Yoruba Gods on the American Stag: August Wilson’s Joe Turner's Come and Gone! Sandra L. Richards desire, both in terms of characters who are seeking to reorient them- selves and in terms of August Wilson’s self-described project of cre- ating a body of plays that will help African (US) Americans more fully embrace the African side of their “double consciousness” (Du Bois 38). Set in 1911 during the Great Migration when hundreds of thousands of African Americans left the rural south to settle in northern, industrial centers, the play dramatizes the various wanderings of a group of African Americans in search of a place where they can feel at home in the world, thats, in search of an economic, social, and cultural environment that will enable their agency. Taking temporary refuge in a Pittsburgh boarding house, they share fragmented memories of family members before seemingly being propelled by desires for adventure, love, or single-minded purpose to jour- ney further. Memory takes many forms: the story of a “shiny man’— suggestive of the Yoruba gods Ogun and Esu—who encourages fellow 1s to claim their predestined “song” in life; roots working and juba dancing, or African spiritual practices adapted to the ecology of the United States; and a temporal sensibility that simultaneously looks back to the Middle Passage and forward to Africa. Chief among these roomers is Bynum, a conjurer, or priestlike figure, who early in the play, recounts a transformative experience involving a mys- terious, shining man walking along a country road. Because the man promised to reveal the “Secret of Life,” Bynum accompanied this man; eventually, he met his father who, grieved that his son seemed to be pursu- ing dreams not of his own making, taught Bynum how to find his own “song,” Properly deployed, that song will enable him to have a unique impact, to make a “mark on life” (10). Since that experience, Bynum has taken as his life’s task to “just like glue ... [stick] people together” (10), and he hopes to confirm the validity of his choice someday by encountering another shiny man. Critics Trudier Harris and Kim Pereira have noted that Bynum description of the shiny man as “One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way has Biblical resonances, but with the exception of Paul Carter Harrison and Pereira, who offer brief comments, virtually no other critic has probed the narrative’s relationship to Yoruba cosmology. In failing to identify this intertext, critics and audiences miss several things. Wilson has fashioned a diaspora text that, given its specific reference to Yoruba belief systems, posits migrancy as the norm and implies an Africa that is always, already hybrid. His drama runs counter to the desire for a site of pristine origin found in many African (US) American discourses of identity. Furthermore, rather than reading the play as an instance of realism that bewilderingly C= to Joe Turner’s Come and Gone are elements of memory and Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter 1999Sandra L. Richards 93 lurches into the realm of the supernatural (see D. Richards), viewers can profit from understanding Joe Turner. . . as a tragedy modeled upon Wole Soyinka’s deployment of the myth of Ogun, whom he characterizes as “[t]he first actor . . . first suffering deity, first creative energy, first chal lenger” who risked his own psychic disintegration in order to reunite the gods with mankind (144). As such, the Wilson drama posits a holistic view of life, implying thereby a link between individual spirituality and collective, political consequences. It marks a continuity between Wilson and those “angry” black playwrights of the 1960s, but this link between spiritual appre- hension and political agency was largely forgotten after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., government suppression of politi- cal radicalism, and public retreat into consumerism. Hence, the outraged surprise and thinly disguised accusations of ingratitude lodged against Wilson after his recent “The Ground on Which I Stand” address and Town Hall debate with Robert Brustein in which he argued not for assimilation but for the continued autonomy of black theater? Viewed through the more appropriate lens offered by Yoruba culture, the play with its repre- sentations of agency, cultural braidedness, and open-ended possibility can, perhaps, help audiences engage the “cultural work” (Tompkins 200-02) of thinking through complex, interrelated questions of identity, cultural production, and democratic ideals. Devotees claim that “Ogun has many faces” (Barnes 2), and asa reputed trickster, Esu is known to assume many guises. How then is one to identify these gods, given the multiple properties attributed to them and their dis- persion from West