The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of

Toni Morrison's "Recitatif"

Shanna Greene Benjamin

Studies in American Fiction, Volume 40, Issue 1, Spring 2013, pp. 87-106
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2013.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/507678

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 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  87

The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”
Shanna Greene Benjamin
Grinnell College

Nostalgia. History. Punctuation? Yes. Punctuation—ubiquitous,

understudied, unconscious, undone, present, presentational,
peripatetic, imported, important.
—Jennifer DeVere Brody1

I
n texts where racial categories are elusive or ambiguous, the space between the
binary becomes open terrain for unpacking race as a trope in American literature.
“Recitatif,” Toni Morrison’s first and only short story, is one such text. “Recitatif,”
so named for a recitative style of vocal performance that advances the action of, say,
an opera in much the same way that dialogue advances the action of a play,2 Morrison
charts the adult lives of Twyla Benson and Roberta Fisk—two women brought together as
eight-year-old girls at the St. Bonaventure orphanage—and dramatizes their periodic and
serendipitous interactions during some twenty years after they first meet. By selectively
identifying one woman as white and the other as black, Morrison paints race as a salient
feature of the narrative. By resisting the impulse to reveal which woman identifies with
which race, however, Morrison challenges the ways writers rely on stereotypical racial
codes to describe their characters, compelling readers to interrogate their own supposi-
tions about racial signifiers.3
Race has been, and quite possibly always will be, as central to American literature
as narratives of contact and conquest, self-reliance and self-fashioning, modernism and
multiculturalism. The conflict that was at one time among the Spanish, French, and Na-

Studies in American Fiction 40.1 (2013): 87–106 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
88  Studies in American Fiction

tive Americans was quickly supplanted by tensions between white colonists and black
Africans. As inadequate as the “black-white nexus” is to capturing the complexities of
America’s multiracial past,4 the United States government has traditionally drawn lines
of full citizenship along this binary, regulating educational access, marriage rights, and
political enfranchisement based upon skin color.5 What resulted was the practice of
categorizing persons according to race. The racial signs and symbols permeating much
of early American writing morphed, later, into tropes of blackness where dark skin (or
simply a dark presence) represents the racial anxieties of white America. In Playing in the
Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison probes how a dark or “African-
ist” presence “ignite[s] critical moments of discovery or change in literature” written by
those who are not black.6 If, as Morrison suggests, the presence of a black body signals a
moment of psychological or spiritual awakening for nonblack characters in texts crafted
by nonblack writers, what sort of awakening takes place when Morrison maintains racial
codes but refuses to identify to whom blackness is ascribed?
“Recitatif” helps to answer this query. First published in Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi
Jones) co-edited anthology Confirmation, and subsequently reprinted in Skin Deep: Black
Women and White Women Write about Race, “Recitatif” stands as Morrison’s sole foray into
the short story and boldly takes aim at the ways in which writers rely on stereotypical
racial codes to describe their characters.7 The tale charts the adult lives of protagonists
Twyla Benson and Roberta Fisk as they argue about their memories of the past and debate
shifting politics in the present; they reckon with how race has influenced their perspectives
and prompt readers to consider the same. Race, to be sure, is central to the story—but
not in the way readers might expect. Morrison states, from the outset, that one woman
is black and the other is white, but she never reveals which is which.
The impulse to “solve” the racial conundrum permeating “Recitatif” reveals an
underlying theme central to Morrison’s short story. Readers want to be able to categorize
characters one way or another, to “know” race, and they will go to great lengths to assign
racial categories if the writer fails to do it for them. When readers focus on the opposing
ends of the racial spectrum, the either / or, the black-and-white of the story, they lose a
crucial layer of meaning imbedded within liminal figures and interstitial narratives that
defy classification along oppositional discursive paradigms. In “Recitatif,” the interstitial
narrative between Twyla and Roberta is the story of Maggie: the “kitchen woman”8 who
functions as an imperfect yet “archetypal mother figure.”9 I argue that by embodying
the elusive truth behind their troubled and traumatic pasts, Maggie inspires Twyla and
Roberta to collaboratively rewrite their shared history.
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  89

By remembering Maggie, Twyla and Roberta revisit the trauma of their past,
which revolves around being “dumped” at St. Bonny’s orphanage by mothers too sick or
too social to care for them (89). Twyla’s and Roberta’s recollections of Maggie’s story unite
them in a shared history rooted in violence; their slippery relationship with the past—what
they remember, what they forget, and whether is it possible for them to reconcile their
conflicting memories—captures the contemporary legacy of America’s racialized past. As
an allegory for black / white relations, their conflicting versions of the Maggie incident
represent the residual, racialized perspectives precipitating from America’s slave past.
Silent and bow-legged, ever-present yet readily marginalized, Maggie symbolizes the
silent truth imbedded within the parenthetical narratives of America’s racialized history.
If Maggie symbolizes this parenthetical past, then Twyla and Roberta represent
the racial binaries circumscribing it. As an “experiment in the removal of all racial codes
from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is cru-
cial,”10 “Recitatif” mines the space between the binary to unravel race as a literary trope.
As the first essay to look solely at Maggie’s function in “Recitatif,” “The Space that Race
Creates” centralizes Maggie’s symbolic function to move parenthetical perspectives—the
existent but subordinated elements of racial discourse—from secondary or superfluous
to central and pivotal.
Twentieth-century criticism reifies readings of “Recitatif” along racial binaries by
focusing on the racial codes that supposedly label Twyla and Roberta as white or black
(although not necessarily in that order). In a slow yet steady trickle of criticism initiated
by Elizabeth Abel’s reflective “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of
Feminist Interpretation,” scholars have considered how Morrison’s manipulation of
racial codes in “Recitatif” affects readers, teachers, and discourse across disciplines. For
example, in “Decoding for Race: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Being White, Teaching
Black,” Ann Rayson explains how so-called “giveaway clues” mark Twyla and Roberta as
white and black respectively; but in so doing, Rayson simply reinscribes the racial binaries
Morrison attempts to dismantle.11 In “Race/[Gender]: Toni Morrison’s <<Recitatif>>,”
David Goldstein-Shirley offers a more complex reading of the story as a “framed tale” but
ultimately yields to the seductive yet slippery business of categorizing the protagonists
racially.12 Rayson and Goldstein-Shirley’s readings are limited in their efficacy because
they rely on what Abel describes as “[racial] codes that function symmetrically for black
women and for white women,” codes that preclude any absolute correlation between
race and the personal attributes of each character in the story.13 Abel defines these sym-
metrically functioning codes as images, signs, and symbols that not only mark race, but
also cause black and white readers to interpret similar stereotypes in opposite ways:
90  Studies in American Fiction

