slurs, bridges, cuts, departures, returns, and head
tunes. Characters sidestep and evade their narra-
tor/composer in redemptive solo digressions and
revise their lives in their own ways.
Like Palmer Hayden, in his paintings of Har-
lem scenes, Morrison provides impressionis-
tic images of hairdresser’s salons, speakeasies,
jazz clubs, funeral parlors, corpse dressers, fried
chicken joints, baby buggies, and rooftop jazzmen,
in contrast to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s images of the
same era—white, upper-class, Long Island man-
sions, and flapper-era parties. Morrison’s inspira-
tion for the figure of Dorcas, the emblematic lost
black daughter whose story lies at the heart of this
novel, came from James Van der Zee’s famous pic-
ture of a dead girl in his The Harlem Book of the
Dead. Her name recalls the biblical Dorcas, whom
the apostle Peter raised from the dead, and in like
manner Morrison textually “raises up” Dorcas and
all the lost young black women she represents. As
Jazz opens Joe has shot the 18-year-old Dorcas,
his lover, who then allows herself to bleed slowly
to death. Violet, Joe’s middle-aged and childless
wife, is now haunted by this dead girl whose face
she has mutilated in a fit of jealous rage and who
gazes back at both of them from the photograph
Violet keeps on their mantelpiece.
Throughout the novel Joe, Violet, and Dorcas’s
aunt, Alice Manfred, seek to redeem Dorcas’s
memory by tracing and healing their own histories
of family dysfunction. The characters’ individual
and collective emotional wounds and disfiguring
substitutions begin in 1855, the year white Vera
Louise Gray becomes pregnant by black Henry
Lestory (or LesTroy), and flees to Baltimore with
her black maid, True Belle, Violet’s grandmother.
True Belle leaves behind two very dark-skinned
children, May and Rose, who in later years are
confused by their mother’s enthusiastic stories of a
glorious white-skinned mulatto boy for whom, it
seems, she has abandoned them.
Abandonment of orphans marks every genera-
tion. When the angry Golden Gray returns to Vir-
ginia to enact revenge on his absentee black father,
he reluctantly helps Wild give birth to a black male
child, probably Joe Trace, whom she then aban-
dons. In 1893 the adult Joe Trace, a hunter, literally
tracks his mother to an earthy warren in the same
Virginia woods in which Golden Gray has sought
to destroy Henry LesTroy. He finds only her evoca-
tive scent. Violet is abandoned by her unmothered
mother, Rose, a suicide who flings herself down a
well in 1892. Dorcas is orphaned when her parents,
along with 200 others, are murdered in a deadly
fire during the 1917 East St. Louis race riots and
then is emotionally denied by her embittered aunt,
Alice Manfred.
Morrison’s plot uncovers a generationally com-
pounding series of losses, all of which explode in
1925–26. Joe, now middle-aged, tracks, seduces,
and eventually shoots the unloved black orphan,
Dorcas, who in turn allows herself to bleed slowly
to death. Violet literally sits down in the street one
day unable to go on with her life’s journey. She
has experienced serial abortions, sleeps with dolls,
nearly abducts a baby, stabs the dead Dorcas in
the face, and then releases her caged parrot to its
sure death.
Morrison’s script for reversing this series of
downward spirals involves a historical and emo-
tional accounting. Joe comes to understand that
his misplaced desire for a young black woman has
to do with his search for his mother. Alice Manfred
admits her failure to love Dorcas because of her
lifelong murderous rage over marital abandon-
ment. Culpability, understanding, love, and sister
friendship bring all three to awareness of the long
history of the lost black daughters. Alice regains
the ability to love, and Violet and Joe once again
whisper nightly under their quilt. When the young
Felice arrives all alone in New York, she finds a sur-
rogate family waiting to nurture her. Unlike Joe,
however, she finds more than the trace of the lost
African parents.
In Jazz Morrison once more mourns the ab-
sence of the African mother and motherland. But
as she mourns the scattered children, she also at-
tests to both the spiritual presence of the African
mother and to her physical incarnation in contem-
porary black parents. Violet will nurture Felice,
and Joe will teach her to dance. Van der Zee’s dead
girl is brought to life in the figures of both Dorcas
and Felice, while Morrison’s jazz composition sug-
gests a potent redemptive grammar for the endless274 Jazz