Toni Morrison – Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club

“Inside Nothing:” The Silent Protest March in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Posted on February 14, 2018February 16, 2018 by bluesyjune

Silent Protest March July 28, 1917

The Massacre and the March

Male Drummers — Male drummers and other men mark the end of section. Children begin new section of marchers.

Silent Protest March of 1917

On July 28^th 1917, nearly ten thousand African-Americans marched down New York City’s Fifth Avenue to protest the feral violence unleashed on the African-American community during the massacre in East Saint Louis, Illinois on July 2, 1917. Led by the children, followed by the women, and backed by the men, those who participated in the March moved as one, to the rhythms of “muffled drums,” while “20,000 negroes lined Fifth Avenue and gave silent approval of the demonstration.”^[i] Referred to as the “silent protest march” by the contemporary newspapers and later historians, not one word was uttered by the marchers throughout the demonstration.^[ii]

Narcis Gurley — The caption reads: “Narcis Gurly, 71 next birthday. Lived in her home 30 years. Afraid to come out till the blazing walls fell in.” (Her arms were badly burned.)

bodiesofvictims — The caption reads: “Looking for bodies of victims. Six were found here.”

Perhaps still reverberating in the minds of many of the marchers was the crackling fury of destructive fires, the dull blunt thwack of metal, stone and brick against black flesh, the screech of quickly advancing shoe leather against pavement, the tinkle crash of breaking glass, the explosions, the gunfire, the laughing and jeering of white perpetrators, and the torturous screams of pain, horror, fear and grief emitting from the throats of men, women, children and the aged, who, in one night, were hunted and ruthlessly slaughtered like prey.

coloredinfrontofcar — The caption reads: “Colored man in front of car. Being mobbed. Militia looking on.”

While explanations for the cause of the massacre ranged from white reaction to the “influx of undesirable negros,” who were perceived as threatening white jobs and homes, to black veteran discontent, the desolation remaining in its wake was uncontestable (“The Massacre of East St. Louis” 221). The East Saint Louis carnage resulted in “nearly two hundred Afro-American [deaths] and six thousand [being] burned out of their houses” (Lewis 10). “Men, women and children were beaten, stabbed, hanged and burned” (Schomburg Exhibit). It was “the worst race riot in American history” (Lewis 9).

The Collective Response

silentparade42ndstreet — The caption reads: “The Negro Silent Parade. At Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, New York City.”

Beginning in 1916, thousands of African-Americans had fled from the South to the North in an effort to escape the lynchings, the town burnings, the segregationist laws, and the manifold economic and social oppressions prevalent in the South. They had hoped for a better life in the North. They had hoped that they were “going to the Promised Land” (Trotter 72). The butchery in East St. Louis reinforced the reality that they had merely changed locations without substantially ameliorating their situations. What could they do? Where else could they go when the North, too, was filling with their blood, exploiting their labor, and defiling their personhood? The Silent Protest March tacitly shouted their collective decision and their answer to the massacre which had occurred: We will stay. We will stand. We will fight.

Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Jazz Rhythms and Silence

In Jazz, the second novel of Toni Morrison’s historical trilogy, Morrison enumerates many historical facts without explication.[iii] As Peterson notes, “the novel opens in 1926, the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, but it offers for full view almost none of the artistic, cultural, or political milestones that African Americans achieved in those years” (201). Morrison’s approach highlights the significance of the one extra-textual historical event explicated in some detail: the Silent Protest March of 1917. Reading Morrison’s novel through the dichotomous, imbricated tools of resistance evident during the March, jazz rhythms and silence, provides the reader with an understanding of some of the agonizing collective and individual incidents which drive the rhythms in jazz music and lie beneath the lyrics. This discussion will briefly explore three of the novel’s main characters, Alice Manfred, Joe and Violet Trace.

Alice’s sister and brother-in-law were killed in the East St. Louis Massacre. They were survived by their daughter Dorcas, who was visiting a friend when her father was “pulled off a streetcar and stomped to death” (Jazz 57). Her mother “had just got the news and had gone back home to try and forget the color of [her husband’s] entrails when her “house was “torched” and she “burned crispy in its flame” (Jazz 57). Since Alice lives in New York and not East St. Louis, she is depicted as a grieving family member deeply impacted by the type of brutality which was rampant during the massacre. Alice does not actively participate in the March but she joins the observers on the side lines.

