New York-- Toni Morrison makes you believe in the story, and the power of the story, but most of all you believe in her story. You can feel it right away in the way she talks. She has a low voice that can sound downright seductive as it sweeps along a sentence. She has the cadences down just right, the inflections. Just as in her writings, she strings along thoughts and words, one after the other -- building on them to an often unexpected but powerful conclusion. All you need is a campfire and a group of listeners reduced to ineffectual silence.
So when she sat down to write "Jazz," her just published novel of Harlem in the 1920s, Toni Morrison was not going to give her readers the usual about dancers and jazz musicians at the Cotton Club, or the poets and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, or any of that dressed-up, repackaged nonsense about the high life and good times in what then was arguably the most important black enclave in the world. What she wanted, Toni Morrison says in a wonderfully evocative phrase, was "to make it strange again."
In her publisher's office, Ms. Morrison stares off reflectively as she relates the thinking behind "Jazz," her first novel since "Beloved" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. That book was about slavery, a most indelicate subject, but one that Ms. Morrison managed to write about with extraordinary skill and sensitivity.
"I wanted to take it [Harlem] away from what was familiar and make it what I think is the Jazz Age," Ms. Morrison, 61, begins. "People think of (the) Harlem of that era in nostalgia terms. I wanted to look at it as though there were no celebrities, there was no Renaissance.
"But even if there were, what about the people who were livinduring that epoch? I wanted to get a bit closer to the marrow, to what it may have been like and why it got that way. I didn't want to go through the Cotton Club, and all those things we are familiar with. A lot of people were disappointed that I didn't put some famous people in 'Jazz.' They said, 'Why couldn't you have just sprinkled them in? What about [poet] Langston Hughes?' They felt really bereft."
Black migration
Thus, "Jazz," like Ms. Morrison's five other novels, is distinctly her own story. The book centers around Joe and Violet, a poor couple fleeing their life in rural Virginia. Most of the characters are transplanted Southerners, who came every which way to "the City" to escape brutality, or dreary lives without hope. ("The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s; the '90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it.")
