This won’t be a “typical” Cole Rush book review. You won’t find a score at the end of it, and I’ll start things off not with a plot summary, but a short plea: just read the book. I’ll also advise you, as many people advised me, to read this story in the “wrong” order. If you’ve been on the fence about trusting me, like the other QTL writers have been for 7+ years, now is the time to do it.
My copy of Toni Morrison’s Recitatif includes an introduction by Zadie Smith. The introduction is fantastic. Consider it a must-read, but only after you’ve read the short story. This warning echoed around me the day I purchased the book at my local shop. Both of the owners and a random customer encouraged reading the story first, and the introduction second. I took their advice, and I now pass it on to you. I also recommend you read the short story and introduction before continuing with my review. It’s best with as little bias as possible, for reasons you’ll understand after reading. There’s something magical about a bookshop moment when three people—two friends and one a complete stranger—offer the same advice on how to consume a story in quick succession. That sort of thing doesn’t happen unless the story in question has something important to say.
Twyla and Roberta meet in St. Bonny’s, a state-run home. Most of the children there are orphans. Twyla and Roberta bond over the fact that they have living mothers. Twyla’s “dances all night,” while Roberta’s suffers from chronic illness. Despite their similarities, the two butt heads across a racial divide and cultural differences. Years pass, and the two women have occasional run-ins, each showcasing their circumstances in a snapshot of their lives. Twyla is working-class, while Roberta has married into wealth. During one meet-up, the two remember a worker at St. Bonny’s named Maggie. They disagree about Maggie: Was she disabled, or simply silent? Was she mistreated or ignored? Did the girls kick her or not? Were they cruel to her or just aloof? The story ends without firm answers, leaving such questions dangling in the air.
Try as I might to grasp onto answers, Morrison had lulled me into the same questioning abyss. I felt like I was with the two characters, unable to remember. And that served as a launchpad to a different question, one that permeates the story despite Morrison never once outright asking it.
Note: I recommend reading Recitatif and Zadie Smith’s introduction (in that order) before reading the rest of this review.
I finished Recitatif with an appreciation for Toni Morrison’s sharp and focused storytelling. I then dove headfirst into Zadie Smith’s introduction. Smith asked a question that had only danced on the fringes of my mind: which girl was black and which was white?
Neither Twyla’s nor Roberta’s race is specifically described in the story. Morrison drops background details and cultural signifiers throughout, but she deliberately leaves out racially coded specifics. The reader never gets an “answer.” I put “answer” in quotes because the question at the core of the book isn’t necessarily the point. You may read Recitatif and conclude that Twyla is white while Roberta is black. Your friend may determine the opposite. But nobody will ever be correct because asking the question is a stepping stone to the larger point of the story.
Remove every racial marker from a pair of people, leaving only their lives, relationships, behaviors, and speech. With only this knowledge, try to determine their race. This is the challenge Morrison poses, and it’s insurmountable. By eliminating the typical signifiers of race, Morrison shows how unstable our assumptions are when race becomes the only lens through which we interpret people. It cannot tell us about a person in any meaningful, deep way without heaps of additional understanding. Morrison removes a core thread of our societal fabric. The absence of racial identifiers turns the mirror on us, as readers. The lack of tacit race language in the story shows us just how much we rely on it day-to-day and, in turn, how ridiculous our presumptions can be. Race tints our perceptions, but it also makes them inherently unreliable.
As someone who reads and reviews books constantly, Recitatif gave me a new perspective on lenses and how we deploy them as readers. Post-Recitatif, I pay closer attention to racial signifiers in the books I read and in how authors describe their characters. What details do they give me, and which do they omit? The presence or absence of such details can completely change my view on a character now, and I’m better for it. Recitatif doesn’t tell us which character is white and which is black. It doesn’t have to—that would ruin the point. Morrison’s brilliance lies in stripping away those markers and watching us scramble to fill the void. Recitatif asks us to sit with our assumptions and contemplate what they reveal. In doing so, Morrison hands us a mirror. What we see there may be unsettling, but that’s reality. We must understand our flaws to fix them. We have to work to be better. That’s why I started with a plea. Not because I want to sound preachy, but because this is the kind of story that works best when you join the conversation. Read it, wrestle with it, and then come back—we’ll talk about it together. That’s the gift of Recitatif.