Alice Manfred stood for three hours on Fifth Avenue marveling at the cold black faces and listening to drums saying what the graceful women and the marching men could not. What was possible to say was already in print on a banner that repeated a couple of promises from the Declaration of Independence and waved over the head of its bearer. But what was meant came from the drums. It was July in 1917 and the beautiful faces were cold and quiet; moving slowly into the space the drums were building for them. (53, emphasis added)

It is significant that a distinction is made between “what was possible to say” and “what was meant” (Jazz 53). The words that were stated to explain the March, and the protestors’ external response to the violence in East Saint Louis did not express “what was meant” (Jazz 53). The drums said “what the graceful women and the marching men could not” say (Jazz 53). The drums spoke what was meant.

Jazz Music: Revealing and Concealing

Morrison, in her 1981 interview with Le Clair, states that she uses the “standard English” language “to help restore the other language, the lingua franca,” “the language that black people spoke” (124). She views this lingua franca as analogous to jazz music: “It is open on the one hand and both complicated and inaccessible on the other” (124). The openness of jazz refers both to the product of the performer and to the response of the listener. Something within the nature of the music itself allows a space and an opening for the listener to enter emotionally even while recognizing its complicated inaccessibility.

The something which allows jazz, though complex, to provide an emotional space for its listeners, is perhaps found in the impulse of the performer. As Charlie Parker is quoted as saying, “music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn” (qtd. in Cone 5). If we heed Charlie Parker’s insight, and accept that what “comes out of the horn” of the performer expresses his/her experiences, thoughts and wisdom, then some aspects of the performance will be emotionally accessible to the listener and other parts will not, as the performer alone knows the full extent of his/her experiences. Jazz music then is open and closed, revealing and concealing, simple and complex.

The Drum Rhythms: Accessible and Inaccessible

The banner held by the marcher in the foreground reads: The First Blood for American Independence was Shed by a Negro Crispus Attucks.

While the banners held by the marchers disclosed their open protest of the savage violence of the East St. Louis massacre, with questions and statements such as: “Mother, do Lynchers go to Heaven?,” “Thou shalt not kill,” and “Give Us a Chance to Live,” the banners did not express the inexpressible.^[iv] The drums both conveyed the “love and the hate, hope and the despair” felt by the marchers and created an emotional space for them to move into, a silent, unutterably complex space where speech was inaccessible (Cone 5). What could possibly be said to express their anger, their fear, their hope, and their despair over the brutal display of violent depravity that comprised the massacre?

The Printed Word: Overt and Covert

Without the inclusion of the music from the drums, the words of the banners which waved over their heads and “the slippery crazy words” printed on the explanatory leaflets the Boy Scouts distributed to those observing the March, “seemed crazy” and “out of focus” (Jazz 58). Although Alice was a part of the assaulted community en masse and a sharer in their grief, the words of the “explanatory leaflets” in particular, merely served to cause a “great gap” to “lunge between the print” and Dorcas, Alice’s newly orphaned niece. “Alice had picked up a leaflet that had floated to the pavement, read the words, and shifted her weight at the curb. She read the words and looked at Dorcas. Looked at Dorcas and read the words again” (Jazz 58).

Some of the explanations offered on the leaflet seemed to be readily apprehended, “We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis,[v] and East St. Louis, by arousing the conscience of the country” (The Negro Silent Protest Parade 2). Yet the statements were also difficult to conceive as a full response to the overwhelming dissolute violence many of the marchers had survived.

As Alice Manfred stood “crushing” the hand of her newly orphaned niece, Dorcas, watching the “cold,” “beautiful faces” of the marchers, she was “struggling for the connection, something to close the distance between the silent staring child and the slippery crazy words” (Jazz 58). Into the space and “spann[ing] the distance” Alice heard the drums “like a rope cast for rescue…which gathered them up and connected them” (Jazz 58).

Responses to Jazz Music

Reflective Hand Gestures: Open and clenched

The drums, muffled during the March, have the rhythms of the jazz music Alice hears all around her. When played without accompanying melodies or lyrics during the March, the drums serve as a connective, traversing the distance between the slippery words and Dorcas, as representative of the traumatized survivors. While jazz music made Alice “aware of its life below the [dress] sash and its red lip rouge,” it also had “a kind of careless hunger for a fight or a red ruby stickpin” which made Alice “hold her hand in the pocket of her apron to keep from smashing it through the glass pane to snatch the world in her fist and squeeze the life out of it for doing what it did and did and did to her and everybody else she knew” (Jazz 58-9, emphasis added). Alice uses the two different hand gestures to try to balance herself, the open hand reaching for the “safe gathering rope thrown to her…on Fifth Avenue” and the fist clenched in anger when she hears “some [jazz] phrase or other” (Jazz 59). Her hand gestures represent the two contradictory and concomitant realities of jazz music in the text: “open” on the one hand, reaching for the connective rope, and “inaccessible” on the other, closed into a fist.

