Kinds of Blue: Toni Morrison, Hans Janowitz, and the Jazz Aesthetic

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Jurgen E. Grandt

The parallels between the cutting contest, "The Chase," and "The Hunt," on the one hand, and Toni Morrison's Jazz, on the other, are numerous. (13) First of all, motifs of cutting, hunting, and chasing permeate the novel. The very first paragraph, the paragraph whose content furnishes the basis for the narrative voice's improvisations, mentions that Violet "went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face," which is in a sense a cutting contest, albeit a tragicomic one, between Violet and her rival and challenger, the girl who had stolen her husband away (3). Later on, the narrative voice provides a more detailed account of the funeral, ascribing Violet's inexplicable deed to the aggressive, violent half of her split consciousness, "that Violet": "She had been looking for that knife for a month. Couldn't for the life of her think what she'd done with it. But that Violet knew and went right to it. Knew too where the funeral was going on ..." (90). Although "the blade she had not seen for a month at least and was surprised to see now aimed at the girl's haughty, secret face" does not do much damage, Violet struggles against the young, brawny ushers trying to restrain her because "maybe she had more than one cutting in mind," as the narrative voice surmises (91).

Violet's split consciousness that leads to her cutting her rival foreshadows Joe's hunt for his mother and his chase after his lover Dorcas. The novel's Golden Gray section ends with alternating parallel plot lines: In the first, Joe is hunting after the mysterious woman the locals in rural Vesper County, Virginia, have dubbed Wild, whom he believes to be his mother. Joe has been trained in woodsmanship by Henry Lestory, also known as Hunters Hunter. (14) Not only is Wild the sort of woman who "made men sharpen her knives," her presence is usually announced by a flock of "redwings, those blue-black birds with the bolt of red on their wings"--surely no coincidence in a novel that early on alludes to Charlie "Bird" Parker in the figure of a "colored man" who "floats down out of the sky blowing a saxophone" (178, 176, 8). (15) Even though Joe makes three attempts to find Wild and comes very close once, he is unable to ascertain whether she is in fact his mother. The second of these two parallel plot lines finds Joe in New York City three decades later chasing his girlfriend, who has just left him for a man her own age, and his search for Dorcas reminds Joe of his past:

   Joe is wondering about all this on an
   icy day in January. He is a long way
   from Virginia, and even longer from
   Eden. As he puts on his coat and cap
   he can practically feel [his childhood
   friend] Victory at his side when he sets
   out, armed, to find Dorcas. He isn't
   thinking of harming her, or, as Hunter
   had cautioned, killing something tender.
   She is female. And she is not prey.
   So he never thinks of that. He is hunting
   for her though, and while hunting
   a gun is as natural a companion as
   Victory. (180)