IN THE FOREWORD to the 2004 Vintage edition of “Jazz” (1992), Toni Morrison writes that it was her body that started the book — that the first lines, like so much of the best music, were born of a physical expression of frustration. She’d already picked a time period and mapped out a plot, “read issues of every ‘Colored’ newspaper I could for the year 1926” and knew each character as well as an old tattoo, but she couldn’t “locate the voice, or position the eye.” How could the narrator elude her when the story was so clear? “I know this woman!” she kept thinking. “Angered by my inability to summon suitable language,” she writes, “I threw my pencil on the floor, sucked my teeth in disgust.” Sth.
“So that’s what I wrote” she says, and it became the novel’s first line:
Sth, I know that woman.
From there, she thought it, breathed it and then wrote it, “effortlessly without pause, playing, just playing along with the voice, not even considering who the ‘I’ was until it seemed natural, inevitable.” It probably was inevitable that a sound would open this book, that Sth would be the note at the start of the story’s score.
She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going.
Released from the constraints of traditional narration, as if having caught her breath, Morrison became her own instrument, letting the story tumble from her. Letting the eye choose its own gaze.
When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church.
Maybe that’s what makes the first paragraph of “Jazz” one of the most gorgeous and compelling in American literature. The fact that it wasn’t written or crafted so much as it escaped from its author, like breath from lungs.
She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”
