Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine

Amara Baraka’s Suppose Sorrow Was a Time Machine is a short story about Tom Russ, who is narrated in the perspective of his unborn grandson. The way that the story is set up, the grandson is speaking to his grandfather, asking questions as if trying to understand and make sense of the “vibrations”. Im not exactly sure what he means by that, but it is repeated multiple times throughout the story and it’s something the narrator constantly wonders about and it seems to be an important issue.

The story itself is like the title—a time machine, because the narrator travels back to the past through the stories he is telling. He takes the reader to different places and dates, first to Dothan , Alabama, 1898, where the vibrations seem to be related to slavery. The narrator states, “ You are a Negro who has felt the ground vibrate, and you are trying to interpret the vibration” (1), and “They have burnt your store,Tom. What does it mean? Is the burning another vibration? (1). The narrator then takes us to Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, 1917, where Tom lives with his wife Anna Russ and two children George and Anna Lois. The narrator states that there are no vibrations, due to the fact that they are living a good life, so he finds himself forced to move to hunt them down. Here, the narrator mentions music as something that they needed to find, and similar to Blues People, music seems to be an important aspect of their life. In Greystone Sanatorium ,1943, the vibration happened when Tom got hit in the head by a street lamp, and was bound to a cane and a wheelchair. And finally Newark, New Jersey, 1925, the last vibration happened with Toms death. I found that his death was written about in a weird and kind of innocent way, as the narrator states, “ Why are your hands to pale, Tom? You must be doing a lot of heavy thinking to be so quiet” (3). Overall, the vibrations in this short story are depicted as the unfortunate events that happened to Tom Russ.