But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. Busloads of blacks and
whites came into Howard Johnson’s together. They roamed together then:
students, musicians, lovers, protestors. You got to see everything at Howard
Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days. (255)In both of the first two readings, the passage is an example of unreliable
interpretation based in naïveté. Morrison expects her rhetorical readers to
recognize that what Twyla observed at Howard Johnson’s hardly reflects the
state of race relations in the United States in the 1960s. Indeed, Morrison’s
depiction of the meeting between Twyla and Roberta functions as evidence
of Twyla’s unreliable interpretation. Rather than being happy to see each other
for the first time since they were together at the orphanage, they are wary of
each other, and Roberta is particularly unwilling to show affection in the pres-
ence of her two friends who are of her same race. If Twyla is white, then the
unreliability reflects her white privilege: it is easy for her to think that blacks
and whites were so friendly because she did not have to experience the per-
vasive effects of white racism. But if Twyla is black, then the naïveté reflects
both her personal good fortune in not having felt those effects and her lack of
awareness of what so many who shared her skin color had to endure. Morri-
son’s meta-communication is about how deeply race sometimes matters.
Now consider Twyla’s report of her feelings about Roberta leaving St.
Bonaventure’s: “I thought I would die in that room of four beds without her
and I knew Bozo had plans to move some other dumped kid in there with me”
(248). Here the first two readings produce the same effect. Whether this narra-
tion is from a white girl speaking about the effects of losing her black friend or
vice versa, it powerfully conveys the speaker’s regret about her friend’s depar-
ture and her feeling of being left behind. Morrison’s meta-communication is
not that race is irrelevant in this situation but that Twyla and Roberta have
forged a genuine friendship across their racial divide and thus that the divide
does not have to be unbridgeable. As the narrative continues, however, Mor-
rison invites her audience to be aware that it is easier for Twyla and Roberta to
bridge that divide when they are children and when they are in the confined
space of the orphanage.
The actual audience’s need to engage in this triple source-tracking leads
to the second turn of the communicative screw: Morrison makes her readers
aware of the various ways in which we make identifications of race on the
basis of markers of class and culture—including, as Elizabeth Abel astutely
points out, ways rooted in our individual racial identities. For example,
Roberta’s knowledge of Jimi Hendrix and Twyla’s ignorance of him will incline
many white readers to assume, as Abel did, that Roberta is black and Twyla
TONI MORRISON’S DETERMINATE AMBIgUITY • 157