Re-imagining Christian Spirituality in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone

Abstract

Forced migration and separation, which are integral to African-American history, coupled with the juridical, social and racial restrictions of slavery, inaugurated an insidious form of dislocation for African Americans: they lost their spiritual anchor in the gods of traditional Africa. With this loss came physical and ideational restlessness, which worsened with emancipation and merely occasioned another quest—a re-union of the physical, social and spiritual. In this paper we argue that Wilson, in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, foregrounds spirituality as the freed slaves’ primary anchor for self-authentication, and that this self-authentication and emancipation must be predicated on the subversion of Christian perspectives of personal redemption and on giving mainstream Christianity an African resonance. We further argue that Wilson presents personal redemption through deliberately subverting the metaphysical belief system the freed slaves were inducted into during slavery, namely Christianity. In other words, Wilson turns Christianity on its head to argue for a more Afrocentric approach to spirituality and personal redemption. The restless wanderings of his characters in search of freedom from physical bondage become a metaphor for a spiritual search. We argue that Bynum’s “Shiny Man” in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is an Afrocentric allusion to the Christ-like figure as the bearer of eternal redemption.