Recitatif, page 1
Also by Toni Morrison
FICTION
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ESSAYS
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
The Origin of Others
The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 1983 by Toni Morrison
Introduction copyright © 2022 by Zadie Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally collected in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, published by William Morrow & Company, New York, in 1983.
www.aaknopf.com www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021944118
ISBN 9780593315033 (hardcover)
Ebook ISBN 9780593315040
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by John Gall
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Contents
Cover
Also by Toni Morrison
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by Zadie Smith
Recitatif
A Note About the Author
Introduction
Somebody in There After All
by Zadie Smith
In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her oeuvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, The Source of Self-Regard, was to observe a literary lab technician reverse-engineering an experiment. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certain—page by page, line by line—that nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. With “Recitatif” she was explicit. This extraordinary story you hold in your hands was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” [*1]
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The characters in question are Twyla and Roberta, two poor girls, eight years old and wards of the state, who spend four months together in St. Bonaventure shelter. The very first thing we learn about them, from Twyla, is this: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” A little later, that they were placed together, in room 406, “stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race.” What we never learn definitively—no matter how closely we read—is which of these girls is black and which white. We will assume, we can insist, but can’t be sure. And this despite the fact that we get to see them grow up, becoming adults who occasionally run into each other. We eavesdrop when they speak, examine their clothes, hear of their husbands, their jobs, their children, their lives…The crucial detail is withheld. A puzzle of a story, then—a game. Only, Toni Morrison does not play. When she called “Recitatif” an “experiment” she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.
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But before going any further into the ingenious design of this philosophical[*2] brain teaser, the title itself is worth a good, long look:
Recitatif, recitative | ˌrɛsɪtəˈtiːv | noun [mass noun]
Musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note: singing in recitative.
The tone or rhythm peculiar to any language obs
The music of Morrison begins in “ordinary speech.” Her ear was acute, and rescuing African American speech patterns from the debasements of the American mainstream is a defining feature of her early work. In this story, though, the challenge of capturing “ordinary speech” has been deliberately complicated. For many words are here to be “sung on the same note.” That is, we will hear the words of Twyla and the words of Roberta, and although they are perfectly differentiated the one from the other, we will not be able to differentiate them in the one way we really want to. An experiment easy to imagine but difficult to execute. In order to make it work, you’d need to write in such a way that every phrase precisely straddled the line between characteristically “black” and “white” American speech, and that’s a high-wire act in an eagle-eyed country, ever alert to racial codes, adept at categorization, in which most people feel they can spot a black or white speaker with their eyes closed, precisely because of the tone and rhythm “peculiar to” their language…
And beyond language, in a racialized system, all manner of things will read as “peculiar to” one kind of person or another. The food a character eats, the music they like, where they live, how they work. Black things, white things. Things that are peculiar to our people and peculiar to theirs. But one of the questions of “Recitatif” is precisely what that phrase “peculiar to” really signifies. For we tend to use it variously, not realizing that we do. It can mean:
That which characterizes
That which belongs exclusively to
That which is an essential quality of
These three are not the same. The first suggests a tendency; the second implies some form of ownership; the third speaks of essences and therefore of immutable natural laws. In “Recitatif” these differences prove crucial, as we will see.
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Much of the mesmerizing power of “Recitatif” lies in that first definition of “peculiar to”: that which characterizes. As readers we urgently want to characterize the various characteristics on display. But how? My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. Well, now, what kind of mother tends to dance all night? A black one or a white one? And whose mother is more likely to be sick? Is Roberta a blacker name than Twyla? Or vice versa? And what about voice? Twyla narrates it in the first person, and so we may have the commonsense feeling that she must be the black girl, for her author is black. But it doesn’t take much interrogating of this “must” to realize it rests on rather shallow, autobiographical ideas of authorship that would seem wholly unworthy of the complex experiment that has been set before us. Besides, Morrison was never a poor child in a state institution—she grew up solidly working-class in integrated Lorain, Ohio—and autobiography was never a very strong element of her work. Her imagination was capacious. No, autobiography will not get us very far here. So, we listen a little more closely to Twyla:
And Mary, that’s my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean. So when the Big Bozo (nobody ever called her Mrs. Itkin, just like nobody ever said St. Bonaventure)—when she said, “Twyla, this is Roberta. Roberta, this is Twyla. Make each other welcome,” I said, “My mother won’t like you putting me in here.”
The game is afoot. Morrison bypasses any detail that might imply an essential quality of, slyly evades whatever would belong exclusively to one girl or the other, and makes us sit instead in this uncomfortable, double-dealing world of that which characterizes, in which Twyla seems to move in a moment from black to white to black again, depending on the nature of your perception. Like that dress on the Internet no one could ever agree on the color of…
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When reading “Recitatif” with students, there is a moment where the class grows uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character.[*3] For example: Twyla loves the food at St. Bonaventure and Roberta hates it. (The food is Spam, Salisbury steak, Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it.) Is Twyla black? Twyla’s mother’s idea of supper is “popcorn and a can of Yoo-hoo.” Is Twyla white?
Twyla’s mother looks like this:
She had on those green slacks I hated….
Roberta’s mother looks like this:
She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross I’d ever seen. I swear it was six inches long each way. And in the crook of her arm was the biggest Bible ever made.
