Jazz

by Toni Morrison

what one cherishes under the duress and emotional disfigurement that a slave society imposes.

the modernity that jazz anticipated

the music insisted that the past might haunt us, but it would not entrap us.

To reproduce the flavor of the period, I had read issues of every “Colored” newspaper I could for the year 1926. The articles, the advertisements, the columns, the employment ads.

I had fainted. What an adult thing to do!

Romantic love seemed to me one of the fingerprints of the twenties, and jazz its engine.

its idea of itself—the essence of the so-called Jazz Age.

the hand of the

past being crushed by the present.

invention. Improvisation, origina...

Rather than be about those characteristics, the novel would s...

who the “I” was until it seemed natural, inevitable, that the narrator could—would—parallel and launch the process of invention, of improvisation, of change. Commenting, judging, risking, and learning.

here the structure would equal meaning.

She sang, my mother, the way other people muse.

Like the music that came to be known as Jazz, she took from everywhere, knew everything—gospel, classic,

language as seductive, as glittery, as an evening purse tucked away in a trunk!

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue.

when she knew the expense wouldn’t improve anything.

but the children of suicides are hard to please and quick to believe no one loves them because they are not really here.

like watching an old street pigeon pecking the crust of a sardine sandwich the cats left behind.

You have to understand what it’s like, taking on a big city: I’m exposed to all sorts of ignorance and criminality. Still, this is the only life for me. I like the way the City makes people think they can do what they want and get away with it. I see them all over the place:

People say I should come out more.

it falls on Lexington and Park Avenue too,

Breathing hurts in weather that cold,

where the sidewalks, snow-covered or not, are wider than the main roads of the towns where they were born and perfectly ordinary people can stand at the stop,

because everything you want is right where you are:

the territory of another where it is believed something curious or thrilling lies.

And just as wonderful to know that back in one’s own building there are lists drawn up

is as much as anybody feels like being bothered with.

slap the children for being slappable;

“You in trouble,” she says, yawning. “Deep, deep trouble. Can’t rival the dead for love. Lose every time.”

sequence of errands, list of tasks.

Violet sat down in the middle of the street.

It never happened again as far as I know—the street sitting—but

We don’t speak if we don’t have to.”

Words connected only to themselves pierced an otherwise normal comment.

move up North to the City almost nothing comes to mind.

remembering what things felt like. That you could say, “I was scared to death,” but you could not retrieve the fear. That you could replay in the brain the scene of ecstasy, of murder, of tenderness, but it was drained of everything but the language to say it in.

did not yearn or pine for the

they thought it was like them: nervous at having gotten there at last, but terrified of what was on the other side. Eager, a little scared, they did not even nap during the fourteen hours

two pieces of coconut cake arranged to look like one—to take the sting out of the curtain;

the sheets they dried on juniper bushes;

a black man who did not have to lace his

dignity with a smile.

think of it—paying money for a meal they had not missed and that required them to sit still at, or ...

dispossessed with or without notice, they hung around for a while and then could not imagine themselves anywhere

after raving whites had foamed all over the lanes and yards of home.

the weight of the building stressing the delicate, dangling shoe, is captured.

And he’d think it was the woman he wanted, and not some combination of curved stone, and a swinging, high-heeled shoe moving in and out of sunlight.

profesora lillian

miss it, doesn’t look up to see what happened to it or to stars made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps.