Summary
The reporters are still outside Millie’s home and she wishes they would leave. She sees herself in the newspaper and marvels at how unreal she looks. These journalists and photographers are exhausting her; each snap feels like a part of her is being eaten away. She is just a terrified woman caught in their headlights.
She has gathered up her things and gone to Torr. Now she feels like she is outside time, staring into the fire. Her son Colman is the only one who knows she is here, but she doesn’t know if he’ll ever speak to her again. She can see the waves outside her window and thinks of how it feels like Joss has been dead for a long time. She feels like she might die in the manner of a grieving animal. Thankfully no one can find her here; they never told the media of this place before.
The house is filled with Joss’s holiday things, Colman’s toys. Millie considers going out but doesn’t think she can face the world. Nevertheless, no one really knows anything about the jazz scene here. They barely knew that Joss Moody was Britain’s greatest trumpet player.
Millie brought Joss here for the first time in 1956. This had been her family’s small vacation home and it reminded her of being a girl on holiday—the smells of the past, the salty sea air. When she was young she was fearless, but that girl has been swept out to sea. What would that girl think of her now? After dusk Millie ventures out. The walk is familiar to her feet but the sea still scares her as it always did. The cliff path is slim and she wonders if she is mad for coming out here. She returns to the house. Her legs feel shorter and her heart is beating faster. Inside she thinks something feels different, like someone might have been there.
It bothers her that everyone is focusing on her and Joss’s “secret.” Doesn’t everyone have secrets? They didn’t hurt anyone. She wonders if they made a mistake.
She remembers the summer before she met Joss. She was here with her family and she was restless, discontented. She wanted passion in her life. Then there came that fateful day at the blood bank, the day when she met Joss. He was extremely handsome with thick black curly hair and neat hands and good clothes. His skin was the color of toffee, his mouth shaped beautifully. She felt a premonitory sense of excitement and giddiness. They did not speak that time but she knew he was looking at her.
It is hard for her to sleep in their bed since Joss has passed. She is so lonely and now knows that “Loss isn’t an absence after all. It is a presence” (12). Sleeping is fitful so she indulges her memory once more. Six months after their first meeting she and Joss were back at the blood bank. She felt brazen knowing she would take him as her lover. They talked about giving blood and he looked at her curiously for coming up to him as boldly as she did. They went to get a drink and he told her his name was Joss Moody, which she said sounded like a stage name. He was first uncomfortable but then understood what she meant. She told him her name was Millicent MacFarlane but everyone called her Millie. She learned he played the trumpet and planned on being famous one day. He walked her home and kissed her cheek. They courted for three months, going dancing many times. She wondered, though, if something was wrong—he never tried to sleep with her. She knew she was in love with him by now and she felt like she was waiting for something to happen.
One night they were going to a jazz club. Joss had already started building a reputation for himself. People found him magnetic. Millie learned his mother was Scottish and his father African, and both had passed.
When Joss played music Millie felt like she’d lost him to it. He belonged to it; it was a holy thing. Eventually, though, even she fell into the music. She saw Joss watching her.
After the club Joss walked her home and kissed her passionately. They fell into each other’s arms and went into Millie’s flat. However, things became awkward and Joss told her he needed to tell her something. Millie felt sick and her mind raced. Joss looked as if he would cry. She got angry and yelled at him, telling him he owed her the truth. Finally, he said he would show her what was the matter. He began undressing slowly, looking at her the whole time. He undid his layers of clothing and revealed wrapped bandages. At first Millie thought he was wounded, but eventually he revealed two small breasts.
Back in the present time Millie notes the calm sea and the blue sky. She wishes she could stay here forever—could she? The people are so kind and more real. She does wish she could see Colman, though, and make him understand she and his father were in love. She prepares to go out, doing her best to be presentable. The weather is changing. She stares into the heart of the sea as she walks and marvels how this is the first time in many years she’s walked this path alone. Everything here seems the same as when she was a young girl. She goes into the Italian café and Mrs. Dalsasso asks where Mr. Moody is this morning. She tells her he died a few weeks ago, and Mrs. Dalsasso says he was a nice man. This cheers Millie up; this is the first time she’s felt like a person, an ordinary widow.
After she forces herself to eat something she decides to call Colman. She is filled with memories of him as a boy. She leaves a message telling him she is his mother and loves him and there is nothing more to it.
She remembers her wedding, which was a joyful affair. Her mother and four brothers came, even though initially her mother did not want her marrying a black man. Her father was not alive. She felt gorgeous, sexy. People danced joyfully and she could not believe she was Mrs. Joss Moody. There were no friends or relatives of Joss; only jazz friends and buddies from the band. Everyone kept congratulating them. They stayed in her flat and her former roommate left. Her mother gave them her old double bed, which they fell into passionately after the wedding. The next day they felt so heavy with love.
Millie’s mind fills with other memories and she knows that Joss would probably want her to mourn him, throw him a memorial, be out in the world. She cannot yet, though. She reads until she falls asleep. She has a terrible dream of being burgled and Joss’s trumpet going missing. She dreams of a small black girl climbing through the window and taking her out, of Joss playing “Millie’s Song,” of Joss missing half his face.
When she wakes she mourns that she has lost him yet again. She thinks of their travels, of how they went almost everywhere but Africa. Joss always used to say every black person had a fantasy Africa. Millie also feels disoriented and that she’s “lost [her] sense of gravity” (35). She looks at the album “Fantasy Africa” and stares at Joss’s face. She remembers the shock she felt when she first found out, but she did not think he was wrong and she knew she loved him and would never stop. Part of her wishes she wasn’t alive either; she does not know how to be herself.
She remembers their early marriage and how she realized she desperately wanted a baby and became resentful that Joss could not give her one. He could do everything else a man did—why not this? She obsessed for weeks and did not want to have sex. One night Joss tried to climb on top of her and she said she wanted a baby. He was sad at first and told her he’d love to do that, and then he became upset. He told her she better leave him now.
The next morning things were strange between them. She knew she’d hurt his pride and his manhood. He told her later that she could find someone to give her a baby but she was aghast, saying she would never do that. He suggested adoption and they decided that was what they’d do.
Millie finds a letter in the morning. It looks culpable somehow. It is not Colman’s writing. She reads it and becomes angry. This Sophie Stones, this reporter, is a nasty liar and she cannot believe Colman plans to collaborate with her. Sophie says she is interviewing him and wants to interview Millie too. Phrases from the letter flicker in Millie’s head even though she wants to put it out of her mind.
Analysis
Trumpet is a slim novel told in lucid, sparse prose, but it packs an incredible emotional and intellectual wallop. Not only does it probe the disconnect between sex and gender, but it deals with other themes of race, creativity, identity, naming, heritage, masculinity, the rapacious and prurient media landscape, the African diaspora, home, biography, and much more. Critic Tracy Hargreaves deems the novel a “construction, reconstruction, and deconstruction of a life. Her text is clearly concerned with issues of authenticity and mimicry and telling stories, all of which rest on being Scottish, being African, being a man and/or being a woman, and on playing jazz, the aesthetic appeal of which forms the bedrock of the narrative structure in the text.”
This first section is all Millie, Joss’s wife, though later sections are from the perspective of Colman, figures like the doctor or registrar, Sophie Stones, and more. Millie’s thoughts are raw, emotional, and moving. She is working her way through her loss, often doing so by conjuring up memories of her life with Joss—how they met, how she found out about his secret, and how they chose to adopt Colman. Because the “truth” about Joss’s biological sex has leaked out to the media and thus the public at large, she is being constantly hounded by reporters and watching her private life spill out like an open book. Her response is to go to Torr, where she and Joss have a private residence (that used to be her own family’s).
As stated, Millie is only one of multiple narrators in the text who seek to bring Joss to life or otherwise comment on their role in his story. Kay honors Joss’s life by, as Judith Halberstam writes, “weaving together a patchwork of memories from Joss’s survivors, but mainly his wife, and making that patchwork into the authentic narrative.” Millie claims that only she really knew Joss and their life together, and rejects the rest of the world’s assumptions. In particular, she rejects Sophie’s attempts to write a biography of Joss that would in any way capture who he was. Throughout the novel Kay will juxtapose the private and public accounts of Joss’s identity, revealing in how they differ that identity and gender are slippery concepts.
Jazz is one of the defining themes and structuring elements of the text. Firstly, it connects Joss (and Colman, though unwillingly for him) to the black past. As Kay is often trying to emphasize, jazz is a black American art form and is connected to the larger history of the African diaspora and slavery in the New World. It is, as critic Carole Jones notes, “the music of loss and mourning as well as a celebration of marginalized lives.” Secondly, “[jazz] is an art form founded on the exploration of different ways of playing a piece of music within the boundaries of that piece,” so “the performative possibilities of jazz are a founding trope in the text.” Narrator passes to narrator, short sections segue into longer ones, voices shift in tone; overall, Joss comes alive through these disparate accounts. Kay jumps back and forth in time as well, alluding to the way jazz pieces often double back to certain rhythms or passages. Thirdly, “jazz improvisation also provides a model of identity formation.” Jazz musicians aren’t creating so much a “work” as a “performance,” and they rely on the community of musicians working with them to create it. There is constant reinvention and a difficulty, if not impossibility, in repeating a performance. Thus, the individual musician is constantly having their music be buffeted, defined, supported, undermined, and/or complemented by the others around them. Joss’s identity as a man functions similarly.
Kay also makes the choice to have Joss play the trumpet when Billy Tipton actually played the piano. This lends itself to fecund symbolic interpretations of the trumpet’s function and meaning within the text. Certainly, the main interpretation is the trumpet-as-phallus, standing in for what Josephine Moore did not have but Joss Moody does. Another sees the trumpet’s concave end as representative of female anatomy, thus having the instrument contain both male and female associations. Yet another critical interpretation eschews this, claiming, “the trumpet is not the anatomical phallus . . . the instrument exists only to trumpet the story of coming and becoming, of permanent dislocation and fragmentation . . . ”
