The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's "Recitatif"

The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's"Recitatif"

Shanna Greene Benjamin

Studies in American Fiction, Volume 40, Issue 1, Spring 2013, pp.87-106 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/saf.2013.0004

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An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” 87

Studies in American Fiction 40.1 (2013): 87–106 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”

Shanna Greene BenjaminGrinnell College

Nostalgia. History. Punctuation? Yes. Punctuation—ubiquitous, understudied, unconscious, undone, present, presentational, peripatetic, imported, important.

—Jennifer DeVere Brody1

In texts where racial categories are elusive or ambiguous, the space between the binary becomes open terrain for unpacking race as a trope in American literature. “Recitatif,” Toni Morrison’s first and only short story, is one such text. “Recitatif,”

so named for a recitative style of vocal performance that advances the action of, say, an opera in much the same way that dialogue advances the action of a play,2 Morrison charts the adult lives of Twyla Benson and Roberta Fisk—two women brought together as eight-year-old girls at the St. Bonaventure orphanage—and dramatizes their periodic and serendipitous interactions during some twenty years after they first meet. By selectively identifying one woman as white and the other as black, Morrison paints race as a salient feature of the narrative. By resisting the impulse to reveal which woman identifies with which race, however, Morrison challenges the ways writers rely on stereotypical racial codes to describe their characters, compelling readers to interrogate their own supposi-tions about racial signifiers.3

Race has been, and quite possibly always will be, as central to American literature as narratives of contact and conquest, self-reliance and self-fashioning, modernism and multiculturalism. The conflict that was at one time among the Spanish, French, and Na-

88 Studies in American Fiction

tive Americans was quickly supplanted by tensions between white colonists and black Africans. As inadequate as the “black-white nexus” is to capturing the complexities of America’s multiracial past,4 the United States government has traditionally drawn lines of full citizenship along this binary, regulating educational access, marriage rights, and political enfranchisement based upon skin color.5 What resulted was the practice of categorizing persons according to race. The racial signs and symbols permeating much of early American writing morphed, later, into tropes of blackness where dark skin (or simply a dark presence) represents the racial anxieties of white America. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison probes how a dark or “African-ist” presence “ignite[s] critical moments of discovery or change in literature” written by those who are not black.6 If, as Morrison suggests, the presence of a black body signals a moment of psychological or spiritual awakening for nonblack characters in texts crafted by nonblack writers, what sort of awakening takes place when Morrison maintains racial codes but refuses to identify to whom blackness is ascribed?

“Recitatif” helps to answer this query. First published in Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) co-edited anthology Confirmation, and subsequently reprinted in Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race, “Recitatif” stands as Morrison’s sole foray into the short story and boldly takes aim at the ways in which writers rely on stereotypical racial codes to describe their characters.7 The tale charts the adult lives of protagonists Twyla Benson and Roberta Fisk as they argue about their memories of the past and debate shifting politics in the present; they reckon with how race has influenced their perspectives and prompt readers to consider the same. Race, to be sure, is central to the story—but not in the way readers might expect. Morrison states, from the outset, that one woman is black and the other is white, but she never reveals which is which.

The impulse to “solve” the racial conundrum permeating “Recitatif” reveals an underlying theme central to Morrison’s short story. Readers want to be able to categorize characters one way or another, to “know” race, and they will go to great lengths to assign racial categories if the writer fails to do it for them. When readers focus on the opposing ends of the racial spectrum, the either / or, the black-and-white of the story, they lose a crucial layer of meaning imbedded within liminal figures and interstitial narratives that defy classification along oppositional discursive paradigms. In “Recitatif,” the interstitial narrative between Twyla and Roberta is the story of Maggie: the “kitchen woman”8 who functions as an imperfect yet “archetypal mother figure.”9 I argue that by embodying the elusive truth behind their troubled and traumatic pasts, Maggie inspires Twyla and Roberta to collaboratively rewrite their shared history.


By remembering Maggie, Twyla and Roberta revisit the trauma of their past, which revolves around being “dumped” at St. Bonny’s orphanage by mothers too sick or too social to care for them (89). Twyla’s and Roberta’s recollections of Maggie’s story unite them in a shared history rooted in violence; their slippery relationship with the past—what they remember, what they forget, and whether is it possible for them to reconcile their conflicting memories—captures the contemporary legacy of America’s racialized past. As an allegory for black / white relations, their conflicting versions of the Maggie incident represent the residual, racialized perspectives precipitating from America’s slave past. Silent and bow-legged, ever-present yet readily marginalized, Maggie symbolizes the silent truth imbedded within the parenthetical narratives of America’s racialized history.

If Maggie symbolizes this parenthetical past, then Twyla and Roberta represent the racial binaries circumscribing it. As an “experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is cru-cial,”10 “Recitatif” mines the space between the binary to unravel race as a literary trope. As the first essay to look solely at Maggie’s function in “Recitatif,” “The Space that Race Creates” centralizes Maggie’s symbolic function to move parenthetical perspectives—the existent but subordinated elements of racial discourse—from secondary or superfluous to central and pivotal.

Twentieth-century criticism reifies readings of “Recitatif” along racial binaries by focusing on the racial codes that supposedly label Twyla and Roberta as white or black (although not necessarily in that order). In a slow yet steady trickle of criticism initiated by Elizabeth Abel’s reflective “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation,” scholars have considered how Morrison’s manipulation of racial codes in “Recitatif” affects readers, teachers, and discourse across disciplines. For example, in “Decoding for Race: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Being White, Teaching Black,” Ann Rayson explains how so-called “giveaway clues” mark Twyla and Roberta as white and black respectively; but in so doing, Rayson simply reinscribes the racial binaries Morrison attempts to dismantle.11 In “Race/[Gender]: Toni Morrison’s <<Recitatif>>,” David Goldstein-Shirley offers a more complex reading of the story as a “framed tale” but ultimately yields to the seductive yet slippery business of categorizing the protagonists racially.12 Rayson and Goldstein-Shirley’s readings are limited in their efficacy because they rely on what Abel describes as “[racial] codes that function symmetrically for black women and for white women,” codes that preclude any absolute correlation between race and the personal attributes of each character in the story.13 Abel defines these sym-metrically functioning codes as images, signs, and symbols that not only mark race, but also cause black and white readers to interpret similar stereotypes in opposite ways:


white audiences read each stereotype as “black” and black audiences read the same stereotype as “white.”14 But by focusing on these codes, on the black-and-white of the story, Abel and scholars like her miss the brilliance of Morrison’s experiment. As much a case study as it is a short story, “Recitatif” deconstructs the black / white binary to reveal the limitations of America’s rigid racial discourse; furthermore, in challenging race as a literary trope, Morrison’s short story gracefully names the prerequisites for interracial humanist connection.

If twentieth-century studies of “Recitatif” focus primarily on extremes—the white and black ends of the binary—instead of plumbing the depths of the murky space in between, twenty-first century scholarship on “Recitatif” better explicates how the story works on our preconceptions about race. For instance, referencing postmodernist understandings of race, the final chapter of Gene Jarrett’s Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature includes a discussion of “Recitatif” that highlights how the story complicates “racial politics” and racial codes to expand the discussion of “anomalous” black texts (those featuring white protagonists or deracialized themes) Jarrett develops throughout the book.15 For all of the interesting ways Jarrett positions “Recitatif” along a spectrum of anomalous black texts from the nineteenth century to the present, he nonetheless concentrates on Twyla and Roberta, much like Rayson and Goldstein-Shirley before him, who mention the kitchen lady Maggie tangentially if at all. These scholars seem to know that Maggie is important, but her superficial treatment in published scholarship suggests that critics are not sure why or how Maggie’s presence enhances the story.

By turning a critical eye to the kitchen woman’s role, the most recent work on “Recitatif” more fully explicates Maggie’s significance to the text. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley’s “Maggie in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’: The Africanist Presence in Disability Studies”16 and Helane Adams Androne’s “Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Viramonte’s ‘Tears on My Pillow,’” are the major voices in a very small body of “Recitatif” scholarship that center on Maggie. In her insightful essay, Adams Androne offers the most groundbreaking study to date of the protagonists, Maggie, and the story’s assorted maternal figures. Specifically, she delineates how Maggie functions as an “archetypal mother” who simultaneously embod-ies the trauma of the past while offering the possibility for healing in the present.17 (The comparative nature of Adams Androne’s analytically rich study necessarily truncates the amount of critical space that can be dedicated to “Recitatif”.) My essay picks up where Adams Androne leaves off by fulfilling the promise of Maggie as central, not peripheral, to Morrison’s short story. Specifically, I add to the critical landscape a sustained analysis


of how Maggie punctuates America’s grammar of race. My investigation of Maggie’s function extends the major arguments surrounding Maggie—particularly those related to racial binaries, historical memory, and physical disability—by prompting a consid-eration of how Twyla’s and Roberta’s narratives are structurally intertwined instead of thematically disparate.18

This essay posits that Maggie embodies a shared narrative that provides common ground for the protagonists to rewrite, even if they are unable to resolve, their conflicting versions of history. Redirecting the scholarly gaze to Maggie allows readers to appreci-ate how parenthetical, interstitial storylines that exist between racial binaries inspire interracial connection and communication, not merely contact and conquest. Maggie, therefore, moves readers to see past the divisive quality of such binaries and instead gaze into a central space of discursive complexity where the narratives constructed about race become collectively interrogated, not unilaterally accepted.

The Body Remembers

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hortense Spillers defines an American grammar: a system of talking about ethnicity grounded in the experience of stolen Africans, where the trauma enacted against the black female body and subsequent degendering of the black female subject become the point of reference for modern conceptions of whiteness and femaleness.19 Spillers’ essay, written a few years after the 1983 publication of “Reci-tatif,” claims key, strategic territory in black feminist studies because it connects slavery, black women’s bodies, and syntax to describe how race and gender are woven into the very systems that structure communication. In this tradition of connecting America’s racial discourse to systems of linguistic composition, Morrison’s “Recitatif” challenges the adequacy of America’s grammar of race—that is, the system of words and imagery that dictates how race has traditionally been constructed in literature—by inserting a parenthetical element, a person really, who challenges the supposedly superfluous qual-ity of the parenthesis itself.

The deaf and mute “sandy-colored” woman “with legs like parentheses” (90), Maggie physically and thematically provides a common ground for the protagonists to explore their conflicting memories of a shared history. As dependents surrendered to the state, Roberta and Twyla rely on one another for strength and support as they deal with life as orphans; as adults, they depend on one another to figure out “[w]hat the hell happened to Maggie?” (110). As dependents who depend on one another at first for emo-tional support, and later, for personal affirmation, Twyla and Roberta constitute the core


of the story: to wit, the subject and predicate of the symbolic “sentence” that “Recitatif” represents. But “Recitatif” is not, metaphorically speaking, a declarative, imperative, or exclamatory “sentence.” Although there are certainly sentiments stated, actions com-manded, and feelings shouted, the question that concludes the story—“[w]hat the hell happened to Maggie?”—situates “Recitatif” as an interrogative—a story structured as a query that begs the question: what is being asked and to whom is this question directed?

