Movement and Absence of Both People and Ideas in Recitatif

Professor Hope Jennings

English 3060 Introduction to Literary Study

26 July 2018

You become who you hang around. This adage is often said by chastising parents to wayward kids, but can be directly applied in the short story Recitatif, which revolves around the disintegrating friendship of two girls. Those girls, Twyla and Roberta, gradually adopt previously-absent racial prejudices that end up fueling their mutual dislike. This transition is aided by their lack of grounding in any one person since their mothers are essentially nonexistent in their lives. The constant presence of movement and the continual absence of their mothers act as metaphors for how the ideas of those in your general vicinity and culture can diffuse into your own views to fundamentally change who you are.

Roberta and Twyla move around a lot. The story is first set at St. Bonny's, a "shelter" where "state kids" were sent (Mays 239). They were there only a short time yet changed locations constantly, like how they "changed beds every night and for the whole four months we were there we never picked one out as our own permanent bed" (Mays 239). This movement suggests that they weren’t grounded while they were at the shelter; that they, potentially, didn’t have firm stances in their views about the world. For example, Twyla would come to regret some things she did at the shelter, like calling Maggie “Dummy” and “Bow legs” (Mays 240) and later remarking “I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn’t let on” (Mays 240). Thus, from the beginning of the story, there is ambivalence in viewpoints associated with movement, and Morrison uses this theme as a metaphor for how other things change in the story, specifically characters’ mindsets.

During their childhood, Twyla and Roberta were such good friends that when Roberta leaves St. Bonny's (the shelter) Twyla remarked, "I thought I would die in that room of four beds without her [Roberta]" (Mays 243). Roberta even "promised to write every day" (Mays 243). Their friendship here illustrates how there was no indication of any kind of animosity between them over something as simple as the color of their skin, yet this changes abruptly after the time break in the story between the last scene at St. Bonny's and when Twyla is working at Howard Johnson's (Mays 243).

Roberta treats her old friend Twyla at the restaurant with indifference (Mays 243) and explains it as a matter of race years later saying, "Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black—white. You know how everything was" (Mays 247). So, Roberta is obviously acutely aware of racial tension between them, yet Twyla immediately admits her ignorance, "But I didn't know. I thought it was just the opposite. Busloads of blacks and white came into Howard Johnson's together" (Mays 247). Roberta had a paradigm shift while Twyla did not. So how did Roberta's attitude toward Twyla change so drastically from wanting to write Twyla when they were apart to giving her the cold-shoulder at a restaurant?

Morrison would argue that those around Roberta changed her mind. While the story does not give specific scenes from Roberta's life that led to this perspective flip-flop, there are scenes from Twyla's life that give insight into how she formed her opposite attitude, that "blacks were very friendly with whites in those days" (Mays 247). She relates how "they [blacks and whites] roamed together then: students, musicians, lovers, protestors" (Mays 247). What gave Twyla her views of race relations was her experience with how others in society interacted, so it is reasonable that, likewise, Roberta's own experiences helped shape her opposing view that race relations were tense. Her friends, like the “two guys smothered in head and facial hair” (Mays 243), helped mold her views of the world, as when she disregarded Twyla at the diner and she had a “private laugh” with and “gave a smile to” them (Mays 243). This shows Roberta was influenced by who she was around, or, in other words, that her thinking was fluid depending on the context.

Since the contexts and locations changed so much in the story, Morrison is showing the reader just how easy it is for external situations and environments to alter our views. For example, Twyla was “driving along Hudson Street out there by the school they were trying to integrate” when she ran into Roberta protesting. She was not planning on seeing Roberta on her drive, yet this is an important turning point in the story, emphasizing the ease with which important, paradigm-altering events can occur. Going along with the theme of movement, Twyla’s cognitive ambivalence is associated with her physical movement (in her car) when Twyla saw Roberta amongst the anti-bussing protesting group and “drove on, and then changed [her] mind” and “circled the block, slowed down, and honked [her] horn” at Roberta (Mays 248). Here, Twyla’s movement is associated with ambiguity, as she was debating in her mind as she “drove on” whether to stop and alter her course upon seeing Roberta.

