Kids always promise to write, and rarely do in "real life," so why would they be any different in fiction? it's one of those polite customs to say you'll be sure to write. Roberta "promised to write every day" but wait, if she can't read how can she write? And as for Twyla, she would have drawn pictures (very child-like) and sent them to Roberta but Roberta hadn't given Twyla her address. Did Twyla ask for it? It sounds as though she didn't. So, as stated earlier, this story used very common themes of the fragility of "friendships"; like friends getting mad at each other, and when they part, they promise to write. "Her big serious-looking eyes - that's all I could catch when I tried to bring her to mind," Twyla said. That's it? Four months living in close quarters with a girl who was her friend, and that's all that can be recounted about her? Friendships are shallow, very thin on substance for many people (young and old), but people use all the right words to convey a sense of value, no matter that they ring hollow. Morrison handles that theme well.
The meaning of "Recitatif," according to seemingly the only source available on the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, relates to a musical style that is on the border between commonplace speech and song. It has to do, in this case, with the Morrison story that has five episodes, each one with a different tone than the previous one. Is it musical or just a humming sound - or a rhythm that is established between two people who were friends but shallow ones at that. When the two meet at the checkout line, twenty years after their first friendship, Twyla remembers (here is some good irony): "Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew...
Then she asks a cruelly brutally pointed question: "Did you ever learn to read?" The irony is not lost on the reader that Roberta may have been literacy-challenged but she rode in a limo and had servants. it's a society where intelligence and education isn't necessarily a requirement for money and social esteem.
In conclusion, to restate, this story is more about the American culture clashes, and about shallow fleeting friendships than "race" per se. In the scene where women are protesting and attempting to get a school integrated, the thin nature of this long "friendship" is revealed by Morrison though the platitudinous dialogue between the two women (cliches like, "It is a free country" and "Your really think that?"), and by Roberta looking at Twyla "...out of some refrigerator behind her eyes." That's cold. And more clues not as to their race - which this paper made clear at the outset was not the main theme - but as to their superficial association and the vast difference in their cultures. After Roberta's "refrigerator" glare, Twyla asks, "And what am I? Swiss cheese?" "I used to curl your hair," Roberta replies. "I hated your hands in my hair" Twyla shoots back. With friends like that, who would ever need enemies?
Works Cited
Goldstein-Shirley, David. (1997). Recitatif. Short Story, 5(1), 77-86.
Morrison, Toni. (2006). Recitatif. Retrieved Nov. 30, 2007, at http://www.facultyfiles.deanza.edu/gems/quigleyjill/recitatifessay.doc.
Wikipedia. (2007). Recitatif. Retrieved Nov. 30, 2007, at http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Reditatif.
