51 pages • 1 hour read
Jackie KayTrumpet
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Establishing Identity
Having chosen a different identity than the one assigned to him at birth, Joss retains it with great care. After his death, the revelation of his decision upends public perception of him—as discussion of same-sex relationships and transgender individuals were not commonplace at the time. In general, the public is shocked by Joss’s secret. Aside from this uproar, Jackie Kay weaves accounts of other characters who deal with shifting identities or struggle to decide who they are. Symbolically, Kay illustrates this by having many characters undergo or consider name changes (such as Joss and Colman).
For some characters, the question of identity relates to sexual orientation. Millie felt attracted to Joss when she assumed him to be a cisgender man, and continued to love him upon discovering Joss’s assigned gender. May Hart, Josephine’s childhood playmate—now in her 70s—looks at a photograph of Joss and perceives him as a woman. This immediately reignites her sexual attraction to him, even after many relationships with cisgender men.
There are also characters wrestling with who they are socially, vocationally, and morally. This idea is best represented by Maggie, the Moodys’ former housekeeper, describing Millie’s Russian nesting dolls. Millie had equated the dolls to people: “We’re all like that, aren’t we? We’ve all got lots of little people inside us” (173). According to Kay, the journey of life is coming to terms with the forces within oneself; one’s identity emerges depending upon which traits take precedence. Colman embodies this idea, as he struggles with his identity before finding peace, accepting the decisions his parents made and acknowledging that he must make his own. In other words, if he is to both appreciate and step out of his father’s shadow, he must carve a path for himself.
Prejudice Based on Race, Gender, or Sexuality
Trumpet is a story about different types of prejudice as experienced and negotiated by the novel’s characters. The most prevalent prejudices in the novel are racial, gender, and same-sex bias. In the novel, the person most impacted by racial bias is Colman. As a 10-year-old, he watched his mother face a bigot who insulted a Black man on their bus. For the first time, Colman became aware that he, like the Black stranger, was different from his white peers. As he grew into a tall, imposing adult, the prejudice against him increased. Kay’s frequent listing of famous Black jazz musicians—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis—points out an ironic reality about racial prejudice: As a talented jazz trumpeter, Joss is almost expected to be Black and, accordingly, he achieved a degree of acceptance beyond other Black individuals.
Kay frames Joss’s choice to identify as a man as not solely based on sexual orientation, despite his attraction to women. Joss chooses to present as male because of the bias among jazz musicians and aficionados against women. He expresses this in his conversation with Melanie, Colman’s girlfriend, who plays the trumpet. “He went on about this: trumpet players were mostly men, it was time a woman like herself gave the guys a fright, a nice wee fright” (119). In Melanie, Joss recognized the possibility of someone achieving what he could not—succeeding as a woman jazz trumpeter.
As a tabloid reporter, Sophie is particularly drawn to the “same-sex” aspect of Joss’s story. She considers the Moodys’ same-sex marriage a form of perversity; it troubles Colman as well. He knows, based on an adolescent conversation with Joss, that his parents had an active sex life. Upon learning his father was assigned female at birth, Colman wrestles with his mother being attracted to another “woman.” Ironically, Colman, who has long experienced prejudice from others because of his race, expresses prejudice against his parents because of the nature of their relationship. However, Sophie and Colman’s judgmental, shallow attraction only reinforces how loving and genuine Joss and Millie’s marriage was. The novel reveals multiple layers of prejudice and shows the hypocrisy of each.
Love Overcomes Barriers
The novel is replete with barriers such as faulty assumptions, prejudices, and negative emotions. Often, these barriers cannot be overcome, as when Millie angrily confronts the bigot on the bus, then feels compelled to leave with Colman long before her stop. It is also noteworthy that Sophie never overcomes her view of Joss and the general populace as perverse. In many cases, however, Kay portrays sincere love as the force that breaks down the barriers that come between human beings.
A key moment of love is when Joss reveals his assigned gender to Millie. Frightened, Joss is ready to apologize for misleading Millie when she kisses him. As the novel’s symbolic embodiment of love, Millie encounters several situations that pain her: She slaps Colman when he is disrespectful (and regrets it), cuts ties with her mother when the older woman refers to Joss as a “Darky,” and feels stunned when Joss suggests that she sleep with one of his bandmates if she want a child. Despite these emotional bruises, she always responds with love: embracing Colman, welcoming her mother to her wedding, and going to an adoption agency with Joss.
Joss also serves as a mediating, healing force. He comes to Millie and his friend Big Red McCall in dreams to guide and console them. His final letter to Colman binds Joss’s own father to him and Colman, as a trio of men searching for acceptance and meaning. The letter demonstrates to Colman that Joss understood his inner conflict. In a final act of love overcoming barriers, Colman abandons the book project and reunites with his mother at their old seaside home. The years of love shared between father, mother, and son restore them despite years of turmoil—as represented by the seabird who sees to Colman and Millie’s reunion.