Twyla describes the protestors as moving—“Just look…swarming all over the place like they own it” (Mays 248). The diction of “swarming” evokes the idea of shifting around, setting the stage for Twyla’s own views to shift and move. Those protestors eventually “began to rock” Twyla’s car, as if Morrison is making the point with this reference to motion that Twyla’s own attitudes about race relations are moving at that moment, changing from positive to negative with each rock of the car by an angry mob. The association of physical movement with fluidity of opinions is further enhanced when “Roberta didn’t move” and “look[ed] steadily at [Twyla]” (Mays 249) once the police cleared the women around Twyla’s car, similar to Roberta’s view about Twyla that she was “the same little state kid who kicked a poor black lady” (Mays 249) was set in stone now, not moving and shifting.

As the story progresses, Morrison continues to use movement to make the point that those you associate with can shape your own opinions. Twyla’s own anger toward Roberta and toward the bussing issue grew stronger each day she was around the people on her side of the bussing issue, evidenced when Twyla said, “My signs got crazier each day” and her admission that she “had gotten addicted now” (Mays 250). The strongest example of views being shaped is with Maggie in the story. Maggie had fallen out of Twyla’s thoughts altogether until Roberta influenced her into thinking about her as white or black and about what happened to her when she fell (Mays 247). Being in Roberta’s presence influenced Twyla to the point she remarks that, by bringing that topic up, “Roberta had messed up my past” (Mays 248). Roberta even tries to persuade Twyla into sharing her view about what happened to Maggie when she said, “Believe me. It happened. And we were there,” (Mays 247) despite Twyla’s inability to remember (Mays 247). This perfectly illustrates the theme throughout the story of the impressionability others have on one’s viewpoints.

What may have made Roberta and Twyla more fluid in their thinking is their lack of role models. There is no mention whatsoever of any kind of father figure for either of the girls in this short story, which is typical of “most of the characters in Morrison’s fiction” (Schneiderman 283-284). The mother is expected to be more of the family anchor, the “leader” as Schneiderman states, and Morrison shows the mother can often be “unsuccessful in protecting their daughters from destructive influences” (Schneiderman 276). This can certainly be seen in the destructive, friendship-wrenching racial attitudes the girls gradually adopt. With no father figures, their mothers are their only familial role models, and they are essentially not a part of the girls’ lives, only visiting once during their tenure at the shelter (not to mention their mothers’ inadequacies are the reason Twyla and Roberta are there in the first place). Thus, who do they look up to? Who should they emulate? Helane Adams Androne argues that Maggie is an archetypal mother figure for Twyla and Roberta (Mays 134). Indeed, Maggie “worked in the kitchen” (Mays 240), a household task typically associated with the mother, is “old” (how most children view their parents), and is “sandy-colored” (Mays 240), which is a color in-between the dark “black” skin color and the lighter “white” skin color, so Maggie could be a mother figure to either of the racially disparate children.

Another way Maggie resembles a mother figure for the girls is how she doesn’t have a voice, which “silences her presence” (Androne 137). Sandra Kumamoto considers how this silence links the archetypal mother figure Maggie with Twyla and Roberta’s actual (failed) mothers (71). Androne says that the “the female protagonists' continually revised memories of an incident in which Maggie is attacked attempt to negotiate a traumatic mothering situation that is both absent and present” (134). So, if Maggie is the only present mother figure for the girls, their later troubles remembering “what the hell happened to Maggie” (Mays 252) support that Twyla and Roberta weren’t grounded in anyone, had no one to look up to and imitate, and were thus primed to have the tablets of their mind written upon by others. Thus, the lack of motherly figures enhances the theme that others can shape our views of the world, similar to what the presence of movement in the story suggests. This sets the stage for later in the story when the world insidiously molds them into fundamentally different people than they used to be, from girls with a healthy, interracial friendship to sign-holding women on opposite sides of a racially-charged protest. Thus, Morrison is kind of subverting the typical meaning for woman’s friendship in literature that Susana Morris says “emphasizes the ways in which women resist and/or reify hegemonic paradigms of power” (3). Rather, this friendship exemplifies how it is hard to resist dominant cultural paradigms. Discussions of social power discrepancies, like whether poorer children should be bussed to more affluent neighborhoods, often evoke anger responses, which is exactly what happens to Roberta and Twyla.

Anger, indicated by the body’s main stress hormone cortisol, has been shown by researchers to have negative effects on the accuracy of recall (Kazen 28), and anger is littered throughout this short story. A prominent example is when Twyla suggested she wanted to kill her mother three separate times (Mays 241-242) during her visit to the shelter because of her mother’s inaptitude, like looking at a mirror during church, bringing no food on a picnic, and embarrassing her in front of the other shelter girls.

