[In the following essay, Atkinson argues that the Black English oral tradition, grounded in African-American culture, forms the foundation of Morrison's fiction.]

Toni Morrison has said, “I tend not to explain things very much, but I long for a critic who will know what I mean when I say ‘church’ or ‘community,’ or when I say ‘ancestor,’ or ‘chorus.’ Because my books come out of those things and represent how they function in the [B]lack cosmology” (McKay, “Interview” 151). As this comment confirms, the oral tradition of Black English is the foundation of Morrison's work.

Language is more than a form of communication: it reveals the concepts that shape the significance and legacy beyond the word itself. Language defines a culture's style and method of looking at life and the individual's place within that culture. It is also “the margin,” the demarcator of beauty, and the repository of a culture's defining boundaries: right, wrong, good, bad, and its liminal thresholds (Kristeva, “Ethics” 231; see also O. Davis). The study of language requires that the researcher acknowledge that the subjects being studied have a language and thereby a culture. For years the debate has raged about the language of slaves and their descendants. Today, the debate centers on whether the language spoken by most African Americans is “correct.” Toni Morrison's fiction dismisses the issue of the correctness of the language, but focuses intensively upon the communal bonding and artistry evident in the language.

Some of our most learned and outspoken Americans have claimed that Africans brought to America as slaves had no art, because they lacked the necessary emotions needed to produce artistry. Thomas Jefferson said of the slave, “Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them” (187-88). Jefferson went on to explain that this lack of feeling in the slave was the reason why the slave produced no art or literature: “Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry.—Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry” (189).

When the Africans were brought to America as slaves they were denied the tools needed to create their traditional arts. Without access to these tools, the African slaves found another outlet to express the emotions of their souls: language. The language of the slaves became their canvas and clay. Their voices became the forms through which they practiced their arts. Jefferson, and others like him, were looking for the tangible presentations of art they associated with their own culture. They were looking in the wrong place. They needed to close their mouths and eyes, and listen to the voice of the African slave.

The language the African slave spoke is the foundation of the language spoken by most African Americans today: Black English. According to Geneva Smitherman, Black English is “an Africanized form of English reflecting Black America's linguistic-cultural African heritage and the conditions of servitude, oppression, and life in America. Black language is Euro-American speech with an Afro-American meaning, nuance, tone, and gesture” (Talkin 2). In African American culture, language is an aesthetic: “Many Black English vocabulary items manifest a poetically appropriate representation of rather mundane reality. Not only is the black lexicon a tool, its figurative power and rhetorical beauty complement its survival function” (70; see also Dillard).

Black English is a sophisticated and complex oral language in which voice and visual styling help to create meaning, what Kristeva describes as “beyond and within, more or less than meaning: rhythm, tone, color, and joy, within, through, and across the Word” (Desire 158). Explication in the oral tradition depends on communal knowledge, context, inflection, tone, and non-verbal gestures, as well as words. Claudia, in The Bluest Eye, describes this experience when she says, “we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre” (16).

Toni Morrison is aware of and concerned with “the language black people spoke”; as she has famously stated, the language “must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black folks love so much—the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them. … Its function is like a preacher's: to make you stand up out of your seat, make you lose yourself and hear yourself. The worst of all possible things that could happen, would be to lose that language” (LeClair 123). The language of Morrison's texts mirrors the oral tradition of Black English. The story being told is defined by the systems of language that are evident in the oral tradition. Fitting the intricate oral tradition of language into a written form is problematic. Written language does not contain symbols to represent the inflection, tone, and non-verbal gestures of Black English. As Smitherman notes, “the real distinctiveness—the beauty—in the black sound system lies in those features which do not so readily lend themselves to concrete documentation—its speech rhythms, voice inflections, and tonal patterns” (Talkin 17).

As one example, in The Bluest Eye Morrison captures the inflection, tone, and non-verbal gestures of the oral tradition when the women's “conversation is like a wicked dance: sound meets sound, curtsies, shimmies, and retires”:

“I kind of thought Henry would marry her one of these days.”

“That old woman?”

“Well, Henry ain't no chicken.”

“No, but he ain't no buzzard, either.”

“He ever been married to anybody?”

“No.”

“How come? Somebody cut it off?”

“He's just picky.”

“He ain't picky. You see anything around here you'd marry?”

“Well … no.”

(16)

The playfulness, laughter, and camaraderie come through the written word and so do the smiles, the head-tilted-to-the-side, the “huh,” and the hand-on-the-hip presence of the women. Morrison does not identify the speakers, but each line is indented, indicating a turn-taking process. The shortness of the turns implies a rapid fire, compressed conversation that is spontaneous, possibly overlapping, just like an oral conversation between friends. The reader is not told where the conversation is taking place—at a card table, in the kitchen, or over a backyard fence. Morrison leaves spaces for the reader to fill. She knows that there will be “holes and spaces” in the text that are caused by writing down an oral language, but Morrison also expects the reader to fill in those gaps with communal knowledge: “My writing expects, demands participatory reading. … We (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience” (Tate 164). This participatory involvement mirrors the ritual of storytelling from the Black English oral tradition. The reader who is aware of the Black English oral tradition is also aware that he/she is obligated to participate in this conversation. The participation could be a “humh” at the end of the dialogue signifying understanding and appreciation, or it could be a smile, a laugh, a head wag, or it could put you in the mind of other women who shared their lives through conversation with friends.

The gaps and spaces created when an oral language is written down also mirror the oral tradition's use of language as an identifying marker, a marker of those who are part of the community and those who are not. In the African American culture correct Black English usage demonstrates group identification. In The Bluest Eye, the patterns of grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and language rituals that the three whores use follow the customs of Black English oral traditions. Because they observe appropriate language characteristic of their culture, the three whores are “correct.” The stark contrast between the discourse of the whores and the description of the whores by the narrator further illustrates their inclusion within their community. The elevated Common English used by the narrator in the description of the whores acts as a mirror reflecting the differences between the whores' language and that of the narrator. This language difference duplicates code-switching used in the Black English oral tradition. Code-switching refers to the alternating use of two different languages in a discourse. Morrison's use of code-switching is another indication of inclusion and exclusion. The whores are part of their community and so is the reader who understands their inclusion without the explanation provided by the narrator.

The narrator, using elevated Common English, re-defines and re-explains the whores in terms that can be understood by the non-Black English speaker: “Three merry gargoyles. Three merry harridans” (47).¹ The word choice in this description is interesting. The juxtaposition of merry, which suggests high-spirted gaiety, with gargoyle and harridans illustrates the complex positions the three whores play in the make-up of their community. (It is interesting to note that these gargoyles, literally and figuratively, live above the Breedloves, just as architectural gargoyles are usually found on the top of structures.) The description of these three women as gargoyles and harridans is appropriate. They scold and can be vicious, but at the same time they are part of a system that gives their community a form of protection. Like the gargoyles of Gothic architecture, they are the conductors of and safeguards for their community. And just in case the reader is still trying to fit these three women into the stereotypical mold of the pathetic, coarse, “prostitutes created in novels” (47), the narrator simply and totally debunks the notion. The three whores are striking and they are associated with beauty: “Poland singing—her voice sweet and hard, like new strawberries” (43). They are associated with the Black English oral tradition and are controllers and extollers of the power of the spoken word. The whores' conversation is very aural. They are storytellers who Signify, that is, they engage in the art of verbal battle, what Clarence Major defines as “‘performance’ talk” (416); the whores, through their Signifyin talk, pass on the beliefs and values of their community.

In Signifyin there is almost always a berating, censuring aspect to the discourse. According to Smitherman, Signifyin is “the verbal art of ritualized insult, in which the speaker puts down, needles, talks about (signifies on) someone, to make a point or sometimes just for fun. It exploits the unexpected, using quick verbal surprises and humor” (Black Talk 206). This sense of Signifyin is somewhat distinct from the way Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his influential study The Signifying Monkey, understands the term. Gates's version of “Signifyin(g)” is based on “refiguring what we might think of as key canonical topi and tropes received from the black [English oral] tradition itself” (xxii). But Gates's theory does not take the “put down” aspect of Signifyin into consideration, and his theory also does not accommodate the reaffirmation of communal identity that is evident in Signifyin from the Black English oral tradition. Rather, Gates's theory is more closely related to rhetoric of the Black English oral tradition of Call/Response and Witness/Testify. While African American writers certainly “read each other, and seem intent on refiguring what we might think of as key canonical topi and tropes received from the black [English oral] tradition itself,” the writers are Called on to Respond to what they have Witnessed in the works of other African American authors. Their Response becomes their Testimony and a reaffirmation of community. Gates claims to have “at last located within the African and Afro-American traditions a system of rhetoric and interpretation that could be drawn upon both as figures for a genuinely ‘black’ criticism and as frames through which I could interpret, or ‘read,’ theories of literary criticism” (ix), but he fails to ground his system of rhetoric in African American traditions; rather, the African American traditions become marginalized in his quest to “read” literary criticism (here read Eurorpean literary criticism). He says he is “attempt[ing] to lift the discourse of Signifyin(g) from the vernacular to the discourse of literary criticism” (xi), but he fails to realize that the discourse of Signifyin does not need to be “lifted” from the vernacular; rather it needs to be examined as a discourse and as a language system within the vernacular. Smitherman's definition of Signifyin, in contrast, comes from and is inclusive of traditional African American culture. She does not feel the need to legitimize Signifyin by lifting it to the heights of “Derrida's neologism” (Signifying Monkey 46), but rather treats the Black English oral tradition with the grace and dignity it deserves as the language system of proud people.

