Charles Petzold

“Recitatif” is (astonishingly) Toni Morrison’s only published short story, and it is guaranteed to mess with your head.

Here’s the premise: Two girls meet in a shelter and develop a friendship. We know that one of these girls is white and the other black, but Morrison never tells us who is which. Over subsequent years, they encounter each other as adults in circumstances that put them in more adversarial relationships, and although their attitudes towards each other (and the larger world) seem to be based on race, we are stuck without knowing exactly how race plays a role!

Recitatif was first published in a 1983 anthology of writings by African American women, and it was later collected in other anthologies, but this is the first time the story has been published by itself. It’s a slim book: The story itself is only 38 pages, but a fascinating (and just slightly longer) Introduction by Zadie Smith helps us navigate our own confusion.

In the opening pages of “Recitatif,” Roberta and Twyla meet in a shelter when they are 8 years old. Roberta is there because her mother is sick. Twyla (the narrator) is there because her mother “danced all night.” (We never learn what that means exactly). Twyla immediately tells us is that her mother warned her that people from Roberta’s race “never washed their hair and they smelled funny.” (p. 4) Immediately we are plunged into some of nastiest manifestations of bigotry.

Although the two girls are predisposed not to like each other, they eventually bond by sharing the circumstance of being two of the few non-orphans in the shelter, and having some common enemies among the other girls and the staff.

Years later, Twyla is “working behind the counter at a Howard Johnson’s on the Thruway just before the Kingston exit” (p. 15) when Roberta shows up looking quite fine and on her way to a Jimi Hendix concert. But Twyla doesn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix is. The next time they meet up, Roberta is married to an IBM executive. “Everything is easy for them,” Twyla writes. “They think they own the world.” (p. 21)

Still later, both married and with children, they find themselves on opposite sides of the debate to use bussing to promote racial integration. Roberta complains “They want to take my kids and send them out of the neighborhood. They don’t want to go.” Twyla replies “So what if they go to another school? My boy’s being bussed too, and I don’t mind.” (p. 30)

In a work of fiction, characters speak words and commit actions, but underlying everything is motivation. Motivation is crucial, and Toni Morrison is deliberately withholding facts that would help us understand motivation. Does Roberta oppose bussing because she doesn’t want her kids going to what she perceives to be a black school? Or does she trust the neighborhood black school because it’s an integral part of the black community? Does Twyla favor bussing because she wants her kids to be exposed to a more diverse classroom? Or because she knows that the white schools are better funded than the black schools that her kids have been going to?

In a purely biological sense, race is virtually non-existent. Yet our history is so drenched with race-based oppression that race continues to influence virtually every political debate and every interaction between white and black people.

By withholding the identification of race in “Recitatif,” Toni Morrison is demonstrating to us an essential truth that nothing about race is symmetrical. Black and white simply can’t be interchanged without altering essential meanings. For example: The concepts of Black Pride and Black Power represent a demand for equality. But swap a different color and you get White Pride and White Power, which seek not equality but instead a strengthening and enforcement of white supremacist politics and oppression.

Toni Morrison is also using “Recitatif” to subvert a traditional characteristic of fiction. Most novels and short stories are built on conflict. There is often a character for whom we feel sympathy, and who we might even identify with, and other characters who we might despise and hate.

Those who choose to read a Toni Morrison work are usually predisposed to recognizing the historical implications of race, and we are ready and willing to sympathize with the victims of oppression. As with many other novels, we know who to hug and who to scorn.

With “Recitatif,” however, we can’t quite figure out for certain which character fills which role. We ultimately discover that both Twyla and Roberta are victims, and we are encouraged to hug them both.