white audiences read each stereotype as “black” and black audiences read the same
stereotype as “white.”14 But by focusing on these codes, on the black-and-white of the
story, Abel and scholars like her miss the brilliance of Morrison’s experiment. As much a
case study as it is a short story, “Recitatif” deconstructs the black / white binary to reveal
the limitations of America’s rigid racial discourse; furthermore, in challenging race as a
literary trope, Morrison’s short story gracefully names the prerequisites for interracial
humanist connection.
If twentieth-century studies of “Recitatif” focus primarily on extremes—the
white and black ends of the binary—instead of plumbing the depths of the murky space
in between, twenty-first century scholarship on “Recitatif” better explicates how the
story works on our preconceptions about race. For instance, referencing postmodernist
understandings of race, the final chapter of Gene Jarrett’s Deans and Truants: Race and
Realism in African American Literature includes a discussion of “Recitatif” that highlights
how the story complicates “racial politics” and racial codes to expand the discussion
of “anomalous” black texts (those featuring white protagonists or deracialized themes)
Jarrett develops throughout the book.15 For all of the interesting ways Jarrett positions
“Recitatif” along a spectrum of anomalous black texts from the nineteenth century to
the present, he nonetheless concentrates on Twyla and Roberta, much like Rayson and
Goldstein-Shirley before him, who mention the kitchen lady Maggie tangentially if at all.
These scholars seem to know that Maggie is important, but her superficial treatment in
published scholarship suggests that critics are not sure why or how Maggie’s presence
enhances the story.
By turning a critical eye to the kitchen woman’s role, the most recent work on
“Recitatif” more fully explicates Maggie’s significance to the text. Sandra Kumamoto
Stanley’s “Maggie in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’: The Africanist Presence in Disability
Studies”16 and Helane Adams Androne’s “Revised Memories and Colliding Identities:
Absence and Presence in Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Viramonte’s ‘Tears on My Pillow,’”
are the major voices in a very small body of “Recitatif” scholarship that center on Maggie.
In her insightful essay, Adams Androne offers the most groundbreaking study to date
of the protagonists, Maggie, and the story’s assorted maternal figures. Specifically, she
delineates how Maggie functions as an “archetypal mother” who simultaneously embod-
ies the trauma of the past while offering the possibility for healing in the present.17 (The
comparative nature of Adams Androne’s analytically rich study necessarily truncates the
amount of critical space that can be dedicated to “Recitatif”.) My essay picks up where
Adams Androne leaves off by fulfilling the promise of Maggie as central, not peripheral,
to Morrison’s short story. Specifically, I add to the critical landscape a sustained analysis
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  91

of how Maggie punctuates America’s grammar of race. My investigation of Maggie’s

function extends the major arguments surrounding Maggie—particularly those related
to racial binaries, historical memory, and physical disability—by prompting a consid-
eration of how Twyla’s and Roberta’s narratives are structurally intertwined instead of
thematically disparate.18
This essay posits that Maggie embodies a shared narrative that provides common
ground for the protagonists to rewrite, even if they are unable to resolve, their conflicting
versions of history. Redirecting the scholarly gaze to Maggie allows readers to appreci-
ate how parenthetical, interstitial storylines that exist between racial binaries inspire
interracial connection and communication, not merely contact and conquest. Maggie,
therefore, moves readers to see past the divisive quality of such binaries and instead gaze
into a central space of discursive complexity where the narratives constructed about race
become collectively interrogated, not unilaterally accepted.

The Body Remembers

In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Hortense Spillers defines an American grammar: a

system of talking about ethnicity grounded in the experience of stolen Africans, where
the trauma enacted against the black female body and subsequent degendering of the
black female subject become the point of reference for modern conceptions of whiteness
and femaleness.19 Spillers’ essay, written a few years after the 1983 publication of “Reci-
tatif,” claims key, strategic territory in black feminist studies because it connects slavery,
black women’s bodies, and syntax to describe how race and gender are woven into the
very systems that structure communication. In this tradition of connecting America’s
racial discourse to systems of linguistic composition, Morrison’s “Recitatif” challenges
the adequacy of America’s grammar of race—that is, the system of words and imagery
that dictates how race has traditionally been constructed in literature—by inserting a
parenthetical element, a person really, who challenges the supposedly superfluous qual-
ity of the parenthesis itself.
The deaf and mute “sandy-colored” woman “with legs like parentheses” (90),
Maggie physically and thematically provides a common ground for the protagonists to
explore their conflicting memories of a shared history. As dependents surrendered to
the state, Roberta and Twyla rely on one another for strength and support as they deal
with life as orphans; as adults, they depend on one another to figure out “[w]hat the hell
happened to Maggie?” (110). As dependents who depend on one another at first for emo-
tional support, and later, for personal affirmation, Twyla and Roberta constitute the core
92  Studies in American Fiction

