Come and Gone by Joe Turner is a play that demonstrates the movement of African Americans towards freedom in 1910. The play is set in a boarding house which is a place of transition for newly freed African Americans. I bring them as they adapt their newfound freedom. The images of the journey and the use of the phrase "the road" are interjected into the different transitions that each character has throughout the show; The show examines how African Americans search for their own cultural identity, following the repression of slavery. For many this involved physically migrating from the South to the North in an attempt to find a new beginning: "In an effort to escape the discrimination they faced in the South and hoping to find financial success, many blacks migrated to Pittsburgh in the 1910s. of a new life and identity..." (Mathers 13). Joe Turner's Come and Gone symbolizes how African Americans moved toward their independence in the 1910s: "From the deep and near South the sons and daughters of the newly freed African slaves roam the city... isolated, cut off from memory... they come dazed with a song worth singing... with pockets full of new hope, scarred men and women trying to break out of the grip... molding the malleable parts of themselves into one new identity of a free man with a defined and sincere value (P. 1303). The characters in the play show great difficulty in discovering who they are due to the fact that they have never been given the opportunity to be anything more than simple. slaves; for this reason the audience sees how the different characters relate to this problem: "Each character has their own way of dealing with their personal identity problem... some search for lost love or... middle of paper ... ... to find his wife... when the characters find what they are looking for they leave the boarding house... so the audience can predict what will happen as they read..." ( Ross 37). Joe Turner's Come and Gone establishes the struggles of African Americans to find themselves and their culture. The show strengthens personal identity, self-esteem and self-acceptance; the use of metaphor such as the road or someone traveling gives the audience a visualization of what the character is going through and also helps the audience identify with the issues presented. Although it was written in a different time period, the concept of finding yourself is still applicable to today's society: "You could say the moral of Joe Turner's Come and Gone is to find who you are and accept that person... something at any time period may concern." (Sinclair 98).