The interrogative qualities of “Recitatif” invoke a tradition of call-and-response that links the story to African-American cultural practices while honoring the question-and-answer feature of the non-rhetorical interrogatory. In other words, questions call for answers. And typically, those answers arrive in a separate sentence following the ques-tion. But unlike an interrogative sentence followed by a discrete declaratory sentence issuing an answer, the answer posed by “Recitatif” is contained within the story, the “sentence,” itself. To find the answer, however, one must engage in a reflective practice that considers how otherwise castoff parenthetical moments help to answer the question implicit in the tale.

A kitchen worker at St. Bonny’s, Maggie’s interstitial narrative contains answers to the implied question driving “Recitatif”: if memory is so unstable, how can blacks and whites ever communicate effectively about the history they share? This is an appropriate question for a story by Morrison, a writer who regularly engages with history and memory in her fiction and non-fiction alike. Both Beloved and A Mercy revisit slavery to prompt contemporary readers to reflect on history-as-artifact versus history-as-experience; in “A Bench by the Road,” Morrison ruminates on how her fiction functions as an artifact that claims space for the marginalized histories of slaves and their descendants. She reflects on the fact that “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it.”20 As a result, she posits “the book” as an appropriate “memorial” to commemorate the past.21 Morrison’s concern with memory and history also emerge in “Recitatif,” which instead of narrating a story about the past, fictionalizes the process blacks and whites must undertake to engage with the past, converse about difficult histories, and come to terms with their diverging recollections of what came before.

The St. Bonaventure orchard is a site ideally situated for the exploration of the space between black and white racial binaries. “Recitatif” begins in the orchard, a liminal space between the “real” world outside of St. Bonny’s and the orphanage itself, spatially establishing the theoretical notion that parenthetical, interstitial narratives create space to explore tensions between binaries. The orchard, a refuge from the grown-up concerns


the girls are unable to navigate on their own, is the place that the memory of Maggie first emerges. Within this domain, a physical and developmental boundary between the orphanage and the hazy adult world emerges; the “big girls [ . . . ] played radios and danced with each other,” enjoying a coterie of budding womanhood forged by “lipstick and eyebrow pencil” (89). As the younger girls look on, the older ones defend their ter-ritory by chasing the prepubescents away, pulling their hair or twisting their arms. Con-sisting of “Two acres, four maybe, of these little apple trees,” the orchard is a centerpiece of Twyla’s dreams: as she remembers her life at St. Bonny’s, she seems unconsciously drawn back to this space. “Empty and crooked like beggar women when [she] first came to St. Bonny’s but fat with flowers when [she] left,” the blossoming trees have yet to bear their fruit (89). The image of the blossoming trees foreshadows the budding relationship between Twyla and Roberta detailed in the remainder of the story. With biblical symbol-ism that is obvious but nonetheless worth mentioning, the apple orchard prompts more than a knowledge of the existence of good and evil, two absolutes at opposite ends of a moral spectrum. It prompts a consideration of the truth that lies somewhere in between.

As the site of the first memory our narrator Twyla conveys, the blossoming apple orchard referenced in the opening pages of the story symbolizes the emotional coming-of-age that Twyla and Roberta experience during the remainder of the tale. Even though neither woman is, at first, ready to confront the memories evoked by the orchard and the harm done to Maggie there, the orchard, like Maggie, is situated in between two spheres—one public and potentially dangerous, the other private and ostensibly safe—and as such, replicates the warring perspectives that characterize Twyla’s and Roberta’s memories of Maggie.

This initial description of Maggie in the orchard frames Twyla’s version of history, a necessary point of departure for Roberta’s subsequent take on the incident. As Twyla reminisces, thinking back to the days at St. Bonny’s through a nostalgic, rose-tinted lens, she recalls the Maggie incident very matter-of-factly:

Maggie fell down [in the orchard] once. The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses. And the big girls laughed at her. We should have helped her up, I know, but we were scared of those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencil. Maggie couldn’t talk. The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. I don’t know if she was nice or not. I just remembered the legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked. [ . . . ] She wore this really stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with ear flaps—and she wasn’t much taller than we were. A really awful little hat. Even for a mute, it was dumb—dressing like a kid and never saying anything at all. (89–90)


Without reason to doubt her credibility, Twyla’s recollection of the “Maggie thing” (102) becomes a “master narrative” against which readers (re)evaluate successive versions of the incident. Even though Morrison could have elected to have Maggie’s story recounted by Roberta, her choice to have Twyla tell the tale highlights the formation of history as a construction. In the same way that certain histories omit facts that contradict the par-ticular story they wish to tell,22 narrators, too, have personal motivations and biases that inform their construction of the narratives they relate. So while it may be impossible to ever know the truth behind the “Maggie thing,” the versions Twyla and Roberta generate together expand Twyla’s initial version of the story—a master narrative, if you will—to accommodate information that has been overlooked or omitted. Twyla’s master narrative would be gospel if it weren’t for Roberta: the woman whose alternative version of the tale, rendered from the other end of the racial spectrum, operates as an oppositional narrative that creates space for new considerations of what happened to Maggie. Roberta upends the declarative quality of Twyla’s master narrative by challenging Twyla’s version and questioning her recollection.

Twyla’s function as our initial source of Maggie’s story is as important as her description of events, for the picture she paints of Maggie’s physical limitations captures the complexities of history’s presence in the present. In other words, the raced, gendered, aged, disabled, serviceable past that marks the “Other” and makes way for cultural and social hierarchies. Maggie is the long history of American racial disenfranchisement embodied in the present. As both the personification of and symbol for this history, Mag-gie functions on multiple levels in “Recitatif.” “Recitatif” features three vignettes where conversations between Twyla and Roberta take center stage. The call-and-response quality of this recitative requires listening and speaking from the participants. Because Maggie is mute and presumably deaf, she cannot participate in the dialogue. Therefore, her story and the history she embodies become marginalized. Unable to speak and, presumably unable to hear, Maggie represents how the unappealing elements of history are actively marginalized—relegated to parenthetical phrases—and therefore unable to significantly alter the “master narrative” and entrenched racial grammar that drives larger conversa-tions about constructions of the past.

At the same time, Maggie represents the shared past and common narrative around which Twyla and Roberta’s subsequent conversations crystallize. Maggie lacks the ability to speak for herself and describe the incident firsthand. Subsumed by self-denial, Twyla and Roberta invoke Maggie’s story as the cornerstone of their collective history. Maggie’s story, in turn, informs how the protagonists craft their self-image as adults. The persistence of the “Maggie thing” in the lives of Twyla and Roberta reveals the


permanence of the past in the present and the dangers of speaking definitively for a past that ostensibly has no voice. Maggie’s role as both a marginalized history unable to speak for itself, and a historical narrative conjured to serve persons in the present, first emerges during the protagonists’ run-in at the grocery store. At this, their second serendipitous meeting after leaving St. Bonny’s, the women delight in seeing one another, giggling at their memories of “Big Bozo” when “just in a pulse beat, twenty years disappeared and all of it came rushing back” (99). The conversation is easy, dominated by marriage, children, and work updates—until they get to the subject of Maggie.

The tension between the characters builds exponentially immediately after Twyla relates: “I don’t remember a hell of a lot from those days, but Lord, St. Bonny’s is as clear as daylight. Remember Maggie? The day she fell down and those gar girls laughed at her?” (101). Roberta’s response is immediate and strong: “Roberta looked up from her salad and stared at me. ‘Maggie didn’t fall,’ she said” (101). While the women disagree about the events of the past, readers begin to question Twyla’s initial description of Mag-gie. To Roberta’s retort, Twyla responds:

“Yes, she did. You remember.” “No, Twyla. They knocked her down. Those girls pushed her down and tore herclothes. In the orchard.” “I don’t—that’s not what happened.” “Sure it is. In the orchard. Remember how scared we were?” “Wait a minute. I don’t remember any of that.” (101)

The struggle to remember the defining moment in their history at St. Bonny’s upsets Twyla, whose internal monologue readers have access to. She thinks to herself: “The Mag-gie thing was troubling me. [ . . . ] Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?” (102–103). Twyla’s desire to stabilize her memory of Maggie, to fix and ground it so it feels firm in her mind, suggests the power of the past to influence how she remembers and understands her-self: as a decent little girl and as an upstanding lady with a past that, while blemished, became flawed through no fault of her own. An affirming or innocuous past? All is well. A contradictory or ruptured memory? Everything is called into question. Because if the past we remember isn’t how it really was, what else could we be overlooking? This is precisely how Twyla feels. Until her conversation with Roberta, Twyla is confident that her memories of St. Bonny’s are accurate. After all, she admits that despite everything she has forgotten about that period in her life, “St. Bonny’s is as clear as daylight” (101).


When Roberta asserts an alternative version of “[t]he Maggie thing,” she fractures the bedrock of Twyla’s memory, and challenges her sense of the past as fixed and firm.

But after their second meeting, it becomes clear that Twyla is not the only one still wrestling with the memory of Maggie. The third time they meet, Twyla, driving down the street toward her son’s school, sees Roberta among a group of protestors pick-eting against school busing. Twyla, who had thought school busing “was a good thing until [she] heard it was a bad thing,” (103) strikes up a conversation with Roberta, who is against sending her children to school “out of the neighborhood” (104). Twyla and Roberta stand on opposing sides of an argument about what is best for their children. Without warning, the conversation turns to Maggie:

“Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re not. 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.” [ . . . ] “She wasn’t black,” I said. “Like hell she wasn’t, and you kicked her. We both did. You kicked a black lady who couldn’t even scream.” “Liar!” “You’re the liar! Why don’t you just go on home and leave us alone, huh?”She turned away and I skidded away from the curb. (105)

Here, in their second of three conversations about the kitchen lady, Maggie becomes raced. According to Twyla’s initial remembrance of the orchard assault, Maggie is “sandy-colored” and racially ambiguous. Beige, buff, or “natural,” Maggie’s neutral skin tone places her inside the racial binary yet outside of it. On the one hand, she looks, racially, to be somewhere in between: not quite white and not quite black. On the other hand, she becomes deracialized, at least as “either / or” racial categories go. But by assigning skin color to Maggie during an episode when the text suggests that picketing upholds racially-inflected political alliances, Roberta re-writes Maggie’s story to assert control over a memory that is becoming increasingly unstable. Moreover, Roberta’s implication of both women in the act denies Twyla the freedom to imagine herself an innocent bystander to the attack of a woman who personifies a history that is unable to speak for itself. This history, mute and possibly deaf, is a grownup dressed in kid’s clothes: developmentally arrested, stuck in time, donning apparel inappropriate for its age. The image of Maggie dressing like a child is important, too, because it illustrates how dressing old stories in new clothes does little to bring them into fashion.


