One thorny issue that Maggie raises is how confusing the distinction between victims and victimizers can become. When Twyla first mentions the orchard, she says, ‘‘I don’t know why I dreamt about that orchard so much. Nothing really happened there. Nothing all that important, I mean.’’ The orchard is the site of Twyla and Roberta’s intimidation by St. Bonny’s older girls and also of Maggie’s humiliation. In the orchard Twyla and Roberta watch the older girls as they ‘‘played radios and danced with each other. They’d light out after us and pull our hair or twist our arms.’’ These big girls seemed scary to them at the time, but looking back Twyla realizes that they were only ‘‘put-out girls, scared runaways most of them. Poor little girls who fought their uncles off but looked tough to us, and mean. God did they look mean.’’ The orchard is important because it is the setting where Twyla and Roberta first become conscious of their position in a hierarchy of power. In a way, every person in the orchard is a victim—powerless and suffering. But within the small world of St. Bonny’s, the older girls seem powerful, despite the fact that they are poor runaways. They group together and use this power over Twyla and Roberta, and, later, over Maggie. As Twyla narrates it, one day Maggie falls down as she rushes through the orchard to catch her bus, and the older girls laugh at her. Twyla and Roberta, like Maggie, suffer from the older girls’ intimidation, but instead of coming to Maggie’s defense, they recognize that Maggie is mute and cannot ‘‘shout back’’ as they do. ‘‘We should have helped her up, I know, but we were scared of those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencil.’’ Compared to Maggie, they are relatively powerful, and they call her names. They fear being voiceless and weak, so they identify with Maggie’s victimizers.

They are able to do this not only because they have voices, but also because they have each other. Twyla and Roberta are allied at St. Bonny’s across the divide of their racial difference because both of them have living mothers who left them there. They are lucky that their parents aren’t dead, but suffer the unique pain of being abandoned. While at St. Bonny’s they form a united front, for the similarity in this most important fact of their childhood lives bonds them strongly. ‘‘Two little girls who knew what nobody else knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed.’’ However, when they meet again, their differences are more apparent. Roberta attributes their hostile meeting in Howard Johnson’s to a historic racial divide: ‘‘Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: blackwhite.’’ In Newburgh, not only do they live in different sections of a racially segregated community, but they are of different economic classes. Roberta has married a wealthy executive and Twyla has married a fireman.

When the town is divided by the busing controversy, so too are Twyla and Roberta. Roberta opposes busing on the grounds of ‘‘mother’s rights.’’ Twyla supports busing on the grounds of ‘‘children’s rights.’’ Both are protesting that their rights are being infringed upon and both sides feel like they are victims. The two women’s private, individual conflicts over what happened to Maggie are reflected in this most overt, public conflict of story. Twyla stops Roberta while she is picketing to argue with her, and soon a crowd surrounds her car and begins rocking it in order to intimidate her.

Automatically I reached for Roberta, like in the old days in the orchard when they saw us watching them and we had to get out of there, and if one of us fell the other pulled her up and if one of us was caught the other stayed to kick and scratch, and neither would leave the other behind. My arm shot out of the car window but no receiving hand was there.

While at St. Bonny’s the girls had been loyal to each other through their shared experience of abandonment; here Roberta abandons Twyla. Morrison describes the scene in terms that echo Maggie’s humiliation in the orchard. Since ‘‘no receiving hand was there’’ to help Twyla, she feels as if she is in Maggie’s position—fallen, helpless, and alone. Roberta is thinking about Maggie at the very same time. Despite the parallel, clear from Twyla’s point of view, between herself and Maggie, Roberta proceeds to tell her that she is instead like the big girls who humiliated Maggie. ‘‘You’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.’’

Here the ambiguity of Maggie as a figure who is both despised and identified with in her powerlessness is compounded by the ambiguity of her racial status. The power hierarchies that Maggie’s humiliation in the orchard reflect are now related to the power hierarchies of race as established through the story’s historical setting. Previously recalled by Twyla as ‘‘sandy-colored,’’ Roberta now describes Maggie as black. Twyla first responds by disagreeing about Maggie’s race, but later she admits, ‘‘Actually I couldn’t be certain. She wasn’t pitchblack, I knew, or I would have remembered that. What I remember was the kiddie hat, and the semicircle legs.’’ The fact that Twyla really doesn’t know what race Maggie belonged to is a testimony to the fact that race made little difference in the power hierarchy of the orchard. But now, in the atmosphere of racial strife that divides Twyla and Roberta, the conflict over what happened to Maggie takes on racial meaning. In a racially polarized world, medium-colored Maggie can serve in the imagination as a symbol of black victimhood or she cannot. As is the case with Morrison’s characterization lies not in the skin of the subject but in the eye of the observer.

