Teaching Toni Morrison's "Recitatif" PDF

Seltzer, Catherine. "“Understand[ing] All Too Well What Is Meant”: Teaching Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”." The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison. Ed. Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 351–362. Bloomsbury Handbooks. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Nov. 2024....

Seltzer, Catherine. "“Understand[ing] All Too Well What Is Meant”: Teaching Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”." The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison. Ed. Kelly L. Reames and Linda Wagner-Martin London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. 351–362. Bloomsbury Handbooks. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Nov. 2024. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350239951.ch-024>. Accessed from: www.bloomsburycollections.com Accessed on: Tue Nov 26 2024 13:11:47 Central European Standard Time Copyright © All rights reserved. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without prior permission in writing from the publishers. 351 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR “Understand[ing] All Too Well What Is Meant”: Teaching Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” CATHERINE SELTZER While ideally Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif ” would be read within the context of Morrison’s oeuvre— the story lends itself to being considered alongside the depictions of girlhood in The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved, for instance—most of us find ourselves teaching it as detached from Morrison’s canon. Its relative brevity and its frequent anthologization make “Recitatif ” the most obvious way to include Morrison’s voice in introductory literature courses or surveys of American literature. As an introduction to Morrison, though, “Recitatif ” can be problematic. Formally, “Recitatif ” is an outlier in Morrison’s oeuvre, the only short story among a rich canon of novels and essays. As significantly, the story strays from the exploration of an explicitly Black consciousness that dictates most of Morrison’s work. Instead, “Recitatif ” balances its attention neatly between two protagonists, one Black and the other white, and the narrative steadfastly refuses to assign race to either character. The challenge of teaching “Recitatif,” then, is often two-fold. On the one hand, we want to ensure that students—particularly those who have not yet encountered Morrison’s novels—are directed to the themes that commonly define her work. Certainly, these are evident in “Recitatif ”: the notions of female friendship, communal trauma, and cultural memory-making become sites of meditation throughout the narrative. The second (often more difficult) challenge, though, is to focus on what makes the story exceptional in her canon—in short, to work with students to tease out the implications of Morrison’s treatment of race in the story. Black identity is a theme that defines all of Morrison’s work, of course, but in “Recitatif,” in which the racial identification of each character has been obscured if not fully erased, Morrison plays with race as a construct in ways that are more complex than they may first appear to students. Arguably, it is the instinct of almost all readers when first approaching a text to rapidly categorize characters by gender, class, and race, creating a shorthand for their identification moving forward. As Robyn Warhol and Amy Shuman have noted, this is almost automatic in the case of race: “In American fiction race is usually specified and always coded: this character is black, that one is white, and once the narration has established those conditions, the authorial audience attaches to each character all the connotations and stereotypes those racial terms signify in U.S. culture” (1012). In refusing to specify race in “Recitatif,” Morrison ultimately challenges us to rethink those “connotations and stereotypes.” What often happens first, though, is that the readers fall 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 351 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  352 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO TONI MORRISON into what have been reliable patterns of reading in the past and begin sifting through the text for the racialized codes that seem critical for interpretation. After a bit of class discussion, they come to realize that “obvious” racial signifiers Morrison has planted throughout the story—references to food preferences, religion, or the regularity with which a character washes her hair—are not so obvious after all. It is a powerful exercise; Morrison’s self-labeled “lark” of a story never fails to “provoke and enlighten,” as she had intended (“Art of Fiction” 102). Yet its unpacking is not an easy process. Even after I had been teaching “Recitatif ” for years, I would often find myself sending up a small prayer before teaching it again, hoping that my students would be generous with one another as they stumbled through the brambles of cultural bias that the story presents to its readers. In the preface to Playing in the Dark, Morrison observes that the kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains. (The only short story I have ever written, “Recitatif,” was an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.) (21) When I began teaching “Recitatif,” years ago now, much of the point of the discussion was to allow the students to catch themselves in reassigning the codes that Morrison had removed or, in some cases, scrambled. The takeaway of the class session—and presumably, by extension, the story itself—was that each of us is complicit in thinking that is “lazy,” “predictable,” and even, distressingly, “sinister.” As satisfyingly tidy as that lesson might be, it was one that often left scars along the way. Students who had raised their hands to declare they had the answer to the story’s unvoiced question of Twyla’s and Roberta’s respective races could feel exposed, regardless which race they had assigned to the characters. And emphasizing students’ imposed readings of the racial identities of the characters also had the effect of distracting us from a consideration of the ways in which the characters (mis)read one another. The result was that I often walked away from the classroom with the sinking feeling that I had not effectively captured the real richness of the story. I’ve found that I’ve been more satisfied with the way the story has worked in my classes in recent years, not simply because I teach it a little differently than I used to, but because my students—and, indeed, the world in which we live—are a little different. “Recitatif ” has taken on a new resonance in classrooms that have been deeply and irrevocably shaped by the murders of Michael Brown (2014), Eric Garner (2014), Breonna Taylor (2020), and George Floyd (2020), among others, and by the subsequent growth of the Black Lives Matter movement. The larger cultural discussion has ensured that most students now accept the idea that our backgrounds and experiences have ingrained us with cultural and racial biases, many of which we may not recognize consciously. As a result, the more straightforward “lesson” of “Recitatif ”—that we make assumptions about race even in the absence of fact—can be addressed at the beginning of a discussion now, rather than serving as a dramatic dénouement. This gives us space to explore the consequences of Morrison’s invitation to engage in misreadings throughout “Recitatif,” only to catch ourselves in our “laziness,” and, as significantly, to think about the reasons that Twyla and Roberta misread one another. **** I’ve taken to entering class discussions of “Recitatif ” by introducing an excerpt from the poet Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2015), a book that has been identified as “part documentary, part lyric 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 352 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  TEACHING TONI MORRISON’S “RECITATIF” 353 procedural” in its capturing of racism in America* (Chiasson 73).1 Early in the book, Rankine suggests the essential volatility that inherently underlies relationships between Black and white friends: A friend argues that Americans battle between the “historical self ” and the “self self.” By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning. Then you are standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from your mouths. What did you say? Instantaneously your attachment seems fragile, tenuous, subject to any transgression of your historical self. And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant. (14) Here, Rankine highlights the ways in which even the most intimate and generous relationships can be clouded by a fraught knowledge of the larger contexts in which they exist. Citizen also introduces terminology that is particularly helpful in considering Twyla and Roberta’s relationship in class discussions—the “self self ” and the “historical self.” Our initial challenge in approaching each of Twyla and Roberta’s encounters is to map the way the girls/women make their “self selves” available to one another and to identify where we catch glimpses of their “historical selves.” Our second task in reading “Recitatif ” is also grounded in Citizen. Like “Recitatif,” Rankine’s piece implicates the reader: there is the contention that we, too, approach a conversation (or text) with the unshakable “full force of [our] American positioning.” In reading “Recitatif,” then, we must be attentive to our “historical selves,” considering how our identities shape us as readers. If we understand that Morrison is placing racial signifiers ripe for misinterpretation throughout the story, how might we catch ourselves in the act of assigning them meaning? Alternately, how might we read against our own potential misreadings? (I often share with my students that a number of scholars have disclosed their own racial identities in their readings of the work, including Elizbeth Abel, in her now-canonical essay “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation,” and Ann Rayson, in “Decoding for Race: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif ’ and Being White, Teaching Black.” In doing so, these scholars indicate their awareness of their “historical selves,” rejecting the projection of distanced subjectivity often associated with academic authority.) We get a sense of Twyla’s “historical self ” early in the story. In speaking of her first day at “St. Bonny’s,” the orphanage to which she has been sent, she explains, It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning—it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race. 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. * I am grateful to my colleagues Howard Rambsy and Liz Cali for their generous conversations about teaching Morrison’s work in their own classrooms. 1 Rankine has observed that her work is in conversation with Morrison’s. In 2020, she explained in an interview that “I feel like Citizen was just the next book that looked at the same dynamic that Toni Morrison was looking at or Frederick Douglass was looking at or James Baldwin, obviously” (interview by Jeffrey Brown). 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 353 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  354 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO TONI MORRISON Roberta, this is Twyla. Make each other welcome.” I said, “My mother won’t like you putting me in here.” (“Recitatif ” 607) Twyla makes no effort to mask her inherited racism here, and while we may be inclined to judge it, in fact the reader’s tendency is to similarly retreat into the historical-self, relying on a racialized shorthand to assign identities to both Twyla and Roberta. The primary “clues” here—Twyla’s mother’s belief that those of Roberta’s race “smell funny” and the characters’ names—point both ways, though. The uncleanliness of the otherized body is a stereotype that exists among all races, and the names “Twyla” and “Roberta” become more racially ambiguous when one bears down on them.2 In class, then, we read through this first encounter twice, once with the assumption that Twyla is white and Roberta is Black, and then again, with Twyla as Black and Roberta as white. The exercise reveals to students the ways in which they may have responded to potentially racialized codes based on their own historical-selves.3 Stopping at this early point in the text to offer alternate racial identities of each character also has the added benefit of loosening the commitment students may feel to their initial readings of the characters; by identifying each reading as legitimate (and thus simultaneously problematic), students are challenged to think more broadly about the way the characters approach one another as the discussion moves forward. Pausing at this point also allows us to think about the complexity of the transmission of the historical-self. Twyla’s knowledge of other races comes from her mother, Mary, and after repeating Mary’s contention that people of another race “smell funny,” Twyla announces with some satisfaction, “she was right.” From the story’s first line, though, we know that Mary is a not dependable source of insight: Twyla has been sent to the orphanage because of Mary’s neglect, which Twyla views in literal terms, pointing to Mary’s habit of “dancing all night” (607). Later, when Mary visits St. Bonny’s a month into Twyla and Roberta’s stay, we are able to fully comprehend her inability to support Twyla. Most obviously, Mary is incapable of providing nourishment for Twyla even in the most literal sense: unlike Roberta’s mother, who brings a full lunch for her daughter, Mary neglects to bring any food for the visit. Mary is “unsuitable” in other ways as well: the outfit she wears to St. Bonny’s—tight green pants and a “fur jacket so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them”—embarrasses Twyla (609). And in spite of her sexualized appearance, Mary is depicted as no more mature than Twyla. Twyla tells us that when her mother spots her outside the orphanage’s chapel, Mary “smiled and waved like she was the little girl looking for her mother—not me” (609). The self-centeredness and immaturity that Mary displays early in the visit are made manifest when she is snubbed by Roberta’s mother, though. Seemingly unconcerned by her daughter’s feelings or 2 Each semester, a number of my white students insist that there is no stereotype of white uncleanliness, and thus, Twyla must be white and Roberta Black. In fact, evidence of this stereotype is plentiful. The comedian Dave Chapelle’s now-famous 2003 skit “Trading Spouses” traded on often profane racial stereotypes, and one scene mocked whites’ suspect hygiene practices specifically. More recently, there have been public debates about the necessity of “leg washing” in which a number of high-profile white women, including the singer Taylor Swift, have questioned its necessity, and another, started by the designer Stella McCartney, advocates for washing clothes less often, further fueling stereotypes of whites’ attitudes toward hygiene. See Nicole Froio. As for names, Elizabeth Abel points out, “If Twyla’s name is more characteristically black than white, it is perhaps best known as the name of a white dancer, Twyla Tharp, whereas Roberta shares her last name, Fisk, with a celebrated black (now integrated) university” (476). 3 In his essay, “Race and Response: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif ’,” David Goldstein-Shirley provides a fairly comprehensive list of all of the markers of racialized identity that are commonly (mis)read by the story’s readers. 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 354 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  TEACHING TONI MORRISON’S “RECITATIF” 355 the fact that, as one of only a few visitors, she is on display—and in St. Bonny’s chapel, no less— Mary sputters and sulks when she realizes the slight: This light bulb goes off in her head and she says “That bitch!” really loud and us almost in the chapel now. Organ music whining; the Bonny Angels singing sweetly. Everybody in the world turned around to look. And Mary would have kept it up—kept calling names if I hadn’t squeezed her hand as hard as I could. That helped a little, but she still twitched and crossed and uncrossed her legs all through service. Even groaned a couple of times. Why did I think she would come there and act right? Slacks. No hat like the grandmothers and viewers, and groaning all the while. When we stood for hymns she kept her mouth shut. Wouldn’t even look at the words on the page. She actually reached in her purse for a mirror to check her lipstick. All I could think of was that she really needed to be killed. The sermon lasted a year, and I knew the real orphans were looking smug again. (610) Mary’s behavior is so horrifying to Twyla that she momentarily wishes her mother dead, a circumstance that would have aligned her with the “real orphans” at St. Bonny’s, girls whose hardness stands in stark contrast to Twyla’s immediate vulnerability (609). Mary’s record of maternal failure—her inability to “act right” in any of the scenarios in which her daughter depends upon her—provides some insight into Twyla’s inclination to claim Mary’s racism as her own. Physically and emotionally abandoned by her mother, Twyla must create an imagined maternal presence that is both powerful and protective. Twyla’s assertion to “Big Bozo” upon being matched with Roberta that “my mother won’t like you putting me in here” is as much an articulation of domestic fantasy as it is an expression of racial prejudice, then. As much as Twyla may think her mother “needed to be killed” during Mary’s tantrum in the chapel, Twyla is also desperate for a mother who might serve as an anchor for her own identity. Accordingly, Twyla is inclined to cling to whatever thin history is offered her, especially if it suggests superiority in some way. In the world of St. Bonny’s—ruled over by the indifferent “Big Bozo” and, more immediately, by the often-cruel “gar girls”—and in the absence of a strong mother, Twyla has little power other than that suggested in the inherited “historical self ” Mary offers in her casual prejudice. The evident irony of Twyla’s “historical” (racist) posturing is that Roberta quickly becomes the one person who is able to appreciate Twyla’s “self-self.” The girls have been thrown together when they are assigned to be roommates, but their real link is in their curious status at St. Bonny’s: both Roberta and Twyla have living mothers and thus are not “real orphans.” Their status belies a sense of real loss: both girls understand themselves to have been “dumped” (607). It is something neither can speak about, but Roberta is able to express her understanding of their shared positioning through a series of sympathetic silences. Most notably, when Bozo responds to Twyla’s announcement that Mary will not approve of her living with someone of another race by suggesting that Mary ought to take Twyla home, a cruel recognition of the scenario’s unlikeness, Roberta says nothing. Twyla is deeply shamed by Bozo’s comment, and she notes that “if Roberta had laughed I would have killed her, but she didn’t” (607). Roberta is ostensibly stung by Twyla’s racist indignation, but she also understands Twyla’s abandonment. This fact is confirmed a few minutes later when Twyla must confess to Roberta that her mother is not “sick,” as Roberta’s is, but rather, “She just likes to dance all night” (607). Roberta offers only a knowing, “Oh,” and Twyla observes that “I liked the ways she understood things so fast” (607). Almost certainly, Roberta does not actually understand why Mary is incapable of caring for Twyla, but what she does understand is Twyla’s shame. Later, Twyla would observe that she and Roberta had been “two little girls who knew what nobody else 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 355 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  356 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO TONI MORRISON in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well” (614). It is in their sympathetic silence that they are able to recognize their “self-selves,” forming a friendship that suggests sisterhood. As Warhol and Shuman have noted in their analysis of the story, it is soon after Roberta offers Twyla her silent acceptance of Twyla’s situation that “the narrator’s ‘I’ morphs into a ‘we’ that speaks for the two girls’ mutual understanding and their unspoken agreement to elide the racial differences between them, even though others won’t let them forget it” (1014). We are given a linguistic illustration of the depth of their knowledge of one another. The anxiety of racial difference is still present in the story’s earliest pages, though, and is primarily rendered visible through the character of Maggie. In first introducing Maggie in the narrative, Twyla describes her as “the kitchen woman with legs like parentheses,” a reference to Maggie’s physical disability, but also a suggestion of the ways in which her presence interrupts the text, reminding us of the potential for racial ambiguity to trouble both the story’s characters and readers (“Recitatif ” 608). If Twyla and Roberta have set aside the question of race in the service of their friendship, Maggie becomes an unrecognized site for their anxiety. Recalling the St. Bonny’s orchard, a space Maggie sometimes crossed on her way to the bus stop, Twyla insists that “nothing really happened there. Nothing all that important I mean … Maggie fell down there once” (608). Even on a first reading, Twyla’s story is recognizably suspect; the repeated dismissal of the importance of the scene in the orchard calls attention to it rather than diminishing it, and the reference to Maggie’s “falling” seems conspicuously incomplete. When reading the scene in which Maggie is first referenced with students, we begin by focusing on the framework into which she is introduced, a space that is notable for its blurring of boundaries and insistent contradictions. In almost every way, the orchard resists clear definition. The staff tries to keep the younger girls out, for example, but they find their way into the older girls’ territory nevertheless, a suggestion of the porous borders that define the space. Beyond this, the orchard is filled with trees whose progress seems to defy time, beginning as crones—“empty and crooked like beggar women”—and then becoming fertile, “fat with flowers” (608). More compellingly, Twyla reveals that the gar girls are not all orphans, as the younger girls are. Instead, they are “put-out girls, scared runaways most of them. Poor little girls who fought their uncles off but looked tough to us, and mean” (608). The difference between “poor little girls” who have been “dumped,” as Roberta and Twyla have, and those who have been “put out” may be seen as slight. It is possible to see the gar girls’ meanness as a desperate posture, simply another way of “not asking questions” through the adoption of anonymizing, “gargoyle-esque” masks (609, 613). The orchard, it seems, is a space where binaries of all sorts are rendered problematic and, consequently, where memory is blurred. It is in this context that we are introduced to Maggie, who also defies the easy boxes used to assign identity. The only reference to Maggie’s race is Twyla’s identification of her as “sandy- colored,” but she notes a similar ambiguity in Maggie’s age: while Maggie is an adult, she dresses like a child, a decision that invites the girls’ contempt. Twyla notes, “She wore this really stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with earflaps—and she wasn’t much taller than we were. A really awful little hat. Even for a mute, it was dumb—dressing like a kid, and never saying anything at all” (608). Twyla’s anger seems misplaced, at best, another hint of her unreliability. Here, she seems to suggest that Maggie’s absolute vulnerability may be Maggie’s own fault, a testament to her “dumbness” (an unkind, if perhaps unconscious, play on her muteness). In this first account, Twyla confesses that she and Roberta called Maggie names and that when Maggie “falls” they do not help her up. 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 356 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  TEACHING TONI MORRISON’S “RECITATIF” 357 It is at the end of the passage that we learn that it is the day before the “fall” that the girls have been told their mothers will be visiting. This information, delivered as if it is a bit of conversational filler, actually becomes one of the story’s important, if ultimately indefinite, “clues.” As Roberta and Twyla experience anxiety about the impending visit from their mothers, Maggie must serve as a sharp reminder of the ways in which the adults in their lives have failed them, as Maggie herself seems to have failed to become fully adult. At the same time, Maggie simultaneously mirrors the ways in which the girls remain painfully vulnerable. If Twyla and Roberta call Maggie names and refuse to help her up, as Twyla recalls in the narrative, then almost surely it is because Maggie has become an outlet for the anger the girls cannot express otherwise. Their treatment of her gives them a sense of power that they are denied by both their mothers and by St. Bonny’s. The account of the girls’ treatment of Maggie shifts throughout the story, becoming more troubling as the context in which it is recounted becomes more loaded. Even in this first—most mild—account of “what happened to Maggie,” though, Twyla expresses shame for the part she and Roberta have played. She explains that while she and Roberta had concluded that Maggie was deaf, as an adult she comes to “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” (608). If Maggie can hear, then she suffers from the girls’ insults in a way that feels deeply recognizable to Twyla. Her muteness may be the consequence of physical disability, but regardless, Maggie shares Twyla and Roberta’s knowledge of “how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed.” Twyla’s shame, then, suggests her recognition that Maggie possesses a “self self,” an identity apart from the role of victim that the girls have projected upon her. Even as the story of what has happened to Maggie shifts, and the girls potentially become more implicated in the violence against her, it is the recognition of Maggie as “somebody in there” that haunts them. **** When Roberta and Twyla encounter one another years later, it is outside of the bubble that has compelled them to connect as “self-selves” as children. In their first meeting outside of St. Bonny’s, Twyla is waiting tables in a Howard Johnson’s, which she understands on some level to be repair work. Recalling Mary’s failure to bring a real lunch to her visit to St. Bonny’s, Twyla observes, “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” (610). If Twyla still defines herself in terms of the personal, though, Roberta has chosen to recast herself in terms of the historical moment. She appears as the physical embodiment of the cultural shift in 1960s America: her “hair was so big and wild I could hardly see her face,” Twyla observes, somewhat disapprovingly. “She had on a powder blue halter and shorts outfit and earrings the size of bracelets. Talk about lipstick and eyebrow pencil. She made the big girls look like nuns” (611). (In fact, the two men who accompany Roberta, both with counterculture-inspired looks of their own, seem more like additional accessories than people. While they laugh when Roberta laughs and roll their eyes in sympathy with Roberta’s disgust, they add nothing of their own to the conversation.)4 4 As Elizabeth Abel has noted, this is in keeping with Morrison’s strategy of ensuring that Roberta and Twyla’s relationship is “unmediated by the sexual triangulations (the predations of white men on black women, the susceptibility of black men to white women) that have dominated black women’s narrative representations of women’s fraught connections across racial lines” (471). 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 357 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  358 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO TONI MORRISON The meeting between the young women is short and painful. Twyla is out of touch in a way that seems not only impossible to Roberta, but offensive. When Twyla responds to Roberta’s announcement that she is joining to see “Hendrix,” by enthusiastically asking, “What’s she doing now?” for example, Roberta sharply corrects Twyla, and reflexively calls her “asshole” (612). Twyla’s naiveté is not confined to music. In their subsequent meeting, Roberta casually explains her behavior at the Howard Johnson’s as a consequence of “how it was in those days: black— white” and suggests, “You know how everything was” (615). It is an explanation that leaves Twyla genuinely stymied. In Twyla’s sense of the world, Howard Johnson’s is a melting pot: “Busloads of blacks and whites came into Howard Johnson’s together. They roamed together then: students, musicians, lovers, protesters. You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days” (615). In Twyla’s construction of it, the restaurant functions as a stand-in for St. Bonny’s: not only is it accessible to a variety of people, but it offers a kind of fundamental care. It is here that Twyla “gets the right food to the right people”—providing basic nurturance—and while Twyla recognizes that the Howard Johnson’s is run down, in the starkness of the predawn hours, she also believes it looks “like shelter,” an echo of St. Bonny’s (611). As a result, while Twyla is self-aware enough to worry when she first approaches Roberta in the restaurant that “maybe [Roberta] didn’t want to be to be reminded of St. Bonny’s or to have anybody know she was ever there,” Twyla is not concerned that their essential connection has changed (615). In Twyla’s thinking, the women inhabit a space that is similar to the one in which they first knew each other. Roberta has a different understanding of the world she occupies, however, and it is clear while she is in the Howard Johnson’s that she is attempting to position her voice within the context of a larger historical-self. Consequently, Roberta creates distance between the intimacy of the selves that she and Twyla shared as girls by dismissing Twyla, both through the repetition of the contemptuous utterance “Wow,” and the sharper “asshole.” (Interestingly, it is the “stingy ‘wow’ ” that Twyla carries forward in memory, clearly recognizing the disgust that underlies it.) Twyla may not fully comprehend the dynamic in which she and Roberta are engaged, but instinctively she seeks to wound Roberta in return by using the tools of the personal: in response to Roberta’s scorn, she asks, “How’s your mother?” a question she understands to be loaded (612). Roberta’s reply, “Fine,” treats the question as innocuous, but she returns fire by politely, devastatingly, inquiring, “How’s yours?” With this exchange, the lines between historical-selves and self-selves are blurred in ways that presumably leave both Twyla and Roberta destabilized. Certainly, after their exchange, Twyla’s sense of the Howard Johnson’s as a protective space is shattered. As she replies to Roberta’s question, assuring her with palpable guardedness that Mary is “pretty as a picture,” she thinks to herself, “Howard Johnson’s really was a dump in the sunlight” (612). Roberta and Twyla’s next encounter, years later when both are married and rooted in families of their own making, is fraught in different ways. In this case, the women run into one another in the new, upscale grocery store in the community. When Twyla does not recognize Roberta at first, she bristles at being called out to as “Twyla” by an unknown speaker, and she curtly offers her married name, “Mrs. Benson,” as a corrective. The title suggests that marriage has changed Twyla, protecting her in some substantial way, but the characteristics that had defined Twyla in her youth are still visible: as a working-class woman, she is tentative about her place in the fancy grocery store and only relaxes when she finds the brand of ice cream favored by her son and father-in-law, reassurance that she is able to provide “the right food to the right people.” Roberta has more obviously reaped the 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 358 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  TEACHING TONI MORRISON’S “RECITATIF” 359 benefits of an identity altered by marriage. As “Mrs. Kenneth Norton,” she is wealthy. Her husband is an IBM executive, a man who does something with “computers and stuff,” as she explains to Twyla disinterestedly, and she now has a chauffeur—who is neither Black nor white, but Asian—and two servants (614). Twyla cannot help but view Roberta with some resentment when she first sees her, thinking, “Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world” (613). It is a claim loaded with implications about Roberta’s class status, but that also contains suggestions of racism, although, in keeping with the story’s larger project, it is not clear if the accusations may be levied against privileged whites or the Black beneficiaries of corporate diversity efforts. The women never address this tension directly; in fact, Twyla delights in the fact that in their initial conversation, they act “like sisters separated for much too long” (614). A lingering anxiety is ultimately revealed, however, when it becomes clear that the women hold competing recollections of what has happened to Maggie in the orchard. Twyla’s story about Maggie falling down is challenged by Roberta’s insistence that the gar girls “knocked her down and tore her clothes,” a memory that she contends Twyla has “blocked” (614–15). Roberta’s account is deeply troubling to Twyla: Maggie’s victimization may be painful to her, but what seems to be more upsetting is the suggestion that Twyla has misremembered her childhood. Roberta’s account is a challenge to Twyla’s construction of self. Twyla expresses her anger and confusion in a burst of resentment toward Roberta: she thinks angrily, “Couldn’t [Roberta] just comb her hair, wash her face, and pretend everything was hunky-dory [?]” (615). In its intimation of the value in Roberta’s clean face and brushed hair, we may read Twyla’s suggestion as an expression of her desire for Roberta to exist more easily within a traditional construction of (white or Black) identity. Roberta’s memories, like her “wild hair” and dramatic makeup in the Howard Johnson’s, challenge Twyla to consider the historical-self in ways that are deeply uncomfortable for her. Ultimately, the women move toward repair of sorts when they again inquire about one another’s mothers. In this reprised conversation, both are more candid: Mary has never stopped dancing, Twyla acknowledges, and Roberta’s mother never “got