Recitatif

Recitatif: A Story

Toni Morrison (1983. Knopf edition, with a forward by Zadie Smith, 2022.)

Toni Morrison’s only short story is the story of two girls, misplaced in an orphanage when they are eight years old. “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.” Roberta’s mother is sick, and our narrator Twyla’s mother dances all night. So they’re put in a room together, and St. Bonny’s generally ignores them, with a little light bullying thrown in.

They are also outsiders because one is white and one is black. Morrison is deliberate about not saying which is which. She can reasonably assume that an American reader will immediately start looking for clues. (Zadie Smith’s introduction cites a study which shows that we all expect Twyla to be of our own race, at least at first.) This aspect of the story tends to become an abyss: the more we look into it, the more it looks back.

Morrison knows very well where the signifiers lie. She’s artful about their hair, their clothing, their taste in food. Which child is more likely illiterate? Which one gets excited about pink scallops on her Easter socks? What will happen when the sick mother and the dancing mother both come for Easter? Roberta’s mother brings a big lunch, and Twyla’s can’t manage it–is either of those situations racially marked?

The St. Bonny’s sojourn is just about four months for each of them, but they will meet again. When they’re about twenty, Twyla is a waitress at a Howard Johnson on the New York Thruway, and Roberta is on her way to see Hendrix. That’s too big a chasm to cross, but a dozen years later, their next meeting will lead to commiseration over coffee.

Roberta recognizes Twyla this time, in a grocery store in Newburgh. Roberta has married a rich man, while Twyla’s married to a fireman. Now they’ve come far enough to remember being dumped together in a safely distant way: “Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew–how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed.” Does this make them friends? I think that’s another open question. Could it? Should it?

 

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