Jazz

“I want to be the language that wishes him well, speaks his name, wakes him when his eyes need to be open.”

 This is the 6th Toni Morrison novel I have read and it has quickly moved up my favorites list (The Bluest Eye and Beloved are in constant battle for number one).  Truly I started this one based on a silly tweet that warned women to be careful of men who read Morrison novels, emphasizing Jazz, because what other woman introduced you to her? The answer is my wife. Funny enough, on a trip with my wife I lost my copy of this book in the Istanbul airport and it took me 2 hours to find it. Similarly, it took me awhile to find out that the structure of this book is based on jazz. The side character in a side character’s story get their own narrative. At first I thought this was commentary on the importance of an individual persons story within a community (I’m not completely sure this commentary is incorrect), but what is clear is that each person gets a solo that adds to the greater narrative like in a jazz performance.

 So what had happened was…

 This novel is truly a tapestry of stories so I will begin with the must know information. Joe Trace, a fifty-something year old man, fell in a maddening love with a 17 year old High School student named Dorcas. So maddening that Joe shot her when Dorcas was at a dance with someone else. Dorcas died that night. Subsequently, Violet Trace, Joe’s wife showed up to the young girl’s funeral and attempted to slash the face of the corpse.  I like to think of that as the bass line of the story, as it is the backbone that everything else plays off of. Now for the trumpets.  

 Violet, renamed by the neighborhood as “Violent”, then slowly becomes friends with Dorcas’ aunt and through their conversations we learn background on her and her husband’s life. Initially Violet and Joe are forlorn and depressed following the funeral, for very different reasons. Joe found freedom in his short, unserious and childish relationship and Violet did not understand why this young woman would consciously take her old husband. Through their back stories we uncover some trauma that bares resemblance to their current situations. Violet moved from the south with Joe to New York City after she immediately fell in love with the man. Both of the persons in this married couple come from uniquely broken homes. Joe was an orphan left behind in a hunting shack by a “wild woman” who lived in the woods. He would later be adopted by a good family who loved and cared for him, but his true calling, hunting, was taught to him by the man who owned the shack he was born in. Violet came from a family where her father was absent and her mother had a mental break that prevented her from taking care of her family. Violet was raised by her maternal grandmother, who was a former slave and raised the man that found Joe’s pregnant mother. People’s individual stories being connected is a large motif in this story. Similar to how the trumpets play off of a baseline. Now for the piano.  

 We learn from conversations with Dorcas’ aunt and her best friend that Dorcas also had a tragic history with her parents dying in a fire. Dorcas’ aunt would take in her niece and raise her extremely strictly.  However, the thought of Dorcas as a tragic character is lessened by her best friend’s recounting of the teenager as selfish and boy crazy. We learn that Dorcas refused any aid after being shot by Joe and died not from the bullet itself, but from blood loss. Violet and Joe get to know this best friend extremely well and begin to rekindle their own relationship. Eventually we see Joe and Violet return to a new norm which includes a life only found in a city like New York.

 Aiight so boom…

 Jazz is the second in the Beloved trilogy whereby Toni asks the question of who is beloved. Both novels integrate love, trauma and murder so intimately that you can mistake one for the other. Similar to Beloved the story of Jazz is inspired by a true story where a young woman in New York was shot by her lover at a party and refused any aid in fear of her lover going to jail. That young woman, like Dorcas, died. I found this out through a famous interview that Toni did, a clip of which goes viral annually. The one where she asks white America “What are you without racism? Are you any good? Are you still strong, still smart, still like yourself?” and “If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem.”

However, I find it interesting that I did not automatically connect this novel to Beloved, instead connecting it to another Morrison novel. I saw Song of Solomon in reverse. In SoS, we see a young man confused as to who he is find himself by retracing his roots through the south. Eventually his trauma catches up to him and he sails into the sky. In Jazz we see the opposite directionally. We have a couple escaping the traumas that they faced in the South with those traumas eventually catching up to them in the North (Violet has similar mental health issues as her mother brought on by their husbands and Joe retreats to what he was known for, hunting, instead this time his target is a 17 year-old who no longer wants him rather than a rabbit, a deer, or the mother that abandoned him). In both SoS and Jazz it is only by confronting the past/present traumas that any joy is gained by the protagonists. In SoS the young man flies into the sky (a utilization of the African American myth surrounding slaves taking flight back to Africa) and in Jazz Violet and Joe hold hands through the streets of New York, shedding the traumas of the South and after 20 years of being in New York City enter the north finally free.