Relational Cohesion: Physical Intimacy and/or Emotional Exclusion

While Alice views the drum rhythms as an “all-embracing rope of fellowship, discipline and transcendence, her niece Dorcas views them as a “beginning, a start of something she looked to complete” (Jazz 60). Severely restrained and closely watched by her aunt, Dorcas “thought of that life-below-the-sash as all the life there was” (Jazz 60). The drums for Dorcas were the “first word(s) of a command” (Jazz 60). Thus, by the time Joe Trace propositions Dorcas, she is eager to satisfy her sexual hungers, even with a married man several decades her senior (Jazz 67).

Joe and Dorcas form a strong physical and emotional connection, bonding both through intercourse and through the sharing of their respective painful experiences. They reveal the open aspects of their hearts as well as the parts inaccessible and complex. In contrast, Joe and his wife Violet do not share the inaccessible parts of their hearts with each other in the early or the latter stages of their relationship. Initially, they are consumed by and focused only on their sexual relationship. While their libidinous response is typical for new lovers, when their physical relationship wanes, they do not mature past the superficial into a deeper knowing of each other which matches their initial physical ardor. Hence, Violet is ignorant of the reasons for Joe’s migration to the City after fourteen years of refusal and resistance to its lure. “Violet never knew what it was that fired him up and made him want…to move to the City” (Jazz 107). Joe, in turn, is unaware of what causes Violet’s eventual silence and sexual withdrawal. “Over time her silences annoy [him], then puzzle him and finally depress him” (Jazz 24). The roots of both their responses stem from what I call a central trauma.

Central Traumas: Hidden and Exposed

Morrison chooses to depict both Violet and Joe as wounded souls with, “sadness at [their] center…the desolated center where the self that was no self made its home” (Beloved 140). The “desolation…at [their] center” stems from the impact of a central trauma, which I define as a devastating incident or series of incidents which cause lasting emotional and psychological turmoil or damage. Often occurring when the character was “too young to say No thank you,” he/she is initially unable to control its impact (Jazz 211).[vi]

All the other life episodes that are rooted in the pain of this trauma, or somehow remind Joe and Violet of it, continually serve to debilitate them throughout the novel, eventually leading to Joe’s murder of Dorcas and Violet’s attack on Dorcas’ corpse. Thus, while seeking to hide their central traumas from others, the actions which result from the impact and aftermath of the traumas end up exposing the depth of their pain. “Joe’s murder of his young girlfriend and Violet’s stabbing of the corpse as it awaits burial indicate the powerful eruption of their unresolved pasts into the present” (Matus 122).

The core of this trauma has no sound. It has a resonating silence, similar to the participants of the Protest March. While the marchers’ silence was their chosen response to the massacre and used as a tool to counter the volume of the violence which precipitated the protest, silence also surrounds Joe and Violet’s central trauma and is their initial response.

Joe and Violet fill their lives with needful activity and work while actively seeking to suppress the impact of their respective central traumas and hide the pain from each other. The central trauma leaves emotional devastation in its wake. The “inside nothing,” which Morrison describes in Jazz, is the desolating emotional aftermath which results from the impact of the central trauma (Jazz 38).

Joe’s Central Trauma

Abandoned at birth by his mother, Joe is adopted as an infant by the Williams family. Although Joe is loved and well treated by the Williams, his stepmother “never pretend[s] that [Joe] [i]s her natural child” (Jazz 124). When Henry Lestroy, a man known for his hunting skills, selects Joe and his stepbrother Victory, to be his apprentices, Joe is indirectly told the truth concerning his parentage. His mother was the local wild woman whom Joe and Victory “were speculating on what it would take to kill…if they happened on her” (Jazz 175). Henry Lestroy ended their banter with “low fire galvaniz[ing] his stare…then he looked right at Joe (not Victory)…You know, that woman is somebody’s mother and somebody ought to take care” (Jazz 175).

Joe then connects and seeks to connect with his mother, Wild, three times. Since she lives in the woods and does not interact with people in a normative way, he only hears her or finds evidence of her presence in each instance. She does not speak with him or reveal herself in any of the encounters. Each interaction deepens his frustration and solidifies his perception that she is deliberately rejecting him. After their first accidental encounter, Joe deliberately tracks Wild. The second interaction occurs after he locates Wild and attempts to connect with her. Although she continues to remain hidden, the nearness of her audible breathing encourages his request, “Is it you? Just say it…You my mother?” (178). Wild’s response, “indecent speechless lurking insanity,” infuriates Joe and drives his maniacal work habits (Jazz 179). During Joe’s third and final attempt to connect with Wild, he locates and enters her burrow finding her things all “mixed up” with Golden Gray’s[vii] and solidifying in Joe the inside nothing he carries from then on (Jazz 182). It is Wild’s “rejection of him…that marks Joe for life” (Mbalia, 626).

The Personification of the Inside Nothing

Wild is the personification of the inside nothing. A living picture of the assault on African-Americans in general, and women in particular, Wild bears on her body the “traces of bad things; like tobacco juice, brine, and a craftsman’s sense of play” (Jazz 171). Yet her untamed lifestyle, her visible presence yet absence, her wordless communication with the outside world, her selection of a living space, are all decided upon and controlled by her. Although she is perceived as deranged, and more than likely is, it can also be argued that she has taken what others have inflicted upon her and chosen to shape it, living in her own way and by her own terms. Like the marchers, she uses her silence as a tool to turn the controls. She instills fear on those who surround her as they never know when she will appear or what she will do.

As the visible presence of the inside nothing, she bears externally the tacit internal scars that Joe and Violet carry. She can be seen as conveying to the reader much of what remains unsaid concerning the feelings of the inside nothing that both Joe and Violet have. Silent but saturated with experiences, present but ignored as if absent, larger than life but unable to be confronted, the effect of the inside nothing in both Violet and Joe’s lives becomes wild. Joe seeks to suppress his own “speechless, lurking insanity” by working manically after his second encounter with his mother (Jazz 179); but he also “bust(s) out just for the hell of it” by “shooting his unloaded shotgun at the leaves” near to where his mother was (Jazz 181).

Violet’s Central Trauma

Dark silence pervades both Violet and Joe’s central traumas. While the searches Joe conducts for his mother conclude in the dim light of late afternoon, Violet’s discovery of her mother’s twisted body at the bottom of a well, occurs in the darkness of early morning. The wide darkness of Joe’s wood blend into the narrow, confinement of the well Violet’s mother, Rose Dear, chooses for the site of her suicide. Since during their first meeting Violet and Joe talk from evening into early morning, they unwittingly help each other through the most difficult portions of their day. “Never again would she wake struggling against the pull of a narrow well. Or watch first light with the sadness left over from finding Rose Dear in the morning twisted into water much too small” (Jazz 104).

While Joe’s inside nothing drives him to maniacal work, the emotional devastation resulting from Rose Dear’s suicide, Violet’s inside nothing, drives her to increasing depression and withdrawal. Insomnia, spurred by her resistance to the pull of the well, drained Violet’s emotional resources. Though surrounded by family, only her grandmother, True Belle’s, urgings to earn money picking cotton during an abundant harvest, shook her from her home. It is during her time away from home picking cotton that she meets and latches onto Joe. Violet then becomes, literally overnight, the aggressive, vocal, determined woman that Joe believes he knows. However, just as Joe pours himself into work to distract him from the pain that he carries, Violet pours all of herself into Joe determined to do and bear anything to be with him. While Dorcas temporarily fills Joe’s inside nothing and he fills hers during their brief affair, neither Joe nor Violet ultimately transcend the inside nothing which haunts them within the course of the novel.

Jazz gives the reader a glimpse into both the collective and the individual traumas which underlie some early jazz music. The significance in the text of both the response to the East St. Louis massacre and Joe and Violet’s respective response to their central traumas help the reader to glimpse some of the inaccessible aspects of jazz music.

And yet the inaccessible openness of jazz music continues to have resonant relevance today. While the widespread feral violence on display during the East St. Louis massacre has not recurred in the recent past, the antithetical dichotomy of recent racial incidents and the inappropriateness of official responses ad judgments, continues to drive both open and inexpressible reactions. Simultaneously, the expanding continuance of the #MeToo outing of predators and exploiters is bringing to light the ongoing impact of central traumas and their prevalence. Although no specific musical form can fully express the inexpressible, Jazz reminds us of some of the depth and scope of the impetus for the creation of and the need for listening to the music which opens a space for the inaccessible. Jazz music plays on.

Endnotes

[i]“Negroes in Protest March in Fifth Av.” New York Times, July 29, 1917.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Morrison lists, mentions but does not expand upon some of the facts which convey to the reader the racial hostilities and barriers of the contemporary manifestations of racism for the period. “A&P hire a colored clerk” (7), “the hair of…colored nurses was declared unseemly” (8), “green as poison curtain separating the colored people eating” (31), “welts given me by a two-tone peckerwood” (96), “stores doubled the price of uptown beef and let the whitefolks’ meat stay the same” (128), “the everyday killings cops did of Negroes” (199).

[iv] Many of the banners noted in the New York Times article seemed to have simply stated the truth of the events and the situation in general while also, perhaps, raising the consciousness of some of the onlookers. They did not, therefore, express the inexpressible feelings of the marchers; they were for the benefit of an extra-communal observer. “Your Hands Are Full of Blood,” “India is Abolishing Caste America is Adopting It,” “Memphis and Waco, Centres of American Culture.”

