On Toni Morrison's Jazz

“Crackers in the South mad cause Negroes were leaving; crackers in the North mad cause they  were coming.”

Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel, Jazz, is an experimental postmodern novel that is essentially about the Great Migration and the African-American migrant experience. Set in 1920s Harlem, the main characters are all migrants from the South whose former lives and family backgrounds are shared by shifting narrators. Indeed, the narrator switches so often that by the end of the novel, the book itself narrates as a metatext. Morrison herself has compared this to jazz music because of the improvisational style of the book. Moreover, the title of the novel refers to the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age more broadly, which included social change, newer forms of music that became essential to how white Americans also thought of the decade, and a decay in moral values often attributed to black jazz and blues music. What is most interesting about this novel is the focus on lower-class blacks instead of the bourgeoisie writers, poets and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Two the main characters, the middle-aged married couple Joe Trace and Violet, are migrants from Vesper County, VA and have been in New York City since 1906. The other character, Joe’s teenage lover he saw behind his wife’s back and later murdered after she left him for a younger man named Acton, Dorcas, represents the effect of jazz and blues and city life on the transplanted black population in Harlem. And like a jazz song, the same story is told over and over again from different perspectives and narrators to eventually get the final story of how Joe and Dorcas meet, why he kills her, and why Violet felt the need to ruin Dorcas’s funeral by trying to stab the corpse. The novel is also similar in some ways to detective fiction and reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a short novel about how tradition led a small Colombian coastal town to let two brothers slaughter the man she claimed took her virginity. Like Marquez’s novel, the several people in Harlem get to answer or share their experiences with Joe, Violet and Dorcas, each one offering their own opinions of the characters and their motivations for their actions. Perhaps Morrison read Gabriel Garcia Marquez?

Morrison was inspired to write the novel by a book called the Harlem Book of the Dead, which is a compilation of funeral photos taken in the 1920s. One of the photos showed a young woman, renamed Dorcas by Morrison, who set out to write a novel. She did thorough research by looking up the musicians and magazines of the era that appear in her story, so it reads authentic. Morrison also referred to the novel as the second part of her trilogy of African-American fiction that begins with Beloved and ends with Paradise, which means her trilogy covers about 100 years of African-American history from the 1870s to the 1970s. Though she refers to the three as a trilogy, it is actually a very loose trilogy, despite the intertexuality between this novel and Beloved. Because Beloved was driven out of Sethe’s home in 1870s Ohio while pregant, and because Joe Trace’s mother is described as an insane woman, some have interpreted the latter to be Beloved based on shared insanity and some other evidence. Regardless of Joe’s possible parentage, the characters in the final novel have no relation to Joe Trace, so one must assume Morrison considers the three a trilogy because of the historical and thematic commonalities.

Anywho, back to the novel’s migration narrative characteristics. First of all, the pasts of both Joe and Violet are elucidated and like most Southern blacks, they left the sharecropping South for industrial, service-sector, and other higher-paying types of employment. Coming to the North meant leaving relatives behind, but the material gains were too great to pass, so they left Virginia in 1906 on board a train bound for New York City, where the two quickly found work. By 1926, when the main events of story take place, they live comfortably in Harlem, Joe selling Cleopatra cosmetics to women in the area and Violet hairdressing. Although they are both country people at heart, with country values and skills of hunting, agriculture, and manual labor, Joe is finally convinced to go to the cities after Booker T. Washington ate with the president of the United States, which symbolized the greater social mobility for blacks in urban areas (Morrison 107). Upon arrival in New York City, both Joe and Violet love it (33). Urban life causes dramatic changes for the formerly country black folks since the “lowdown” music, prostitution, rent parties, and drinking are assumed to cause moral decay. Urban life becomes deterministic, with the city choosing what one does, which in the case of Joe meant seeking what everyone loses in their youth: young love. Despite decades of a lasting marriage with Violet, she spends more time with her parrot she taught to say, “I love you,” than on Joe (49). Their loveless marriage, only still together because the other is all they have of the South and their youth, develops into relationship of routine, demonstrated by Violet cooking the same food for dinner everyday. Thus, despite the economic opportunities of the City, their lives are still determined by forces beyond their control (white employers and city officials) and only for their nostalgia of their Southern days does their marriage live after Joe shoots Dorcas. Dorcas, on the other hand, represents class tensions within Harlem and moral bigotry among Harlem’s “Christian” community. Dorcas, adopted and raised by her aunt, Alice Manfred, after her parents are killed by whites during the 1917 East St. Louis Riot, Alice raises her to not dress skimpily or listen to the jazz and blues music played by musicians and heard everywhere on phonographs. Dorcas ultimately gives in to the ‘lowdown” Negro music, pursues dancing and partying with lower class blacks of questionable moral fiber (as her aunt Alice would say). According to her best friend before her murder, Felice, Dorcas was boy crazy and self-centered, only dating Acton to see the envy on other girls’ faces, even though Acton, who when she is shot while at a party with him, is more concerned about her blood getting on his shirt than the dying girl before him. 

The City, therefore, does not live up to all its promises. People from different parts of the South congregate in Harlem, have access to better jobs, but eventually lose aspects of their rural roots by dressing in different, more revealing styles, dancing to blues and jazz, and prostitution thrives. Joe and Violet, like Dorcas, also change their lives according to the City’s will. The City’s skyscrapers, fast-paced life, and constant disappointment by persuading men to live for the weekend which never brings true happiness caused Joe to seek to relive his youth, to “refresh” himself by seeking another woman. When describing his relationship with Dorcas, he said, “ I rose in it” instead of falling in love; Dorcas was an Eden for his possessive and self-centered desire to make himself happy by avoiding the routine of his loveless marriage. At the same time, Joe enjoyed the neighborhood he lived on where he was a well-known and respected figure for organizing the toys children left out and the respect and acceptance of the community, even after shooting Dorcas. Violet, on the other hand, embraces her hairdressing career which makes good money, regrets never having a child, and longs for her Virginia youth when she was strong and independent. By the novel’s conclusion, she and Joe are happy together, despite him cheating on her with a young woman; she eventually realizes Dorcas was a troubled young woman and she has Joe’s attention now after he killed Dorcas.

The multiple points of view and heavy symbolism likely mean that none of the events after the funeral of Dorcas are true, but each interpretation being something the individual narrators (Felice, Joe, Violet, Alice, Malvonne and other characters) would like to believe happened with the characters. Of course the City’s affects, positive and negative, are assumed to cancel each other out by the novel’s conclusion, if one trusts Felice’s narration. Therefore, the Great Migration had some unquestionably positive results for black America, but the loss of country life and persistence of racism and exploitation alongside class tensions that developed with the increasing gap between black middle class and urban workers, led to a fractured community where light-skinned blacks and the wealthy still dominated the scene. Indeed, the peers of Felice and Dorcas ranked each other based on skin color and excluding darker skinned girls, and Violet herself wished for lighter skin like Dorcas because that likely played a role in Joe and her getting together. All in all, a good novel, though hard to read at times. Not nearly as powerful as Beloved or Song of Solomon, Morrison once again displays her mastery of literature and the African-American oral traditions of participatory storytelling; what occurs in the novel is always up to the interpretation of the author, and what specifically happened with Joe, Dorcas, and Violet remains in the air.