When I see them now they are not in sepia, still, losing their edges to the light of a future afternoon. Caught midway between was and must be.
For me they are real. Sharply in focus and clicking.
Toni Morrison, Jazz, 1992
I remember where I was when I first read lines from Morrison’s Jazz. It wasn’t the first time I learned about Morrison. I received an excerpt of The Bluest Eye to read when I joined my prep school’s Speech Team in 7th grade, and that was my first time reading her. The Dick and Jane intro was eerie and distant—the reference too old for me to catch—but I quickly saw myself in the Black girl who would have her bouts of imagining white embodiment. So I first knew Morrison as a Black woman writer who knew something about me.
Jazz surfaced through bell hooks at my dining table in my final semester of college. She, too, turned to Morrison to articulate something about self-image. I was reading “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life,” hooks’s essay about two family snapshots: one of a young man who appeared more confident and at ease than he ever did as her father, and one of hooks herself as a young girl dressed in her favorite cowgirl costume. She loved that picture: “it was the only image available to me that gave me a sense of presence, of girlhood beauty and capacity for pleasure…There is a look of heavenly joy on my face. I grew up needing this image cherishing it—my one reminder that there was a precious little girl inside me able to know and express joy.”
hooks brought the picture to a cousin’s house. She wanted her extended family to see her “in my glory,” and to keep the picture close. But the picture didn’t return home with her. She lost it—left it at the family’s house—and no one ever found it. She was devastated by that loss of “proof that there was a me of me.” In hooks fashion, her essay evolves from a psychic meditation on the loss of a self-image she could love into an appreciation for the power of snapshots in Black homes altogether. Pictures populate altars, forming “commemorative places” to pay “homage to absent loved ones.” bell hooks could have then used any example to describe this altar-building, the ways we capture and curate pictures on living room mantels, bedroom walls, ‘fridgerator doors, mirror frames. But instead, she turned to a scene from Morrison’s Jazz (1992).
First, you should know this about Jazz: the story is about a married Southern migrant couple in 1920s Harlem, Joe and Violet Trace. Joe has an on-going affair with a teenager named Dorcas (this was rape, to be clear), and when she’s bored of him, he finds her at a party and kills her. His cheating, murder, and misery—and Dorcas’s youth—drive Violet mad. Instead of stabbing him, she finds herself at the girl’s funeral and tries to stab her face. She visits Dorcas’s aunt and the aunt gives Violet a picture of her niece, whether out of spite or surrender I can’t remember. Violet brings the picture home. She removes every sea shell and trinket they had on the mantel, and replaces it all with this lone picture of Dorcas—maybe out of spite and surrender. That’s when Morrison writes the scene that hooks brings into her essay:
…a dead girl’s face has become a necessary thing for their nights. They each take turns to throw off the bedcovers, rise up from the sagging mattress, and toptoe over cold linoleum into the parlor to gaze at what seems like the only living presence in the house: the photograph of a bold, unsmiling girl staring from the mantelpiece. If the tiptoer is Joe Trace, driven by loneliness from his wife’s side, then the face stares at him without hope or regret and it is the absence of accusation that wakes him from his sleep hungry for her company. No finger points. Her lips don’t turn down in judgement. Her face is calm, generous and sweet. But if the toptoer is Violet, the photograph is not that at all. The girl’s face looks greedy, haughty, and very lazy. The cream-at-the-top-of-the-milkpail face of someone who will never work for anything, someone who picks up things lying on other people’s dressers and is not embarrassed when found out. It is the face of a sneak who glides over to your sink to rinse the fork you have laid by your plate. An inward face—whatever it sees is its own self. You are there, it says, because I am looking at you.
To be clear, this scene is ethically disturbing and wild. These two adults have become unhinged by the desires and faults they attached to this girl, WHO JOE MURDERED AND VIOLET TRIED TO MURDER AFTER SHE WAS ALREADY DEAD. When I first read this passage in college, I was so taken by the stunning prose—Black aesthetics in action—that I didn’t sit long enough with the audacity of the plot, and how I felt about it.
Still, this passage did for me exactly what hooks says it could do: “I quote this passage at length because it attests to a kind of connection to photographic images that has not yet been acknowledged in critical discussions of black folks’ relationship to the visual. When I first read these sentences, I was reminded of the passionate way we related to images when I was a child. Fictively dramatizing the extent to which a photograph can have a ‘living presence,’ Morrison describes the way that many black folks rooted in Southern tradition once used, and still use, pictures. They were and remain a mediation between the living and the dead.”
a necessary thing for their nights…
If the tiptoer is Joe Trace…But if the tiptoer is Violet…
You are there because I am looking at you.
Up until this point, my studies taught me that pictures were for representation and resistance, for documenting and defining, for capturing and curating. No one until Morrison taught me that pictures were alive. How they come into being, how they exist and endure separate from their moment and their making, how they move, and how what we see in them changes through whose looking. Pictures exist in relation with and in defiance to our vision. I think about this character of aliveness as animation more than immortality. The end of the book showed me that.
I found a copy at my college's women’s center where I worked. The center had become my home, and I took my time during my final walk-through before graduating. In the lactation room near the front desk, we kept a library of donated books. For the first time, I paid attention to the shelves. I saw Jazz, with its first edition violet spine, neon and framed in turquoise edges. On the cover, the title is the same color purple, and the author’s name is yellow. The lettering stretches across the page, large and tight against the sides, structured to be grand and modern like the city Morrison writes into.
Jazz is as much about Harlem as place as it is about Violet and Joe’s drama. It’s as much about their southern roots and their psychic inheritances as it is about their northern adjustment. It’s about the fracturing and rearrangement of lives—individual and collective—and also about the limitations of the cultural discourse created to name that duality. “Old” Negro and “New” Negro is too reductive, too either/or. How do we describe a living so multi-sited and transformed? What do we leave behind, what do we pick back up, and what keeps hold on us regardless? What were our desires “then” and what are they “now”? What is desire at all for two people who, in trying to gather their bearings, harm another and evade each other? To be clear, Jazz is not about pathology, but cacophony—a cacophony of circumstances and choices, set in an era so romanticized, canonized, and studied for its artistry. How did this artistry register in ordinary living?
“When I see them now,” the omniscient narrator says of Violet and Joe, who reach an armistice towards the end of the book, “they are not in sepia, still, losing their edges to the light of a future afternoon. Caught midway between was and must be. For me they are real. Sharply in focus and clicking.”
(My favorite sentences of all time, so far.)
For Morrison writing in the 1990s, the people that we imagine to have lived during the Harlem Renaissance, the Jazz Age, the Great Migration—our people—can never be reduced to the figures, characters, and actors that our art and literary genres make them out to be. At the time she was writing, the people she was writing about may have still been living and aging. The character Dorcas, who was a teenager in the 1920s, may well have been an 80-something-year-old Black woman Morrison passed by on the sidewalk by 1992—if she’d lived. That’s another way to think about aliveness for those of us sensitive to the simultaneity of past, present, and future.
I’ve buried the lede: Dorcas was based on a real person who Morrison saw in a photograph. Which, of course! That’s what Morrison did: imagine stories from real challenge and real tragedy, like when she told us the story of an enslaved woman who was willing to end the lives of her children if it meant ensuring their freedom.
During her time as an editor at Random House, Morrison edited Harlem Book of the Dead, a book of postmortem portraits by photographer James Van Der Zee. His smartly dressed “Harlem Couple” now frames our public imagination of the Harlem Renaissance.
But when Morrison worked with him in the 1970s, Van Der Zee was an elder artist receiving belated attention from the mainstream art world. Morrison’s mission at Random House was to uplift Black writers, artists, and activists through publishing. If I remember the story correctly, filmmaker Camille Billops conducted interviews with Van Der Zee for the book. Morrison encouraged her to ask him to tell stories based on some of the portraits that impacted him the most. One of the photos was of a teenage girl in a casket adorned with flowers. Van Der Zee told the story:
"She was the one I think was shot by her sweetheart at a party with a noiseless gun. She complained of being sick at the party and friends said, 'Well, why don't you lay down?' and they taken [sic] her in the room and laid her down. After they undressed her and loosened her clothes, they saw the blood on her dress. They asked her about it and she said, 'I'll tell you tomorrow, yes, I'll tell you tomorrow.' She was just trying to give him a chance to get away."
The book was published in 1978, and the fact of a girl shot by her lover with a silent gun germinated in Morrison for another decade before we got Jazz. hooks doesn’t mention this backstory in her reference to Jazz, and she might not have known the influence at the time. I didn’t learn the connection until working on a paper in grad school (it’s an academic article now, if you’re interested) and reading interviews Morrison gave about the novel. The photo inspired her to render Harlem through multiplicities that don’t bring resolve: sights and sounds of pleasure and progress contrasted with tragedies in shadows, kept quiet.
It’s been nearly ten years since I swiped Jazz from the Women’s Center, and I still fan hard over this book.
I keep my copy close. I listen for the clicking.