The alternative readings of Maggie that result from Twyla’s and Roberta’s arguments point to how racial binaries and the opposing perspectives they represent can create space for new considerations of parenthetical narratives. On one side of this binary is Twyla’s master narrative, which casually mentions early on that “Maggie fell down [in the orchard] once” (89). In this version, rendered by Twyla based on her initial recollection, Maggie’s fall was purely accidental: she “fell down.” In the second version, after Twyla confidently asserts that her memories of St. Bonny’s are “as clear as daylight,” Roberta posits a counter-narrative that implicates “those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencil” (i.e., the “gar girls,” a sarcastic play on gargoyles) for knocking Maggie down and tearing her clothes (101). In the third instance, Twyla and Roberta are already engaged in a contentious debate over the racial politics of school busing when Roberta claims that they were both complicit in Maggie’s assault: “[ . . . ] you kicked her. We both did. You kicked a black lady who couldn’t even scream” (105).

The conflict between Twyla and Roberta escalates in intensity as “Recitatif” pro-gresses. Each time the protagonists engage, Twyla’s initial description of Maggie’s “fall” seems less plausible and her master narrative becomes more unreliable. It is through this incessant engagement between the protagonists, and the resulting unraveling of Twyla’s initial account, that Maggie’s story evolves into a critique of histories that serve the needs of individuals instead of mining a path toward the truth. Without a counterpoint to Twyla’s master narrative (who for reasons unknown is our sole source for information about Roberta, Maggie, and the mothers) we are left with one version of the “Maggie thing”; Roberta’s counterpoint (although it, too, is imagined) encourages Twyla’s self-discovery even though it initially wracks her with guilt. Their conflict proves that the truth is not embedded along the binary, in their individual remembrances of Maggie. Instead, it exists somewhere in between, housed in an interstitial space that, because it cannot speak its own truth, must rely on those with agency to parse the parenthetical—the existing but contained narratives—for the unuttered truths they contain and inspire.

Re-membering For(e)mother/s

A peripheral figure at best, Maggie is physically described as the kitchen lady with “legs like parentheses”: an apt description for the woman who ultimately performs the work of that very punctuation in the story. As a symbolic and embodied parenthetical phrase, Maggie cues readers to pause and consider how subordinated voices are indispensable to complicating master narratives. Maggie, a specter of marginalized histories in “Recitatif,” haunts the plot as the bow-legged kitchen lady who troubles the relationship Twyla and


Roberta attempt to forge as adults. Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play offers an extraordinarily useful critical bridge between Maggie’s physical description and her symbolic function in the text. Brody reads “dots, ellipses, hyphens, quotation marks, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points through the trans and / or interdisci-plinary lens of performance studies” to reveal how “punctuation plays a key role in our quotidian movements and missteps by stopping, staying, and delaying the incessant flows of information to which we are subject.”23 These marks on the page, Brody suggests, are signs and symbols that serve as syntactical signposts, performing backbreaking gram-matical work with grace and ease. The lines, dots, and curves delicately craft the flow of text and meaning. As a form of text-traffic control, punctuation manages the power and pace with which written material is expressed and understood.

Consider, as an illustration of the performative power of punctuation, the title of Brody’s opening section: “For(e)thought: Pre/Script: gesturestyluspunctum,” in which she “argues and plays with points—specifically points made about punctuation,” and considers the racial implications of considering how these black marks mar the page.24 This opening is not only “Forethought”—the section that maps out the monograph as a whole—but it is also “For thought”—a generative gesture that invites readers to participate in the meaning-making process. After the colon (a permeable dual-dotted passageway indicating that the subsequent material amplifies the portion preceding it) is the rule—that is, if you read the first word as “prescript.” Read “Pre/Script” with the slash in place, and you have an echo of the opening reference to forethought, as the pre-fix “pre” alerts readers to the fact that this “script,” this writing, is preliminary. Then, a second colon indicates the deferral (or accumulation?) of meaning in the compound word “gesturestyluspunctum.” Here we have “gesture” (the move), “stylus” (the writing), and “punctum” (the marking). Together, these words represent the very core of Brody’s thesis: how markings move writing. The title of this section, “Re-membering For(e)mother/s,” riffing on Brody’s approach to punctuation as a site of play, reads Maggie as the physi-cal embodiment of parenthetical narratives. Secondary and seemingly superfluous, it is Maggie who compels Twyla and Roberta to re-member their mothers by prompting them to piece together familiar recollections and repressed emotions. At the same time, in this restructured mosaic of the past, Maggie is the inept foremother and shameful history Twyla and Roberta are unable to disown, but to whom they are unwittingly beholden. Maggie, then, becomes the unwanted surrogate at whom Twyla and Roberta direct their repressed grief over their mothers’ abandonment.

