"Recitatif: A Story" by Toni Morrison, with an introduction by Zadie Smith; Alfred A. Knopf (40 pages, $16)
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Two little girls meet in a children’s shelter sometime in the 1950s. They spend four months as roommates there and then meet again randomly as they grow up.
One girl is Black, the other is white, but the reader of “Recitatif,” Toni Morrison’s only short story, never knows which is which.
The story is a dazzling display of literary skill in which every word is finely honed to keep the reader guessing, and it’s also a test of the reader: Why is it so profoundly important to us to know a character’s race?
Morrison, who died in 2019, wrote “Recitatif” in 1980, in the years between her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," and her masterwork, "Beloved" (she wrote 11 novels in all), and before her 1993 Nobel Prize. The story has appeared in anthologies, but now Knopf has published it as an elegant stand-alone book, and it could hardly be more timely.
The new edition of the story has an introduction by novelist and essayist Zadie Smith ("White Teeth," "Intimations"). The introduction is terrific and insightful and well worth reading, but it is also one giant spoiler.
Please, please, read the story first. It’s not that Smith answers the question of which girl is which race — she doesn’t know, either — but that her explication is so thorough (it’s as long as the story) that reading it first would preempt to some degree the story’s emotional impact.
And the story has plenty of that, from its opening lines: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s.”
The narrator is 8-year-old Twyla, and her initial response to Roberta is revulsion: “It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning — it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race.”
But they bond over what they have in common: fear and confusion, loneliness, lousy grades and the discovery that “nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped.”
Eventually, each girl returns to her mother. Morrison brings them together as adults several times, with a mixture of tension and old affection. In the late 1960s, Roberta stops at a diner where Twyla is working and they have a frosty exchange. A few years later they run into each other in an upscale grocery store and discover they live in neighboring towns. “Suddenly,” Twyla says, “in just a pulse beat, twenty years disappeared and all of it came rushing back.”
The happy reunion doesn’t turn into renewed friendship, though. Twyla and Roberta see each other next when schools in their community desegregate, and they end up in opposite picket lines. The story ends with their chance meeting one Christmas Eve, when Roberta brings up a memory from St. Bonny’s she’s mentioned several times before.
It’s about a group of kids bullying a disabled school employee named Maggie. Twyla remembers it as an ugly thing the two witnessed, but Roberta’s version of the story shifts. And, just to add another spin, one of them remembers Maggie being Black, the other doesn’t.
With each detail — the families they make, the neighborhoods they live in, the attitudes they express — Morrison keeps us off balance about each woman’s race. It’s a timely story in a nation where race carries the weight of so much of what we think we know about people who bear a different skin. If we could not know another person’s race, how would we treat them, and how would they treat us?
The story is timely, too, in that it’s published amid another cycle of book banning in schools. (I’ve lost count of how many I’ve seen in my lifetime.) Morrison’s books, particularly "The Bluest Eye" and "Beloved," appear frequently on lists of challenged books, often for “sexual content” (which is actually damning depictions of sexual violence) or racist language.
What both books are really about, of course, is the corrosive effects of racism. Sexual content might be what’s flagged — even though the idea of kids going to the library in search of sexual content when most of them have access to the internet is quaintly laughable.
Library shelves hold scads of books with passages about straight white kids hooking up, yet somehow the ones on the challenge lists for “sexual content” seem so often to be by and about people of color, non-Christians or LGBTQ people.
“Recitatif” will be an especially difficult test for book banners: no sex, no offensive language and no way to tell what race its characters are.
But Morrison is on their list, so they’ll be looking for something.
I will let her have the last word on the subject, from the essay “Peril” in her 2019 collection "The Source of Self-Regard." Books are banned and writers attacked, she wrote, “because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources. ... Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow.”