[v]Both Waco and Memphis refer to incidents of particularly brutal lynchings. While many other lynchings had also occurred in 1916 and 1917, these two cases were remarkable in the excessive depravity of the mob and the large numbers of perpetrators and observers.

On May 15,1916 Jesse Washington, a 17 year-old farmhand, was accused of raping and killing a 53 year-old white woman, Lucy Fryer. Following his brief trial in Waco, Texas a mob waited outside the courthouse to capture Washington. A chain was tied around his neck and he was brutally stabbed and beaten as he was dragged to a prepared tree. He was covered in oil and slowly lowered over the fire beneath. More than 10,000 onlookers watched this two-hour horror. His remains were then placed into a sack and dragged to Robinson, Texas where his mangled and burned body was hung on a utility pole. http://wacohistory.org/items/show/55

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5401868

On May 22, 1917 Ell Persons, an African-American woodcutter, was accused of raping and decapitating Antoinette Rappel, a sixteen year-old girl. Though detectives surmised that a white man killed her and a white man’s handkerchief was found at the scene, Persons was repeatedly arrested for the crime and eventually beaten into making a confession. After a speedy trial in Nashville, Persons was to be escorted back to Memphis by two deputies. However, when the train arrived in Potts Camp, Mississippi, the deputies handed Persons over to a waiting mob. He was chained to a log and burned to death. His body was mutilated after death with many persons taking “souvenirs,” his ears, his heart and his head, which was photographed and then thrown at a group of African Americans. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rhetoricraceandreligion/2016/04/burned-alive-the-lynch-murder-mutilation-and-mayhem-of-ell-persons.html

[vi] I argue elsewhere that each of Morrison’s novels have at least one character who has a central trauma which impacts their present circumstance and situation.

[vii] Golden Gray is the mixed-race son of Vera Louise, a white woman, and Henry LesTroy, an African-American young man. When her parents discover that Vera Louise is pregnant through a “Negro boy,” she is given a “lingerie case full of money” and encouraged to leave home (140-1). Golden Gray is raised both by his mother and Violet’s grandmother, True Belle, the one slave Vera Louise wanted with her when she departed. Light skinned enough to pass for white, he is raised as a white male and never informed of his African-American lineage until he is a young man of eighteen. Once informed of his father’s identity, Golden Grey sets out to find Henry LesTroy and encounters a pregnant Wild on the road. Though initially terrified of her, after she gives birth to Joe and refuses to nurse him, they evidently end up living together in Wild’s hideaway. Joe comes upon their home after his third and final attempt to connect with his mother.

Dr. Caryl Loney-McFarlane is an independent scholar, a Higher-Education Diversity Consultant and a Diversity Fellow at Princeton University. Originally from New York City, she attended Queens College, of the City University of New York (CUNY), where she earned her undergraduate degree in English with a Pre-Med. minor. She continued her studies at Rutgers University, completing her doctoral degree in English in 2007. Her graduate work focused on 20th Century African Diaspora literature with a concentration on the novels of Toni Morrison. Currently, her independent scholarship focuses on racism in American history and its intersection with and impact upon our present-day interactions and relationships. She is the former Senior Program Officer of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where she directed six higher-education programs for underrepresented populations. Both in her current work as a Diversity Fellow with Princeton and as a diversity consultant, she seeks to aid her clients in their efforts to diversify their institutions and address barriers in racial progress.

Claudia’s Blues: Blues, Jazz, and the Affirmation of Self in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Posted on October 23, 2017 by bluesyjune

Toni Morrison’s much acclaimed debut novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), examines the devastating effects of white supremacist values and aesthetic ideals on an African American community living in Lorain, Ohio in 1941. Perhaps more importantly, the novel also explores alternative aesthetic modes that form the basis for new ways of imagining racial identity in the post-Civil Rights era. Specifically, while Morrison’s novel reflects a blues impulse in its tragic-comic affirmation of Claudia MacTeer’s childhood experiences, it utilizes jazz aesthetics, specifically the techniques of “riffing” and “quoting,” as the means to extend a pointed cultural critique of the ideology of whiteness.

By “blues impulse,” I am referring to the creative reconceptualization and ironic re-presentation of pain (the tragedy of loss, of injustice, of mere bad luck) that allows such pain to take on not only a new meaning, but also a new ontological value. As the novelist and essayist Ralph Ellison has observed, “the blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (129). The blues impulse, in other words, seeks to find transcendence not in the detachment and abstraction of an “objective” explanation of tragedy, but in the rich density of subjective understanding that results from one’s protracted engagement with and creative reconceptualization of pain. Consequently, it is not merely the individual’s own painful experience that is altered through the blues impulse; the individual’s interpretive frame is also transformed. As Houston A. Baker puts it, the blues impulse offers new “interpretations of the experiencing of experience” (7).