Signifyin is an act of delineation; it is didactic and inclusive. In the Black English oral tradition, when one is Signified on one must acknowledge the Signification. An indication of Pecola's otherness is the inversion of the Signifyin act that takes place with Pecola and the three whores. Though the three whores Signify in the presence of Pecola, they cannot be the doorway through which Pecola gains entry into the community because Signifyin in the oral tradition is age specific. The only time an adult and child participate in the act of Signifyin is in a parent/child dynamic, when the child is being taught a lesson or is being guided by the adult. Claudia and Frieda know the rules of discourse of their community: “We didn't initiate talk with grownups; we answered their questions” (22). With the whores, Pecola inverts the community rules of discourse because she initiates the conversation: “The women were friendly, but slow to begin talk. Pecola always took the initiative with Marie, who, once inspired, was difficult to stop” (44). Pecola does not participate verbally or non-verbally, staying outside of the Signifyin act:

“All I know is, them bandy little legs of yours is every bit as old as mine.”

“Don't worry ‘bout my bandy legs. That's the first thing they push aside.”

All three of the women laughed.

(45)

In fact, Pecola is so far outside this communal activity that she is almost invisible or under erasure. The whores do not acknowledge Pecola's presence and talk over and around her, which, in the Black English oral tradition, signifies her “otherness.” Pecola could gain entrance to her community by practicing the communal rules of discourse, but she has not learned these rules at home and so she is lost. Claudia and Frieda do not, as they should, invite Pecola into the community through their discourse with her. Like Milkman in Song of Solomon, Pecola needs a Pilate to guide her through this initiation, just as Pilate guides Milkman when she begins his lessons of discourse by correcting Guitar when he says, “Hi” (Song 36). This illustrates Morrison's concern with the act of rituals. Part of the reason that Pecola's story is told is because a necessary ritual was not performed, and thus a gap was created that needs to be closed. Thus The Bluest Eye can be read as a cautionary tale because, like Beloved, it is a story that should not be repeated.

Other examples of Black English oral traditions are the Signifyin acts of the “Three quarts of milk” soliloquy of Mrs. MacTeer in The Bluest Eye (22), “When Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith” (145) of Sula, and the first private conversation between Son, “the nigger in the wood pile,” and Jadine in Tar Baby (83, 112-27). In “Three quarts of milk” (98), Mrs. MacTeer is not only venting her anger, she is teaching her daughters one of the rhetorical tropes of their culture, how to Signify, and she is teaching them life lessons about greed and self reliance (“My mother knew that Frieda and I hated milk and assumed Pecola drank it out of greediness”); family and community values (“There's a limit to everything”); and parenting responsibilities (“‘Folks just dump they children off on you and go on ‘bout they business’”) (22-23). Mrs. MacTeer as a caretaker of her cultural mores is an apt instructor for her children and the reader. It is important to examine what is being said as well as who is saying it.

Sula's Signifyin “When Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith” speech to Nel is not only Signifyin on Nel, it is also Signifyin on America. The form of this Signification begins with a dialectic of the improbable: “‘Oh, they'll love all right. … After all the old women have lain with the teenagers … after all the black men fuck all the white ones … when Lindbergh sleeps with Bessie Smith and Norma Shearer makes it with Stepin Fetchit’” (145-46). The contradictions of “old” and “teenager” lying together escalates to “weathervane[s]” “mount[ing] … hogs” (146). Sula is Signifyin on Nel and the people of the Bottom as well as on American puritanical views of sex and racial prejudices.

In Tar Baby, when Son Signifies on Jadine he is not only putting her down, he is also demonstrating that he is part of the community while she is not. This face-to-face confrontation takes place just after Jadine has received her coat made of “the skin of the baby seals” (112). When Jadine asks Son what his name is, he replies, “‘What do you like? Billy? Paul? What about Rastus?’” (115). Rastus—the name of the Black figure on the Cream of Wheat box—is one of those names, like Sambo or Steppinfetchit, whose history brings to mind the stereotypical Uncle Tom: sleepy-eyed, lazy-acting, stupid, and buffoonish. By using this name, Son is Signifyin on Jadine. Son's use of the name Rastus also illustrates the importance of his name: “the name most truly his wasn't on any of the Social Security card, union dues cards, discharge papers. … Son. It was the name that called forth the true him. The him that he never lied to, the one he tucked in at night and the one he did not want to die. The other selves were like the words he spoke—fabrications of the moment, misinformation required to protect Son from harm and to secure that one reality at least” (139). The importance of his name is also a form of Signification; as Barbara Hill Rigney argues, “The primary significance of the name Son is … not to denote an individual self (‘He did not always know who he was, but he always knew what he was like’[165]), but to place that self in a context of relationship: Son is a son of Africa and also a son of the American black male experience, the ‘Nigger Jims … Staggerlees and John Henrys’ (166) … his name being his … connection with community and black tradition” (43). Just as she earlier failed to recognize Gideon's true name, instead referring to him as “Yardman” (a serious insult in Black English, to call out his name and indicate disdain for his social position and his very self) (115), Jadine does not recognize the significance of Son's Signifyin or that Son's name connects him to his community. Jadine's response to Son's “Rastus” is “‘Don't be funny. What is your name’” (115)—which is inappropriate. She should have come back with a statement that indicated that she heard and understood his reprimand. Son is signaling to the reader that he knows who he is and what Jadine is: fragmented and outside of her community.

