Reading Response 11/17

“Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine” by Amiri Baraka is a fictional story where the future speaks to the present about the past. Tom Russ is the grandfather of the narrator, who speaks to his grandfather in his “post-prebirth enlightenment” pg2. The narrator talks about vibrations that give Tom uneasiness due to its uncertainty of where they were coming from and their exact meanings. Throughout the story, these vibrations are filled with aspirations, dreams, hope and history. Before the 1890’s there was not a need for African Americans/Blacks to worry about such things because they were enslaved. So these vibrations were more of a rumbling of the soul and an awakening of the mind of the once oppressed now freeman of what their future held.

Like Baraka’s Blues People, these vibrations transcend just like the work song evolved into spiritual song that later became blues than transformed into Jazz.  Tom’s evolution from Dothan, Alabama (south) in 1898 to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1917 and finally further up north to Newark, New Jersey in 1925 represent the same migration African music has taken in the US. The vibrations (work songs) in Dothan were still vibrations in Newark but with a different meaning, this is seen when the narrator talks about the rebuilding of Tom’s store and it “wasn’t really any store at all, only the insane intensity of your vision” pg1, just like he was still a black business owner in Alabama as in New Jersey but with different liberties.

           

The narrator uses vibrations as a vehicle to explore life at a time were Negros even though oppressed, they never had to worry about being self sufficient and independent, but with slavery being abolished the time had come for them to forge there own identities and think not only about their futures but the futures of their children and their children’s children. When Tom and Anna move to Pennsylvania his thoughts are finally about his lineage, using “street” speech, “send my grandson’s mother to college. She’s got to know ‘bout them vibrations”.pg2

Amiri Baraka has a way of using music as the background and foundation to explain the empowerment of the black culture.  He writes “one vibration can carry a man a long way if he knows just how to handle it”pg2, meaning that Tom Russ could have given up in Alabama after the first burning of his store or even the second but music that he knew in the south was doing something of its own in the north and he was in the hopes of finding out “what part of the world is fashioned in my image”. Pg2

At the end when Tom is lying in the hospital dying, the narrator wants more of him but there is nothing left to give. Tom has given his all but his story will not die with him he’s been talking to his unborn grandson who will feel the vibrations too but his won’t be musical but instead literary!!!