Morrison explicitly highlights this interpretive potential of the blues during an early scene in which the narrator fondly recalls listening to her mother sing while cleaning house. Claudia explains that the “greens and blues in [her] mother’s voice took all the grief out of the words and left [her] with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet” (26). Throughout The Bluest Eye, the tragic-comic perspective of the blues impulse allows the narrator to cultivate both a space of intimacy in the recollecting of her own painful experiences in childhood and a broader affirmative perspective on racial identity that challenges dominant social norms and values. In another scene, for example, the adult narrator looks back on an episode of childhood illness, locating in the experience a complex array of emotions, contradictory perspectives and interpretations. Notably, the scene initially emphasizes the child’s perspective: Claudia’s discomfort in a drafty room (“Once I have generated a silhouette of warmth, I dare not move, for there is a cold place one-half inch in any direction” [11]); her absorbed fascination with the strangeness of her own bodily excretions (“the puke swaddles down the pillow onto the sheet—green, gray, with flecks of orange” [11]); and her emotional and intellectual confusion as she attempts to understand the source of her mother’s anger (“My mother’s voice drones on. She is not talking to me. She is talking to the puke, but she is calling it my name: Claudia. . . . My mother’s anger humiliates me; her words chafe my cheeks, and I am crying. I do not know that she is not angry at me, but at my sickness” [11]). For the child, Claudia, the experience is painful largely because of her lack of control and her limited understanding. She does not, cannot, as a child, comprehend the fear in her mother’s tone or the frustration behind her mother’s words. For Claudia’s family, like most families in her community, life amounts to an existential struggle, a “peripheral existence” (17). As the narrator explains, “Being a minority in both caste and class, we moved about . . . on the hem of life, struggling to consolidate our weaknesses, and hang on, or creep singly up into the major folds of the garment” (17). It is only retrospectively that the adult Claudia can “squeeze” from her childhood experience a tragic-comic lyricism:

But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it—taste it—sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere in that house. . . . And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die. (12)

In this exquisite passage, we witness the dilation of interpretative possibilities. Pain is not divorced from love, but, as “fructifying,” is its material condition of possibility. Morrison does not attempt to resolve or relieve the child’s earlier experience of anguish through sentimentalism; on the contrary, the extended use of depersonalizing synecdoche in the passage is meant to distill the experience of love as a physical act. In Claudia’s blues, the initial ambiguity of linguistic expression gives way to the ontological density of physical tenderness: the explicitly auditory and tactile images “feet” and “hands” are experienced by Claudia as presences, the self-evident truth of “somebody . . . who does not want me to die” (12).

The emotional complexity of the scene of Claudia’s childhood illness effectively challenges the anemic white ideal of family represented by the Dick and Jane reading primer that opens the novel. Moreover, I would argue that this scene, like many others in the novel, codifies the blues impulse as a strategy for the ontological affirmation of blackness, more generally. If, as Ellison argues, the blues impulse is principally characterized by the commitment to working through painful experiences in an effort to find transcendence in tragic-comic lyricism, then it also implies a concomitant belief that psychic and somatic sources of pain may be powerful indices of one’s being. Morrison seems to suggest this idea when she describes the old women who come to visit Cholly’s Aunt Jimmie, women who give voice to a “threnody of nostalgia about pain” (137).

They licked their lips and clucked their tongues in fond remembrance of pains they had endured—childbirth, rheumatism, croup, sprains, backaches, piles. All of the bruises they had collected from moving about the earth—harvesting, cleaning, hoisting, pitching, stooping, kneeling, picking—always with young ones under foot. (138)

For these women, the various pains they have endured persist in memory as vital markers of their presence in the world and irreducible evidence of their “Becoming” (138). Painful experiences thereby form the phenomenological fabric onto which the patterns of memory, history, and identity are woven. By emphasizing the blues impulse as an affirmation of the ontological value of pain—and the complexity of human experience more generally—Morrison aims to critique oppressive ideologies that limit the scope of human experience and expression in the name of spiritual transcendence or aesthetic beauty.

