Everything is Relative

Lori Bielen                                                            Women Writers and Feminist Theory

Response to “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison

 

     After I finished reading the short story “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison, I was left with some unanswered questions, but not one of those questions was which one of the characters was the Black woman and which one was the White.  I immediately assumed Twyla was the Black woman, primarily because the story was told by Twyla in first person narrative, and being that Toni Morrison is a Black woman, then Twyla must be Black as well.  After reading the supplementary essay “Black Writing, White Reading” by Elizabeth Abel, my jaw nearly dropped to the floor.  You can imagine how stupid I felt for making such a narrow minded assumption.

     Unfortunately, now I can not differentiate whether my assumption that Twyla was the Black woman influenced the rest of my reading of the short story, or if the rest of the story proved my theory that Twyla must be the Black woman to be true, but I never once doubted or had to think twice about who was who in the story.  For example, in the scene where the mothers come to visit St. Bonny’s, Twyla’s mother is portrayed as the embarrassing mother, with a very loud and obnoxious voice and pants that are way too tight, and Roberta’s mother is the religious mother who thinks she is better than Twyla’s mother and refuses to even shake her hand.  This superior attitude displayed by Roberta’s mother is a typical reaction to the actions of Black women by White women that have been demonstrated numerous times throughout history, film, and literature.  That is why it made perfect sense to me and I didn’t second guess it.

     Another reason why I was certain Twyla was the Black character and Roberta was White also took place in the scene where the mothers visit.  Roberta’s mother brought an enormous spread of food for lunch including chicken legs and ham, and Twyla’s mother did not bring anything.  Twyla tries to make sense of this when she says, “The wrong food is always with the wrong people.  Maybe that’s why I got into waitress work later-to match up the right people with the right food.”  I assumed that because chicken legs and ham are stereotypically referred to as “soul food”, and yet it is Roberta’s mom who brought it, must be why Twyla says that it is the wrong food with the wrong people.  In other words, she should be eating that food, not Roberta.  Now I realize it is just because Roberta did not appreciate the food and just let the chicken legs sit there, and Twyla would have greatly enjoyed that lunch.

     What Morrison did in this short story, by never disclosing which race either woman was, was sheer brilliance.  Every one of the stereotypes mentioned in the story, such as pink scalloped socks, tight green slacks, and the adoration of Jimi Hendrix, could have been true for either of the women, regardless of their race.  She displays how the divide between the races has a lot to do with how Blacks and Whites define themselves in opposition to one another, which Roberta and Twyla both do throughout the story.  They go from being very close friends to strangers with absolutely nothing in common in just a few years.  In the supplementary essay, Abel makes an excellent point which helped my reading of the story when she says, “By forcing us to construct racial categories by highly ambiguous social cues, “Recitatif” elicits and exposes the unarticulated racial codes that operate at the boundaries of consciousness.”  My interpretation of this is that everything is relative, and until you have been in someone else’s shoes or have seen a situation through their eyes, you can not possibly understand what they have been through or how they may see things.  Yet by building friendships like these two women have, we can certainly try to understand each other a little bit better.