well,” she confesses. The brief exchange is poignant, an adult acknowledgment of grief and loss, but, significantly, one that does not “ask too many questions,” and so recognizes an essential sympathy of selves. It is a thin attempt to plaster over a larger rupture, though. Twyla is resentful that “Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie”; in short, Roberta has inserted the historical into the more comfortable world defined by the intimacy of “self-selves” (615). **** It is in the women’s next encounter when their historical-selves and self-selves fully clash, and they find themselves “standing face-to-face in seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from [their] mouths,” to borrow again from Rankine. The racial identifications that the two have largely ignored in childhood and have addressed only tangentially in subsequent meetings are called out more directly when they are drawn into the “strife” that surrounds the bussing debate in the New York suburbs (615). Twyla becomes involved when she sees Roberta at a protest holding a sign that says, “MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO.” Up until this point, she had few feelings about bussing: Joseph [Twyla’s son] was on the list of kids to be transferred from the junior high school to another one at some far-out-of-the-way place and I thought it was a good thing until I heard it was a bad thing. I mean I didn’t know. All the schools seemed dumps to me, and the fact that one was nicer looking didn’t hold much weight. But the papers were full of it and then the kids 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 359 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  360 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO TONI MORRISON began to get jumpy … I thought Joseph might be frightened to go over there, but he didn’t seem scared so I forgot about it. (616) It is only when she sees Roberta’s sign that Twyla becomes determined to take the other side. For many students, it is this scene that crystallizes Twyla’s and Roberta’s racial identities: Roberta, who is opposed to bussing, must be white, while Twyla, who has suddenly determined she is in support of it, must be Black. Bussing was a proposal that found pushback among all who were involved, however, and while the narrative of white protest, led by those threated by the diversification of schools, may be more persistent, there is an ample historical record of Black protest of bussing as well. As studies demonstrate, Black communities tended to pay the greater price for bussing, both in the distance their children were compelled to travel to attend school and the subsequent neglect of schools located in historically Black neighborhoods. If Morrison has used bussing as something of a red herring (at least in her invitation to racialize the story’s characters), it is also less central to Twyla and Roberta’s dispute than it might seem. Certainly, for Roberta, bussing is a signifier of injustice, either as it symbolizes impingement on her white privilege or, alternately, as it represents a burden placed on the Black community. Twyla is less concerned with the historical discussion that Roberta sees herself as engaging in: arguably, it is Roberta’s sign that compels her to join the protests. Roberta’s suggestion that mothers play a distinctive role in shaping laws and norms violates Twyla’s sense of the world. She may be a mother herself, but we see her as largely passive in this role. More significantly, Twyla will always understand herself as an abandoned child, and she had believed the same was true of Roberta, who had been her “sister” in the experience at St. Bonny’s. (Tellingly, Twyla tries to reify this connection on the picket line when she tells Roberta that anyone who “think[s] they can decide where my child goes to school” is akin to Bozo.) Roberta’s sign functions as a direct rebuke to Twyla, an erasure of their shared “self-selves” in an attempt to assert the historical, racialized self. It is notable, though, that Roberta’s sign is something of a paradox. When Twyla first approaches Roberta, telling her, “My boy’s being bussed too, and I don’t mind,” Roberta chastises her, explaining, “It’s not about us, Twyla. Me and you. It’s about our kids” (616). Roberta’s remark seems a direct contradiction of the sign she hoists at the protest, which highlights mother’s rights and makes no mention of “our kids.” Indeed, at some level, Roberta seems to want it both ways until she is confronted by Twyla. Twyla’s insistence that the issue is solely personal pushes Roberta to embrace the historical. These are the “seconds that wipe the affable smiles right from [their] mouths,” and when Twyla’s car is rocked by anti-bussing protesters, Roberta looks on impassively. Twyla had believed that Roberta would help her, the adult manifestation of their pattern of coming to the other’s aid when they were being chased by the gar girls at St. Bonny’s, and accordingly, we understand the moment in which Twyla’s “arm shot out of the car window, but no receiving hand was there” as one of conscious abandonment (617). Roberta does not fully sever the connections of “self-selves,” though, until she once again revises Twyla’s memory of Maggie. Amid the chaos of the protest, she tells Twyla, “Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re not. You’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot” (617). It does not matter that Roberta immediately confesses to kicking Maggie along with Twyla: Roberta has effectively overwritten Twyla’s understanding of her essential self with one shaped by the brutality of her racial history, be it one located in racial prejudice (if Twyla is white) or self-loathing (if she is Black). 