Throughout The Bluest Eye, the ideology of whiteness is associated with a disavowal of complex emotional experience, and specifically, the attempt to discipline the body and the mind into conformity with a set of unrealistic, arbitrary, and oppressive standards. The character Geraldine, for example, represents a pathological adherence to the white (supremacist) ideal. Geraldine and women like her are said to live their lives in a state of somatophobic hyper-vigilance against what they perceive to be signs of threatening bodily excess, or what the narrator calls “Funk” (83): “Wherever it erupts, this Funk, they wipe it away; where it crusts, they dissolve it; wherever it drips, flowers, or clings, they find it and fight it until it dies” (83). A generic description of unruly and abject corporeality that “erupts,” “clings,” “drips,” and “crusts” is applied, finally, to its concrete manifestation in the black female body (“they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair” [83]). When identified in the bodies of women like Geraldine, such generic instances of funkiness—“the dreadful funkiness of passion . . . of nature. . . [and] of the wide range of human emotions” (83)—become legible as the peculiar markers of race. The disturbing implication for Geraldine is the impoverishment of her inter-personal relationships (notably with her husband and son) and the cultivation of racial self-loathing. Geraldine’s fear of bodily excess and her concomitant desire for corporeal containment have both resulted from and have been translated into unstable codes for deciphering and maintaining racial identity in relative proximity to whiteness. In Geraldine’s anxious formulation, “Colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud” (87).

Earlier in the novel, we are presented with the initial stages of this “conversion” into the ideology of whiteness as the discipline of hyper-cleanliness. Specifically, Claudia recalls being forced, as a child, to bathe in a zinc tub in preparation for wearing a new dress: “no time to enjoy one’s nakedness, only time to make curtains of soapy water careen down between the legs. Then the scratchy towels and the dreadful and humiliating absence of dirt. The irritable, unimaginative cleanliness. Gone the ink marks from legs and face, all my creations and accumulations of the day gone, and replaced by goose pimples” (22). The symbolic implications of the scene are unmistakably linked to the loss of self-expression, the devaluing of corporeality (in all of its forms), and the consequent narrowing of the interpretive potential for the “experiencing of experience” (Baker 7), both for oneself and within one’s community. Throughout The Bluest Eye, the blues impulse may be viewed, broadly, as essential to what Craig Hansen Werner calls the “individual expression and the affirmative, and self-affirming, response to the community” (xxi). Furthermore, according to Werner, we may view the novel’s interrelated “jazz impulse” as an elaboration of the blues impulse, in that it “provides ways of exploring implications, of realizing the relational possibilities of the (blues) self, and of expanding the consciousness of self and community through a process of continual improvisation” (xxii). If The Bluest Eye imagines new, affirmative terms for conceptualizing blackness, terms which emphasize the dignity of embodied existence, emotional courage and complexity, and the lyrical expression of pain, it locates these terms of self-affirmation within a broader, improvisatory cultural critique.

The two principle jazz techniques utilized by Morrison in the composition of The Bluest Eye are “riffing” and “quoting.” Musically, the concept of a “riff” implies a short figure or phrase that, when repeated, provides both a foundation (in the form of a recognizable motif) and a vehicle for improvisatory innovation through the means of revision, inversion, and parody. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued that the concept of “riffing” is a “central component” of both jazz improvisation and “Signifyin(g),” the term he uses to designate the technique of parodic revision and “troping” characteristic of African American discourse (114). An allied concept, “quoting,” generally refers to the intentional incorporation of well-known and thereby easily recognizable melodic source material into an original jazz composition or improvisation. Like riffing, quoting is a technique that exploits repetition and revision; however, the latter may produce even more dramatic effects because it may evoke an expression of what Gates describes as ‘resemblance by dissemblance’ (113). While quoting generally implies the brief inclusion of an extrinsic melody within a jazz solo as a kind of “inside joke,” we can extend the concept here to refer to the revision of a popular standard within a jazz context. In his discussion of this phenomenon, Gates cites the well-known example of John Coltrane’s 1965 jazz rendition of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic, “My Favorite Things” (1959) performed by Julie Andrews. The Coltrane rendition does not replace the original version; rather, through parodic revision, it offers a new perspective on conventional Western themes and idioms. Similarly, in his study of the poetry of Amiri Baraka, William J. Harris argues that jazz aesthetics, like that represented by the music of Coltrane, can form the basis for radical cultural and political critique. According to Harris, Baraka believed that by “shatter[ing] and twist[ing] and finally eradicate[ing] Western structures,” jazz aesthetics had the potential to “structure a new black world” (14).

In the opening of The Bluest Eye, Morrison quotes the 1940s Dick and Jane reading primer and then “signifies” on the text by repeating the same passage two more times, first without punctuation or conventional capitalization, and then without any spacing between words. The original lines, “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty” is finally rendered, almost illegibly, as “Hereisthehouseitisgreenandwhiteithasareddooritisverypretty” (Morrison 4-5). Morrison’s revision of the original work both shatters the textual surface and puts into question the ideological perspective that it represents. Though the words of each version remain identical, the collapse of the grammatical structures induce parodic significations based upon the tension between form and content, signifier and signified. The staccato, declarative statements that initially provide a window into white suburban security and promote the ideal of the nuclear family, dissolve, like the breathless notes of a careening saxophone solo, into the frantic articulations of a maddening and unrealizable desire. Throughout the novel, Morrison employs similar techniques to critique some of the more insidious elements in white supremacist ideology, particularly those that promote whiteness as the ideal of beauty.

