Reading Response 11/17

In the short story, “Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine" by Amiri Baraka the word “vibration” recurred constantly throughout. Vibrations could be symbolism for music, because the sound frequency the musical instruments tend to cause vibrations, the term “vibe” is also an emotional state that people often get from listening to music. In this second narrative point of view, the “you” refers to persona’s grandfather Tom Russ, which was introduced in the beginning. In this short story, finding love for music while escaping racism was the main goal for Tom. The story started out in Dothan, Alabama a southern state, which in 1898 is considered a hostile area towards African Americans. Tom's store was burned down and he was beaten down by the "unholy bastards" and despite Tom building the store back to the ground it was also burned and was threatened to be ran "out of town." Yet with Tom’s persistence he built a funeral, but this time it was successful, and the racists didn’t mind a bit because it was where dead African-American go to, until the noise bothered them and then burned in down again. Tom then moved towards north to escape the racial violence, then the persona said "His grandson'll be back to correct your grammar and throw stones in your well" (3). I found this interesting because he's saying that he himself will come back to Alabama and continue his journey as his grandfather's predecessor, picking right where he left off. Tom and his family then moved north in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1917. However it felt as if Tom wasn’t satisfied with selling eggs, produced, and liquor, hence "No Vibrations here." was acknowledged. With the lack of vibrations Tom proposed to Anna to go  further north to find the vibrations, "Got to find out where the music goes when we don't hear it anymore" (4). This clearly indicates that the vibration does symbolize music throughout this short story. But a specific type of music is what they're hunting for. Baraka made a decent description of music "Three Negroes, 2 with horns, the third with a battered drum. Tah tah, tat, tah, yippeee, hoorah.” (4) This made even more clear what music the vibrations indicate, Tom is looking for Blues.