Jazz (22 page)

Authors: Toni Morrison

BOOK: Jazz

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Some of them know it. The lucky ones. Everywhere they go they are like a magician-made clock with hands the same size so you can’t figure out what time it is, but you can hear the ticking, tap, snap.

I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure. Hangs on to wells and a boy’s golden hair; would just as soon inhale sweet fire caused by a burning girl as hold a maybe-yes maybe-no hand. I don’t believe that anymore. Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out.

It’s nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. Their ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavor would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher’s palm asking for witnesses in His name’s sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore; there is no stud’s eye, no chippie glance to undo them. They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.

But there is another part, not so secret. The part that touches fingers when one passes the cup and saucer to the other. The part that closes her neckline snap while waiting for the trolley; and brushes lint from his blue serge suit when they come out of the movie house into the sunlight.

I envy them their public love. I myself have only known it in secret, shared it in secret and longed, aw longed to show it—to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say at all:
That I have loved only you, surrendered my whole self reckless to you and nobody else. That I want you to love me back and show it to me. That I love the way you hold me, how close you let me be to you. I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time now, and missed your eyes when you went away from me. Talking to you and hearing you answer—that’s the kick.

But I can’t say that aloud; I can’t tell anyone that I have been waiting for this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were able I’d say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.

Toni Morrison

JAZZ

Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities, Emeritus at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.

ALSO BY TONI MORRISON

FICTION

Love

Paradise

Beloved

Tar Baby

Song of Solomon

Sula

The Bluest Eye

NONFICTION

The Dancing Mind

Playing in the Dark:
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Acclaim for Toni Morrison’s
JAZZ

“Marvelous…. Morrison is perhaps the finest novelist of our time.”

—Vogue

“The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women.”

—Edna O’Brien,
The New York Times Book Review

“She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation—that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize–winning
Beloved
…. Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem’s jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear.”

—Glamour

“She is the best writer in America. Jazz, for sure; but also Mozart.”

—John Leonard, National Public Radio

“A masterpiece…. A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion…. Mesmerizing.”

—Cosmopolitan

“Lyrically brooding…. One accepts the characters of
Jazz
as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator’s mind.”

—The New York Times

“Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious.”

—People

ALSO BY
T
ONI
M
ORRISON

BELOVED

Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
Beloved
is the story of Sethe, an escaped slave, who has lost a husband and buried a child. She now lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, and a disturbing, mesmerizing apparition called Beloved. Though Sethe works at “beating back the past,” it makes itself heard and felt incessantly, most especially through Beloved, whose childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who has now returned from the “place over there” to exact retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3341-1

SONG OF SOLOMON

Song of Solomon,
a novel of great beauty and power, creates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, with the birth of Macon Dead, Jr., known as Milkman, son of the richest black family in a Midwestern town. Milkman grows up in his father’s money-haunted, death-haunted house and then strikes out alone toward adventure, and as the unspoken truth about his family and his buried heritage comes to light, toward an adventurous and crucial embrace of life.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3342-X

SULA

Both black, both smart, both poor, and raised in a small Ohio town, Sula and Nel meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes. Through their girlhood years they share everything until Sula escapes the Bottom, their hilltop neighborhood of fierce resentment toward failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, and bug-ridden flour. Sula roams the cities of America for ten years, and when she returns to town she finds Nel married and acculturated to life at the Bottom, while Sula remains the oddity of the community.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3343-8

TAR BABY

The cultivated millionaire Valerian Street’s existence is arranged by his fastidious butler, Sydney, whose niece Jadine has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian’s expense. One night, a ragged, starving black American street man breaks into the house. Jadine, who at first is repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood: uneducated, violent, and contemptuous of her privilege. Each becomes fascinated with the other, and the novel deftly reveals how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart.

Fiction/Literature/1-4000-3344-6

PLAYING IN THE DARK
Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Toni Morrison’s brilliant discussions of the “Africanist” presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway lead to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree, which came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.

Literary Criticism/0-679-74542-4