Morrison uses language to define those who are a part of their community and those who are not. In Song of Solomon Macon Dead demonstrates he is outside of his community when he breaks the language codes of the community. Macon is a landlord and Mrs. Bains is one of his tenants who has taken on the care of her grandchildren. When she comes to ask him if he will extend her some credit for her rent, he crosses the boundaries of community principles: “When Macon Dead got to the front door of his office he saw a stout woman … standing a few feet away. Macon unlocked his door, walked over to his desk, and settled himself behind it. As he was thumbing through his accounts books the stout woman entered” (21). Macon's actions of sitting while this elderly woman stands is just the beginning of his breach of community boundaries:

“Afternoon Mr. Dead, sir. I'm Mrs. Bains. Live over at number three on Fifteenth Street.”

“Yes, Mrs. Bains. You got something for me?”

“Well, that's what I come to talk to you about. You know Cency left all them babies with me. And my relief check ain't no more'n it take to keep a well-grown yard dog alive—half alive, I should say.”

“Your rent is four dollars a month, Mrs. Bains. You two months behind already.”

“I do know that, Mr Dead, sir, but babies can't make it with nothing to put in they stomach.”

Their voices were low, polite, without any hint of conflict.

“Can they make it in the street, Mrs. Bains? That's where they gonna be if you don't figure out some way to get me my money.”

“No sir. They can't make it in the street. We need both, I reckon. Same as yours does.”

(21)

Macon separates himself from his community when he allows Mrs. Bains to make the first greeting, and his separation is further indicated when he later does not realize that Mrs. Bains has Signified on him. Macon does not respond; he does not participate in the Signifyin act which demonstrates his isolation. Mrs. Bains repeatedly refers to Macon as “sir,” effectively putting him in the position as controller, master, or The Man, not a favorable position in the African American community (see Major 470).

In these early glimpses of Pilate and Macon the reader is shown who has the knowledge of communal mores, who is a reliable storyteller, and—crucially—who has the power of the word, nommo, the African concept that constitutes “the driving power … that gives life and efficacy to all things” (Jahn 101). Pilate's power and position in the community is tied to her nommo. She is initiator of ritual and the keeper of community. She is a griot, the figure who, as D'Jimo Kouyate describes it, “maintain[s] a cultural and historical past with that of the present. … the oral historian and educator in any given society” (Gross and Barnes 179); Pilate teaches people to know themselves and their place within their community. The first time she talks with Milkman and Guitar, she teaches them how to speak their language, and she teaches them how to listen:

“Hi.”

The woman looked up. First at Guitar and then at Milkman.

“What kind of word is that?” Her voice was light but gravel-sprinkled. Milkman kept on staring at her finger, manipulating the orange. Guitar grinned and shrugged. “It means hello.”

“Then say what you mean.”

“Okay. Hello.”

“That's better. What you want?”

“Nothin. We just passin by.”

“Look like you standin by.”

“If you don't want us here, Miss Pilate, we'll go.” Guitar spoke softly.

“I ain't the one with the wants. You the one wants something.”

“We wanna ask you something.” Guitar stopped feigning indifference. She was too direct, and to keep up with her he had to pay careful attention to his language.

(36-37)

Pilate not only gives these young boys a language lesson, she also demonstrates to the reader that they need to learn to “listen” carefully too. When she says, “‘You the one wants something’” to Guitar, she is alerting the reader and Guitar to an aspect of Guitar's nature that later proves prophetic.

Some of Morrison's most memorable characters wield the power of the word. They are tellers of tales: Claudia in The Bluest Eye, Eva in Sula, Pilate in Song of Solomon, Therese in Tar Baby, Baby Suggs and Sethe in Beloved, and the narrator of Jazz. These characters may not appear to be the “traditional” models of correctness and beauty, but in Morrison's novels beauty is perceived through a different lens, the lens of language. These non-traditional characters become the griots of Morrison's fictional worlds, caretakers of knowledge, guardians of history.

In Morrison's novels, as in the oral tradition, who is telling the tale is as important as the story being told. In Song of Solomon, both Macon and Pilate tell stories, but while Pilate is a storyteller of power, Macon lacks perception and feelings. He is isolated and fragmented, and he does not even know it, while Pilate is centered within her community. When the reader is introduced to Pilate, she has “[h]er head cocked to one side, her eyes fixed on Mr. Robert Smith, she sang in a powerful contralto: O Sugarman done fly away” (6). Her song is a story that connects to the epigraph (“The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names”), to Mr. Smith's flight, and to the stories of The Africans who Could Fly. Her song binds her to her community. Macon has lost the ability to participate in his community's oral tradition: “when he was just starting out in the business of buying houses, he would lounge around the barbershop and swap stories with the men there. But for years he hadn't had that kind of time, or interest” (52). Macon fails to participate in one of the community rituals of individual actualization through group discourse. Macon must participate or he is outside of the circle of his community. When he does not participate he is absenting himself from a ritual practice that allows all to be heard and all to listen, a practice that reaffirms the participants' membership in their community.

Reaffirmation of community is one of the hallmarks of Black English. Systems of language within the Black English oral tradition are systems that call for the participants to reaffirm their cultural roots, community, and themselves. One of those systems is Call/Response, defined by Smitherman as “stating and counter stating; acting and reacting.” It is “spontaneous verbal and nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker's statements (‘calls’) are punctuated by expressions (‘responses’) from the listener.” Call/Response is collaborative improvisation that is a characterization of common content and shared experience. It is also an outward expression of group that indicates a connection, a shared history and culture. It unifies the listener and the speaker. Response also allows the Caller to know that the audience approves of what she is saying and/or how she is saying it; it is immediate validation: “The process requires that one must give if one is to receive, and receiving is actively acknowledging another” (Talkin 119, 104, 108). In the African American community, when people pass each other in hallways, on streets, at stop lights, et cetera, they acknowledge each other's presence through verbal and/or non verbal signals; they Call and Respond to each other. Macon does not do this: “He hailed no one and no one hailed him. There was never a sudden braking and backing up to shout or laugh with a friend” (32). Macon's failure to participate in Call and Response further demonstrates his fragmentation and isolation.²

In Song of Solomon, there are layers of Call/Response when Macon stands outside of Pilate's house listening to the women inside singing: “Macon walked on, resisting as best he could the sound of the voices that followed him” (28). Pilate, Reba, and Hagar are singing a Call/Response song to each other, but their song is also Calling to Macon: “They were singing some melody that Pilate was leading. A phrase that the other two were taking up and building on. Her powerful contralto, Reba's piercing soprano in counterpoint, and the soft voice of the girl, Hagar … pulled him like a carpet tack under the influence of a magnet” (29). This passage is also Calling to the reader to Respond. It Calls on the reader to empathize with Macon's fragmentation. The reader becomes a Witness to his isolation, loneliness, and inability to participate.

African American writers have combined the rhetoric of Call/Response with Witness/Testify, another part of the word-of-mouth facet of the African American community: “In the African-American grain, stories were told in unceasing collaboration between the storyteller and his audience, the black community. Call-and-response was so fundamental to the form and meaning of the tales that anyone, black or white, allowed into the circle was bound to become a participant as well as a witness” (Callahan 71). Morrison allows the reader to become part of the “circle” of storytelling and thereby Witnesses. In African American culture Witness/Testify, like Signifyin and Call/Response, uses the act of communication as a metaphor for the unity expressed in the traditional African world view. The act of Witness/Testify is tangible proof that symbolizes or serves as evidence to validate one's existence as part of the group. In the oral tradition of Black English, Witness and Testify go hand in hand: one who Witnesses has an obligation to Testify. To Witness is to affirm, attest, certify, validate, and observe. Thus Smitherman defines Testifying as a “concept referring to a ritualized form of black communication in which the speaker gives verbal witness to the efficacy, truth, and power of some experience in which all blacks have shared” (Talkin 58).

Witness/Testify is a shared collective memory, a cultural ritual that promotes solidarity and cohesion, creating a living archive of African American culture. Witnessing is shared experience, emotional, physical, communal, historical—it is social empathy. Testifying articulates and validates the shared experience through gesture, sign, symbol, or verbal expression. In both the oral tradition and in literature, the participants of Witness/Testifying must “bear witness” to the joys and sorrows of life, and then they must Testify, tell, pass on, share the event with others. Witness/Testify assumes shared experience by the teller and the hearer: it creates and maintains spiritual kinship. Those who Witness have a responsibility to preserve and tell the tale. In written discourse, the reader becomes both symbolic and actual participant in the storytelling event through shared experience, shared emotional response, and connection made by the communal aspect of the event.

Morrison achieves this connection in Beloved when Baby Suggs leads the Testimony in the meetings at the Clearing:

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, “Let the children come!” and they ran from the trees toward her.

“Let your mothers hear you laugh,” she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

(87)

The “company” in the Clearing are physically mirroring the spiritual kinship of the Call/Response ritual when they respond to the Call by entering the circle in the Clearing: “‘Let the grown men come,’ she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees” (87). The ritual in the Clearing is a Testimony to “the only grace they could have” (89). The reader becomes both a Witness—we are allowed to see and hear this Testimony through the written word—and a Testifier—we are Called to Respond just as the people in the Clearing are Called to respond with “their … mouths and [they] gave her the music. Long notes held until the four-part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh” (89). Through Call/Response and Witness/Testify, Morrison make a connection between Baby Suggs, the people in the Clearing, and the reader.

In Jazz, the reader is a Witness for Violet, for Joe, and for the narrator. The reader is also a Witness to the story that is being told, and through discussion of the story the reader Testifies. The narrator of Jazz is participating in the act of Call/Response because she is a reminder, a Call to remember, all those tellers of tales, both in fiction and in life, who have sat on front porches, on stoops, at windows, and Witnessed the world pass by. This narrator follows a tradition of fictional sentries who Witness and Tell: the watchers on the porch in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mrs. Hedges in Ann Petry's The Street are characters who piece together their world from the scraps of information they glean from the lives of people around them. The reader, like these sentries, pieces together Joe and Violet's story through the fabric of language. I am a Witness to Joe and Violet's story and now you too have become a Witness and you are now obligated to Testify.

The reader who understands the implicit values and behavioral models taken from Black English oral traditions will have an understanding of Morrison's texts that “evolves out of the culture, the world, the given quality out of which [Morrison] write[s]” (McKay, “Interview” 151). Each culture has its own systems of value and beauty that are defined by language. In Song of Solomon Ruth may appear, to those unaware of African American culture, to be correct and beautiful while Pilate is strange and even ugly. But when viewed through the lens of their culture, Ruth is strange and Pilate is beautiful. Pilate is first described in juxtaposition to Ruth:

The singer [Pilate], standing at the back of the crowd, was as poorly dressed as the doctor's daughter was well dressed. The latter had on a neat grey coat with the traditional pregnant-woman bow at her navel, a black cloche, and a pair of four-button ladies' galoshes. The singing woman wore a knitted navy cap pulled far down over her forehead. She had wrapped herself up in an old quilt instead of a winter coat. Her head cocked to one side, her eyes fixed on Mr. Robert Smith, she sang in a powerful contralto.

(5-6)

On the surface, this description seems to demonstrate the unpleasantness of Pilate's appearance in comparison to Ruth's attractiveness, but in the Black English oral tradition, the surface meaning of words is rarely the complete meaning. Definitions of words and word usage are derived from the Black English oral tradition of linguistic reversal, using negative terms with positive meanings as well as contextual meaning, a practice of exchanging or masking one linguistic process with another language known as calquing or loan translation.

Morrison uses language to define Ruth and Pilate within the social context of their community and culture. When the descriptions of Ruth and Pilate are read with a knowledge of the Black English oral tradition, the reader understands that Pilate is being praised while Ruth is being censured. The description of Ruth's and Pilate's clothing is a telling point in this narrative. Pilate is dressed “poorly” and Ruth “well” (5). Ruth's “neat gray coat” is analogous not only with wealth and prosperity, but also with Whiteness. The “traditional pregnant-woman” outfit is customary in the White community. Even the description of Ruth's hat, “black cloche,” and foot wear, “four button ladies' galoshes,” distinguishes her from the African American community, while the description of Pilate immerses her in her community, especially the “old quilt instead of a winter coat” (6). The narrator says Ruth “had on a neat gray coat,” but Pilate “wrapped herself up in an old quilt” (5, emphasis added). Ruth is so passive that it seems as if she had been dressed by someone else, while Pilate is dynamic—she makes an active choice to wear a quilt instead of the more conventional coat. Perhaps the most revealing indicators of the description of these two women is that Ruth is voiceless while Pilate sings in a “powerful contralto” (6). In the African American culture, oral language is prized, and Pilate is a master of oral language, while Ruth is silent. Pilate, like the three whores of The Bluest Eye, has and uses the power of words: they sing, they are storytellers, they have the power to name and thereby define, and they are the criterion by which others are judged.

Other examples of the Black English oral traditions that Morrison uses are the references to the music that serve as filler and background in her texts: Baby Suggs's allusions in Beloved: “‘Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don't study war no more’” (86, emphasis added); the song Halle hears that signals the time for them to escape: “‘Hush, hush. Somebody's calling my name. Hush, hush. Somebody's calling my name. O my Lord, O my Lord, what shall I do?’” (224); and Sixo's death song (225). These songs are sacred songs, songs that are emotional and historical sites. They are a communal discourse about life. They are also part of the oral tradition of Call/Response and Witness/Testify: both Baby Suggs's and Halle's songs are Call/Response songs, requiring a lead singer and an answering chorus. They also Call on the person who is knowledgeable about the oral tradition and Church to Respond with a pause—to remember other times when those songs were sung. That pause is the act of Witness/Testify and a reaffirmation of community ties.³ Similarly, in Jazz traces of music flow throughout the story. Song titles (“The Trombone Blues” [21]), lyrics (“Turn to my pillow where my sweetman used to be … how long, how long, how long” [56]), and names of performers (Slim Bate's Ebony Keys [5]) add a richness to the text and infuse the story with the sound and feel of the city of the 1920s and 30s.

Morrison does not always use punctuation to identify the lyrics or titles of songs. She sometimes slips them into the narrative like a faint hum, or a radio turned down low. And just as when you hear snatches of a song from a radio, the memory of the song and the place you heard it flash through your mind, sometimes the song stays in you mind and you carry it until you hear another song. The narrator's description of the City in Jazz has that quality: “Big-legged women with pink kitty tongues …” (7). You can hear the song being played, or if you have not heard it before, if, as Paul D said, you do not understand the words or you do not know them, you can still understand. Through understanding, the reader participates in the event, as in the narrator's description of Dorcas's thoughts on the delicious music in Jazz: “Dorcus lay on a chenille bedspread … knowing that there was no place to be where somewhere … somebody was not licking his licorice stick, tickling the ivories, beating his skins, blowing off his horn while a knowing woman sang ain't nobody going to keep me down you got the right key baby but the wrong keyhole you got to get it bring it and put it right here, or else” (60). The litany of lyrics becomes like that sound right on the edge of consciousness that tantalizes the hearer/reader to listen harder, lean toward the place where the music comes from, and pay close attention. Morrison, like Pilate, is teaching the reader how to participate in the discourse of her novel and the discourse of African Americans through the uses of the Black English oral tradition.

The wonder and the beauty of Morrison's use of music in her text is that she can move you from the mourner's bench, to a jook joint, or to an uptown club in the city.⁴ Morrison entices the reader's participation by leaving the music unfocused. She does not tell the reader who is singing or playing “‘Hit me but don't quit me’” (59), and so the reader can determine the mood of the music by imagining the performer: Billie Holiday, feisty, determined, hard living and hard loving; Ella Fitzgerald, wistful, smooth, and bluesey; or Ben Webster with a mournful sax, crying out in despair. The music also allows the text a sense of freedom in that the mood of the music can change; it is not static. The center-less nature of the music allows the reader to participate in the Black English oral tradition of improvisation.

The plasticity of the oral tradition is also evident in its vocabulary (see Sale). Sula's “I disremember” (116), Beloved's “rememories” (95), and the “Who misraised you?” (20) of Jazz are all examples of how language is molded to fit the situation and the speaker. Morrison has said, “There are certain things I cannot say without recourse to my language” (LeClair 123). She uses phrases and terms that are unique to Black English: in The Bluest Eye, “Big Mama” (21), which means “one's grandmother, ‘big’ implying ‘older’ rather then ‘larger’” (Major 325). Because the term “Big Mama” is a Southern phrase, it is a continuation, a link, not only between generations, but also between the North and the South, past and present.

In Sula, Eva says Uncle Paul is “Triflin’” (68), which Smitherman describes as “a person who fails to do something that he/she is capable of doing; inadequate, lazy, having no get-up-and-go” (Black Talk 227). The label of triflin also implicitly shows disdain and disrespect for the person it marks. Eva also tells Hannah, “‘Stepping tall, ain't you?’” (68). According to Smitherman, steppin means, “Walking, often with a decisive purpose” (Black Talk 215). The meaning of Eva's statement refers to moving with a definite intention, knowing where you are going and how you are going to get there. It also implies that others are observing you and you are aware of this observation. Eva's “‘Stepping tall, ain't you?’” in this instance means that Hannah may believe that she is special, prosperous, has some power to know where she is going, and what she is going to do once she gets there, but underlying all of this is the ironic twist that though it may seem positive, Hannah's prosperity is based on a false assumption and that she is thinking more highly of herself than she should.

In Song of Solomon, Guitar asks Milkman, “‘What you opening your nose for?’” (102) which means, to have a strong emotional response, “to be under another's spell” (Major 325). (This phrase also has strong sexual connotations, and often describes some male or female so caught up in their sexual partner that they have lost themselves—they have given away their power to someone who could use it to destroy them.) It also implicitly means that Milkman is vulnerable because the full statement from Black English is usually something like, “Got your nose open so wide somebody could drive a truck through it.” When one is “under another's spell,” one is unprotected and out of control, at the mercy of someone else. Ironically, in the end it is Guitar who has his nose open, for he falls under the spell of mythical gold and Milkman is in control when he leaps into “the killing arms of his brother” (337). In Beloved the narrator says of Sixo's death song that it was “hatred so loose it was juba” (227). In America, Juba became the name of a dance and the term for a wild, free, joyous occasion. The juxtaposition of hatred and juba creates such a dichotomy that it establishes a dynamic image of hatred so unbounded that it is a joyous happening, rancor unleashed.

Morrison does not define or explain these terms from the Black English oral tradition in her text—indeed Morrison is frustrated at the tradition of “explanation” in African-American literature: “there was so much explanation,” she says of the Black writing that preceded her, “the Black writers always explained something to somebody else. And I didn't want to explain anything to anybody else!” (Bakerman 38). For Morrison, explanation is part of the critical, not the creative, process. Morrison's use of the oral tradition helps to establish a context which in turn creates meaning in her stories. The Black English oral traditions evident in her texts evoke echoes of emotions which in turn resound between the text and the reader. Morrison has enveloped the written word in the oral tradition: the use of words from Black English and the rituals and style of the oral tradition enhance her texts, and the systems of language, the style, and the lexicon of Black English that Morrison uses in her novels bear Witness to African American culture. Following in the discourse of that culture, readers of Morrison's texts are given the opportunity—the invitation—to participate in the storytelling event. To borrow Hélène Cixous's phrase, Morrison writes with “the flesh of language” (52) from the vantage point of a people who live, and thrive, within the context of historical and political realities not of their making. The language of her texts “makes you stand up out of your seat, makes you loses yourself and hear yourself” (LeClair 123), because it is grounded in African-American culture.

Notes

1. The traditional name given to the “correct or proper” language used by the dominant culture of the United States is usually Standard English. The word Standard sets up a hierarchy. If there is a standard than anything else must be sub-standard. The word common can also be problematic, but in this instance it refers to the discourse of the dominant community as a whole: the familiar, the prevalent method of discourse that has been designated as the language of the dominate culture.

2. In a similar instance, Morrison uses the ritual of “speaking” to define the moment in Beloved when Denver becomes whole and a member of her community. Stamp Paid is talking to Paul D about Denver, and states:

   “I'm proud of her. She is turning out fine. Fine.”

   It was true. Paul D saw her the next morning when he was on his way to work and she was leaving hers. Thinner, steady in the eyes, she looked more like Halle than ever.

   She was the first to smile. “Good morning, Mr. D.”

   “Well, it is now.” Her smile, no longer the sneer he remembered, has welcome in it.

   (266, emphasis mine)

   In the Black English oral tradition, the younger person acknowledges an older person. If the younger person must be prompted to do this then that person is demonstrating her/his lack of upbringing. Similarly, Morrison uses “speaking” in Tar Baby to demonstrate that Jadine is not part of her community because she does not participate in language rituals that are valid in the African American community: Son greets her three times with “Morning” (96) and she does not respond.

3. A particularly poignant moment of the failure of Call/Response occurs in Beloved, when Sixo's song Calls on Paul D but Paul D does not respond: “He thinks he should have sung along. Loud, something loud and rolling to go with Sixo's tune, but the words put him off—he didn't understand the words. Although it shouldn't have mattered because he understood the sound” (227). Sixo's death is a remembrance of an unfulfilled cultural ritual that haunts Paul D—he did not answer Sixo's Call.

4. The “mourner's bench” is usually the front pew in a traditional African American Baptist or Methodist church. During Revival, sinners, backsliders, and the unsaved sit on the mourner's bench while the saved try to convert them and bring them back into the fold. The word “jook,” derived from West African languages, means wicked. In America, jook joints were, and are, places where people go to have a good time, singing, dancing, talking. They are usually little hole-in-the-wall places on the outskirts of “civilization.” “Uptown club” is a term that refers to a place where the musicians feel at home. Fats Waller's song “Lounging at the Waldorf” is a signifyin song that distinguishes between uptown and downtown clubs: “Downtown we got drums but we muffle them. They [White people] like jazz, but in small doses … Uptown jazz ain't stiff with propriety.” African American musicians would play downtown clubs for mostly White audiences for money, and when their set was over they would go uptown and play for mostly Black audiences.

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