To understand how Maggie’s parenthetical positionality works within the racial grammar of “Recitatif,” an exploration of its foundations in punctuation-as-practice is


in order. Standard definitions of the grammatical function of parentheses, here taken from The Associated Press Guide to Punctuation by René J. Cappon, and Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, offer a framework for decoding Maggie’s parenthetical function in “Recitatif.” On the one hand, Cappon writes, “Parentheses preside over the peripheral—information not always trivial but never vital: asides and afterthoughts, comments, bits of background.”25 He recommends that readers “[d]rop these snippets into the relevant sentence, without, however, disturbing its grammar and syntax” and use them to “clarify an ambiguous pronoun and to translate technical and obscure terms into everyday Eng-lish.”26 Ultimately, however, Cappon concedes: “But they are distracting, and should be avoided when possible.”27 There is little to promote the value of parentheses in Cappon’s definition, especially when he concludes that “[c]ommas and dashes can also do the job of parentheses, often more effectively.”28

On the other hand, Gordon envisions the parenthesis as punctuation that “pal[s] around in pairs to enact their literal meaning taken from the Greek: a putting in beside.”29 This part of Gordon’s definition constitutes the two most appealing components of how parentheses work, at least as far as this essay is concerned: first is the acknowledgment of parentheses as punctuation that relies on pairs; second is the alignment of the parenthetical phrase as that which comes in alongside the “out-there-for-everyone-to-see-main-street of the sentence.”30 By “enticingly embrac[ing] extra material of all sorts, from unwel-come long-winded digressions to amusing crisp asides; wisecracks and other comments; and an amplification or explanation in the sentence in which the parenthetical prose is ensconced,” the parenthesis, as Gordon describes it, is an ideal space to house thematic rupture while still containing it within the grammatical system dictating its parameters.31 If the relationship between Twyla and Roberta is structured according to an American racial grammar—a grammar that pits white against black in a racialized binary—then the inclusion of parentheses offers a syntactical occasion to pause and consider how the interstitial narrative within the parentheses relates to the “master” narrative surrounding it. But like Spillers’ American grammar book, gender remains a necessary consideration, as the labia-like typeface outlining parenthetical parameters creates a wholly woman-centered space for Twyla and Roberta to come to terms with the reality of their lives as motherless mothers.

Morrison challenges Cappon’s notion that parentheses merely “preside over the peripheral” by allowing Twyla’s and Roberta’s responses to Maggie to amplify the dominant narrative of their evolving relationship. Specifically, Maggie’s parenthetical narrative and the conversations it engenders point to an interstitial space where vital


details relating to Twyla and Roberta’s background reside. Certainly, the story is about two orphans; but it is also about how those orphans feel about the mothers who aban-doned them. It seems, therefore, that the other common narrative Twyla and Roberta share is the truth of their origins: not just the facts about their time at St. Bonny’s, but also the residual trauma of their stay. Here, the interstitial narrative housed within the parenthetical space, a narrative characterized by stories of St. Bonny’s and Maggie, has the power to widen or narrow the emotional distance between the two women depend-ing upon how these memories are used and understood.

Our understanding of each encounter between Twyla and Roberta pivots on the tone of the mother-centered refrain that concludes each of their meetings. The variations in tone from one refrain to the next are crucial to tracking the dissonance and harmony Twyla and Roberta experience together as adults. In their first meeting at the Howard Johnson’s, Twyla, embarrassed when Roberta responds with chilly indifference at her attempts to reconnect, concludes their meeting with a prickly: “‘How’s your mother?’” (96). Nervous, “[Roberta] swallowed. ‘Fine,’ [Roberta] said. ‘How’s yours?’ ‘Pretty as a picture,’ [Twyla] said and turned away” (96). Twelve years later in their second meeting, the tone of their refrain softens. They promise to do a better job staying in touch and each asks, with great sincerity, about the other’s mother:

“By the way. Your mother. Did she ever stop dancing?” [Twyla] shook [her] head. “No. Never.” Roberta nodded. “And yours? Did she ever get well?” “She smiled a tiny sad smile. “No. She never did. Look, call me, okay?” (102)

The third time they meet, on opposite sides of the picket line, all it takes is Twyla’s query “IS YOUR MOTHER WELL?” hoisted on a picket sign, to keep Roberta from returning to the protest “for the rest of the day or any day after” (106–07). When Twyla and Roberta feel vulnerable or angry, these refrains are voiced with an anger that expands the space between them; when voiced with a spirit of compassion or intimacy, such moments bring them closer together. The repetition of this mother-centered narrative shifts from individual expressions of maternal longing and evolves into a chorus where together, the protagonists voice the lingering pain of abandonment in shifting tones that reflect intermittent emotional flux.

The text of these refrains points to the mothers (i.e., “How’s your mother?” or “IS YOUR MOTHER WELL?”) but the subtext points to Maggie. Maggie and her memory


reside in the interstitial space between parentheses and between the protagonists who represent the binary comprising the arcs. The space between Twyla and Roberta, black and white women who represent opposite ends of a racial binary and signify opposing ends of the parenthesis as sign and symbol—( )—is filled with memories of Maggie not as a superfluous presence, but as another maternal memory that keeps Twyla and Roberta vacillating between friendship and enmity, connectedness and detachment.

