Book Review 1: Toni Morrison – Jazz
Homage to a historical fiction masterpiece and Happy Birthday to the Legend
Toni Morrison usually kicks off the reading year.
I have unexplainable traditions, no rhyme, some reason. I imagine my mother felt the same, screaming my name while I was outside with my hooligans friends, asking me to pass the remote on her bedside table while she lay in bed. Frustrating, but I will keep this hand-me-the-object tradition alive #ungentleparenting; maybe I’ll ask to pass my book instead. Where was I?
Circa 2022, I began the (reading) year with Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, respectively. And out of respect, rest in literary peace to giants of the pen game. I am breaking that tradition this year (don’t ask why).
I am dedicating my first book review to Toni Morrison to avenge myself. And the second to James Baldwin. This will be a frustrating endeavor because The Bluest Eye is my favorite Morrison book. However, pre-2023 (the year I read Jazz), I took very sparing notes while reading. And when I opened my Bluest Eye Word doc – from 2022 – to review what I jotted down, my notes-to-self was half a page short. There’s just not enough between the…
“oh nah”
“yoooooo”
“c’mon son”
…to give you a full review.
I remember the plot and the characters, but more than anything else, Bluest Eye remains my favorite Morrison novel because I remember how I felt as I coursed through it. The feeling of putting it down, reluctantly, experiencing pure awe at what I just read. Completely enthralled. The fine details escape me, naturally, over 3 years. You know what’s worse than that? I read Sula right after (tied with Jazz for my second favorite Morrison book), and then Beloved. Do you know how frustrating this is? Don’t throw stones at me for this, but I was not feeling Beloved the first time I read it. I gave it another shot in 2024, and it spoke to me more deeply then. Good things take time, sometimes.
And with that, Jazz.
“JAZZ” IS WIDELY considered Morrison’s most challenging novel and is purported to have been her favorite.” – NY Times
You see, Morrison says things in ways that you just won’t ever come across from the mouth/pen of another person. It’s one reason I’m infatuated with everything she inked.
Exhibit A (from the Foreword): “She sang, my mother, the way other people muse. A constant background drift of beautiful sound I took for granted, like oxygen.”
Jazz, the music form, was omnipresent throughout Morrison’s childhood and adult life. Organically, in the same way that someone of my age would likely title a book “Hip Hop” without that necessarily being the book's focal point. A reminder of what the powerful art force is/was for the time. Thematically necessary, even mandatory.
Of the Jazz Age, Morrison notes –
“I was struck by the modernity that jazz anticipated and directed, and by its unreasonable optimism…the music insisted that the past might haunt us, but it would not entrap us.”
“The moment when an African American art form defined, influenced, reflected a nation’s culture in so many ways: the burgeoning of sexual license, a burst of political, economic, and artistic power; the ethical conflicts between the sacred and the secular; the hand of the past being crushed by the present.”
“Romantic love seemed to me one of the fingerprints of the twenties, and jazz it’s engine.”
With this book, Toni Morrison gave me my favorite type of reading, history, while also marrying two of my many favorite historical periods (or, some could argue, one continuous period): the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz is both a novel and a painting of the 1900s to 1920s. More specifically, an event in 1926.
The event.
“I had decided on the period, the narrative line, and the place long ago, after seeing a photograph of a pretty girl in a coffin, and reading the photographer’s recollection of how she got there.” – Toni Morrison
Photographer’s recollection: The husband shot his wife. The wife refused to identify him to authorities before she passed away.
(Below) could be the image that Morrison was inspired by –
Let’s make some noise for the photographer, James Van Der Zee (RIP), one of the eminent chroniclers of the Harlem Renaissance. History goes that Van Der Zee photographed many people in their coffins (examples), even his teenage daughter who passed at the tender age of 15. These photographs served many purposes: dignify the dead, document the lives of people who migrated to Harlem, provide respite to the family of those in the Old Country (South) who could not make it to their family member’s funeral, and on and on.
I may be underselling. Van Der Zee described this in a much more fly manner –
“I put my heart and soul into them and tried to see that every picture was better-looking than the person.” (MoMA)
The man (photo is so tough) and his domain –
I still haven’t dived into the book, forgive me, here we go.
Joe Trace, a 50-year-old man who sells cosmetics door-to-door, kills his 18-year-old lover, Dorcas Manfred, at a party. While their love affair had blossomed into something he likely took more seriously than her, naturally (SHE’S 18!), Dorcas shifted and wanted to talk to boys her age. After Joe shoots Dorcas, she tells her friend (Felice) and others to leave her be, let her sleep, and that she’ll go to the hospital in the morning (nod to the actual event). And even in imminent death, Dorcas made one last plea to Felice, presumably to save Joe’s ego –
“There’s only one apple. Just one. Tell Joe.”
Okay, hold on. So, instead of working that train line from Old Country (South) to New Country (North), Joey Boy was selling cosmetics? He then spent the rest of his life cooing in his room, reminiscing on Dorcas. Old head was a walking burgundy flag. Alright, back to it.
The “pretty girl in a coffin” inspired Dorcas’s character in the novel. Violet Trace is Joe’s wife and a well-known beautician in her Harlem neighborhood. Violet immediately gets a ‘she’s off the rails’ (aka Violent) reputation for 1) trying to attack Dorcas’s corpse at her funeral and 2) spending the rest of her lifetime obsessing about the “dead girl” (who was she, what she liked, and, most importantly, why Joe was obsessed with her).
Violet even went to her school. The detail of which stuck out to me like a sore thumb because it is the exact name of the school I attended from kindergarten to 8th grade –
“She haunted PS-89 to talk to teachers who knew the girl.”
I know Joe is the real wild one in this story, but a lot of Morrison’s focus is on Violet’s task of investigating the deceased; forgive me if this feels a little one-sided.
Violet even befriended Dorcas’s aunt, Alice Manfred, who seemed to revel in having company after losing Dorcas and her husband (he ran off with another woman). Violet and Alice bonding over losing loved ones/lovers is not a thematic subtlety.
Alice adopted Dorcas following Dorcas’s parents’ deaths from attacks/their home being torched (a nod to what drove many families from the South). But Dorcas, true to her youth and the alluring nature of NYC, reveled in all the city had to offer. Alice could only do so much to exercise control over Dorcas’s life.
NYC, the unconquerable, the oh so alluring –
“Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do. And what goes on on its blocks and lots and side streets is anything the strong can think of and the weak will admire.”
“Alice Manfred had worked hard to privatize her niece, but she was no match for a City seeping music that begged and challenged each and every day.” “Come,” it said. “Come and do wrong.”
Morrison lays bare Violet’s “cracks,” much of which the reader (I think) is to assume are Joe's doings (what he may have led Violet to believe about their future as lovers). Their journey together from Vesper County, VA (nod to the Great Migration) suggested they would be by the other's side forever. Natural conclusion. Initially, they did not want children (“Loved them…But neither wanted the trouble.”). However, things, times, and people evolve. We edit our former nays habitually. And eventually, “…mother-hunger had hit [Violet] like a hammer.”
But “mother-hunger” hit Violet like a hammer for other reasons. She grew up severely impoverished in the South. As such, Violet’s mother was unable to provide adequate care for her. The feeling of failing as a mother overwhelmed her to the point of taking her own life. Sidebar – birthing, nurturing, and mothering are superhuman feats; birthing alone is a magical accomplishment. Ripped from her mother at a young age altered Violet's psyche forever. It is no surprise then that Violet ultimately concludes –
“What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?”
I am about to race past a detail you will likely respond to with “WHAT?!” But stick with me, it’s part of Morrison humanizing the “mother-hunger” and Violet’s search for familial (familiar) love. So, Violet stole someone’s child (yes, you read that correctly) and thought to herself –
“Joe will love this…she could use [something else] for a crib until she got a real one.”
And Joe, from that old-school way of ‘you just stick with your person,’ did just that, despite what he may have felt was an untenable household.
“Over time her silences annoy her husband, then puzzle him and finally depress him. He is married to a woman who speaks and mainly to her birds. One of whom answers back: “I love you.”
But Joe, you had a hand in making it unlivable. To cut Violet some slack, she gave Joe her “best years” (stereotypically speaking) and moved with him from South to North during their youth. His decision to obsess over a child, while not consummating one with Violet, likely contributed to the factors that made her spiral.
“Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses — young loving.”
A little on Joe before we wrap. He’s buggin He couldn’t escape himself/his story. He was an orphan, taken in by two people who never really named him. I believe he took Joseph after the pope. And then trace after his mom told him that the family who abandoned him left him without a trace. Naturally, a line is drawn – orphans – as to what could have been a reason for Dorcas and Joe forming a tight bond. He’s still buggin
“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly…” – Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
You know how it ends. I spoiled that at the beginning of the piece. This book is truly amazing. Covering many themes – African American life in Harlem, romance, freedom of choice, doom, seduction, loss, anger, mothering – Jazz is a classic, pun intended.
Two strong quotes from the book to close off –
“He knew wrong wasn’t right, and did it anyway.”
“Can’t rival the dead for love. Lose every time.”
A final word, for real.
Disclaimer: I read this book in 2023. My pre-2024 Morrison notes (across all her books) are not as robust because…she is just that good at keeping me fully engaged in the pages. I honestly forget to take notes. If some of the review feels wanting, apologies. Please fill in where I may have left out (assuming you’ve read Jazz); more hands/pens benefit readers.
After reading Jazz, I rewatched Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (documentary). Worth all 2 hours. I may watch it again. There are bios everywhere on Morrison. But if you need a quick one, these folks provide a good overview The Bus x Bio.
And remember,
in all that you do, please, don’t ever stop reading.
Toni Morrison is always a good idea. Such a great review J, we need more!
Great style. I can hear your personality through the words. Keep the reviews going