entire slave trafficking experience in American history. When Herald Loomis is released by Turner, he tries to go back to the life he had before as a sharecropper with his family, but the family has been ripped apart. His wife has disappeared, and his daughter left behind to be raised by her grandmother. Herald cannot go back to the life which gave him his identity and a life carrying around the identity as one of Joe Turner’s slaves is no life at all. Multiply this exponentially and you have the story of everyone whose life and identity were stolen by the slaveholders of the Confederacy. (A fictional construct which, of course, never officially existed because Lincoln refused to acknowledge its legitimacy; a nicely ironic turn of the tables on the subject of identities.) Ultimately, this is what the play is about because it is not just those African natives stolen from their homeland and pressed into bondage by slaveholders who share this collective nightmare, but their descendants whose identity is also diffused by the historical antecedent to their births. The African-American experience in the United States is unlike any other immigrant experience. All the other stories of immigrants coming to America from elsewhere—Sweden to Japan to Argentina—is a story of intent and cultural assimilation.
Whether desired or not, the Irish culture flowed into the American just as easily as the Italian or the Polish or Indian or the Korean. It is only the various cultural histories from those countries making up the African continent which were not allow to flow at all. Perhaps the Russians and the Algerian cultures were met with resistance, but they melted into the pot nonetheless. They could gather together freely with others from different parts of those countries and express their cultural bond openly. This was no the case with the African identity and this is the circumstance which binds all the characters in this play together. There is the shared sense of displacement and identity imposition from without and the unique lack of contact and even direct knowledge of the cultural identity of their ancestors. The bloodlines of the lineage were purposely squeezed so tightly that what little information did flow was a slow drip. The play is not just the story of Herald Loomis being forced to re-enact the slave experience in America, but of an entire culturally bound group of people across the country being force to re-enact it every day that passes without them having found their “song” and established their self-identity by themselves alone.