Two passages, the first voiced by Twyla after the busing incident and the sec-ond articulated by Roberta after the Christmas encounter, illustrate how their maternal memories shape their memories of Maggie. With her son Joseph’s graduation from high school on the horizon, Twyla thinks back to the picketing incident. She reflects on Ro-berta’s assertion during their disagreement over school busing, that Maggie was not only black, but also that they had participated in her assault. In the process, Twyla concludes that Maggie and her mother have become conflated in her mind:

I tried to reassure myself about the race thing for a long time until it dawned on me that the truth was already there, and Roberta knew it. I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing 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. Rocking, dancing, swaying as she walked. And when the gar girls pushed her down and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me—and I was glad about that. (108)

Then, after an undisclosed number of years, Roberta runs into Twyla once again and expresses feelings as intense and reflective as those cited above. Twyla, out and about, stops at a diner for “a cup of coffee and twenty minutes of peace” before going home to tie up lose ends “before Christmas Eve” (108). Then, donning “a silvery evening gown and dark fur coat,” in walks Roberta, who wastes no time picking up where their last difficult encounter left off:

“I have to tell you something, Twyla. I made up my mind if I ever saw you again, I’d tell you.” “I’d just as soon not hear anything, Roberta. It doesn’t matter now, anyway.” “No,” she said. “Not about that.” [ . . . ] “It’s about St. Bonny’s and Maggie.” “Oh, please.” “Listen to me. I really did think she was black. I didn’t make that up. I really thought so. But now I can’t be sure. I just remember her as old, so old. And because she couldn’t


talk—well, you know, I thought she was crazy. She’d been brought up in an institution like my mother was and like I thought I would be too. And you were right. We didn’t kick her. It was the gar girls. Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her. I said we did it, too. You and me, but that’s not true. And I don’t want you to carry that around. It was just that I wanted to do it so bad that day—wanting to is doing it.” (109)

Maggie is the “dancing mother,” the sick mother, the empty shell. She is the kitchen lady who presumably cooks, cleans, and serves. She provides sustenance but no useful ad-vice. Any care she expresses is wholly ineffable. She is the target of Twyla and Roberta’s vitriol because they are unable to confront their mothers directly and choose to project their anger toward and violence onto Maggie. Since they take no action when the gar girls push Maggie down, Twyla and Roberta make up for failing to act by targeting this violence toward Maggie’s memory and the narrative history that accompanies it. Twyla and Roberta think that in order to heal, they must create a new narrative that gives them agency in a situation where they previously had none. But the sense of wholeness this false narrative produces is fleeting because it is the active denial of events as they were—an intentional corruption of their shared history.

“Recitatif” suggests that genuine racial reconciliation is only possible when Twyla and Roberta reject the puffed-up, self-serving narratives that expand the space between them and instead opt for a condensed, cooperative narrative between the racial oppositions they embody. The protagonists must engage in relentless self-reflection to willingly release their adherence to individual narratives in the service of a collectively constituted cross-racial one. Literally the representation of a person gazing into a mirror reflecting her exact inverse, the image of a person engaging in self-reflection symbolically mimics the duplicate markings that denote the parenthesis: ( ). And in much the same way that self-reflection draws the interpretive gaze inward, parentheses draw attention to the interstitial narrative inside its parameters. Thus, Maggie’s parenthetical body not only encompasses the interstitial narrative that Twyla and Roberta collectively recreate in their ongoing dialogues about what happened to the kitchen lady, but Maggie’s story also prompts the self-reflection required to ignite healing between the protagonists as they struggle to distill life events through the filter of personal experience.

Conclusion: From the Unspeakable Unspoken to the Spoken Unspeaking

The power of parentheses to create space for alternative narratives, while containing them in a structure that maintains the underlying grammar of a sentence, defines the difficult


and seemingly contradictory relationship between Maggie’s two primary functions in the text. She is the forgotten and overlooked, yet enriching textual detail that may or may not be read as part of the sentence (story) proper; at the same time she marks space claimed for the inclusion of her own marginalized narrative. In essence, Maggie symbol-izes an absent history while embodying the space for its inclusion. As “still a virtually unspeakable thing,” Maggie represents race—the thing that Morrison describes as one of those “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” in her lecture of the same name.32 Maggie is the racial memory unconsciously invoked every time a reader attempts to identify Twyla and Roberta racially. By consistently erupting in Twyla’s and Roberta’s conversations, Maggie remains the unwieldy history that, despite the protagonists’ best efforts, cannot be contained or controlled.

As witnesses to Maggie’s assault, Twyla and Roberta become custodians of Maggie’s story, ideally in a way that respects its complexity. At first, the trauma of their abandonment is too strong. Instead of sympathizing with Maggie, they enact ongoing violence against Maggie’s memory to recast the feelings of powerlessness they experienced as children. But as time goes on, their recollections of the Maggie incident change. Instead of being directed outward toward the kitchen lady, Twyla’s and Roberta’s conversations turn inward to consider the residual effects of their childhood trauma on their personal development. The following account, offered by Twyla and Roberta as children, explains why the protagonists project their personal suffering onto Maggie:

“But what about if somebody tries to kill her?” I used to wonder about that. “Or what if she wants to cry? Can she just cry?” “Sure,” Roberta said. “But just tears. No sounds come out.” “She can’t scream?” “Nope. Nothing.” “Can she hear?” “I guess.” “Let’s call her,” I said. And we did. “Dummy! Dummy!” She never turned her head. “Bow legs! Bow legs!” Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn’t let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us. (90, my emphasis)

As a silent witness to her own abuse, unable to scream out in her own defense, Maggie’s body is subject to the whims of the mean-spirited girls, while her thoughts are locked


away inside, inaccessible to outsiders. Without access to her thoughts (writing is not presented as a communicative mode for her), Maggie becomes a blank slate onto which Twyla, Roberta (and even readers) project meaning. In the orchard, Maggie lacks agency: overwhelmed by the girls, she cannot escape; mute from birth, she cannot scream. This predicament is similar to that of Twyla and Roberta, who cannot leave St. Bonny’s and must repress the anger and fear they would rather direct to the women who birthed yet surrendered them. Their coming to terms with the emotions evoked by the memory of Maggie occurs during their Christmas encounter, when both Twyla and Roberta finally confront the shared fear and terror they experienced as children and repressed as adults.

But something happens at the very end of the story—past the Howard Johnson’s, past the grocery store, past the picket line—that disrupts the conciliatory tone main-tained during their coffee klatch Christmas Eve. The final lines, after Roberta admits her mistaken memory, become increasingly more compassionate, as the women examine the fear and distress they experienced as children and the residual guilt of not helping Maggie. Empathy abounds as the women begin to reap the good fruit borne of a difficult emotional reckoning:

“We were kids, Roberta.” “Yeah. Yeah. I know, just kids.” “Eight.” “Eight.” “And lonely.” “Scared, too.” She wiped her cheeks with he heel of her hand and smiled. “Well, that’s all I wanted to say.” (110)

Finally, it appears, the women’s preoccupation with Maggie has ended. Then, Roberta upsets the sense of resolution that comes after she “clarifies” the details of the Maggie incident when, in the final line of the story, she cries: “Oh, shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit. What the hell happened to Maggie?” (110)

The interrogative structure of “Recitatif” explains the meaning behind what is otherwise a difficult ending for readers who focus on assigning race to Twyla and Ro-berta, and for scholars who mention the ending but do little to parse out its meaning. By ending with a question, the text creates space to consider the narratives that exist yet remain unspoken. And voicing Maggie’s narrative through Twyla and Roberta—women who represent opposing ends of a racial binary—suggests that binaries don’t necessarily foreclose; they can also reveal. The ending is truly only the beginning. But it is a difficult


one. To make good use of the space between the binary, this interstitial space must be mined and engaged by willing parties—not unlike Twyla and Roberta—committed to figuring out not where to place blame, but how to move forward. They need to engage with history, not to erase, but to delimit a space within the dominant discourse for the black, female, domestic, disabled, and mute narratives to be heard.

Even though parenthetical phrases are woven into master narratives in a way that structurally maintains their “grammar and syntax”—after all, it is still possible to read “Recitatif” with little consideration of the kitchen woman—acknowledging the inclusion and content of the parenthetical changes everything.33 Such is the case with Maggie. In the end, it is Maggie who prompts Twyla and Roberta to face who they are and what they have become because she reminds them (and readers as well) that racial reckoning results from directly confronting the past, not diverting from it. At the same time, Maggie emerges as an imperfect and unexpectedly powerful maternal force who teaches Twyla and Roberta that considering the whereabouts and condition of the voice-less stories of race is required to cross the chasm of racial difference where blacks and whites—in the space between the binary—come together to dialogue about the past and (re)write racial history together.

Notes

1. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2008), 1.2. I am grateful to my colleague, ethnomusicologist Jennifer Williams Brown, for illuminating the

relationship between the structure of “Recitatif” and the musical style it alludes to. It seems ap-propriate that, after reading various definitions on my own, our dialogue clarified matters for me.

3. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), xi.

4. Jack D. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 2.

5. For more on the development of “whiteness” as an area of scholarly inquiry, see Valerie Melissa Babb Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998) and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (New York: Routledge, 2008).

6. Morrison, Playing, viii.7. Morrison, Playing, xi.8. Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” in Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race, ed. Marita

Golden and Susan Richards Shreve (New York: Anchor, 1996), 87–110, at 89. All subsequent in-text citations refer to this source.

9. Helane Adams Androne, “Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Viramonte’s ‘Tears on My Pillow’,” in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 32, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 133–150, at 134.


10. Morrison, Playing, xi.11. Ann Rayson, “Decoding for Race: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Being White, Teaching Black,” in

Changing Representations of Minorities East and West, ed. Larry E. Smith and John Rieder (Honolulu: Colleges of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, 1996), 41.

12. David Goldstein-Shirley, “Race/[Gender]: Toni Morrison’s <<Recitatif>>”, in Journal of the Short Story in English (Autumn 1996): 83–95, at 89.

13. Elizabeth Abel, “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation” in Critical Inquiry 19, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 102–31, at 471.

14. Abel uses the phrase “‘they never washed their hair and they smelled funny’” as an example of a symmetrically functioning code (471).

15. Gene Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn. Press, 2007), 180.

16. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, “Maggie in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’: The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies” in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 36, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 71–88.

17. Adams Androne, “Revised Memories,” 134.18. See also Jan Furman “Race and Response: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’” in Short Story 5, no. 1 (Spring

1997): 77–86; and Kathryn Nicol, “Visible Differences: Viewing Racial Identity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and ‘Recitatif,’” in Literature and Racial Ambiguity, ed. Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks (Am-sterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002), 209–31.

19. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” in Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81, at 67.

20. Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road: Beloved” in Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: Univ. Press of Miss., 2008): 44–50, at 44.

21. Ibid.22. See Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy for the Native Guards” for an exploration of how the Mississippi

Native Guards “2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx” were erased from the historical record (Native Guard: Poems, [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006]), 44. Trethewey’s collection exempli-fies how contemporary African American writers continue to wrestle with the themes of family, history, and legacy explored in “Recitatif.”

23. Brody, Punctuation, 6.24. Ibid, 2.25. René J. Cappon, The Associated Press Guide to Punctuation (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 71. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid.28. Ibid.29. Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 112.30. Ibid.31. Ibid.32. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Lit-

erature” in Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 1–34, at 3.33. Cappon, 71.

The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's "Recitatif"

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