Anger has also been shown to reduce cognitive performance (Kazen 28), so as Twyla and Roberta become angrier they might be more susceptible to not recognizing the effects others are having on their own ideas. The anger only increases throughout the story until an emotional climax is reached with the protesting—the height of the “racial strife” (Mays 248) between them. When Twyla is “jostling people” (Mays 250) and raising emotionally-charged signs like “How would you know?” (Mays 250) specifically meant for Roberta, there are suggestions that Twyla isn’t thinking and processing normally (that the cortisol is affecting her brain), like when other people thought she “was a kook” (Mays 250) and how Twyla admits she “had gotten addicted” to the sign-making (Mays 250). Twyla could have simply walked over to Roberta and insisted that they talk things out, which Roberta probably would have been willing to do, but Twyla persisted in trying to make a statement to Roberta from far away, trying to position herself so that “Roberta and [her] could reach the end of [their] respective lines at the same time…[so they] would face each other” (Mays 250). This action is kind of extreme to do for multiple days and is evidence of the reduced cognitive performance and increased impressionability of one’s views mentioned earlier that anger elicits, thus enhancing the metaphors of movement and the absence of mothers in regards to the impressions others can have on us.

Thus, anger’s mind-numbing effects ties into the girls’ anger about their mothers’ absence because, as Shanna Green Benjamin puts it, they shift their anger and violence away from their mothers, the ones who “birthed yet surrendered them” (104), and towards Maggie (102). So, the changing memories of Maggie, whether she was white or black (Mays 250) and whether they kicked her (Mays 251), could have been fueled by the anger they had towards their mothers, towards the people that shaped and had such a say in their lives without their expressed written consent. This is similar to how the culture in which they lived imposed its own racial prejudices and subsequent anger on them.

The impressions others have on one’s viewpoints are examined in Recitatif using the constant presence of movement and the lack of motherly figures to illustrate fluidity in thinking. Twyla and Roberta moved from shelter to suburb and along with their physical movement their thinking about their relationship with a friend of the opposite race changed drastically. Like with the swarming protestors and Twyla’s rocking car, movement is associated with changing ideas about race and the world as imposed by people in society. The lack of grounding the girls had from having no effective parents left Maggie as the only mother figure, making Twyla and Roberta’s ambivalent memory of her a metaphor for how others change our views of the world if we don’t already have strong, grounded views. Finally, the anger in the story enhances the theme of changing views because anger reduces the mind’s ability to differentiate between other’s views and one’s own. In a world where tensions, racial and otherwise, seem to be at a fever pitch, remaining steadfast in one’s central beliefs yet fluid in appropriate contexts becomes all the more important.

Works Cited:

Benjamin, Shanna Greene. (2013). The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's "Recitatif". Studies in American Fiction, 40(1), 87-106. Retrieved from http://rave.ohiolink.edu/ejournals/article/320292117

Helane Adams, Androne. "Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in Morrison's "Recitatif" and Viramontes's "Tears on My Pillow." MELUS, no. 2, 2007, p. 133. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.libraries.wright.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.30029727&site=eds- live.

Kazen, M., et al. "Inverse relation between cortisol and anger and their relation to performance and explicit memory." Biological Psychology, vol. 91, no. 1, 2012, pp. 28-35. OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center, doi:10.1016/J.BIOPSYCHO.2012.05.006.

Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Kindle, W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.

Morris, Susana M., ""Sisters separated for much too long": Women's Friendship and Power in Toni Morrison's "Recitatif"." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 32, no. 1, 2013, pp. 159-180. OhioLINK Electronic Journal Center, rave.ohiolink.edu/ejournals/article/321861349.

Sandra Kumamoto, Stanley. "Maggie in Toni Morrison's "Recitatif": The Africanist Presence and Disability Studies." MELUS, no. 2, 2011, p. 71. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.libraries.wright.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.23035281&site=eds-live.

Schneiderman, Leo. "Toni Morrison: Mothers and Daughters." Imagination, Cognition and Personality, vol. 14, no. 4, 1994-1995, pp. 273-290. EBSCOhost, doi:10.2190/WB6P-HCBN-03YY-LPBR.