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A NOTE FROM THE PLAYWRIGHT

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 recconnect, to reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and whelp of joy.

-August Wilson

AN AFRICAN AMERICAN ODYSSEY
by
Spencer R. Crew

In 1911, Pittsburgh, the city of Holly's boardinghouse in Joe Turner's Come and Gone, did not have a large African-American community. Those few who lived there (6% of the total population) were the first wave of newcomers from the South-adventurous souls who braved the meager prospects. The characters in Joe Turner are pioneers, for the great wave of migration to Pittsburgh would not come until 1916, when the prosperity brought on by the First World War guaranteed more and better jobs. 

These early African-American settlers in Pittsburgh and other northern cities were fleeing a South where, though slavery had been abolished, Jim Crow laws, the Klan, the sharecropping system and discriminatory voting legislation made a fair, not to mention a prospering, life impossible. No longer slaves but not truly free, they set out on an odyssey to make a place for themselves in American society. The characters in Joe Turner's Come and Gone who pass through Holly's boardinghouse face a new future, but its foundations are not yet clear. Each is searching for ways to define him- or herself in terms which give his or her life a purpose and meaning.

The play accurately reflects the reasons African-Americans migrated North: the search for family members, dispersed by the chaos and hardship that followed slavery, and the subsequent attempt to re-establish the family unit as a way of creating a solid foundation in an uncertain world; and the search for economic security, as decent jobs were impossible to find in the South. Not that the North was a haven. Labor organizations were closed to the new migrants, and European immigrants dominated the unskilled, non-union industrial occupations. Indeed, Book T. Washington had advised, "Cast down your buckets where you are...the South presents a far better opportunity than the North." But, as Joe Turner illustrates, many disregarded his advice.

The new migrants faced several problems upon arrival. Long-standing northern residents, like Seth Holly,  concerned with the precariousness of their own economic status, worries about the newcomers entering their communities. Like many established African-Americans, Seth is concerned about the impression made by the migrants, for northern communities had their own customs and point of view regarding African-Americans. African-Americans were expected to show initiative and a willingness to work hard in the face of difficult working conditions. Poor job performance on the part of one worker, regardless of the obstacles he faced, called into question the abilities of all African-American workers. The same expectations held true for public activities and living conditions. African-Americans were rarely commended for their positive attributes, but often condemned as a group for actual of perceived failings.

Acutely aware of the pitfalls of freedom in the North, the established African-Americans offered sometimes unwanted advice to their recently arrived brethren. Recent migrants, however, did not always follow the counsel offered them; they had their own goals in mind when they decided to head North. Theirs was the first generation born outside slavery and they could not easily accommodate themselves to the restrictions of the South, let alone the North. They bridled at accepting second-class status and at the discriminatory practices which were an everyday part of life. 

The migrants, in their eagerness to cast aside their pasts and create new live, threatened the delicate racial balance of their new communities. The established African-American residents tried to intervene, for they were acutely aware that what might be a waystop on a continuing journey for the newcomers represented their own home and future. 

For the African-Americans, moving offered a means of escaping the unacceptable conditions of the South but it did not totally free them from their pasts. In addition to certain behaviors which the northern-born African-Americans found objectionable and sought to reshape, the legacy of slavery carried with it traditions from the distant African past. The new-comers accepted this past easily, for these traditions were an integral part of their early years. On the other hand, root doctors, conjuring and other African traditions left northern-born African-Americans uneasy. These traditions touched a part of them that was buried in their psychic past, but which did not fit the lived they sought to create. Thus, the southern migrants constantly reminded the settled northerners of a past and traditions they were trying to suppress.

This quest for self-definition is a struggle faced by all mankind, but the particular circumstances of the African-American migration form the basis for the characters in Joe Turner. They are African-Americans no doubt, but are not sure whether the are more African or more American. Some are more comfortable with their African/southern antecedents than others, but all are in a process of transition. They are not content with their present state and thus continue to search for alternatives that might improver their lives and give them greater peace.

The history of the African-American people was at a crossroads in 1911. Race relations in the South were at an all-time low and the gains made in northern stated were beginning to erode. African-Americans had to define their role in American society or have their status slop away into a semi-feudal state.  The residents of the Holly boardinghouse represent the struggle with these issues. Similar exchanges were occurring in cities like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Gary, Indiana. Old values and new ones-struggling to define the future.

In 1911, this effort had only begun. More migrants would pour North in the years that followed and the importance of their presence would continue to grow. Their clashed with older African-American residents would forge a new African-American national community with a firmer sense of self and its place in American society. This community would eventually spawn the Harlem Renaissance, the March on Washington Movement in 1941 and the Civil Rights Activism after 1954. Many questions remain unanswered and the struggle towards self-determination continues. But as is the case in any important endeavor, it is the struggle and the resulting growth which are the crucial elements ina successful odyssey.

Spencer R. Crew is a professor of African-American History and the curator of the Smithsonian Institute exhibit "Field to Factory: Afro-American Migration 1915-1940."

Information in "Who's Who in the Cast" is provided by the production. Where opinions are expressed, they are those of the players, not necessarily those of PLAYBILL Magazine.