"look. look. look.": The Work of Black Aesthetics in Toni Morrison's Jazz

"Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now."

(Jazz, 229)

Silent protest parade in New York City against the East St. Louis riots, 1917¹

On July 28, 1917, thousands of people crowded New York's Fifth Avenue for the NAACP's Silent Protest Parade, demonstrating against lynching and the East St. Louis race riots. Official mottos and signs—as pictured above—included phrases like: "We are maligned as lazy, and murdered when we work," "Your hands are full of blood," and "Our music is the only American music."² Supporters gathered along the sidewalks, watching the marchers move.

Alice Manfred finds herself among these spectators during a scene in the middle of Toni Morrison's novel Jazz (1992), a story told through the voice of a nameless, omniscient narrator. For three hours, Alice watches the "tide of cold black faces, speechless and unblinking" while the marching drums speak and see for them.³ Alice knows the political context intimately: her niece Dorcas' parents were among the casualties of the East St. Louis riots. But the bodies and tempo of the parade render even more visceral this allconsuming paradox of black life: the fatal threat of black success and the burdened hope of black freedom. Rather than receive the call of the drums, Alice blames them: "No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and roves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played, and both dance to, close and shameless or apart and wild."⁴ For Alice, the lynchings and riots were not about Black World War I veterans who had the audacity to return alive, nor about the apparent threat of Black success in the urbanizing New South and Mid-West. No, this fever of the color line was about music. Jazz, Alice resolves, "made you do unwise and disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law."⁵

The narrator recounts that Alice's niece Dorcas, seven years old and newly orphaned, catches something different, something with no precise form, no slogan, and no past:

[…] although her earliest memory when she arrived from East St. Louis was the parade her aunt took her to, a kind of funeral parade for her mother and father, Dorcas remembered it differently. […] Resisting her aunt's protection and restraining hands, Dorcas thought of that life-below-the-sash as all the life there was. The drums she heard at the parade were only the first part, the first word, of a command. For her the drums were not an all-embracing rope of fellowship, discipline, and transcendence. She remembered them as a beginning, a start of something she looked to complete.⁶

Whereas the parade triggers in Alice a morally righteous response toward racial politics and culture, Dorcas locates an opening beyond the language of solidarity and progress, of labor and citizenship, of racial transcendence. Her earliest memory of New York marks the Silent Parade as a marker of genealogical death. This memory ruptures her past: the drums birth Dorcas into a realm of possibility beyond permission and propriety, beyond Alice's rightful caution and the parents' double death—that of the social kind and of the belief that the prosperous and dutiful ones could up-lift their way out. Dorcas remembers the Silent Parade as a revelation, something newly and divinely known from a place where knowledge is not supposed to come; she wants nothing else but these drums as her own origin. How does it feel to be a problem? Dorcas wants to find out.

The setting of Jazz unfolds through the historical backdrop of black movement, migration, and music in early twentieth century Harlem. The narrator appears to speak as the setting itself. Toni Morrison, when reflecting on her inspiration for the...