Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray

First published: 1974

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1920’s

Locale: Rural Alabama

Principal Characters:

• Scooter, the boyhood nickname identity of the adult narrator of the novel
• Little Buddy Marshall, Scooter’s best friend
• Luzana Cholly, a fearless blues hero who plays the twelve-string guitar
• Miss Tee (Edie Bell Boykin), Scooter’s favorite aunt
• Deljean McCray, Scooter’s first, continuing, and last lover during his youth

The Novel

Train Whistle Guitar offers a story of a black boy’s preadolescent and adolescent seasons in a small town deep in the South during the decade after World War I. The story is told by the man whom the boy has become, recounting his memories after he has gone away to college, served in World War II, and made somebody out of himself, as he was born marked to do. He has also been marked for life by his education in that small-town community and culture. The events of the story are the remembered highpoints in a daily dialogue, one carried out between the child and his community and between the conscious and unconscious (or spontaneous and reflective) selves of that child. The story implies a dialogue between the narrator’s childhood self and adult self, the facts of his growing and the art of his telling of it—what, in memory and crafted language, can now be made of that growing. As memory and art thus valorize life, the feature that emerges as most meaningful is the boy’s daily education, partly in school but most clearly out of school.

Like many novels of the early education of a heart, Train Whistle Guitar is episodic in its plot structure. What is remembered and told is what was felt as adventure by the boy. The story therefore moves as the boy felt life to move, from worthy time to worthy time, with only a sense of lull filling in the time between, like the steady rhythm of a drum or heart. Those experiences were intuited by the boy to be charged with meaning, but the full revelatory quality of their meaning has come to be known only later, in their telling as story.

The story is told in the first person, in the past tense. Often the voice that the reader hears and the language in which that voice speaks are the boy’s, but occasionally the voice of the adult narrator reminds the reader that memory is occurring, so that persons, places, and events are doubly distanced, taking on the heightened reality of names of things that are evoked but are not actually present, except in their essences, and may have never existed in any simple, fixed form.

The novel opens with an introduction of the chinaberry tree that stood in the front yard of the boy’s home. As in a fairy tale, often the boy would climb to the top of this “spyglass tree” and look out to the horizon. The point of view from which the story is told, especially in the early chapters, is that of a child’s privileged position vis-à-vis adult life and a child’s interpretation and reinterpretation of the life that he observes, as his awareness expands with experience, study, status, and reflection.

The story moves outward from the tree to the fields and the town, to the boy’s earliest sense of a hero on whom he might model himself for finding meaning in the larger, outer world, to his sense of himself as having a destiny (perhaps even heroic) in that world. Then come, chapter by chapter, the boy’s adventures, with each one suddenly presenting a lesson to be learned: the premature attempt to hop a freight train north; the celebration of athletic heroes; discovery of a corpse in the swamp; rhythms of family, school, and town; visions of a living history and geography; observations of obsessive romance and of racist hostility; adolescent experiences of sex; and discoveries about kinship. These experiences teach the value and fragility of human well-being and what can be done to protect and nourish it: lessons of love, courage, responsibility, and sacrifice; the mystery of violence and death; appropriate pride and humility; imagination and possibility; style and grace. The story of each adventure is told in the language and spirit of the blues, of signifying, and of incipient jazz. It is the language of play and of art. Each lesson includes a further insight into the blues as a mythologizing perspective on life.

The Characters

Early in the novel, Scooter remarks that his hero, Luzana Cholly, “was forever turning guitar strings into train whistles which were not only the once-upon-a-time voices of storytellers but of all the voices saying what was being said in the stories as well.” These are also the voices of the characters in Murray’s novelistic storytelling, a cross section of the “blues people” (to borrow a phrase from the contemporary African American writer Amiri Baraka) whom Murray knew in the rural South of his boyhood—ordinary people who spoke with extraordinary wisdom in an extraordinary new style of American English as they composed a heroic life and heritage. The artistic style of these voices, as exemplified in the novel’s narration, is a major device used by Murray for characterization. Another device is the content spoken by these voices, as Scooter talks about the members of his family and the people of his town and as they talk about one another and about him.

Characterization is accomplished mainly through talk, especially as Scooter relates and comments upon conversations among persons around him, discussing conversational styles and attitudinal content. He also reports, interprets, and sometimes explains people’s clothing styles, gestures, food, habits, achievements or failures, reputations, special acts and responses, histories, and stories they are known for telling about their own lives. Scooter’s characterizations of persons are corroborated by remarks by Little Buddy Marshall and by other observers and storytellers in the community, or sometimes by white folks. Some of the characters in the novel, like some of the scenes, conversations, and language, are types, but these are the ones that Scooter knew at greater distance and that would exist as types for any child, and even these are given individualizing touches of detail. Those that he knows closely are portrayed lovingly and extensively enough to take on multifaceted and urgent identities in the reader’s imagination.

Scooter, a child with definite but mysterious parentage, emerges as a product of this entire community of talkers. By his own representation and his later adult assessment, and by the remarks of others, Scooter is revealed as having the flaws and making the mistakes that are common to his age group. He is also revealed, in contrast to his friend and foil, Little Buddy Marshall, as having been known all along, and having known himself, to be destined for a larger life. He is a learner and spirited articulator of all that is most vital in what comes his way. As such, he is taught (and the reader is taught) by every character in the novel, from blues musicians and relatives to jive interloper and sheriff. Scooter personifies the heart’s imagination, finding the beauty of compassionate and truthful expression of the full range of persons and events that life presents to him.