Perhaps because Maggie does so little, she means so much. At the story’s conclusion, Roberta, dressed in silver and fur, meets Twyla coincidentally at a diner after an elegant party. She confesses to lying about their participation in the assault on Maggie in their childhood and tearfully asks what happened to her as a way of confronting her denied past as a ‘‘state kid’’ who spent time in an orphanage. This also serves as a gesture of reconciliation with Twyla, who, despite a diametrically opposite present lifestyle, shares her past of abandonment and loss. Twyla has already resolved that she never had kicked Maggie, but concedes that she had wanted to. She identifies Maggie with her mother, Mary. ‘‘Maggie was my dancing mother,’’ Twyla says, in a statement that explains both her repressed hostility toward Maggie and her pity for her carefree, irresponsible mother. ‘‘Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody who could tell you anything important that you could use.’’ At the diner Roberta also admits to wishing that she had kicked Maggie. And, despite the fact that Roberta’s stern, proper mother seems the exact opposite of Mary, Roberta identifies Maggie with her, as well. ‘‘She was brought up in an institution like my mother was and like I thought I would be too.’’ Furthermore, both Twyla and Roberta identify with Maggie themselves. ‘‘I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me—and I was glad about that,’’ Twyla states. Through the ambiguous figure of Maggie both women find a way to unlock their ambivalent feelings toward their own mothers. And through remembering their identifications with this woman whom they had once joined together against, they find a way to articulate a connection that transcends the racial chasm that divides them. But the question remains, ‘‘What the hell happened to Maggie?’’ The two women will never know, nor will they ever be as whole as if they had not abandoned Maggie and, eventually, each other.

Source: Sarah Madsen Hardy, ‘‘What Happened to Maggie,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999. Madsen Hardy has a doctorate in English literature and is a freelance writer and editor.

Like all of her fiction, the only short story ever published by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison challenges its readers. From its outset, ‘‘Recitatif’’ keeps its readers off-balance. Its plot enigmas, language tricks, and story line gaps disturb readers, prodding them out of lazy reading and complacency and into fuller, deeper engagement with the text. These unusual textual elements push readers to solve the mysteries, fill in the gaps, and thereby complete the story. By participating in making meaning out of the text, readers experience the story on a more visceral level than they otherwise would. Furthermore, they respond on a meta-analytical level, encouraged to consider why the text’s elements influenced their responses in particular ways. By using such rhetorical devices to pull readers into meaning-making and self-reflection, Morrison also pulls readers into questioning their own assumptions, particularly about race.

The readers’ uneasiness begins with the story’s first paragraph, when a narrator, speaking in first person, begins to tell how she and a girl named Roberta were taken to a shelter called St. Bonny’s. Readers cannot determine the narrator’s identity, but from the narrator’s casual language (e.g., referring to a restroom as a ‘‘john’’) and mistakes in grammar (e.g., ‘‘. . . when Roberta and me came . . .’’; using sentence fragments and improper punctuation), readers begin to make assumptions about her class status. Most significantly, the text’s first page introduces readers to the principal mystery of the text: the racial identities of the two girls. The second paragraph, which indirectly provides the narrator’s identity, Twyla, indicates that Roberta is ‘‘from a whole other race.’’ Members of Roberta’s race, which is not specified here or anywhere else in the text, ‘‘never washed their hair and they smelled funny,’’ according to Twyla’s mother. In this instance, readers can be certain that by ‘‘they’’ Twyla is referring to members of Roberta’s race. Later, when she disparagingly speaks about the residents of the wealthy part of town, she remarks, ‘‘Everything is so easy for them.’’ In a stroke, readers’ confidence that ‘‘they’’ and ‘‘them’’ means the other race is shattered; perhaps Twyla means the other class. At this early point in the story, however, readers are only beginning to work on the puzzle of the characters’ racial identities, perhaps not yet realizing that the text will never yield that information.

Later in the story, when the girls’ mothers come to visit (Twyla explains that she and Roberta ‘‘weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped’’ by incompetent mothers), RoR berta’s mother brings chicken legs, ham sandwiches, oranges, chocolate-covered graham crackers, and milk. Whatever conclusions readers reached based on the girls’ opinions of St. Bonaventure’s food now must be reconsidered. If the chicken legs are fried, perhaps this lunch indicates that Roberta is African American, readers relying on stereotypical notions might assume. On the other hand, many African Americans cannot tolerate the lactose found in milk—a fact more likely known by black readers— so the description of Roberta drinking milk from a Thermos conjures in the minds of some readers images of a white girl. Finally, if readers’ assumptions about who eats what kind of food are not already shaky, Twyla then remarks, ‘‘The wrong food is always with the wrong people,’’ further destabilizing readers’ conclusions.

The characters’ names themselves also resist readers’ pat conclusions. Roberta, a feminine form of Robert, is a centuries-old European name, leading some readers to associate it with the white race. On the other hand, some readers might be familiar with African Americans named Roberta, such as singer Roberta Flack. Furthermore, about halfway into the story, readers learn that Roberta’s surname is Fisk, which might remind some readers of Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville. Twyla, a more uncommon name, might lead some readers to believe she is black if they associate African Americans with non-traditional given names. Twyla Tharp, the dancer and choreographer, however, is white. (Although readers learn Roberta’s surname, Twyla reveals only her post-marriage surname, depriving readers of a potential clue.) Readers then learn that Roberta has married a man named Kenneth Norton, also the name of a black heavyweight boxer. Depending upon readers’ knowledge and assumptions, they disregard some of these clues and incorporate others in their conjectures about the characters’ racial identities. Readers familiar with more than one of these name-related clues face the more difficult task of assigning relative weight to them, probably never feeling certain of their conclusions.

Readers’ assumptions of phenotypical, corporeal markers also influence their conclusions about the characters’ races, and, to the extent that their assumptions about those markers conflict with other textual clues, readers continuously second-guess themselves each time they encounter a new clue. The first body-related clue comes early in the story, when the girls curl each other’s hair before their mothers arrive. Readers might wonder why, if one of them is black (as is clear from Twyla’s earlier comment that ‘‘we looked like salt and pepper,’’ she needs her hair curled. The uncertainty is only beginning at this point. Meeting again in the coffee shop some years later, Roberta sports ‘‘big and wild’’ hair, perhaps suggesting an afro. The next description of Roberta’s hair comes when Twyla sees her in the grocery store. Twyla reports that ‘‘her huge hair was sleek now, smooth around a small, nicely shaped head.’’ Did Roberta straighten her (naturally curly) hair or stop curling her (naturally straight) hair? Morrison notably avoids the adjective kinky, which readers more likely would associate with African-American hair texture. In a later encounter at a demonstration against busing for school desegregation, startled by their mutual animosity, Roberta says to Twyla, ‘‘I used to curl your hair,’’ to which Twyla responds, ‘‘I hated your hands in my hair.’’ Was Twyla’s hair straight, then? And if so, does that mean she is white? Readers struggle to form mental pictures of the characters out of these troubling clues.

Twyla’s descriptions of the girls’ mothers provide more but equally ambiguous clues for readers. Twyla is horrified when her mother arrives for a visit wearing ‘‘those green slacks I hated and hated even more now because didn’t she know we were going to chapel? And that fur jacket with the pocket linings so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them.’’ Ratty and garish clothes: Do those suggest to white readers that she is ‘‘black’’? Do black readers think such descriptions indicate ‘‘white trash’’? Are there cross-over assumptions, such as black readers associating shabby clothes with blacks and white readers imagining Twyla’s mother as white trash? And if readers do make one of these associations, they must ask themselves why. Is it because they associate ratty clothing with one race or the other? Do they associate ragged clothing with poverty, and then jump to the association of poverty with one race or the other? Then Twyla remarks that the green slacks ‘‘made her behind stick out.’’ Do the slacks make it appear that her buttocks stick out although they really do not, or do they emphasize buttocks that really do stick out? And if the latter, do protruding buttocks suggest an African-American physique?

Added to this unflattering description of Twyla’s mother is her depiction of Roberta’s mother, which, if readers are prone to associate body shape with one race or another according to prevailing stereotypes, complicates their conclusions. If readers think that protruding buttocks indicate Twyla’s mother’s blackness, they somehow must reconcile this description of Roberta’s mother: ‘‘She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross I’d ever seen.’’ Readers inclined to rely on physical markers on which to base racial identification are unsettled by these descriptions. Moreover, they must question why they view the descriptions as contradictory. The cross, too, provides a clue that is difficult to interpret: Does this assertion of her piety indicate a more flamboyant faith, such as Southern Baptist, typically associated with African American Christians?

Complicating matters further, Twyla describes the mothers’ behaviors in ways that challenge readers seeking to use behaviors rather than physiques as a basis for their conjectures. First, Roberta’s mother refuses to shake the hand of Twyla’s mother. Is it because she is a white bigot, a resentful black woman, or a black bigot? Or is her rebuff unrelated to race? Perhaps it is based on perceived class difference. Or maybe Roberta’s mother is simply anti-social. The subsequent response of Twyla’s mother exacerbates readers’ confusion. At the entrance to the chapel, where the rebuff occurred, she loudly says, ‘‘That bitch!’’, an interjection so crass and inappropriate that Twyla thinks her mother ‘‘really needed to be killed.’’ Is such behavior associated with one race? Or is it class? Or simply upbringing?

The confusion between class and race also arises when readers encounter the scene in which Twyla and Roberta face off on opposite sides of the issue of mandatory busing for school desegregation. Roberta stands opposed to busing; Twyla then counter- protests in favor of it. Does Roberta oppose busing because she opposes desegregation? If so, is her opinion related to her race? If so, is her race white or black? Many blacks have opposed busing, desegregation, or both; readers with a reasonably sophisticated understanding of the civil rights era know they cannot assume that her opposition to busing means she is a white racist. Readers also must consider whether Roberta, who by this time has acquired the trappings—and presumably the attitudes—of affluence, opposes busing on the grounds that her children will be sent to inferior schools. Her convictions about busing might be entirely unrelated to race. When it becomes clear that Twyla’s stance stems more from her resentment of Roberta than from her own political opinions, readers cannot derive more insight from the situation.

Other ambiguous clues relate to Twyla’s apparent naivete and ignorance. In the coffee shop scene, Roberta tells Twyla that she and her companions are headed for California, where one of them has an appointment with Hendrix. Never having heard of rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, Twyla asks, ‘‘What’s she doing now?’’ to which Roberta responds, ‘‘Hendrix. Jimi Hendrix, asshole. He’s only the biggest— Oh, wow. Forget it.’’ Assuming that readers know who Hendrix was—the text never does identify him—they must grapple with Twyla’s ignorance. Some might conclude that her unfamiliarity with the black musician indicates she is white. As Lula Fragd, a black critic, pointed out to her white colleague, Elizabeth Abel, who had made that assumption [recounted in Critical Inquiry], most of Hendrix’s fans were white, not black, a fact that black readers are more likely to know.

Twyla also expresses remarkable ignorance about race relations in the United States. When Roberta explains her earlier coldness to Twyla, she says, ‘‘Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.’’ Twyla tells the reader:

But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. Busloads of blacks and whites came into Howard Johnson’s together. They roamed together then: students, musicians, lovers, protesters. You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.

Although the reader cannot pin down precisely when the coffee shop scene took place, it most likely occurred after Twyla was about 16 (old enough to work fulltime), which was in 1953, but before the characters reunite again, presumably around 1965. During this Jim Crow period, it is possible that a young, white person might be unaware of the tensions underlying apparently good relations between the races. Readers might consider this explanation of Twyla’s remark, thinking perhaps that Twyla is white. Twyla’s later comments, though, lead readers to think that her naive belief that race relations were good might stem from a general lack of awareness about social matters, not only about race relations. About busing, she says, ‘‘I thought it was a good thing until I heard it was a bad thing. I mean I didn’t know.’’ If she simply is unused to thinking about social issues, her unenlightened sense of race relations might not signify whiteness, after all. Again, readers’ conclusions are stymied.

Silence and absence recur as themes in ‘‘Recitatif,’’ and augment Morrison’s rhetorical strategy of inducing the reader to complete the text. The story ends not with a statement but a question, asked by Roberta: ‘‘What the hell happened to Maggie?’’, referring to the kitchen worker who is tormented by the girls in the shelter when she falls in the orchard. The puzzles of what really happened to Maggie, whether she was black or not, and whether Roberta and Twyla participated in the orchard incident increasingly trouble readers as they progress. Early in Twyla’s narrative, she says she often dreams of the orchard but does not know why. ‘‘Nothing really happened there,’’ she says. This comment is most problematic. The entire narrative comprises Twyla’s recollections of past events. If, as readers naturally assume when reading a first-person account, the narrator is speaking to them in the present, then why would Twyla say that nothing really happened in the orchard? Telling a retrospective story, she ought to know that the incident with Maggie, which obsesses her throughout the story, is not only significant but crucial.

The enigma of Maggie is emphasized by Twyla’s description: ‘‘The kitchen women with legs like parentheses.’’ Parentheses indicate something of secondary importance, which, added to Maggie’s muteness, connote a passive, marginalized victim, a cipher; the bow legs conjure the image of a zero itself. Reduced to nothing, Maggie is robbed of agency, which leaves for her only the role of pawn in the battle of memories waged by Twyla and Roberta over three decades. Twyla first tells readers that Maggie fell down in the orchard and the older girls at the shelter assaulted her. When she accidentally meets Roberta 20 years after they left St. Bonaventure, Roberta contradicts Twyla’s recollection of the incident with Maggie, telling her that Maggie did not trip; the girls pushed Maggie down. Twyla refuses to believe this account, but Roberta’s insistence plants doubt in her mind: ‘‘Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that.’’ Readers take her at her word, until she adds, ‘‘Would I?’’ With the introduction of Twyla’s uncertainty about her own memory, readers, dependent entirely on Twyla as a source of information, also begin to feel uncertain.

The uncertainty intensifies as the narrative progresses. At their next unpleasant reunion, at which each woman stands literally and figuratively on opposite sides of a busing and desegregation demonstration, Roberta says to Twyla, ‘‘You’re the same little state kid who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.’’ This new version of the story introduces the notion that Twyla and perhaps Roberta participated in tormenting Maggie, and that Maggie, whom at first Twyla described as ‘‘sandy-colored,’’ was black. Twyla’s unspoken response is, ‘‘What was she saying? Black? Maggie wasn’t black.’’ Later Twyla acknowledges that, although she is certain that she did not kick Maggie, Maggie might have been black: ‘‘When I thought about it I actually couldn’t be certain.’’ To readers, this incident is becoming a Rashomon of sorts, leaving them to wonder which version of the story to believe. Finally, Twyla seems fairly certain: ‘‘I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to,’’ a version that Roberta finally corroborates during their last reunion at Christmas when she tearfully confesses that they had not kicked Maggie. But the uncertainty continues when Roberta says, ‘‘I really did think she was black. I didn’t make that up. I really thought so. But now I can’t be sure.’’ If neither she nor Twyla feels certain about Maggie’s race, neither can readers. Then, the story concludes with Roberta’s unanswered question, ‘‘What the hell happened to Maggie?’’ Twyla’s earlier statement that she and Roberta were two girls who knew how to believe what had to be believed becomes quite ironic, for readers have found that the characters, and therefore the readers, do not know what to believe.

Roberta’s accusation that Twyla kicked a black woman and yet has the nerve to call her, Roberta, a bigot exacerbates readers’ distrust of the characters’ memories. Readers must try to recall whether Twyla did indeed call Roberta a bigot; perhaps readers will review the narrative for confirmation, having learned to question their own memory of the narrative. In fact, nowhere in the text does Twyla call Roberta a bigot. This further undermining of the readers’ faith in the characters’ memories—as well as their own— also complicates the readers’ task of identifying the characters’ races, because readers are likely to bring to the text an assumption about who bigots tend to be, who is more likely to accuse another of bigotry, and who is more likely to make a false accusation of bigotry. The problematic accusation also calls into question the completeness of Twyla’s storytelling; perhaps she did call Roberta a bigot but failed to report it to her readers.

Some aspects of the text itself disturb readers as much as do puzzles within the story. These mysterious elements of the text, which might be called meta-textual enigmas, raise questions about how readers are meant to deal with the story. For example, when recounting the episode of Roberta’s unexpected appearance at the coffee shop in which Twyla worked, Twyla says:

I walked over to the booth, smiling and wondering if she would remember me. Or even if she wanted to remember me. Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of St. Bonny’s or to have anybody know she was ever there. I know I never talked about it to anybody.

Yet, Twyla is in the act of telling somebody— the readers/listeners of the story—about her experiences at St. Bonaventure. If she refrains from discussing with anybody—her husband, her son— even the fact that she lived for four months at St. Bonaventure, readers wonder why she is speaking to them about the experiences. In fact, ostensibly, the sole basis for the encounter between her and the readers/listeners is Twyla’s apparent desire to share intimate revelations about such events, some of which she acknowledges to be embarrassing, shameful, or painful to face. By presenting this paradox, the author seems to be toying with the conceit of a first-person-narrated story. While some puzzles within the story disturb readers less experienced with wringing meaning from a narrative, this meta-mystery surrounding the reading experience itself appears to be aimed at readers more thoroughly trained and skilled, for they would be most likely to notice the incongruity of an ostensibly reticent yet thoroughly confessional narrator. Thus, some of the disturbing tactics seem designed for one kind of reader, and others for another kind.

Besides listening to or reading the text, readers face another possible way to perceive it. Perhaps ‘‘Recitatif’’ is not a spoken or written tale, but a sung one, combining speech and music. Even the title reflects the vocal foundation of Morrison’s story. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘‘recitative,’’ which comes from the French recitatif, as a ‘‘style of musical declamation, intermediate between singing and ordinary speech, commonly employed in the dialogue and narrative parts of operas and oratorios.’’ By using the French word, Morrison not only alludes to the French term faire le recit de sa vie—to tell the story of one’s life—but also connotes the term’s meaning in music. Morrison’s connotation of an operatic recitative—a middle ground between verbal expression and musical expression— is particularly appropriate given the parallel significance of oral storytelling and musical signification in African and African-American culture. As Robert Palmer explains in Deep Blues, black slaves by the middle of the 18th century were forbidden from using drums and horns throughout North America except in French Louisiana. ‘‘Plantation owners had learned, sometimes the hard way, that such loud instruments could be used to signal slave insurrections,’’ Palmer writes. All that was left with which to express themselves ‘‘utilized mankind’s most basic musical resources, the voice and the body.’’ Vocal expression, either spoken or sung, not only survived slavery, but perhaps enabled the slaves themselves to survive slavery. With a one-word title, Morrison thus captures and honors 400 years of African-American expression. As Palmer states: ‘‘Through singing to themselves, hollering across the fields, and singing together while working and worshipping, they developed a hybridized musical language that distilled the very essence of innumerable African vocal traditions.’’ By connoting this tradition, Morrison consciously places ‘‘Recitatif’’ in an African-American expressive tradition.

The text’s relentless perturbation of its readers jars them from a position of relatively passive reception into one of active co-creation. This effect not only intensifies readers’ attention to the story and their sense of stake in it, but also serves a broader, ideological purpose. ‘‘Recitatif’’ exempli- fies what Catherine Belsey [in Critical Practice] calls an ‘‘interrogative text,’’ as opposed to a declarative or imperative text. The interrogative text

disrupts the unity of the reader by discouraging identi- fication with a unified subject of the enunciation. The position of the ‘‘author’’ inscribed in the text, if it can be located at all, is seen as questioning or as literally contradictory.

In ‘‘Recitatif,’’ the author’s attitude is shrouded behind that of Twyla, and even Twyla’s perspective is one of confusion, as she confesses her lack of understanding of contemporary race relations. Belsey continues:

Thus, even if the interrogative text does not precisely . . . seek ‘‘to obtain some information’’ from the reader, it does literally invite the reader to produce answers to the questions it implicitly or explicitly raises.

‘‘Recitatif’’ certainly invites readers to answer questions about the narrative itself, and, more significantly, about extra-narrative matters. Why do readers interpret clues in particular ways? What assumptions do they make about race and racism? Indeed, why do readers feel it is important to ascertain the characters’ respective races in the first place? At the very least, readers must realize their own predilection for racial categorization, a more benign component of racism which John H. Stanfield II calls ‘‘racialism.’’ Beyond such a realization, some readers confront the prejudices that lead to how they categorize.

Belsey asserts, ‘‘The work of ideology is to present the position of the subject as fixed and unchangeable.’’ By presenting a text and the ‘‘reality’’ it depicts as unfixed and changeable, Morrison not only calls attention to an ideology that seems so natural that individuals fail to recognize it as such, but challenges that ideology. The text stirs up matters of race and racism, refusing to perpetuate oversimplified and unquestioned assumptions about racial categories and stereotypes. Moreover, by guiding the reader into inferring the characters’ races—in addition to demanding that the reader solve other sorts of textual and narrative puzzles— ‘‘Recitatif’’ forces the reader’s complicity in the story’s mission, which is to deconstruct racism. Morrison has stated that she wrote the story as an experiment in language, to see whether she could write a story without relying on the insidious linguistic shortcuts of racial categorization and stereotyping that she feels are so prevalent in American literature. By making readers supply, from their imagination and experience, the missing information, the story encourages them to question the sources of those inferences. The reader is thus brought into the ‘‘Morrisonian’’ task of questioning racial categorization and stereotyping. In short, Morrison ingeniously works toward her ongoing mission of deconstructing race and racism by getting the reader to do so, a strategy that also pervades her novels and non-fiction.

Source: David Goldstein-Shirley, ‘‘Race and Response: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’,’’ in Short Story, Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 77–86.

Twyla opens the narrative of Toni Morrison’s provocative story ‘‘Recitatif’’ (1982) by recalling her placement as an eight-year-old child in St. Bonaventure, a shelter for neglected children, and her reaction to Roberta Fisk, the roommate she is assigned: ‘‘The minute I walked in . . . I got sick to my stomach. It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning—it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race. And Mary, that’s my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean.’’ The racial ambiguity so deftly installed at the narrative’s origin through codes that function symmetrically for black women and for white women (‘‘they never washed their hair and they smelled funny’’) intensifies as the story tracks the encounters of its two female protagonists over approximately thirty years. Unmediated by the sexual triangulations (the predations of white men on black women, the susceptibility of black men to white women) that have dominated black women’s narrative representations of women’s fraught connections across racial lines, the relationship of Twyla and Roberta discloses the operations of race in the feminine. This is a story about a black woman and a white woman; but which is which?

I was introduced to ‘‘Recitatif’’ by a black feminist critic, Lula Fragd. Lula was certain that Twyla was black; I was equally convinced that she was white; most of the readers we summoned resolve the dispute divided similarly along racial lines. By replacing the conventional signifiers of racial difference (such as skin color) with radically relativistic ones (such as who smells funny to whom) and by substituting for the racialized body a series of disaggregated cultural parts—pink-scalloped socks, tight green slacks, large hoop earrings, exR pertise at playing jacks, a taste for Jimi Hendrix or for bottled water and asparagus—the story renders race a contested terrain variously mapped from diverse positions in the social landscape. By forcing us to construct racial categories from highly ambiguous social clues, ‘‘Recitatif’’ elicits and exposes the unarticulated racial codes that operate at the boundaries of consciousness. To understand the cultural specificity of these codes, Morrison writes into the text a figure of racial undecidability: Maggie, the mute kitchen worker at St. Bonaventure, who occasions the text’s only mention of skin color, an explicitly ambiguous sandy color, and who walks through the text with her little kid’s hat and her bowed legs ‘‘like parentheses,’’ her silent self a blank parenthesis, a floating signifier. For both girls a hated reminder of their unresponsive mothers, Maggie is not ‘‘raced’’ to Twyla (that is, she is by default white); to Roberta, she is black. The two girls’ readings of Maggie become in turn clues for our readings of them, readings that emanate similarly from our own cultural locations.

My own reading derived in part from Roberta’s perception of Maggie as black; Roberta’s more finely discriminating gaze (‘‘she wasn’t pitch-black, I knew,’’ is all Twyla can summon to defend her assumption that Maggie is white) seemed to me to testify to the firsthand knowledge of discrimination. Similarly, Roberta is sceptical about racial harmony. When she and Twyla retrospectively discuss their tense encounter at a Howard Johnson’s where Twyla was a waitress in the early 1960s, they read the historical context differently: ‘‘‘Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black—white. You know how everything was.’ But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. Busloads of blacks and whites came into Howard Johnson’s together. They roamed together then: students; musicians, lovers, protesters. You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.’’ In the civil rights movement that Twyla sees as a common struggle against racial barriers, Roberta sees the distrust of white intervention and the impulse toward a separatist Black Power movement: she has the insider’s perspective on power and race relations.

It was a more pervasive asymmetry in authority, however, that secured my construction of race in the text, a construction I recount with considerable embarrassment for its possible usefulness in fleshing out the impulse within contemporary white feminism signalled by the ‘‘not just idiosyncratic’’ confession that stands as this paper’s epigraph. As Gallop [in Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory] both wittily acknowledges the force of African-American women’s political critique of white academic feminism’s seduction by ‘‘French men’’ and, by simply transferring the transference, reenacts the process of idealization that unwittingly obscures more complex social relations, I singled out the power relations of the girls from the broader network of cultural signs. Roberta seemed to me consistently the more sophisticated reader of the social scene, the subject presumed by Twyla to know, the teller of the better (although not necessarily more truthful) stories, the adventurer whose casual mention of an appointment with Jimi Hendrix exposes the depths of Twyla’s social ignorance (‘‘‘Hendrix? Fantastic,’ I said. ‘Really fantastic. What’s she doing now’?’’ From the girls’ first meeting at St. Bonaventure, Twyla feels vulnerable to Roberta’s judgment and perceives Roberta (despite her anxiety about their differences) as possessing something she lacks and craves: a more acceptably negligent mother (a sick one rather than a dancing one) and, partially as a consequence, a more compelling physical presence that fortifies her cultural authority. Twyla is chronically hungry; Roberta seems to her replete, a daughter who has been adequately fed and thus can disdain the institutional Spam and Jell-O that Twyla devours as a contrast to the popcorn and Yoo-Hoo that had been her customary fare. The difference in maternal stature, linked in the text with nurture, structures Twyla’s account of visiting day at St. Bonaventure. Twyla’s mother, smiling and waving ‘‘like she was the little girl,’’ arrives wearing tight green buttockshugging slacks and a ratty fur jacket for the chapel service, and bringing no food for the lunch that Twyla consequently improvises out of fur-covered jelly beans from her Easter basket. ‘‘Bigger than any man,’’ Roberta’s mother arrives bearing a huge cross on her chest, a Bible in the crook of her arm, and a basket of chicken, ham, oranges, and chocolate- covered graham crackers. In the subsequent Howard Johnson scene that Twyla’s retrospective analysis links with the frustrations of visiting day (‘‘The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe that’s why I got into waitress work later—to match up the right people with the right food’’ the difference in stature is replayed between the two daughters. Roberta, sitting in a booth with ‘‘two guys smothered in head and facial hair,’’ her own hair ‘‘so big and wild I could hardly see her face,’’ wearing a ‘‘powder-blue halter and shorts outfit and earrings the size of bracelets,’’ rebuffs Twyla, clad in her waitress outfit, her knees rather than her midriff showing, her hair in a net, her legs in thick stockings and sturdy white shoes. Although the two bodies are never directly represented, the power of metonymy generates a contrast between the amplitude of the sexualized body and the skimpiness and pallor of the socially harnessed body. Twyla’s sense of social and physical inadequacy vis-a-vis Roberta, like her representation of her mother’s inferiority to Roberta’s, signalled Twyla’s whiteness to me by articulating a white woman’s fantasy (my own) about black women’s potency. This fantasy’s tenaciousness is indicated by its persistence in the face of contrary evidence. Roberta’s mother, the story strongly implies, is mentally rather than physically ill, her capacity to nurture largely fictional; Roberta, who is never actually represented eating, is more vulnerable as an adult to its memory, a weakness on which Twyla capitalizes during their political con- flicts as adults; the tenuousness of the adult Roberta’s own maternal status (she acquires stepchildren, rather than biological children, through her marriage to an older man) may also testify figuratively to a lack created by insufficient mothering.

