Why I read Morrison’s “Jazz” while mourning.
This summer, I lost a few family members a few weeks apart. For me, the loss of these relatives felt like a hole in the narrative of my life – all of my memories of Christmas, Thanksgiving, family vacations, weddings, and baby showers took on a bittersweet tinge, as the key factors of those memories were no longer with us. Among the losses included my favorite uncle (sorry, other uncles) – whose voice made up most of my memories of my childhood. When I think of my sweet sixteen, I think of this uncle (the MC of the party) collecting me at the front door . When I think about weddings, I think about this uncle and the 25-minute speech that he had to deliver at my cousin’s wedding right before we could eat. When I think about Thanksgivings and Christmases, I think about him, his dry macaroni pie and burnt plantains, his generosity and love and the way he announced family dinner started at 2pm because “black people are always late anyway.” I think about teasing him at my cousin’s graduation party about his tight shirt – two weeks before he passed.
Weeks after this loss, Toni Morrison had passed away and the world had a titans of literature. When I think about who I am, I think about Morrison, along with Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston and Ntozake Shange – the great pantheon of storytellers who spoke and soothed me through their words and characters. They soothed wounds I didn’t even know I had – those feelings black women have but don’t feel right about saying aloud until a braver, wiser voice says “It’s alright, I feel it too.”
In high school, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon” were the first books I had ever read that focused on black women who weren’t Harriet Tubman or Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs (no disrespect to the OGs). Morrison took my breathe away at how she spared no words in identifying the wound – pointing it out in black and white, then soothing it as she goes along with the story. The story too is soothing, as it’s woven from the most mundane but familiar parts of black folks’ lives – starched church dresses stiff with tulle and angry, sizzling hot combs and jazz music and the creole of our grandmothers. Morrison’s approach pitted the discomfort and unfairness of the world against the strength and power of love, home and empathy. In most cases, love won.
While mourning a voice that shaped me personally and another that shaped the world culturally – I had stopped writing and reading. It felt wrong to garner pleasure from stories when someone I loved had their story cut short. I could hardly tell a story about myself without feeling the hollow bitterness – a major character gone from my narrative but not my memory. When I desperately wanted to start reading again, the first person I looked back to was Toni Morrison. I read “Jazz.”
“Jazz” is a story of mourning, loss and memory. Joe Trace kills his young lover quite literally out of love and obsession of her. His wife, Violet,is outcasted from the neighborhood when she tries to mutilate the corpse of her husband’s lover at the funeral. The empathy Toni gives her characters is stunning – you aren’t made to pity or feel bad for them but to simply understand. The loss of the young lover ruins everyone’s life – especially Joe, who is heartbroken that he is the reason for his own pain. Loss riddles every character to re-evaluate themselves, what and who they love and what got them to this point. It’s hard not to see yourself if in these characters. Their reactions to loss are so effortlessly human and subtle and strong and understandable.
I’m grateful I read “Jazz” during my mourning – not just because misery loves company but sometimes you just need to feel someone else heal before you heal yourself. What makes a writer like Morrison even more special is how she hits every mark on how black folk mourn (or ignore our mourning), especially when she takes the “strong black woman” and lets her grieve. Toni Morrison’s black women are flawed and hurt and put themselves back together because the world simply doesn’t give luxury to black women in pain. She finds the beauty in love – not just romantic love but the different, special, surprising kinds of love that get us through these kinds of rough patches. Love of friends, coworkers, people on the street, even reformed enemies – that kind of love that restores our faith in humanity.
The beauty of storytellers (good ones at least) is that they know how to soothe us because they know how to point out all our vulnerabilities. They know the balm for the pain because they know that pain and every intricate detail of how it hurts us. Writing about loss is hard – it’s our largest vulnerability. The way we handle that loss and caring for the memory of a loved one is difficult and sometimes makes us awfully hard to empathize. But a good storyteller knows that there is beauty in every struggle, and empathy and love in every story. The memory of our loved ones may be tainted with the bitterness of loss – but the wonderful thing is that we have these stories to tell, carry on and bring us closer to each other.
