Jazz by Toni Morrison

First published: 1992

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Historical

Time of plot: 1920’s

Locale: Virginia; Harlem, New York City

Principal characters

• Violet Trace, a beautician
• Joe Trace, her husband and a cosmetics salesperson
• Dorcas Manfred, Joe’s young lover
• Alice Manfred, Dorcas’s aunt
• Felice, Dorcas’s friend
• Rose Dear, Violet’s mother
• Wild, Joe’s mother
• Golden Gray, a light-skinned African American
• True Belle, Violet’s grandmother
• Hunters Hunter, Golden Gray’s father and Joe’s hunting mentor

The Story:

A three-month affair between Joe Trace and the young Dorcas Manfred ends when Joe shoots Dorcas at a party. At the young woman’s funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet Trace, is nicknamed Violent after she tries to cut the face of the corpse. For months, Violet and Joe grieve. They have only a photograph of Dorcas. The narrator believes that another scandalizing threesome is about to occur, as Dorcas’s friend, Felice, visits the couple.

The childless, withdrawn Violet had once collapsed in the street. At another time she had intended to take someone else’s baby home. Violet’s public craziness differs greatly from the determined and vocal woman she used to be. After Dorcas’s funeral, Violet even cast out the parrot who told Violet he loved her.

Violet herself recalls the funeral and its aftermath and wonders where her old, strong self has gone. She tortures herself about the things Joe may have done with Dorcas, revealing her own earlier relationship with Joe.

Violet is now remembering her childhood in Virginia: Her father can only visit the family occasionally, and secretly, because of Reconstruction (a period after the American Civil War). When he does visit, though, he always brings presents for his wife, Rose Dear, and their five children. Unfortunately for the family, Violet’s father also belongs to a political party that opposes white landowners. Eventually, Rose Dear is dispossessed of her home and its contents because of his involvement with that party.

True Belle, Violet’s grandmother, leaves Baltimore to care for her daughter and grandchildren. Eventually, Rose Dear drowns herself in a well. True Belle feeds the children stories of Golden Gray, the mixed-race boy that Violet never meets but is nevertheless crazy about. Violet believes her husband, Joe, had been a substitute for Golden Gray, just as Violet had been a sort of substitute for Joe’s mother, Wild.

In 1906, Joe and Violet travel by train to New York City, like numerous others from the American South. Twenty years later, Joe and Violet are barely speaking. Joe has given up his jobs, and Violet thinks of the woman who attacked Dorcas’s dead body in the coffin as someone other than herself.

Joe still grieves for Dorcas and tries to fix in his mind his first meeting with her. He cannot even recall how he felt about his life with Violet in Vesper County, Virginia, before they left the South. He had first met Dorcas in 1905, when delivering a cosmetics order to a customer who was visiting her family. Earlier, he had seen Dorcas buying candy. In the room he rented every Thursday from his neighbor Malvonne, Joe talked with Dorcas about the South and the mother from whom he wanted a sign of acknowledgment. He also had comforted Dorcas, whose own parents had been killed in the East St. Louis riots of July, 1917.

Alice Manfred is watching a march with her nine-year-old niece, Dorcas, a march being held to protest the death of two hundred people in the East St. Louis riots. Alice, whose sister and brother-in-law had been killed in the riots, has just taken in Dorcas—who does not say a word to her aunt about her parents’ deaths, and will never do so.

Now seventeen years old, Dorcas has been seduced by the music of the city and constrained by the discipline of her aunt. At one party she attends with her friend Felice, Dorcas is acknowledged but then dismissed by a boy she likes. It turns out that Joe is just the person she needs in her life.

Soon after Dorcas is killed by Joe, Violet visits Alice to ask her about her young niece who, unlike Violet, had light, creamy skin. Alice allows Violet to take a photograph of Dorcas home with her and then begins to thinks about the strength of many black women. She mends Violet’s coat lining and thinks about her own unarticulated fury at a husband who had taken off with another woman and who had died seven months later.

Violet remembers her sudden hunger for motherhood from ten years earlier. She still has a doll hidden under her bed.

In spring, 1926, Joe still has the blues. He remembers the family who had adopted him in Virginia when he was a baby. As a child, he had given himself his own surname—Trace—after his adoptive mother had told him his parents had vanished without a trace. At the age of fourteen, he had tried to track down his mother, Wild. Joe now begins to think of how he had tracked Dorcas in the city, much like his earlier quest. He characterizes his relationship with Dorcas as having been Edenic.

The narrator tells what she knows of True Belle, who had worked for a Virginia plantation owner’s daughter, Vera Louise, before the Civil War. When Vera Louise became pregnant—by a local black youth, Hunters Hunter—she was disowned by her parents and moved with True Belle to Baltimore; here, the yellow-haired Golden Gray had been born. True Belle had been forced to leave her own daughters behind with an aunt.

At the age of eighteen, Golden Gray, with directions from True Belle, sets out to find his father. Hunters Hunter has never been told of his existence. The narrator draws on literary stereotypes in imagining Golden Gray’s quest and the young man’s discovery of the pregnant and injured Wild, who is about to give birth to Joe.

In rural Virginia, the elusive black woman, Wild, is the source of many local superstitions. Field workers hear her laughter in the cane, and pregnant women worry that her presence might affect their unborn, but Hunters Hunter knows she is real and that Wild and Golden Gray are together.

Joe remembers looking for signs of his mother—a flock of redwings, rustling sugar cane, smoke-sugared air, a scrap of song—and he finds an entrance to a cave. The cave shows evidence of habitation—silver brushes, a doll, and Golden Gray’s clothing, but no Wild. In 1925, he thinks about this cave as he seeks out Dorcas.

Dorcas is thrilled with her new boyfriend, Acton. Joe had empowered her, whereas Acton is demanding and self-centered. At a crowded party with Acton, Dorcas knows Joe will come for her, but when she is shot in the shoulder, she refuses to identify Joe or go to the hospital.

Dorcas’s photograph has been returned to Alice, and music is in the air as Felice, carrying a race record for her aunt, visits Joe and Violet to tell more about Dorcas, including her last words. Like Wild and Violet, Felice is a dark-skinned black. Her visits comfort Violet and Joe, as if she is the child they never had. Joe begins to work again, and the couple find their true selves.

Bibliography

Eichelberger, Julia. Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. A fascinating study that considers how Morrison’s characters search for individual identity through a desire for or sometimes refutation of power. For undergraduate and graduate students. Includes a literature review.

Fultz, Lucille P. Toni Morrison: Playing with Difference. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Examines Morrison’s approach to differences (for example, black and white, male and female, wealth and poverty) in her intricate narratives.

Furman, Jan. Toni Morrison’s Fiction. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996. Offers a comprehensive introduction to Morrison’s novels with a strong chapter on Jazz.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Reviews, essays, and articles on Morrison’s writing, including Jazz. An invaluable resource by two well-known scholars.

Rodrigues, Eusebio L. “Experiencing Jazz.” Modern Fiction 39, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter, 1993): 733-754. An excellent reading of Morrison’s novel as a kind of jazz performance in itself.

Stein, Karen F. Reading, Learning, Teaching Toni Morrison. New York: Peter Lang, 2009. An excellent primer for students just beginning their studies of Morrison and her works. Includes a chapter on Jazz as well as an introductory chapter about the background to Morrison’s fiction.

Tally, Justine, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A comprehensive work that offers several scholarly chapters on Jazz and includes a guide to further reading.

Van der Zee, James, Owen Dodson, and Camille Billops. The Harlem Book of the Dead. Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Morgan & Morgan, 1978. Morrison’s idea for Jazz came from Van Der Zee’s photograph of an unknown girl said to have been shot by her “sweetheart.” This collection contains photographs of deceased African Americans that were taken in New York funeral homes in the 1920’s. Includes a foreword by Morrison.

Walker, Alice. “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?” In In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. London: Women’s Press, 1984. In this classic text, Walker explores the way “colorism” can exclude the black-woman ancestor, which may be relevant to understanding the characters of Wild and Golden Gray in Morrison’s Jazz.