of the story: to wit, the subject and predicate of the symbolic “sentence” that “Recitatif”
represents. But “Recitatif” is not, metaphorically speaking, a declarative, imperative, or
exclamatory “sentence.” Although there are certainly sentiments stated, actions com-
manded, and feelings shouted, the question that concludes the story—“[w]hat the hell
happened to Maggie?”—situates “Recitatif” as an interrogative—a story structured as a
query that begs the question: what is being asked and to whom is this question directed?
The interrogative qualities of “Recitatif” invoke a tradition of call-and-response
that links the story to African-American cultural practices while honoring the question-
and-answer feature of the non-rhetorical interrogatory. In other words, questions call for
answers. And typically, those answers arrive in a separate sentence following the ques-
tion. But unlike an interrogative sentence followed by a discrete declaratory sentence
issuing an answer, the answer posed by “Recitatif” is contained within the story, the
“sentence,” itself. To find the answer, however, one must engage in a reflective practice
that considers how otherwise castoff parenthetical moments help to answer the question
implicit in the tale.
A kitchen worker at St. Bonny’s, Maggie’s interstitial narrative contains answers
to the implied question driving “Recitatif”: if memory is so unstable, how can blacks and
whites ever communicate effectively about the history they share? This is an appropriate
question for a story by Morrison, a writer who regularly engages with history and memory
in her fiction and non-fiction alike. Both Beloved and A Mercy revisit slavery to prompt
contemporary readers to reflect on history-as-artifact versus history-as-experience; in “A
Bench by the Road,” Morrison ruminates on how her fiction functions as an artifact that
claims space for the marginalized histories of slaves and their descendants. She reflects
on the fact that “There is no place you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to
summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us
of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it.”20 As a result, she
posits “the book” as an appropriate “memorial” to commemorate the past.21 Morrison’s
concern with memory and history also emerge in “Recitatif,” which instead of narrating a
story about the past, fictionalizes the process blacks and whites must undertake to engage
with the past, converse about difficult histories, and come to terms with their diverging
recollections of what came before.
The St. Bonaventure orchard is a site ideally situated for the exploration of the
space between black and white racial binaries. “Recitatif” begins in the orchard, a liminal
space between the “real” world outside of St. Bonny’s and the orphanage itself, spatially
establishing the theoretical notion that parenthetical, interstitial narratives create space
to explore tensions between binaries. The orchard, a refuge from the grown-up concerns
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  93

the girls are unable to navigate on their own, is the place that the memory of Maggie
first emerges. Within this domain, a physical and developmental boundary between the
orphanage and the hazy adult world emerges; the “big girls [ . . . ] played radios and
danced with each other,” enjoying a coterie of budding womanhood forged by “lipstick
and eyebrow pencil” (89). As the younger girls look on, the older ones defend their ter-
ritory by chasing the prepubescents away, pulling their hair or twisting their arms. Con-
sisting of “Two acres, four maybe, of these little apple trees,” the orchard is a centerpiece
of Twyla’s dreams: as she remembers her life at St. Bonny’s, she seems unconsciously
drawn back to this space. “Empty and crooked like beggar women when [she] first came
to St. Bonny’s but fat with flowers when [she] left,” the blossoming trees have yet to bear
their fruit (89). The image of the blossoming trees foreshadows the budding relationship
between Twyla and Roberta detailed in the remainder of the story. With biblical symbol-
ism that is obvious but nonetheless worth mentioning, the apple orchard prompts more
than a knowledge of the existence of good and evil, two absolutes at opposite ends of a
moral spectrum. It prompts a consideration of the truth that lies somewhere in between.
As the site of the first memory our narrator Twyla conveys, the blossoming apple
orchard referenced in the opening pages of the story symbolizes the emotional coming-
of-age that Twyla and Roberta experience during the remainder of the tale. Even though
neither woman is, at first, ready to confront the memories evoked by the orchard and
the harm done to Maggie there, the orchard, like Maggie, is situated in between two
spheres—one public and potentially dangerous, the other private and ostensibly safe—
and as such, replicates the warring perspectives that characterize Twyla’s and Roberta’s
memories of Maggie.
This initial description of Maggie in the orchard frames Twyla’s version of history,
a necessary point of departure for Roberta’s subsequent take on the incident. As Twyla
reminisces, thinking back to the days at St. Bonny’s through a nostalgic, rose-tinted lens,
she recalls the Maggie incident very matter-of-factly:

Maggie fell down [in the orchard] once. The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses.
And the big girls laughed at her. We should have helped her up, I know, but we were
scared of those girls with lipstick and eyebrow pencil. Maggie couldn’t talk. The kids said
she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and
sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. I don’t know if she was nice or not. I just
remembered the legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked. [ . . . ] She
wore this really stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with ear flaps—and she wasn’t much taller
than we were. A really awful little hat. Even for a mute, it was dumb—dressing like a kid
and never saying anything at all. (89–90)
94  Studies in American Fiction