Does that help? We might think the puzzle is solved when both mothers come to visit their daughters one Sunday and Roberta’s mother refuses to shake Twyla’s mother’s hand. But a moment later, upon reflection, it will strike us that a pious, upstanding, sickly black mother might be just as unlikely to shake the hand of an immoral, fast-living, trashy, dancing white mother as vice versa…Complicating matters further, Twyla and Roberta—despite their crucial differences—seem to share the same low status within the confines of St. Bonaventure. Or at least, that’s how Twyla sees it:
We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped. Even the New York City Puerto Ricans and the upstate Indians ignored us.
At this point, many readers will start getting a little desperate to put back in precisely what Morrison has deliberately removed. You start combing the fine print:
We were eight years old and got F’s all the time. Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher.
Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorly—or are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both?
As a reader you know there’s something unseemly in these kinds of inquiries but old habits die hard. You need to know. So you try another angle. You get granular.
Twyla’s mother brings no food for her daughter on that Sunday outing
Cries out “Twyla, baby!” when she spots her in the chapel
Is pretty
Smells of Lady Esther dusting powder
Doesn’t wear a hat in a house of God
Calls Roberta’s mum “that bitch!” and “twitched and crossed and uncrossed her legs all through service.”
Meanwhile, Roberta’s mother brings plenty of food—which Roberta refuses—but says not a word to anyone, although she does read aloud to Roberta from the Bible. There’s a lot of readable difference there, and Twyla certainly notices it all:
Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe that’s why I got into waitress work later—to match up the right people with the right food.
She seems jealous. But can vectors of longing, resentment or desire tell us who’s who? Is Twyla a black girl jealous of a white mother who brought more food? Or a white girl resentful of a black mother who thinks she’s too godly to shake hands?
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Children are curious about justice. Sometimes they are shocked by their encounters with its opposite. They say to themselves: Things are not right. But children also experiment with injustice, with cruelty. To stress-test the structure of the adult world. To find out exactly what its rules are. (The fact that questions of justice seem an inconvenient speculation for so many adults cannot go unnoticed by children.) And it is when reflecting upon a moment of childish cruelty that Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the system—whatever their position may be within it—and those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody. Because there is a person in St. Bonaventure whose position is lower than either Twyla’s or Roberta’s—far lower. Her name is Maggie:
The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses….Maggie couldn’t talk. The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and sandy colored and she worked in the kitchen. I don’t know if she was nice or not. I just remember her legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked.
Maggie has no characteristic language. She has no language at all. Once she fell over in the school orchard and the older girls laughed and Twyla and Roberta did nothing. She is not a person you can do things for: she is only an object of ridicule. “She wore this really stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with earflaps—and she wasn’t much taller than we were.” In the social system of St. Bonaventure, Maggie stands outside all hierarchies. She’s one to whom anything can be said. One to whom anything might be done. Like a slave. Which is what it means to be nobody. Twyla and Roberta, noticing this, take a childish interest in what it means to be nobody:
“But what about if somebody tries to kill her?” I used to wonder about that. “Or what if she wants to cry. Can she cry?”
“Sure,” Roberta said. “But just tears. No sounds come out.”
“She can’t scream?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“Can she hear?”
“I guess.”
“Let’s call her,” I said. And we did.
“Dummy! Dummy!” She never turned her head.
“Bow legs! Bow legs!” Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby-boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn’t let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us.
* * *
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Time leaps forward. Roberta leaves St. Bonny’s first, and a few months after so does Twyla. The girls grow into women. Years later, Twyla is waitressing at an upstate Howard Johnson’s, when who should walk in but Roberta, just in time to give us some more racial cues to debate.[*4] These days Roberta’s hair is “so big and wild” Twyla can barely see her face. She’s wearing a halter and hot pants and sitting between two hirsute guys with big hair and beards. She seems to be on drugs. Now, Roberta and friends are going to see Hendrix, and would any other artist have worked quite so well for Morrison’s purpose? Hendrix’s hair is big and wild. Is his music black or white? Your call. Either way, Twyla—her own hair “shapeless in a net”—has never heard of him, and when she says she lives in Newburgh, Roberta laughs.
* * *
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Geography, in America, is fundamental to racial codes, and Newburgh—sixty miles north of Manhattan—is an archetypal racialized American city. Founded in 1709, it is where Washington announced the cessation of hostilities with Britain and therefore the beginning of America as a nation, and in the nineteenth century was a grand and booming town, with a growing black middle class. The Second World War manufacturing boom brought waves of African American migrants into Newburgh, eager to escape the racial terrorism of the South, looking for low-wage work, but with the end of the war the work dried up; factory jobs were relocated south or abroad, and by the time Morrison wrote “Recitatif,” Newburgh was a depressed town, hit by “white flight,” riven with poverty and the violence that attends poverty, and with large sections of its once beautiful waterfront bulldozed in the name of “urban renewal.” Twyla is married to a Newburgh man from an old Newburgh family, whose race the reader is invited to decipher (“James and his father talk about fishing and baseball and I can see them all together on the Hudson in a raggedy skiff”) but who is certainly one of the millions of twentieth-century Americans who watched once thriving towns mismanaged and abandoned by the federal government: “Half the population of Newburgh is on welfare now, but to my husband’s family it was still some upstate paradise of a time long past.” And then, when the town is on its knees, and the great houses empty and abandoned, and downtown a wasteland of empty shopfronts and aimless kids on the corner—the new money moves in. The old houses get done up. A Food Emporium opens. And it’s in this Emporium—twelve years after their last run-in—that the women meet again, but this time all is transformation. Roberta’s cleaned up her act and married a rich man:
