Recitatif

September 1, 2021

The only short story Nobel laureate Morrison ever wrote, "Recitatif" concerns Twyla and Roberta, friends in childhood, who lost touch as adults but keep encountering each other at places like a grocery store, a diner, and a protest march. One is white, one is black, but readers don't know which is which, Morrison having aimed to craft "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." Bearing an introduction by Zadie Smith, this is the story's first-time appearance as a stand-alone. When Verdelle published the Good Negress in 1995, she won early praise from Morrison. The novel went on to claim the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award and PEN/Faulkner finalist honors, but Verdelle's next novel--a Western featuring Black characters--has languished. Nevertheless, the novel led to a friendship with Morrison, detailed here along with Verdelle's early struggles to write and thoughts on what it means to be considered a writer with promise, still struggling. Originally scheduled for September 2021.

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February 15, 2022
"Recitatif" is Morrison's sole short story. Originally published in an anthology in 1983, it resurfaced in Glory Edim's On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library (2021), and now stands resoundingly on its own. As with all the Nobel laureate's work, "Recitatif" is endlessly ponderable. The title is French for recitative--"a rhythmically free vocal style that imitates the natural inflections of speech," and a key to Morrison's shrewdly precise dialogue. The story begins when two abandoned eight-year-old girls, Twlya and Roberta, meet in a shelter. One is white, one is Black; but we're left guessing about their racial identities, an exercise that reveals just how thoroughly programmed our racial perceptions are. In her substantial and enlightening introduction, Zadie Smith quotes Morrison, whom she describes as "the great master of American complexity," explaining that this tale is "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes." Class is also a sharp divide, especially when Twyla and Roberta reconnect as mothers living very different lives in a gentrifying Hudson River town and vehemently at odds over school busing. This is a profound and foundation-rocking conundrum of a -story.

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Starred review from February 15, 2022
The only short story ever written by the Nobel Prize-winning Morrison is also a thought experiment, illuminated here by Zadie Smith's close analysis of equal length. Twyla and Roberta are both 8 years old when they meet at a New York state institution where they are briefly housed--because, as Twyla tells us in the first sentence, "My mother danced all night and [Roberta's] was sick." They connect immediately despite the fact that "we looked like salt and pepper standing there and that's what the other kids called us sometimes." The girls run into each other several times later in life but never recapture their childhood connection. Among the wedges between them are their differing memories of an incident they witnessed involving a bow-legged "kitchen woman" named Maggie. Now, listen up: If you only remember one thing about this review, remember to skip over the 50-page introduction and read the 50-page story first. Just as students read the text before they hear the lecture, Smith's exegesis is much more meaningful if you know the story. If you read the intro first, you forfeit the ability to apprehend the story on your own, more critical than usual here since the issue goes beyond spoilers. According to Morrison herself, this story is "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." And as Smith adds, the "subject of the experiment is the reader." On every page, Morrison teases said reader with details about the girls, their mothers, and their lots in life that seem like they could help solve the puzzle of which is Black and which is White, yet they never conclusively do so. And as the story is designed to show and Smith will make sure you see, that is not the most important thing. A uniquely interesting and enlightening reading experience.

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