Without reason to doubt her credibility, Twyla’s recollection of the “Maggie thing” (102)
becomes a “master narrative” against which readers (re)evaluate successive versions of
the incident. Even though Morrison could have elected to have Maggie’s story recounted
by Roberta, her choice to have Twyla tell the tale highlights the formation of history as
a construction. In the same way that certain histories omit facts that contradict the par-
ticular story they wish to tell,22 narrators, too, have personal motivations and biases that
inform their construction of the narratives they relate. So while it may be impossible to
ever know the truth behind the “Maggie thing,” the versions Twyla and Roberta generate
together expand Twyla’s initial version of the story—a master narrative, if you will—to
accommodate information that has been overlooked or omitted. Twyla’s master narrative
would be gospel if it weren’t for Roberta: the woman whose alternative version of the tale,
rendered from the other end of the racial spectrum, operates as an oppositional narrative
that creates space for new considerations of what happened to Maggie. Roberta upends
the declarative quality of Twyla’s master narrative by challenging Twyla’s version and
questioning her recollection.
Twyla’s function as our initial source of Maggie’s story is as important as her
description of events, for the picture she paints of Maggie’s physical limitations captures
the complexities of history’s presence in the present. In other words, the raced, gendered,
aged, disabled, serviceable past that marks the “Other” and makes way for cultural and
social hierarchies. Maggie is the long history of American racial disenfranchisement
embodied in the present. As both the personification of and symbol for this history, Mag-
gie functions on multiple levels in “Recitatif.” “Recitatif” features three vignettes where
conversations between Twyla and Roberta take center stage. The call-and-response quality
of this recitative requires listening and speaking from the participants. Because Maggie
is mute and presumably deaf, she cannot participate in the dialogue. Therefore, her story
and the history she embodies become marginalized. Unable to speak and, presumably
unable to hear, Maggie represents how the unappealing elements of history are actively
marginalized—relegated to parenthetical phrases—and therefore unable to significantly
alter the “master narrative” and entrenched racial grammar that drives larger conversa-
tions about constructions of the past.
At the same time, Maggie represents the shared past and common narrative
around which Twyla and Roberta’s subsequent conversations crystallize. Maggie lacks
the ability to speak for herself and describe the incident firsthand. Subsumed by self-
denial, Twyla and Roberta invoke Maggie’s story as the cornerstone of their collective
history. Maggie’s story, in turn, informs how the protagonists craft their self-image as
adults. The persistence of the “Maggie thing” in the lives of Twyla and Roberta reveals the
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  95

permanence of the past in the present and the dangers of speaking definitively for a past
that ostensibly has no voice. Maggie’s role as both a marginalized history unable to speak
for itself, and a historical narrative conjured to serve persons in the present, first emerges
during the protagonists’ run-in at the grocery store. At this, their second serendipitous
meeting after leaving St. Bonny’s, the women delight in seeing one another, giggling
at their memories of “Big Bozo” when “just in a pulse beat, twenty years disappeared
and all of it came rushing back” (99). The conversation is easy, dominated by marriage,
children, and work updates—until they get to the subject of Maggie.
The tension between the characters builds exponentially immediately after Twyla
relates: “I don’t remember a hell of a lot from those days, but Lord, St. Bonny’s is as clear
as daylight. Remember Maggie? The day she fell down and those gar girls laughed at
her?” (101). Roberta’s response is immediate and strong: “Roberta looked up from her
salad and stared at me. ‘Maggie didn’t fall,’ she said” (101). While the women disagree
about the events of the past, readers begin to question Twyla’s initial description of Mag-
gie. To Roberta’s retort, Twyla responds:

“Yes, she did. You remember.”

“No, Twyla. They knocked her down. Those girls pushed her down and tore her
clothes. In the orchard.”
“I don’t—that’s not what happened.”
“Sure it is. In the orchard. Remember how scared we were?”
“Wait a minute. I don’t remember any of that.” (101)

The struggle to remember the defining moment in their history at St. Bonny’s upsets
Twyla, whose internal monologue readers have access to. She thinks to herself: “The Mag-
gie thing was troubling me. [ . . . ] Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that
business about Maggie. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?” (102–103). Twyla’s
desire to stabilize her memory of Maggie, to fix and ground it so it feels firm in her mind,
suggests the power of the past to influence how she remembers and understands her-
self: as a decent little girl and as an upstanding lady with a past that, while blemished,
became flawed through no fault of her own. An affirming or innocuous past? All is well.
A contradictory or ruptured memory? Everything is called into question. Because if the
past we remember isn’t how it really was, what else could we be overlooking? This is
precisely how Twyla feels. Until her conversation with Roberta, Twyla is confident that
her memories of St. Bonny’s are accurate. After all, she admits that despite everything
she has forgotten about that period in her life, “St. Bonny’s is as clear as daylight” (101).
96  Studies in American Fiction

When Roberta asserts an alternative version of “[t]he Maggie thing,” she fractures the
bedrock of Twyla’s memory, and challenges her sense of the past as fixed and firm.
But after their second meeting, it becomes clear that Twyla is not the only one
still wrestling with the memory of Maggie. The third time they meet, Twyla, driving
down the street toward her son’s school, sees Roberta among a group of protestors pick-
eting against school busing. Twyla, who had thought school busing “was a good thing
until [she] heard it was a bad thing,” (103) strikes up a conversation with Roberta, who
is against sending her children to school “out of the neighborhood” (104). Twyla and
Roberta stand on opposing sides of an argument about what is best for their children.
Without warning, the conversation turns to Maggie:

“Maybe I am different now, Twyla. But you’re not. You’re the same little state kid
who kicked a poor old black lady when she was down on the ground. You kicked a black
lady and you have the nerve to call me a bigot.” [ . . . ]
“She wasn’t black,” I said.
“Like hell she wasn’t, and you kicked her. We both did. You kicked a black lady who
couldn’t even scream.”
“Liar!”
“You’re the liar! Why don’t you just go on home and leave us alone, huh?”
She turned away and I skidded away from the curb. (105)

Here, in their second of three conversations about the kitchen lady, Maggie becomes
raced. According to Twyla’s initial remembrance of the orchard assault, Maggie is “sandy-
colored” and racially ambiguous. Beige, buff, or “natural,” Maggie’s neutral skin tone
places her inside the racial binary yet outside of it. On the one hand, she looks, racially,
to be somewhere in between: not quite white and not quite black. On the other hand,
she becomes deracialized, at least as “either / or” racial categories go. But by assigning
skin color to Maggie during an episode when the text suggests that picketing upholds
racially-inflected political alliances, Roberta re-writes Maggie’s story to assert control over
a memory that is becoming increasingly unstable. Moreover, Roberta’s implication of both
women in the act denies Twyla the freedom to imagine herself an innocent bystander to
the attack of a woman who personifies a history that is unable to speak for itself. This
history, mute and possibly deaf, is a grownup dressed in kid’s clothes: developmentally
arrested, stuck in time, donning apparel inappropriate for its age. The image of Maggie
dressing like a child is important, too, because it illustrates how dressing old stories in
new clothes does little to bring them into fashion.
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  97