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 360 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  TEACHING TONI MORRISON’S “RECITATIF” 361 Twyla responds by joining the other side of the protest the next day, creating signs that will be meaningful only to Roberta. (For instance, she creates a poster that says “HOW WOULD YOU KNOW?” in response to Roberta’s “MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO,” an ambiguous, if not actually nonsensical, yin to Roberta’s yang.) By making the protest a personal matter, Twyla attempts to rewrite the narrative Roberta has introduced, reasserting the primacy of the intimate self. She continues to be troubled by the memory of Maggie, however, which she now understands is a mechanism for understanding her relationship to race and to power (and powerlessness). Twyla is certain she did not kick Maggie (“I didn’t do that, I couldn’t do that”), but she is distressed by the fact that she can’t identify Maggie’s race (618). Ultimately, she determines that the truth was already there, and Roberta knew it. I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything important that you could use. Rocking, dancing, swaying as she walked. And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t— just like me and I was glad about that. (618) It is an ugly truth, and it does little to resolve the mystery of Twyla’s and Roberta’s respective racial identities. Twyla’s epiphany—confirmed by Roberta when the two women meet a final time on Christmas Eve years later—is valuable in many ways, though. It insistently reiterates the blurring of lines that we associate with Maggie from her first appearance in the text. Here, Twyla decides there is “nobody inside,” a contradiction of her earliest claim that there “was somebody in there after all,” a move that links Maggie equally to Mary and to Twyla. Tellingly, Roberta also sees Maggie as a representation both of her mother and of herself. She muses, “I thought she was crazy. She’d been brought up in an institution like my mother was and like I thought I would be too. And you were right. We didn’t kick her. It was the gar girls. Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her.” She concludes, “wanting to is doing it” (620). Roberta believes—and Twyla fears—that there is a racial component in their desire for violence, but their inability to confidently distinguish Maggie’s race makes it impossible for the characters (or the reader) to fully identify the dynamic at work. The women do not know whether Maggie was Black—“I really thought so,” Roberta explains, “But now I can’t be sure”—and so they cannot interpret their rage toward Maggie in relation to their historical-selves (619). Ultimately, they must settle for an account of their pasts in which Maggie represents their own helplessness, a story that is valid but that is rooted squarely in the “self-self.” It allows the women to reaffirm their connection to one another, which they do by repeating their confessions about their abandonment as children. “Did I tell you? My mother, she never did stop dancing,” Twyla tells Roberta. “Yes. You told me. And mine, she never got well,” Roberta replies. Offered without any awkward inquiry, these acknowledgments operate as small gifts, a recognition of what Rankine has identified as the “joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings” (620). And yet, the last line lines of the story, uttered by Roberta, suggest that while the characters’ historical-selves may remain an unresolvable mystery, they are not forgotten and, in fact, are critical even in their elision: “Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened to Maggie?” (620). The lines function as a cri de coeur, and arguably, they operate as the “recitatif ” of the title—a vocalization somewhere between song and the spoken word, used to introduce narrative into an interlude. If we think of 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 361 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM  362 THE BLOOMSBURY HANDBOOK TO TONI MORRISON Roberta’s question this way, we understand that the story’s ending is simply a pause, an invitation from Morrison to reread the text through multiple interpretations of Maggie’s experience, and thus to reinterpret Roberta and Twyla, tracing their shifting contexts in ways that are often reflective of our own. WORKS CITED Abel, Elizabeth. “White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 19, no. 3, 1993, pp. 470–98. Chiasson, Dan. “Color Codes.” The New Yorker, vol. 90, no. 33, 2014, pp. 73. Froio, Nicole. “The Hygiene Culture Wars that Started on Social Media.” Zora, Aug. 1, 2019, https://zora.med ium.com/the-hygiene-culture-wars-that-started-on-social-media-3e5c0ac8be55. Accessed Oct. 12, 2021. Goldstein-Shirley, David. “Race and Response: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif ’.” Short Story, vol. 5, no. 1, 1997, pp. 117–86. Morrison, Toni. “The Art of Fiction No 134.” Interview with Elissa Schappell and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, vol. 128, Fall 1993, pp. 82–125. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage, 1993. Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 9th ed., vol. E, edited by Nina Bayn, et al., Norton, 2017, pp. 607–20. Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Penguin, 2015. Rankine, Claudia. Interview by Jeffrey Brown, PBS NewsHour, July 29, 2020. Rayson, Ann. “Decoding for Race: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif ’ and Being White, Teaching Black.” Changing Representations of Minorities East and West, edited by Smith, Larry E., U Hawai’i P, 1996, pp. 41–6. Warhol, Robyn, and Amy Shuman. “The Unspeakable, the Unnarratable, and the Repudiation of Epiphany in ‘Recitatif ’: A Collaboration between Linguistic and Literary Feminist Narratologies.” Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 6, 2018, pp. 1007–25. 9781350239920_pi-408.indd 362 06-Oct-22 9:46:48 PM