Jazz [Hardcover]

Joe and Violet met in Vesper County, Virginia in 1906. Dorcas moved to the city from East St. Louis where her parents had been killed in the riots. She lived with her Aunt Alice who disliked the music and felt it was responsible for most social ills. By the time she was eleven her whole life was unbearable. Alice Manfred worked hard to make her niece private, but she was no match for a city seeping music. Joe met Dorcas at Alice Manfred's place. Alice tells Violet sometime after Dorcas's death that she does not understand women with knives. Violet's father and mother had been dispossessed, in a sense driven off of the land. Her mother committed suicide just before one of the four or so times when her father returned to the family with funds. The important thing learned by Violet was never to have children. She had met Joe when she was doing a bad job of picking cotton. Joe did not want children either. Later on, though, Violet longed for a child.

Dorcas was young but wise. She was Joe's personal sweet. People might say he treated Violet like a piece of furniture. He was born and raised in Vesper County in 1873. He was called Trace because his own parents had disappeared without a trace. When he went to school he told the teacher his name was Joseph Trace. His foster brother, Victory Williams, turned around in surprise and said the Williams parents would be mad. He told Victory that when his parents came back he would need a different name so they could pick him out among the seven or so children; but they never came for him. Dorcas had long hair and bad skin. When Joe was a teenager he encountered the person he believed was his mother, a wild woman, someone who was almost feral. This scared him. It made him work hard. Dorcas said that Joe made her sick. She had a new friend, Acton. Acton felt that Dorcas liked to deceive Mrs. Manfred, her Aunt Alice. Dorcas ws buried with a stolen opal ring on her finger.

If you have read any of Toni Morrison's works, this book follows the exact same pattern of her others: no visible pattern at all, but somehow coming together throughout the various narratives in various times and places within history. Although many questions are left unanswered, you still feel as if you have been immersed in a dream, a fantastic journey into the past that you never want to end. Morrison's writing is both beautiful and complex. There literally are no words to describe it. There is no one else out there like Morrison.

I suggest that first-time Toni Morrison readers start off with Sula, which is her shortest and least complex work, but still one of her greatest, and then pick up Jazz after you have read a few others including Beloved, Tar Baby, and Song of Solomon.