The alternative readings of Maggie that result from Twyla’s and Roberta’s
arguments point to how racial binaries and the opposing perspectives they represent
can create space for new considerations of parenthetical narratives. On one side of this
binary is Twyla’s master narrative, which casually mentions early on that “Maggie fell
down [in the orchard] once” (89). In this version, rendered by Twyla based on her initial
recollection, Maggie’s fall was purely accidental: she “fell down.” In the second version,
after Twyla confidently asserts that her memories of St. Bonny’s are “as clear as daylight,”
Roberta posits a counter-narrative that implicates “those girls with lipstick and eyebrow
pencil” (i.e., the “gar girls,” a sarcastic play on gargoyles) for knocking Maggie down and
tearing her clothes (101). In the third instance, Twyla and Roberta are already engaged in
a contentious debate over the racial politics of school busing when Roberta claims that
they were both complicit in Maggie’s assault: “[ . . . ] you kicked her. We both did. You
kicked a black lady who couldn’t even scream” (105).
The conflict between Twyla and Roberta escalates in intensity as “Recitatif” pro-
gresses. Each time the protagonists engage, Twyla’s initial description of Maggie’s “fall”
seems less plausible and her master narrative becomes more unreliable. It is through this
incessant engagement between the protagonists, and the resulting unraveling of Twyla’s
initial account, that Maggie’s story evolves into a critique of histories that serve the needs
of individuals instead of mining a path toward the truth. Without a counterpoint to Twyla’s
master narrative (who for reasons unknown is our sole source for information about
Roberta, Maggie, and the mothers) we are left with one version of the “Maggie thing”;
Roberta’s counterpoint (although it, too, is imagined) encourages Twyla’s self-discovery
even though it initially wracks her with guilt. Their conflict proves that the truth is not
embedded along the binary, in their individual remembrances of Maggie. Instead, it exists
somewhere in between, housed in an interstitial space that, because it cannot speak its
own truth, must rely on those with agency to parse the parenthetical—the existing but
contained narratives—for the unuttered truths they contain and inspire.

Re-membering For(e)mother/s

A peripheral figure at best, Maggie is physically described as the kitchen lady with “legs
like parentheses”: an apt description for the woman who ultimately performs the work
of that very punctuation in the story. As a symbolic and embodied parenthetical phrase,
Maggie cues readers to pause and consider how subordinated voices are indispensable to
complicating master narratives. Maggie, a specter of marginalized histories in “Recitatif,”
haunts the plot as the bow-legged kitchen lady who troubles the relationship Twyla and
98  Studies in American Fiction

Roberta attempt to forge as adults. Jennifer DeVere Brody’s Punctuation: Art, Politics, and
Play offers an extraordinarily useful critical bridge between Maggie’s physical description
and her symbolic function in the text. Brody reads “dots, ellipses, hyphens, quotation
marks, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points through the trans and / or interdisci-
plinary lens of performance studies” to reveal how “punctuation plays a key role in our
quotidian movements and missteps by stopping, staying, and delaying the incessant flows
of information to which we are subject.”23 These marks on the page, Brody suggests, are
signs and symbols that serve as syntactical signposts, performing backbreaking gram-
matical work with grace and ease. The lines, dots, and curves delicately craft the flow of
text and meaning. As a form of text-traffic control, punctuation manages the power and
pace with which written material is expressed and understood.
Consider, as an illustration of the performative power of punctuation, the title of
Brody’s opening section: “For(e)thought: Pre/Script: gesturestyluspunctum,” in which
she “argues and plays with points—specifically points made about punctuation,” and
considers the racial implications of considering how these black marks mar the page.24
This opening is not only “Forethought”—the section that maps out the monograph
as a whole—but it is also “For thought”—a generative gesture that invites readers to
participate in the meaning-making process. After the colon (a permeable dual-dotted
passageway indicating that the subsequent material amplifies the portion preceding it)
is the rule—that is, if you read the first word as “prescript.” Read “Pre/Script” with the
slash in place, and you have an echo of the opening reference to forethought, as the pre-
fix “pre” alerts readers to the fact that this “script,” this writing, is preliminary. Then, a
second colon indicates the deferral (or accumulation?) of meaning in the compound word
“gesturestyluspunctum.” Here we have “gesture” (the move), “stylus” (the writing), and
“punctum” (the marking). Together, these words represent the very core of Brody’s thesis:
how markings move writing. The title of this section, “Re-membering For(e)mother/s,”
riffing on Brody’s approach to punctuation as a site of play, reads Maggie as the physi-
cal embodiment of parenthetical narratives. Secondary and seemingly superfluous, it is
Maggie who compels Twyla and Roberta to re-member their mothers by prompting them
to piece together familiar recollections and repressed emotions. At the same time, in this
restructured mosaic of the past, Maggie is the inept foremother and shameful history
Twyla and Roberta are unable to disown, but to whom they are unwittingly beholden.
Maggie, then, becomes the unwanted surrogate at whom Twyla and Roberta direct their
repressed grief over their mothers’ abandonment.
To understand how Maggie’s parenthetical positionality works within the racial
grammar of “Recitatif,” an exploration of its foundations in punctuation-as-practice is
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  99

in order. Standard definitions of the grammatical function of parentheses, here taken