Pivoting not on skin color, but on size, sexuality, and the imagined capacity to nurture and be nurtured, on the construction of embodiedness itself as a symptom and source of cultural authority, my reading installs the (racialized) body at the center of a text that deliberately withholds conventional racial iconography. Even in her reading of this first half of the story, Lula’s interpretation differed from mine by emphasizing cultural practices more historically nuanced than my categorical distinctions in body types, degrees of social cool, or modes of mothering. Instead of reading Twyla’s body psychologically as white, Lula read Twyla’s name as culturally black; and she placed greater emphasis on Roberta’s language in the Howard Johnson scene—her primary locution being a decidedly white hippie ‘‘oh, wow’’—than on the image of her body gleaned by reading envy in the narrative gaze and by assigning racial meaning to such cultural accessories as the Afro, hoop earrings, and a passion for Jimi Hendrix appealed more to white than to black audiences. Roberta’s coldness in this scene—she barely acknowledges her childhood friend—becomes, in Lula’s reading, a case of straightforward white racism, and Twyla’s surprise at the rebuff reflects her naivete about the power of personal loyalties and social movements to undo racial hierarchies.

More importantly, however, this scene was not critical for Lula’s reading. Instead of the historical locus that was salient for me—not coincidentally, I believe, since the particular aura of (some) black women for (some) white women during the civil rights movement is being recapitulated in contemporary feminism (as I will discuss later)—what was central to her were scenes from the less culturally exceptional 1970s, which disclosed the enduring systems of racism rather than the occasional moments of heightened black cultural prestige. In general, Lula focused less on cultural than on economic status, and she was less concerned with daughters and their feelings toward their mothers than with these daughters’ politics after they are mothers.

When Twyla and Roberta meet in a food emporium twelve years after the Howard Johnson scene, Twyla has married a fireman and has one child and limited income; Roberta has married an IBM executive and lives in luxury in the wealthy part of town with her husband, her four stepchildren, and her Chinese chauffeur. Twyla concludes in a voice of seemingly racial resentment: ‘‘Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.’’ A short time later the women find themselves on opposite sides of a school integration struggle in which both their children are faced with bussing: Twyla’s to the school that Roberta’s stepchildren now attend, and Roberta’s to a school in a less affluent neighborhood. After Twyla challenges Roberta’s opposition to the bussing, Roberta tries to defuse the conflict: ‘‘‘Well, it is a free country.’ ‘Not yet, but it will be’,’’ Twyla responds. Twyla’s support of bussing, and of social change generally, and Roberta’s self-interested resistance to them position the women along the bitter racial lines that split the fraying fabric of feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Privileging psychology over politics, my reading disintegrates in the story’s second half. Lula’s reading succeeds more consistently, yet by constructing the black woman (in her account, Twyla) as the politically correct but politically naive and morally conventional foil to the more socially adventurous, if politically conservative, white woman (Roberta), it problematically racializes the moral (op)positions Morrison opens to revaluation in her extended (and in many ways parallel) narrative of female friendship, Sula. Neither reading can account adequately for the text’s contradictory linguistic evidence, for if Twyla’s name is more characteristically black than white, it is perhaps best known as the name of a white dancer, Twyla Tharp, whereas Roberta shares her last name, Fisk, with a celebrated black (now integrated) university. The text’s heterogeneous inscriptions of race resist a totalizing reading.

Source: Elizabeth Abel, ‘‘Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation,’’ in Critical Inquiry, Spring, 1993, pp. 471–98.