40 pages • 1 hour read
Victor LavalleThe Ballad of Black Tom
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Guitar
In The Ballad of Black Tom, guitars are important symbols of character change, the power of music, and family. Playing the guitar is the main way Tommy connects with his father, who taught him how to play. Even though Tommy does not play the guitar well, a guitar or at least the case, is always with him. When Tommy learns to play the conjure music Otis teaches him, it signals Tommy’s transformation from a hustler into a magician. Tragically, the guitar is the symbolic center of Otis’s death. Otis wanted Tommy to wield the guitar as a figurative weapon, but the police mistake Otis’s guitar for a literal weapon—a rifle—when Howard searches Tommy’s apartment. The blood-spattered guitar Tommy is rumored to carry after he becomes Black Tom symbolizes the injustice that has embittered him.
The guitar is also Tommy’s symbol of growth. At first, Tommy’s guitar case is empty, and he uses it for show. When he does play, it is only for money, part of an act. Learning to play “Don’t you mind people grinning in your face,” shows Tommy’s changing relationship to the guitar. Before, playing and hustling were his livelihood, but now, his life depends on the music’s mystical qualities. Tommy breaks his guitar before leaving Suydam’s party, symbolizing that he has mastered enough magic to work on his own. The broken guitar also foreshadows Otis’s death.
The Stone
The stone Tommy finds at Suydam’s mansion and carries with him until he hears of his father’s death represents power. Tommy finds the stone on Suydam’s property, intending to throw it at the boys who have been following him threateningly. After warning Tommy not to do it, Suydam brings the stone into the house instead of discarding it. Once, during their interview, Suydam raises the stone to hit Tommy when Tommy accidentally opens the library doors into the portal. This quasi-violent act represents Suydam’s mixed intentions toward Tommy. While Suydam is never physically violent, he plans to subjugate the entire population, which is far more dangerous.
Suydam uses the stone as a metaphor for how insignificant humanity’s struggles are in Cthulhu’s eyes. Tommy stares at the stone on the train back to Harlem, lost in contemplation of his strange night and its possibilities. The stone is a weapon, but it is also a tool. These are the attributes between which make Tommy feel torn over Suydam’s offer. In this way, the stone also represents his indecision. When Tommy returns to Harlem and learns of his father’s death, he feels the weight of the stone in his pocket. He feels the stone’s weight again as Howard describes how he emptied his gun shooting Otis, reloaded, and emptied it again. The stone’s weight symbolizes the weight on Tommy’s mind. As an object of contemplation, it focuses Tommy’s dilemma and disappears from the narrative once Tommy decides to join Suydam.
The Yellow Book
The book Tommy obtains for Ma Att is a motif that arises at every major plot event in the novella. Tommy’s first contact with the supernatural is his delivery of the book, and he puts his father in danger by enlisting him to help steal the final page. By having his illiterate father remove the deadly page, Tommy believes he has circumvented his instructions to not read or touch the book. He is pleased, thinking he has tricked Ma Att into paying him twice; once for the book and again for the missing page. Ma Att is smarter than Tommy thinks and hires the detectives to retrieve the stolen page. Howard’s search of the apartment turns up the missing page and proves fatal for Tommy’s father. Tommy feels partly responsible for his father’s death because it was his arrogance in stealing the page that led the detectives to his home.
The Supreme Alphabet contained in the book appears at key moments in the plot, helping to draw out the story’s themes. The words Zig Zag Zig etched on the covers stand for knowledge, wisdom and understanding, which is what each of the main characters wants. Suydam, Black Tom and Ma Att each want the book for their own reasons and pursuing the book or its lost page accounts for a significant amount of the plot’s action. In Part 2, Malone’s goal is to keep Black Tom from acquiring the book, and when he fails, he marshals the full force of the NYPD to stop whatever Black Tom has planned. The “O” marking the door Malone enters during the raid is “Cipher,” the 15th letter of the Supreme Alphabet and the symbol for completion, highlighting that the plot has come full circle.
The Sleeping King
Robert Suydam is obsessed with the Sleeping King, or Cthulhu, one of H.P. Lovecraft’s elder gods. The name Cthulhu comes from the Greek word chthonic, meaning subterranean. In the Cthulhu mythos, the priests of the cult of Cthulhu will wake him from his deathlike sleep, and Cthulhu will rise to rule over a primitive form of humanity. Suydam wants to be the priest who frees Cthulhu and believes that dark-skinned people represent the primitive form of humanity over which he and Cthulhu will rule. This is the crux of Suydam’s white savior complex. Black Tom has a different, nihilistic goal in mind. He wants Cthulhu to destroy all of humanity, rather than rule over a select group. Black Tom never says what he plans to do after Cthulhu wakes; he may survive, or he may face annihilation along with everyone else.
Waking the Sleeping King is the goal that drives the plot forward. The characters, especially Suydam, present him as the ultimate force of evil, but even after Suydam and Black Tom open the portal to Cthulhu’s realm, Cthulhu does not actually do anything. Instead, his awakening and destruction exist as a constant possibility. After Malone has retired and the raid has long past, seeing Cthulhu’s image in the sky terrifies him. In this way, LaValle extends the possibility of Cthulhu’s coming into the present day, making the reader reflect on how the novella’s events are relevant to our own era.
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By Victor Lavalle
