Bynum Walker

Joe Turner’s Come and Gone teaches African Americans to embrace their African identity, so it is easy to view Bynum Walker to be a conjure man who binds together people of dispersal due to firstly their forced migration from Africa to America three hundred years ago and secondly the Big Migration from American South to American North after the emancipation. Indicated by his name “Bynum,”he binds people together. To critic Hay, Bynum is a “one-man chorus”(95). For the playwright and director Harrison, Bynum personifies “the community of the living and the dead”and he also signifies “the spiritual imperatives of the community’s moral universe”(Hay 95). Wilson presents this iconic character to us lucidly through three methods: first, his binding people; second, his searching for the shiny man; and third, his signifying the hybridization of African-Christian living.

2.1.1 Binding People

Bynum binds people together by performing rituals and offering wise councils to the lost souls. In the stage directions Wilson tells us Bynum “gives the impression of always being in control of everything. Nothing even bothers him. He seems to be

lost in a world of his own making and to swallow any adversity or interference with his grand design.”⁶ Indeed, Bynum seems to appear as an omniscient conjure man.

Although he does not conduct rituals on stage, the spectators are informed of his rituals reported by first Seth and later the neighbor boy Reuben Mercer. He is then characterized as a “priest”(Richards 92), a “diviner”(?). The only thing he performs on stage is the juba dance.

This “perfectly sane African healer”(Shannon 135) offers sagacious tips to people so as to enlighten people or bind them together. To Jeremy, Mattie, and Loomis, he gives out worthwhile advice. When Bertha dissuades Jeremy from going to Seefus because of the danger of being imprisoned again, Bynum disagrees by saying, “Some things is worth taking the chance going to jail about”(18). When Mattie pays him to get her man Jack Carper back, Bynum frankly instructs her, “Somebody else done get a powerful hand in it and ain’t nothing to be done to break it. You got to let him go find where he’s supposed to be in the world”(23). When Loomis tells him not to sing the song, “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,”Bynum prescribes to him,

Now, I can look at you, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done forget his song. Forget how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he is. […] I can tell you one of Joe Turner’s niggers. ‘Cause you forget how to sing your song. (71)

To those who are lost, Bynum enlightens them, so Jeremy can plunge into the unknown world to do what he likes, and Mattie can forget the man who does not fit her and can run after the man whom she may rely on at the end of the play. As pointed out by Elam, Bynum also helps Selig find Loomis’s wife by giving him very useful road guidance to Ranken (190-91), and thus Bynum “binds”Loomis and Martha together. More importantly, it is also Bynum who helps set Loomis free. When

Loomis protests, “All the time it was you that bind me up! You bound me to the road,”

Bynum clearly answers, “Iain’t bind you, Herold Loomis. You can’t bind what don’t cling”(91). Seeing Loomis pulling out a knife, he furthers teaches him, “You binding yourself. You bound onto your song. All you got to do is stand up and sing it…Then you be free”(91). Later, Loomis does succeed in standing up and singing his song. In sum, Bynum is indeed the wise bard in guiding people.

2.1.2 Searching for the Shiny Man

That Bynum is a bard, a healer is clearly represented through his ritual and advice; however, the wise bard himself is also looking for the shiny man to obtain

6 August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. (New York: Penguin Books, 1988). Subsequent

some reconfirmation. This act to find the shiny man is the second method Wilson uses to characterize Bynum. It is a very significant strategy of Wilson’s to characterize or even to thematize; that is, no one is perfect, not even the wisest character. Therefore, even if Bynum has learned the most important message from his father to heal people, even if he has been given the crucial vision, a vision described by him as “something I ain’t got words to tell you”(10), he is still in search of the shiny man. At the end of the play when Loomis is able to stand up to break away from his past, Bynum then finds his shiny man—Loomis, who is “shining like new money”(94). As Wolfe has pointed out, “The healer is healed by someone whose inner split he helped heal”(85).

Some critics have noticed this legacy for the healer to pass this precious teaching to the next; hence, the search of the shiny man can be perpetuated on and on. For example, Brewer asserts Bynum’s experience “prefigures Loomis’s later

self-laceration”(11). While Pereira regards Bynum as a “catalyst”(66), Keller calls him a “precursor”as opposed to Loomis, the true African subject (478). Bynum’s search for the shiny man is consequently a uniquely Wilsonian characterization.

2.1.3 Signifying the Hybridization of African-Christian Living The third way to characterize Bynum is also quite Wilsonian is his

hybridization of African-Christian living. It is doubtless to say that between African and White Christian value, Wilson tends to convince his fellow blacks to identify more with their black roots. Thisis because Blacks have been physically and

spiritually dominated by whites for too long that they have forgotten who they really are. At an interview in 1991, Wilson clearly explained that the one simple fact for the people in the play is that “they are African people”(Bigsby 211). Nevertheless, what is dramatized in the play is definitely an inextricable combination of African and Christian beliefs, cultures, and ways of living. Joe Turner’s come and Gone smacks of African mythology as critics like Pereira (65), Harrison, and Keller (474) have

pointed out. However, the play is at the same time imbued with biblical allusions as suggested by Harris, Pereira (66, 71), Keller (474), Hay (95), and Richards (92).

Blacks cannot be too assimilated or Christian that they forget they are black. Nor can they become completely separated from the white, Christian, Eruocentric culture. But they can hybridize the two and keep the flexibility. Hence, Bynum in his vision can see the similar vision Loomis later sees in his trance—the rebirth of their bones people (their African ancestors), and, meanwhile, he can be given the job by his father to be and to seek “the One Who Goes Before and Shows the Way”(John the Baptist) (10). Just like African American English that retains the form of white English with African autonomy, Bynum’s African Christian way of living also allows the two cultures to co-exist peacefully.

Bynum performs ritual cleansing, guides people to sing their song of

self-recognition, seeks the shiny man to heal himself and others, and hybridizes African and Christian values of life. He has to be read metaphorically so that we can comprehend that between the bipolarized African and Christian forces in the play, there is a peaceful and mutually beneficiary hybridization of living.