'Sth, I know that woman': History, gender, and the South in Toni Morrison's Jazz

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Mitchell, Angelyn

Historians must necessarily speak in generalities and must examine recorded sources.... They habitually leave out life lived by everyday people. History for them is what great men have done. But artists don I have any such limitation, and as the truest of historians they are obligated not to. -Toni Morrison

The South is an ancestral home of Black Americans. It is true, of course, that slavery existed in the North and that Black people have lived from the beginning in all sections of this country. But collectively it is the South that is the nucleus of Black American culture. It is here that the agony of chattel slavery created the history that is yet to be written. It is the South that has dispersed its culture into the cities of the North. The South is, in a sense, the mythic landscape of Black America. -Eugenia Collier

In 1974, Toni Morrison wrote an article for Black World introducing its readers to "a genuine Black history book" ("Behind the Making" 89). This book, The Black Book (1974), is the collection of Black memorabilia she edited while she was a senior editor at Random House. Discussing the collection's vitality, she offered what she believed should be the primary function of Black history and art: the reinterpretation, re-evaluation, and rediscovery of Black life as lived. Of her personal reasons for her involvement in this compilation, she wrote, "I was scared that the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way [African Americans] really were" ("Behind the Making" 90). After centuries of being defined by others, of intended and unintended misrepresentations and misinterpretations of African American life, Morrison wanted to document history as lived by African Americans in this country. Thus Morrison established early in her career an interest in cultural and historical conservation. Accordingly, when one looks across the spectrum of her novels, novels in which she encodes the multiplicity and complexity of Black life, one sees that Morrison, in her novels, continues her conservation as she reinterprets, re-evaluates, and rediscovers Black life as lived, particularly but not exclusively as lived by Black women.

Fusing Black history and art in each of her seven novels, Morrison asserts, interrogates, and critiques the social, political, and cultural interests of African Americans. By so doing, she establishes, records, and preserves African American history's "usable past" as empirical event as well as subjective experience. Morrison displays in her craft a keen sense of and a preoccupation with history in writing about the "disremembered and unaccounted for" (Beloved 274). In addition to her interest in history and Black women, Morrison, like Collier, also views the South as the "ancestral home of Black Americans" as well as the "nucleus of Black American culture" as all of her novels are peopled with southerners. While Morrison is not a southerner, each of her novels engages some aspect of the southern Black experience, particularly in relation to Morrison's female characters. For example, in addition to interrogating the ill-effects of Eurocentric acculturation on the developing Black feminine psyche, The Bluest Eye (1970) also examines not only pre-World War II African American urban life in Ohio, but also southern Black womanhood through the migratory characters of Pauline and Geraldine. Sula (1973) also explores African American northern life in Ohio, from years spanning post-World War I to the Vietnam War era, by focusing on the Peace family and its matriarch, Eva, a southern woman from Virginia. Set primarily in the years before the Civil Rights Movement, Song of Solomon (1977) chronicles the coming of age of Milkman Dead. During the climax of his journey, Milkman meets the remarkable southern women of Shalimar, Virginia, who, significantly are psychically healthier than their northern sisters. In contrast to Jadine of Tar Baby (1981), a work set in the post-integrationist 1970s, the admirable women of Son's all-black Eloe are welcoming and communal, self-reliant, and rooted. Beloved (1987) offers a poetic meditation on nineteenth-century chattel slavery and the devastating psychological effects on its female victims; neither Baby Suggs nor Sethe can escape the haunting memories of their dehumanizing experiences in the slaveholder's South. Finally, in her most recent novel, Paradise (1997), the men and women who found the all-Black town of Ruby hail from the South. Spanning from post-Reconstruction America to postintegration America, Paradise centers upon the construction of freedom and its meaning. In addition to Morrison's careful attention to historical moments, one can also see that southern Black women are also significant in her rendering of Black life.

In Jazz ( 1992), her novel which deals directly with Southerners who travel north, Morrison provides the opportunity for a generational examination of three southern Black women whose lives are shaped and complicated by their racialized and genderized historical circumstances in the South. In Jazz Morrison offers literary portraitures of southern Black women during three significant historical moments of American history-American slavery, Reconstruction, and the Great Migration. Eusebio Rodrigues observes in his article "Experiencing Jazz" that the novel "jazzifies the history of a people. . . by giving us rapid vivid glimpses of their life in the rural South after emancipation" (742). As a cultural and historical conservator, Morrison inscribes her three southern women characters-True Belle, Rose Dear, and Violet-as the texts of their respective historical moment, American slavery, Reconstruction, the Great Migration. By revealing how their particularized histories inform their lives, Morrison augments her readers's understanding so that they too will "know that woman" (Jazz 1).