from The Associated Press Guide to Punctuation by René J. Cappon, and Karen Elizabeth
Gordon’s The New Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the
Eager, and the Doomed, offer a framework for decoding Maggie’s parenthetical function in
“Recitatif.” On the one hand, Cappon writes, “Parentheses preside over the peripheral—
information not always trivial but never vital: asides and afterthoughts, comments, bits
of background.”25 He recommends that readers “[d]rop these snippets into the relevant
sentence, without, however, disturbing its grammar and syntax” and use them to “clarify
an ambiguous pronoun and to translate technical and obscure terms into everyday Eng-
lish.”26 Ultimately, however, Cappon concedes: “But they are distracting, and should be
avoided when possible.”27 There is little to promote the value of parentheses in Cappon’s
definition, especially when he concludes that “[c]ommas and dashes can also do the job
of parentheses, often more effectively.”28
On the other hand, Gordon envisions the parenthesis as punctuation that “pal[s]
around in pairs to enact their literal meaning taken from the Greek: a putting in beside.”29
This part of Gordon’s definition constitutes the two most appealing components of how
parentheses work, at least as far as this essay is concerned: first is the acknowledgment of
parentheses as punctuation that relies on pairs; second is the alignment of the parenthetical
phrase as that which comes in alongside the “out-there-for-everyone-to-see-main-street
of the sentence.”30 By “enticingly embrac[ing] extra material of all sorts, from unwel-
come long-winded digressions to amusing crisp asides; wisecracks and other comments;
and an amplification or explanation in the sentence in which the parenthetical prose is
ensconced,” the parenthesis, as Gordon describes it, is an ideal space to house thematic
rupture while still containing it within the grammatical system dictating its parameters.31
If the relationship between Twyla and Roberta is structured according to an American
racial grammar—a grammar that pits white against black in a racialized binary—then
the inclusion of parentheses offers a syntactical occasion to pause and consider how the
interstitial narrative within the parentheses relates to the “master” narrative surrounding
it. But like Spillers’ American grammar book, gender remains a necessary consideration,
as the labia-like typeface outlining parenthetical parameters creates a wholly woman-
centered space for Twyla and Roberta to come to terms with the reality of their lives as
motherless mothers.
Morrison challenges Cappon’s notion that parentheses merely “preside over
the peripheral” by allowing Twyla’s and Roberta’s responses to Maggie to amplify the
dominant narrative of their evolving relationship. Specifically, Maggie’s parenthetical
narrative and the conversations it engenders point to an interstitial space where vital
100  Studies in American Fiction

details relating to Twyla and Roberta’s background reside. Certainly, the story is about
two orphans; but it is also about how those orphans feel about the mothers who aban-
doned them. It seems, therefore, that the other common narrative Twyla and Roberta
share is the truth of their origins: not just the facts about their time at St. Bonny’s, but
also the residual trauma of their stay. Here, the interstitial narrative housed within the
parenthetical space, a narrative characterized by stories of St. Bonny’s and Maggie, has
the power to widen or narrow the emotional distance between the two women depend-
ing upon how these memories are used and understood.
Our understanding of each encounter between Twyla and Roberta pivots on the
tone of the mother-centered refrain that concludes each of their meetings. The variations
in tone from one refrain to the next are crucial to tracking the dissonance and harmony
Twyla and Roberta experience together as adults. In their first meeting at the Howard
Johnson’s, Twyla, embarrassed when Roberta responds with chilly indifference at her
attempts to reconnect, concludes their meeting with a prickly: “‘How’s your mother?’”
(96). Nervous, “[Roberta] swallowed. ‘Fine,’ [Roberta] said. ‘How’s yours?’ ‘Pretty as a
picture,’ [Twyla] said and turned away” (96). Twelve years later in their second meeting,
the tone of their refrain softens. They promise to do a better job staying in touch and each
asks, with great sincerity, about the other’s mother:

“By the way. Your mother. Did she ever stop dancing?”
[Twyla] shook [her] head. “No. Never.”
Roberta nodded.
“And yours? Did she ever get well?”
“She smiled a tiny sad smile. “No. She never did. Look, call me, okay?” (102)

The third time they meet, on opposite sides of the picket line, all it takes is Twyla’s query
“IS YOUR MOTHER WELL?” hoisted on a picket sign, to keep Roberta from returning to
the protest “for the rest of the day or any day after” (106–07). When Twyla and Roberta
feel vulnerable or angry, these refrains are voiced with an anger that expands the space
between them; when voiced with a spirit of compassion or intimacy, such moments
bring them closer together. The repetition of this mother-centered narrative shifts from
individual expressions of maternal longing and evolves into a chorus where together,
the protagonists voice the lingering pain of abandonment in shifting tones that reflect
intermittent emotional flux.
The text of these refrains points to the mothers (i.e., “How’s your mother?” or “IS
YOUR MOTHER WELL?”) but the subtext points to Maggie. Maggie and her memory
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  101

reside in the interstitial space between parentheses and between the protagonists who
represent the binary comprising the arcs. The space between Twyla and Roberta, black
and white women who represent opposite ends of a racial binary and signify opposing
ends of the parenthesis as sign and symbol—( )—is filled with memories of Maggie not as
a superfluous presence, but as another maternal memory that keeps Twyla and Roberta
vacillating between friendship and enmity, connectedness and detachment.
Two passages, the first voiced by Twyla after the busing incident and the sec-
ond articulated by Roberta after the Christmas encounter, illustrate how their maternal
memories shape their memories of Maggie. With her son Joseph’s graduation from high
school on the horizon, Twyla thinks back to the picketing incident. She reflects on Ro-
berta’s assertion during their disagreement over school busing, that Maggie was not only
black, but also that they had participated in her assault. In the process, Twyla concludes
that Maggie and her mother have become conflated in her mind:

I tried to reassure myself about the race thing for a long time until it dawned on me that
the truth was already there, and Roberta knew it. I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with
the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to
help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and
dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. Nobody
who could tell you anything important that you could use. Rocking, dancing, swaying as
she walked. And when the gar girls pushed her down and started roughhousing, I knew
she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me—and I was glad about that. (108)

Then, after an undisclosed number of years, Roberta runs into Twyla once again and
expresses feelings as intense and reflective as those cited above. Twyla, out and about,
stops at a diner for “a cup of coffee and twenty minutes of peace” before going home to
tie up lose ends “before Christmas Eve” (108). Then, donning “a silvery evening gown
and dark fur coat,” in walks Roberta, who wastes no time picking up where their last
difficult encounter left off:

“I have to tell you something, Twyla. I made up my mind if I ever saw you again, I’d
tell you.”
“I’d just as soon not hear anything, Roberta. It doesn’t matter now, anyway.”
“No,” she said. “Not about that.” [ . . . ] “It’s about St. Bonny’s and Maggie.”
“Oh, please.”
“Listen to me. I really did think she was black. I didn’t make that up. I really thought
so. But now I can’t be sure. I just remember her as old, so old. And because she couldn’t
102  Studies in American Fiction

talk—well, you know, I thought she was crazy. She’d been brought up in an institution
like my mother was and like I thought I would be too. And you were right. We didn’t
kick her. It was the gar girls. Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to
hurt her. I said we did it, too. You and me, but that’s not true. And I don’t want you to
carry that around. It was just that I wanted to do it so bad that day—wanting to is doing
it.” (109)

Maggie is the “dancing mother,” the sick mother, the empty shell. She is the kitchen lady
who presumably cooks, cleans, and serves. She provides sustenance but no useful ad-
vice. Any care she expresses is wholly ineffable. She is the target of Twyla and Roberta’s
vitriol because they are unable to confront their mothers directly and choose to project
their anger toward and violence onto Maggie. Since they take no action when the gar
girls push Maggie down, Twyla and Roberta make up for failing to act by targeting this
violence toward Maggie’s memory and the narrative history that accompanies it. Twyla
and Roberta think that in order to heal, they must create a new narrative that gives them
agency in a situation where they previously had none. But the sense of wholeness this false
narrative produces is fleeting because it is the active denial of events as they were—an
intentional corruption of their shared history.
“Recitatif” suggests that genuine racial reconciliation is only possible when
Twyla and Roberta reject the puffed-up, self-serving narratives that expand the space
between them and instead opt for a condensed, cooperative narrative between the racial
oppositions they embody. The protagonists must engage in relentless self-reflection to
willingly release their adherence to individual narratives in the service of a collectively
constituted cross-racial one. Literally the representation of a person gazing into a mirror
reflecting her exact inverse, the image of a person engaging in self-reflection symbolically
mimics the duplicate markings that denote the parenthesis: ( ). And in much the same
way that self-reflection draws the interpretive gaze inward, parentheses draw attention
to the interstitial narrative inside its parameters. Thus, Maggie’s parenthetical body not
only encompasses the interstitial narrative that Twyla and Roberta collectively recreate
in their ongoing dialogues about what happened to the kitchen lady, but Maggie’s story
also prompts the self-reflection required to ignite healing between the protagonists as
they struggle to distill life events through the filter of personal experience.

Conclusion: From the Unspeakable Unspoken to the Spoken Unspeaking

The power of parentheses to create space for alternative narratives, while containing them
in a structure that maintains the underlying grammar of a sentence, defines the difficult
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  103

and seemingly contradictory relationship between Maggie’s two primary functions in

the text. She is the forgotten and overlooked, yet enriching textual detail that may or
may not be read as part of the sentence (story) proper; at the same time she marks space
claimed for the inclusion of her own marginalized narrative. In essence, Maggie symbol-
izes an absent history while embodying the space for its inclusion. As “still a virtually
unspeakable thing,” Maggie represents race—the thing that Morrison describes as one
of those “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” in her lecture of the same name.32 Maggie is
the racial memory unconsciously invoked every time a reader attempts to identify Twyla
and Roberta racially. By consistently erupting in Twyla’s and Roberta’s conversations,
Maggie remains the unwieldy history that, despite the protagonists’ best efforts, cannot
be contained or controlled.
As witnesses to Maggie’s assault, Twyla and Roberta become custodians of
Maggie’s story, ideally in a way that respects its complexity. At first, the trauma of their
abandonment is too strong. Instead of sympathizing with Maggie, they enact ongoing
violence against Maggie’s memory to recast the feelings of powerlessness they experienced
as children. But as time goes on, their recollections of the Maggie incident change. Instead
of being directed outward toward the kitchen lady, Twyla’s and Roberta’s conversations
turn inward to consider the residual effects of their childhood trauma on their personal
development. The following account, offered by Twyla and Roberta as children, explains
why the protagonists project their personal suffering onto Maggie:

“But what about if somebody tries to kill her?” I used to wonder about that. “Or what
if she wants to cry? Can she just cry?”
“Sure,” Roberta said. “But just tears. No sounds come out.”
“She can’t scream?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“Can she hear?”
“I guess.”
“Let’s call her,” I said. And we did.
“Dummy! Dummy!” She never turned her head.
“Bow legs! Bow legs!” Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby boy
hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn’t
let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who
heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us. (90, my emphasis)

As a silent witness to her own abuse, unable to scream out in her own defense, Maggie’s
body is subject to the whims of the mean-spirited girls, while her thoughts are locked
104  Studies in American Fiction

away inside, inaccessible to outsiders. Without access to her thoughts (writing is not
presented as a communicative mode for her), Maggie becomes a blank slate onto which
Twyla, Roberta (and even readers) project meaning. In the orchard, Maggie lacks agency:
overwhelmed by the girls, she cannot escape; mute from birth, she cannot scream. This
predicament is similar to that of Twyla and Roberta, who cannot leave St. Bonny’s and
must repress the anger and fear they would rather direct to the women who birthed yet
surrendered them. Their coming to terms with the emotions evoked by the memory of
Maggie occurs during their Christmas encounter, when both Twyla and Roberta finally
confront the shared fear and terror they experienced as children and repressed as adults.
But something happens at the very end of the story—past the Howard Johnson’s,
past the grocery store, past the picket line—that disrupts the conciliatory tone main-
tained during their coffee klatch Christmas Eve. The final lines, after Roberta admits her
mistaken memory, become increasingly more compassionate, as the women examine
the fear and distress they experienced as children and the residual guilt of not helping
Maggie. Empathy abounds as the women begin to reap the good fruit borne of a difficult
emotional reckoning:

“We were kids, Roberta.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I know, just kids.”
“Eight.”
“Eight.”
“And lonely.”
“Scared, too.”
She wiped her cheeks with he heel of her hand and smiled. “Well, that’s all I wanted
to say.” (110)

Finally, it appears, the women’s preoccupation with Maggie has ended. Then, Roberta
upsets the sense of resolution that comes after she “clarifies” the details of the Maggie
incident when, in the final line of the story, she cries: “Oh, shit, Twyla. Shit, shit, shit.
What the hell happened to Maggie?” (110)
The interrogative structure of “Recitatif” explains the meaning behind what is
otherwise a difficult ending for readers who focus on assigning race to Twyla and Ro-
berta, and for scholars who mention the ending but do little to parse out its meaning.
By ending with a question, the text creates space to consider the narratives that exist yet
remain unspoken. And voicing Maggie’s narrative through Twyla and Roberta—women
who represent opposing ends of a racial binary—suggests that binaries don’t necessarily
foreclose; they can also reveal. The ending is truly only the beginning. But it is a difficult
 An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif”  105

one. To make good use of the space between the binary, this interstitial space must be
mined and engaged by willing parties—not unlike Twyla and Roberta—committed to
figuring out not where to place blame, but how to move forward. They need to engage
with history, not to erase, but to delimit a space within the dominant discourse for the
black, female, domestic, disabled, and mute narratives to be heard.
Even though parenthetical phrases are woven into master narratives in a way
that structurally maintains their “grammar and syntax”—after all, it is still possible to
read “Recitatif” with little consideration of the kitchen woman—acknowledging the
inclusion and content of the parenthetical changes everything.33 Such is the case with
Maggie. In the end, it is Maggie who prompts Twyla and Roberta to face who they are
and what they have become because she reminds them (and readers as well) that racial
reckoning results from directly confronting the past, not diverting from it. At the same
time, Maggie emerges as an imperfect and unexpectedly powerful maternal force who
teaches Twyla and Roberta that considering the whereabouts and condition of the voice-
less stories of race is required to cross the chasm of racial difference where blacks and
whites—in the space between the binary—come together to dialogue about the past and
(re)write racial history together.

Notes

1. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Punctuation: Art, Politics, and Play (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2008), 1.
2. I am grateful to my colleague, ethnomusicologist Jennifer Williams Brown, for illuminating the
relationship between the structure of “Recitatif” and the musical style it alludes to. It seems ap-
propriate that, after reading various definitions on my own, our dialogue clarified matters for me.
3. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993),
xi.
4. Jack D. Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black
Peoples (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 2.
5. For more on the development of “whiteness” as an area of scholarly inquiry, see Valerie Melissa
Babb Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New
York Univ. Press, 1998) and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish became White (New York: Routledge, 2008).
6. Morrison, Playing, viii.
7. Morrison, Playing, xi.
8. Toni Morrison, “Recitatif,” in Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write About Race, ed. Marita
Golden and Susan Richards Shreve (New York: Anchor, 1996), 87–110, at 89. All subsequent in-text
citations refer to this source.
9. Helane Adams Androne, “Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in
Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Viramonte’s ‘Tears on My Pillow’,” in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature
of the U.S. 32, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 133–150, at 134.
106  Studies in American Fiction

10. Morrison, Playing, xi.

11. Ann Rayson, “Decoding for Race: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’ and Being White, Teaching Black,” in
Changing Representations of Minorities East and West, ed. Larry E. Smith and John Rieder (Honolulu:
Colleges of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature, 1996), 41.
12. David Goldstein-Shirley, “Race/[Gender]: Toni Morrison’s <<Recitatif>>”, in Journal of the Short
Story in English (Autumn 1996): 83–95, at 89.
13. Elizabeth Abel, “Black Writing, White Reading: Race and the Politics of Feminist Interpretation”
in Critical Inquiry 19, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 102–31, at 471.
14. Abel uses the phrase “‘they never washed their hair and they smelled funny’” as an example of a
symmetrically functioning code (471).
15. Gene Jarrett, Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature (Philadelphia: Univ.
of Penn. Press, 2007), 180.
16. Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, “Maggie in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’: The Africanist Presence and
Disability Studies” in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 36, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 71–88.
17. Adams Androne, “Revised Memories,” 134.
18. See also Jan Furman “Race and Response: Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’” in Short Story 5, no. 1 (Spring
1997): 77–86; and Kathryn Nicol, “Visible Differences: Viewing Racial Identity in Toni Morrison’s
Paradise and ‘Recitatif,’” in Literature and Racial Ambiguity, ed. Teresa Hubel and Neil Brooks (Am-
sterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002), 209–31.
19. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” in Diacritics 17,
no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81, at 67.
20. Toni Morrison, “A Bench by the Road: Beloved” in Toni Morrison: Conversations, ed. Carolyn C.
Denard (Jackson: Univ. Press of Miss., 2008): 44–50, at 44.
21. Ibid.
22. See Natasha Trethewey’s “Elegy for the Native Guards” for an exploration of how the Mississippi
Native Guards “2nd Regiment, Union men, black phalanx” were erased from the historical record
(Native Guard: Poems, [New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006]), 44. Trethewey’s collection exempli-
fies how contemporary African American writers continue to wrestle with the themes of family,
history, and legacy explored in “Recitatif.”
23. Brody, Punctuation, 6.
24. Ibid, 2.
25. René J. Cappon, The Associated Press Guide to Punctuation (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 71.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Karen Elizabeth Gordon, The New Well-Tempered Sentence (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 112.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Lit-
erature” in Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 1–34, at 3.
33. Cappon, 71.