The Sin Box and The Shawshank Redemption OR The Power of Music

One of my favorite moments in the novel A Lesson Before Dying is when a self-righteous, old-school southern minister in 1940s Louisiana rails at a young schoolteacher for supplying an imprisoned man with a radio. "He needs God in that cell, and not that sin box."

A sin box!!??

I burst out laughing the first time I read that line. The author's inspired term for a radio in the eyes of Reverend Ambrose offers some much needed comic relief in this heart-breaker of a book. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, A Lesson Before Dying is the story of a young black schoolteacher, Grant, assigned to instill a sense of worth, courage and pride in Jefferson, an 18-year-old black man wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death in the Jim Crow South.

Referred to by his own defense lawyer as a hog ("Why, I'd just as soon put a hog in the the electric chair as this"), Jefferson has been repeatedly degraded and denied his humanity by an unjust society, and is understandably embittered. When Grant begins visiting the imprisoned Jefferson, Jefferson is virtually unreachable. He is uncommunicative and beaten-down.

But then Jefferson begins to change. It is a seemingly small change: when the schoolteacher comes to visit him one day, Jefferson looks at him without hate. "Last Friday," Grant tells the Reverend, "was the first time he ever asked me a question or answered me without accusing me for his condition."

What brought about the change in the imprisoned Jefferson? That little "sin box" the schoolteacher gave him.

I'm a great believer in the power of music. I'm convinced that it reaches some part of us that words cannot. When I first got into Beethoven, I remember telling someone that Beethoven was good for the soul. I still believe that. I also feel the music of Bruce Springsteen is good for the soul, though my appreciation for both puzzles some. (To which I'd reply with a Leonard Bernstein line: there are only two categories of music that matter--good and bad.)

Which is why I love it when the schoolteacher in A Lesson Before Dying balks at the possible removal the "sin box" from Jefferson's cell. "You can take it from him," Jefferson tells the Reverend. "But you won't reach him if you do. The only thing that keeps him from thinking he is not a hog is that radio." The radio and the music that comes out of it has lifted Jefferson to a higher plane.

An equally powerful depiction of the power of music is in the movie The Shawshank Redemption. Although Stephen King wrote the novella on which the movie is based, this scene is not in the novella, and full credit must go to the empathetic imagination of screenwriter and director Frank Darabont.

This scene also takes place in a prison, Shawshank Prison, where a prisoner played by Tim Robbins bars the door to the guard's station, places a record on the turntable, and then broadcasts the music over the PA system, so that every prisoner in Shawshank can hear it. Everything in the prison comes to a halt as the men stand transfixed by the music, staring at the speakers from which a duet from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro is broadcast.

In the movie's voice-over, Red, played by Morgan Freeman, says:

"I have no idea to this day what them two Italian ladies were singin' about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I like to think they were singin' about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it."

Do you have a favorite example of the power of music in literature, film or our lives? Feel free to share it!

In Praise of Letters

"We must make a religion of that last thing - endurance," Tennessee Williams wrote in a letter to his friend, Joseph Hazan. "Read the collected letters of D.H. Lawrence, the journal and letters of Katherine Mansfield, of Vincent van Gogh. How bitterly and relentlessly they fought their way through! Sensitive beyond endurance and yet enduring! . . . . They live, they aren't dead. That is the one ineluctable gift of the artist, to project himself beyond time and space through grasp and communion with eternal values. Even this may be a relative good, a makeshift. Canvas fades, languages are forgotten. But isn't there beauty in the fact of their passion, so much of which is replete with the purest compassion?"

The above is from The Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams: Volume 1, which I was surprised and delighted to find on the library shelves. The book hadn't been checked out in two or three years, and so I feared it was missing. But there it was! I was grateful, but also slightly appalled on Tennessee's behalf that no one had checked out his letters in the last few years. This is a writer so fine that even his letters shimmer with poetry and light.

But how many of us seek out letters? I confess it's a format I sometimes overlook, in spite of my devotion to The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, which I was ridiculously pleased to learn was also a favorite of Tennessee Williams. Although I've read one of the Williams biographies, I didn't know--or had forgotten--that he was interested in van Gogh, and had even planned to write a play about him. But that's one of the pleasures of letters--intimate documents that illuminate the inner workings and passions of your heroes and others.

If you're a fan of van Gogh, check out The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. He was a gifted writer as well as a voracious reader, and after urging his brother to read Jane Eyre, writes: "I wish all people had what I am gradually beginning to acquire: the power to read a book in a short time without difficulty, and to keep a strong impression of it. In reading books, as in looking at pictures, one must admire what is beautiful with assurance--without doubt, without hesitation."

If you enjoy the letters of writers, check out The Habit of Being: Letters by Flannery O'Connor, whose dark sense of humor is evident throughout. Of her advance copies of her novel, Wise Blood, she wrote: "My nine copies have to go to a set of relatives who are waiting anxiously to condemn the book until they get a free copy."

Other collections of letters available at the library include those of Mozart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Truman Capote, Mark Twain and Jane Goodall.

Do you have a favorite collection of letters that you'd like to recommend? Here's your chance!