Africa to the Americas? Cultural anthropologist Sandra Barnes advocates a polythetic system of classification that recognizes a porousness that stimulates creativity while insisting upon enough stability to stave off distortion; under such a system, the presence of a combination of telling features is sufficient to distinguish one domain or, in this instance, one god from another. Similarly, Sidney Mintz and Richard Price assert that in assessing continuities between Africa and the Americas, one needs to ask “what the representations mean, intend, and express” rather than search for strict correlations between practices in the two environments (gtd. in Barnes 10). Thus, in seeking to identify a Yoruba thread in Wilson's drama, we need to evaluate the combination of features that would place Bynum’s shiny man within the domains of Ogun and of Esu. According to Yoruba cosmological lore, Ogun was the only god willing to risk psychic disintegration in order to traverse the chthonic abyss that separated the gods from humans (Soyinka 27-28). Mastering fire and fash- ioning the first tool, namely an iron sword, he cut through a formidable nothingness to lead the other gods to their desired reunion on earth. Thus, like the Christian god, Ogun is a divinity who takes on a collective burden and leads others to self knowledge. The shininess that Bynum reports may be related to iron, the essential feature associated with Ogun. In fact, the written text hints at the domain of Ogun at the very outset for those with the “diaspora literacy” ( 43-44) or knowledge of African dias- porie cultures to recognize the signs.* As the first smith who learned how to change ore into iron, Ogun challenges those who journey onto his94 Research in African Literatures terrain to create new technologies and thus new (or in truth, re-fashioned) identities in response to changing conditions. Wilson emphasizes the hi torical fact of Pittsburgh as a city of steel, where individual mettle as well as civic identity was forged. Black migrants are characterized in iron-mal imagery ax 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. (immedi- ately prior to act one, n.p.) ‘oreigners in a strange land,” these newcomers—or diaspora folk—bring histories of separation and dispersement and search not for a sense of home or stability but for ways to “reassemble, to give clear and luminous meaning to the song which is both a wail and a whelp of joy” (n.p.). OF course, spectators do not have access to these rich clues except through the skill of the theater director, designers, and actors in making palpable this arduous move towards sel-cognition. Bynum says of this shiny man, “This fellow don’t have no name. I call him John ‘cause it was up around Johnstown where I seen him” (8). A plau- sible explanation of a posible name, but in the context of other signs, astute readers are likely to suspect other referents as well. Note that Bynum meets this person on a road and he offers a solution that functions like a riddle in that it propels Bynum to search for further confirmation. We seemingly are in the domain of Esu’s younger relative, that African American folk figure known as High John the Conqueror. Anthropologist \d creative writer Zora Neale Hurston reports that High John was said to be a physically big man, a small man, and no “natural man” at all who came from Africa and took human shape in order to help black peoples survive slavery with their dignity intact (922). Similarly, Esu’s praise songs describe him as having difficulty sleeping in a house because it was too small but finding comfort in a hut in which he could stretch out. Esu is said to be able to turn right into wrong and wrong into right (Pemberton 25). High John has similar abilities, for he often bamboozles the slave master for the benefit of the enslaved As the mediator between the divine and the human, Esu favors the crossroads where men and women must make decisions; High John, or John, has met Bynum on the road and led him to a life-changing challenge. Esu is also acknowledged as the keeper of se, or the power-to-make-things- happen that resides in human beings as well as in objects (Thompson, Mash 5-6). Each individual possesses her/his own unique ase. “It is the ground of all creative activity, which, if not properly acknowledged, may prove destruc- tive to human endeavors” (Abiodun 13), As unborn spirits, we are allowed to choose our individual destiny, but that knowledge is forgotten upon our entry into the material world. Thus, divination is one of the means through which we humans discover our orf ini, or personal identity (also translated as one’s inner, spiritual head); in so doing, we repeat aspects of divine expe- rience, thus partaking in the essence of a particular god (or gods), who is