Gasoline Point, Alabama, becomes a collective character of the novel, given physical form by Scooter and given personality by the stories that its citizens tell about themselves and one another. A reader of the novel, hearing or overhearing through Scooter the details of characters’ lives and their responses to their own lives and the lives of others, perceives a collective spirit of communal caretaking, realistic acceptance of human foibles and catastrophes, exceptional daily competence and courage to survive and even triumph in the face of racist oppression, and profound appreciation of the best features and accomplishments exhibited by humans.

The language of that community—flowering with enthusiasm in the voice of the boy as he learns his own variation of its syncopated, signifying style, now remembered lovingly by the adult narrator and thereby released by the novelist like the notes from a guitar or a piano—has a life of its own, performing for the reader like an over-character who is the embodiment and spirit of the novel’s plot and themes.

Critical Context

It is useful to read Train Whistle Guitar beside Black Boy (1945), in which novelist Richard Wright autobiographically presents his boyhood in small-town Mississippi. His story takes place at the same time as Murray’s quasi-autobiographical story of Scooter in neighboring Alabama. Wright wrote vividly of the saving power of the imagination in a highly intelligent and questioning boy. His tale is bleak, with its emphasis on the presence of racist whites and on the cultural as well as physical poverty of a black peasant class. Wright’s seminal and still powerful novel Native Son (1940) also provides a meaningful critical context for Murray’s novel. In that story, set in Chicago in the 1930’s, Wright emphasizes the same conditions of black life as in Black Boy and shows resulting acts by the young black protagonist that are monstrous and lead to his death, although, at the end, he mentally and spiritually transcends both racism and the impoverished culture of his black community. In its psychological and sociological analysis, Native Son lodges a strong protest against racism and prejudiced capitalism in the United States. It is clear that Wright conceived his readers to be, like the jurors who convicted his protagonist, white and prejudiced. His novel solidly established the concept of “protest literature” as a valuable kind of writing by African American authors.

Ralph Ellison, in essays and in his novel Invisible Man (1952), expresses the position that in writing protest literature a black author kneels before a jury of white readers and pleads for recognition of the humanity of black Americans. Ellison proposes that African American novelists should begin from an assumption of the full humanity of black Americans and strive from there toward meeting the highest universal artistic standards in the clarification of human life for all readers.

The matter of universality is itself a part of the critical context for the present novel. In 1974, when it was published, white literary critics could still belittle a work by a black author by claiming that since it portrayed the understandably limited lives of African Americans, it could not represent the universality of human life and therefore could not achieve the status of high art. Meanwhile, however, the black aesthetic movement was proposing that African American writers should take as their audience exclusively African American readers and write with the assumption that white American culture rendered white readers less than fully human by its pervasive racism.

Murray’s aesthetic and ethical position is closer to Ellison’s. Stating that in America cultural differences are more important than are differences of race, he assumes the full humanity of both blacks and whites and writes for any open-minded reader. Racists in his novel are portrayed as fools and enemies of humanity, and racism does not dominate the content of the novel. Murray goes beyond protest by establishing an irresistibly large, humane perspective in which racism is rendered impotent by its own blind pettiness. Racists are unattractive. African American culture is triumphantly beautiful in its creation of life-enhancing possibilities out of chaos and absurd social divisiveness. Murray sees the creation of a culture to be primarily an aesthetic endeavor of transforming experience into strong mythic selfhood.

Bibliography

Berry, Jason. “Musical Literature.” The Nation 224 (January 15, 1977): 55-57. Because of this novel’s derivation from blues perspective and idiom, its content and style contrast with those of traditional black realism and social protest literature, as well as with white southern regional fiction.

Borshuk, Michael. Swinging the Vernacular: Jazz and African American Modernist Literature. New York: Routledge, 2006. Argues that Train Whistle Guitar represents a revision of black modernism.

McPherson, James Alan. “The View from the Chinaberry Tree.” The Atlantic Monthly 234 (December, 1974): 118, 120-123. Participating in a rediscovery and reaffirmation of black cultural and spiritual roots in the South, the novel expresses the complexity of relationships between illusion and ever-changing American reality that form essential parts of both black American consciousness and the literary burden of transforming history into art.

Murray, Albert. South to a Very Old Place. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971. Murray’s stream-of-consciousness chronicle of his journey through the South, which included interviews with contemporary black and white southern authors and with residents of the Alabama town in which he spent his boyhood.

O’Meally, Robert G. Foreword to Train Whistle Guitar, by Albert Murray. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. With his uses of naming, storytelling, counterstatement, and call and response, Murray has invented “ways to write the blues,” thereby expressing themes of everyday heroism, possibility, and joie de vivre while presenting types of people and places of a southern blues community.

Wideman, John. “Stomping the Blues: Ritual in Black Music and Speech.” American Poetry Review 7, no. 4 (1978): 42-45. This review of Murray’s study of the history and nature of blues music, Stomping the Blues (1976), provides context and insights for understanding and appreciating Murray’s musical use of African American speech patterns in his prose style in Train Whistle Guitar.