Joe Turner's Come and Gone

“[they]…drop everything and head North looking for freedom. They don’t know the white fellows looking too. White fellows coming from all over the world. White fellow come over and in six months got more than I got.” 

Seth and Bynum are discussing the naiveté of young men like Jeremy when they arrive from the South, unprepared for the realities of racial discrimination in the North. As Seth observes, African-American men are in fact competing with white European immigrants who will be privileged over them and fare better economically very quickly.

“My daddy called me to him. Said he had been thinking about me and it grieved him to see me in the world carrying other people’s songs and not having one of my own. Told me he was going to show me how to find my song.” 

This quote from Bynum’s vision introduces song as a metaphor for identity and establishes the importance of constructing a distinct sense of self. The African-American search for identity is one of the central themes of the play,

“Oh he showed me all right. But you still got to figure it out. Can’t nobody figure it out for you. You got to come to it on your own.”

Bynum is telling Selig what he learned from the shiny man about the secret of life, which is that each person has to work to establish their own identity because no one else can do that for them.