Seth is a boarding-house owner determined to achieve material success. He refuses to acknowledge any suggestion of his African heritage. Seth’s focus in life is to become financially stable by any means necessary. He is very demanding of boarders, insisting on advanced payment in full, and is preoccupied with maintaining a respectable house. The revealing aspect of Seth is his scorn for the African American movement north. When one of his young boarders gets in trouble with the police, Seth tells Bynum, “These

Loomis, a spiritually sick man, wanders the land searching for his wife who disappeared. A man of few words and a deacon in a church, Loomis, is falsely accused of gambling, and then shanghaied by Joe Turner. As Patricia Gantt describes he is a wanderer, “who after seven years’ of innocent entrapment on Joe Turner’s Tennessee chain gang, wanders the country with Zonia, his daughter” (71). He does not know how to renew his life in the wake of debilitating disillusionment and suffering, but finds his experience with members of the boarding house is the turning point. While Loomis is staying there, Bynum talks of a man who finds people for a fee. This is someone who can bring peace and finality to his life. Loomis, like Bynum, has experienced a significant spiritual event that he relives when the boarders of the Holly’s are doing a Juba chant. He enters into a mystical trance, dancing and speaking in the tongues only to lapse into semi-unconsciousness and begins to prophesy. In the end, after finding his wife Martha, Loomis declaims against Christianity’s false pledge to alleviate the suffering of the black man. He identifies Christ as an instrument of domination, encouraging Africa Americans to endure their maltreatment and offering little more than promises for happiness after death. Cutting himself across the chest, Loomis explains he has done enough bleeding to warrant salvation. This transformation is one of such that Loomis starts glowing. Bynum tells him, “Herald Loomis, you shining! You shining like new money!” (Wilson 2087). Loomis departs the Holly’s house, ready to start a new life having found his song, and now free from the bondage of his wife.

niggers coming up here with that old backward country style of living. It’s hard enough now without all that ignorant kind of acting. Ever since slavery

Some topics in this essay:
Joe Turner’s, Africa Americans, Selig Seth, African American, American Seth, Herald Loomis, Turner’s Tennessee, African Americans, Loomis Bynum, Rutherford Selig, boarding house, joe turner’s, seth tells, chain gang, displaced people, rutherford selig, white man’s, lost people, people fee, material success,