Morrison explores the pathological cultural fixation on whiteness and its detrimental effects on African American girls, in particular, by introducing the child star Shirley Temple as a central figure or riff whose symbolic implications are examined through multiple repetitions and inversions. The riff is deployed soon after the introduction of Pecola Breedlove, a girl whose family had been put “outdoors” by her father, Cholly. Looking back, the adult Claudia explains that while Pecola and her sister, Frieda, “gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face” (19) on a cup of milk and “had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was” (19), she “hated Shirley” (19). A central riff “quoted” from popular culture, the image of Shirley Temple on a cup of milk represents both a consumable image of white desirability (symbolism later reiterated in the image of Mary Jane candies [50]) and a kind of doppelgänger that interferes with the narcissistic development of Claudia’s ego. Crucially, Claudia’s jealousy stems not from the fact that Shirley is “cu-ute,” but because the culture’s adoration for Shirley seems to coincide with or necessitate her own displacement and invisibility. The narrator explains: “[I] hated Shirley . . . [b]ecause she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing and chuckling with me” (19). For the young Claudia, who views racial features as simply the markers of familial belonging, Shirley’s dance with Bojangles represents a vexing disturbance in expectations, namely the exclusion of herself from her own mirror image.

As the foundational riff which concretizes the violent psycho-social process at the heart of white supremacist ideology, then, “Shirley Temple” encompasses both (particular) image and (universal) concept. It is not simply that Claudia hates this particular child actress; rather, the narrator explains that the initial aggressive response to the experience of displacement leads to the cultivation of a “hatred for all the Shirley Temples of the world” (19). By elaborating on this riff, Morrison attempts to make visible the psychic “conversion” (23) process whereby this outward aggression is redirected and ultimately introjected within the ideological fantasy of white supremacy. If, from a psychological perspective, Shirley Temple may be viewed as Claudia’s threatening image-double, the plastic “blue-eyed Baby Doll” (20) doubles Shirley Temple as a fetishistic icon of whiteness, embodying what the cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek has referred to as the “sublime object” (18) of ideological fantasy. Claudia’s inability to find meaning in the doll beyond its inert surface characteristics—the “hard unyielding limbs,” “bone-cold head,” and “starched gauze or lace” (20) of its dress (a dress reminiscent of the one she, herself, is sometimes forced to wear)—reflects the fact that she has not yet been successfully interpellated into the network of ideological codes that privilege “whiteness” as a transcendental signifier. Although Claudia intellectually understands that “all the world had agreed” (21) on the desirability of the doll, she does not yet identify with and consequently cannot comprehend that desire. Her destruction of the dolls may be viewed, therefore, as an unsuccessful attempt to uncover the elusive “sublime object” that she believes gives the doll a hidden, intrinsic value. Inside the doll, however, Claudia discovers only more extrinsic features—the “mere metal roundness” (21) of the disk that produces the doll’s sound, “like the bleat of a dying lamb” (21).

Although the Shirley Temple/blue-eyed Baby Doll riff undergoes many subsequent parodic repetitions and inversions throughout the text, it is in the image of Pecola’s baby, the product of an incestuous rape by her father, that its form is finally shattered. Claudia imagines the baby’s “living, breathing silk of black skin” (190) in contrast with the “synthetic yellow bangs” and “marble-blue eyes” (190) of the plastic doll, thereby painfully evoking resemblance through dissemblance. More importantly, Claudia’s desire for the baby to live—despite the horrific circumstances of its conception—reflects what Werner describes as the “expanding the consciousness of self and community” promoted by the jazz impulse (xxii). Reflecting on her reaction to the tragedy, the adult Claudia recalls: “I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live–just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals” (190); however, she also recognizes her own responsibility in Pecola’s tragedy, admitting “We honed our egos on her” (205). Ultimately, Morrison suggests that the significance of the aesthetic impulses of blues and jazz exceeds the affirmation of the individual’s own experience of pain in the face of oppression. The forms of selfhood that these impulses make possible offer, in addition, a powerful source of ethical awareness and concomitant sense of accountability within the community itself.

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John F. Callahan, Modern Library, 1995, pp. 128-144.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. 1988. Oxford UP, 2014.

Harris, William J. The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. U of Missouri P, 1985.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. Vintage, 2007.

Werner, Craig Hansen. Playing the Changes: from Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse. U of Illinois P, 1994.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989.