I like imagery

I'm choosing to write about August Wilson's story, Joe Turner's Come and Gone: The Play because the powerful use of imagery he gives the reader in less than 2 pages of text amazed me. "The sun falls out of heaven like a stone." (p.90) BAM! It is hot, the heat is heavy. What a great way to enter into a scene. This short piece is full of "nuggets", the mixture of short and long sentences give the piece a steady pace that doesn't feel rushed. Wilson puts the reader into the experience of being Pitsburgh, we see how alive the city is as it "flexes its muscles...Men throw countless bridges across the rivers..." (p.90) Without effort the reader understands hoe busy, how industrious, how hardworking this city, and these citizens are.

Countering this high energy tone in the first paragraph, the pace slows (just a little) as we begin to see the "...newly freed African slaves wander into the city. Isolated, cut off from memory..." (p.90). These people don't seem to belong in the fast paced city but they are looking for a new home. Wilson contrasts the "fresh, hard, gleaming steel" (p.90) to a softer, more human image, "...they arrive carrying Bibles and guitars, their pockets lined with dust and fresh hope..." (p.90). These are people with out a home, on a journey to an already industrious center, will the city slow down and welcome these newcomers? No, they would need to squeeze into the system; Wilson describes this as "...shaping the malleable parts of themselves into a new identity as free men of definite and sincere worth." (p.90).

Wilson ends this piece with a tinge of hope, but mostly as a fog;  who knows what lies ahead for these travelers? "...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." (p.91) These people seem lost in an identity crisis, lost within themselves and lost within the greater community. Wilson exposes these nameless characters inner struggle for acceptance and understanding through the strong images he paints for his readers.

Interesting sidenote: Before I wrote this blog I didn't know that Wilson also wrote the play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. The play is about realizing false promises of jobs and of how great life would be in the North for freed slaves.