Bingo: Free (taking the place of “Arts” square)
I read quite a bit of Toni Morrison many years ago, and remember being dazzled. More than most writers, she could really draw deep feelings out of me. A while back I read a passage from her book Jazz, and it was so evocative it made me buy the book. Like her other works, it’s incredibly beautiful and real and heart-breaking. But it was also a hard book to read because I truly got lost sometimes and didn’t understand what was going on or who was speaking or what time period it was as passages elided into each other.
I’ll sketch the plot briefly. Violet and Joe are a middle-aged couple who have grown apart. Joe has fallen head over heels in love with an eighteen year old girl called Dorcas. In the very first paragraph we find out that Joe has shot and killed Dorcas “[because of] one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.” At Dorca’s funeral, Violet tries to attack her corpse. The story goes back and forth in time to trace the different relationships and family pasts. We get different monologues from various characters, but there is a first person narrator that tells the story. I was confused about who the narrator is, which made me feel stupid. Something about being lost at points made me embarrassed, like I wasn’t smart enough to understand the book.
But enough about my incredible neuroses. I was truly puzzled about the narrator. I think maybe the narrator was Violet’s soul, the part of her that harbors who she really is, her insight, her need for love and connection, her pain and her integration. Late in the book she has a conversation with Dorcas’s friend Felice, who is visiting after Dorcas’s death to see if Violet and Joe have a ring she lent Dorcas. She tells Felice, “What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want it?…Don’t you want it to be something more than what it is?” Felice responds, “What’s the point? I can’t change it.” Violet replies, “That’s the point. If you don’t, it will change you and it’ll be your fault ‘cause you let it. I let it. And messed up my life.” She goes on to tell Felice about “having another you inside that isn’t anything like you.” Felice asks, “How did you get rid of her?” Violet says, “Killed her. Then I killed the me that killed her.” “Who’s left?” “Me.”
The neighborhood sees Violet as crazy, sometimes calling her “Violent,” but Felice doesn’t think she is at all. She also sees all the good in Joe, and how, for his faults, he cares for women. Dorcas wouldn’t name who killed her as she lay dying, so Joe is not arrested. Instead, he and Violet are drawn back together, on their older love and care. The narrator ends the book with this:
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.”
Regardless if I missed some or all of the book’s points, it was meaningful to read. Now I will go look up the book and find out what I missed.