Morrison guides her rhetorical readers to recognize that Twyla’s epiphany is
itself limited because it uses Maggie as what Mitchell and Snyder call a nar-
rative prosthesis. Twyla has made Maggie the key to her epiphany about her
own feelings of powerlessness and resentment, but she has failed to give Mag-
gie her own distinctive selfhood. If Morrison were to fully endorse Twyla’s
epiphany, then she too would also be using Maggie as a narrative prosthesis,
but her canny awareness of the complex interactions of identity markers, an
awareness that underlies all of “Recitatif,” is ample warrant that she withholds
a full endorsement.
In part 5, Morrison gives Roberta a speech that strongly echoes this pas-
sage as it reveals Roberta’s own internalist perspective on Maggie. Roberta
admits that although she really did think Maggie was black, she now cannot
be sure. And she goes on:
And because she couldn’t talk—well, you know, I thought she was crazy. She’d
been brought up in an institution like my mother was and like I thought I
would be too. And you were right. We didn’t kick her. It was the gar girls.
Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her. I said we
did it, too. You and me, but that’s not true. . . . It was just that I wanted to do
it so bad that day—wanting to is doing it. (261)Roberta’s perspective parallels but does not merge with Twyla’s, and that
parallel emphasizes both their similarity (each displaced her feelings about her
mother onto Maggie) and their separateness (each came to the recognition of
her feelings on her own). Roberta’s withdrawal of her accusation and Twyla’s
recognition of the parallel prepares the way for the story’s ending, in which
they take steps back toward re-forming their intermental unit. But before I
examine those steps, I want to examine a curious feature of the passage com-
municating Twyla’s epiphany.
There is a revealing glitch in that passage, but, like the instances of impos-
sibilities and implausibilities that I examined in chapter 2, it is one that most
readers are not likely to notice—or to be bothered by when it is pointed out.
The implausibility here is a logico-temporal one that becomes visible once we
notice that Twyla has now, without comment, replaced her earlier report that
“Maggie fell down” with the account that the gar girls pushed Maggie down
and then kicked her. Since Twyla the character comes to accept this account
before Twyla the narrator begins telling, and since Twyla the narrator is a
retrospective non-self-conscious narrator, Twyla the narrator ought never to
164 • CHAPTER 8