Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ is a brilliant guessing game

Toni Morrison wrote just one stand-alone short story in her career, and page for page, it is as powerful and audacious an exploration of racial bias in America as her 11 novels. 

“Recitatif,” first published in 1983 and rereleased by Knopf on Feb. 1, is the story of two poor girls, Twyla and Roberta, one white, one Black – though we’re never told which is which – who meet when they share a room in a state shelter for four months. They’ve landed there in the late 1950s at the age of 8 because of their mothers’ inability to take care of them. Years later, their paths cross again, having landed on opposite sides of the track in an upstate New York town – and on opposing sides of school busing protests. 

All five sections of this episodic story, which spans more than 20 years, are narrated by Twyla. She begins, “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s.” 

Morrison wrote “Recitatif” in 1980, and explicitly characterized it as an experiment about what happens when you remove all racial codes from “a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” 

 

What happens is profoundly thought-provoking. Even four decades after this story was written, readers are ineluctably drawn into a quandary about which character is white and which is Black. But here’s the brilliance of Morrison’s experiment: Each conjecture exposes the reader’s own racial preconceptions. 

In her superb introductory essay, Zadie Smith comments, “When reading ‘Recitatif’ with students, there is a moment where the class grows uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character.” 

At every turn, Morrison withholds key details and plants deliberate decoys to keep us questioning our judgments. Smith amusingly compares the resulting uncertainty to “that dress on the Internet no one could ever agree on the color of.” 

Is a white mother more likely to go out dancing all night – and is dancing a euphemism for more shameful activity? Is a Black mother more likely to object to her daughter rooming with someone from “a whole other race”? Who’s more likely to tell her daughter that the other kind “never washed their hair and they smelled funny”? 

Morrison even plays with the food. Is a Black or a white kid more likely to appreciate the shelter’s meals, which Roberta loathes and Twyla loves – Spam, Salisbury steak, Jell-O with fruit cocktail? Or does Twyla’s gusto have nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the fact that hot meals are a welcome change for a child whose mother’s “idea of supper was popcorn and a can of Yoo-Hoo”?  

When the two mothers come to visit, Twyla’s shows up for chapel bare-headed and empty-handed in tight green slacks “that made her behind stick out.” Roberta’s mother, “Bigger than any man,” with a huge cross on her chest, spurns the other woman. She carries an enormous Bible and a lunch of chicken legs, ham sandwiches, oranges, a thermos of milk, and “a whole box of chocolate-covered grahams.” We wonder whether her illness – which we later learn sends Roberta back to the shelter several times through her teens – is also code, perhaps for addiction or mental illness. 

“Recitatif” is about class as much as race. At 8, Twyla is constantly ranking herself. She writes that she and Roberta were low on the shelter’s pecking order – even lower than Puerto Ricans and Native Americans because “we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped.” They’re also both F students, Twyla because she couldn’t retain lessons, and Roberta because she couldn’t read at all. But young Twyla has her own hierarchy: “A pretty mother on earth is better than a beautiful dead one in the sky even if she did leave you all alone to go dancing,” she writes.  

Held in even less esteem than the girls is a mute kitchen worker named Maggie, “with legs like parentheses.” One day, when Twyla and Roberta come across the shelter’s mean older girls tormenting Maggie, they don’t intervene. Morrison returns to the shameful incident repeatedly to highlight blind spots in her characters’ self-awareness, including how the powerless treat others even worse off. 

The interplay between class and race also comes to the fore when Twyla, a restaurant server who’s married to a firefighter, comments on Roberta’s new wealth after she marries a rich older widower with four kids and a prestigious job: “Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world,” Twlya says bitterly. Is she talking about white people, or rich people?

Smith notes that readers tend to identify with the narrator along racial lines, with white readers thinking Twyla is white, and Black readers feeling she’s black. Presumably, Morrison had a firm idea which of her characters was white and which Black, but she never tips her hand.

“Recitatif” is a shrewd feat of composition and social commentary. Smith calls it “a perfect – and perfectly American – tale, one every American child should read.” Why limit it to children? Its short length would make it an ideal, accessible selection for book groups and community-wide reading programs, sure to spark self-scrutiny and discussion. Both timely and timeless, it’s a story I can’t recommend highly enough.

 

Heller McAlpin reviews books regularly for the Monitor, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR.