Recitatif – Group Assignment

Text-to-World connection –  Individual Assignment by Jeremy R.

Recitatif by Toni Morrison tackles the topic of racial identity in which from the beginning of the story it is clear that the color of one’s skin is apparent to one’s self-awareness through the narrator Twyla, with her experience staying at an orphanage. It is surprising that from a young age when Twyla stayed at the orphanage because her mother was busy dancing all night, she was fully aware that St. Bonny housed all these other kids coming from different backgrounds and she could distinguish their race or ethnicity, such as the Puerto Ricans, the Upstate Indians, Koreans, blacks, and whites. Twyla’s awareness reminds me of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B Du Bois when he talks about double consciousness, of being aware that he’s American but also aware and constantly reminded by other people especially white people, that he is black. Twyla is reminded who she is because she’s ignored by the other group of kids because she was different not only because her mother was not dead, but because of the way she looked. The only person who seemed to not ask questions or maybe not those kinds of questions of “race” was her new roommate, Roberta. When Roberta first met Twyla she didn’t seem to care that Twyla was different from her and they both bonded even if they looked like salt & pepper together as Twyla pointed out because that’s what the other kids called them. Du Bois famously said, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” This was to say that the color line is the divide between races and this was instituted and solidified by slavery. After slavery was abolished after the American Civil War, it took into different forms that still divided blacks and whites such as Jim Crow laws. For example, bans on interracial marriage and separation between races in public and places of business were also common parts of Jim Crow. This divide is what causes a lot of conflicts throughout the 20th century especially between the African Americans and the White Americans who have to share the nation but the many white Americans would not fully accept blacks into their lives or let them fully integrate into society. The irony is that the African Americans did not ask to come to America yet they were forced into labor and accepted as slaves but once slavery was over their lives were still miserable and how could millions of blacks leave the country? So the solution to this problem was to legalize the divide. As the divide was being perpetrated by the law, after the violence and the injustices were becoming more visible from this invisible divide, the outcry started, the blacks were fed up and stood up for themselves just as they rose to end slavery. This was the continuation of the African American experience with their struggle for freedom as we have read previously from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass. This was the conversation for many years after Douglass, as to what many Americans were starting to realize as Abraham Lincoln believed, that slavery was morally wrong. The battle for freedom wasn’t over because blacks and other minority groups were not being treated equally in society as to the white Americans who were superior. It took marches and protests, and it took strong leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to organize people, convincing the public to share his dream to make an end of racism. 

“When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every city and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, Free at last, Great God almighty, We are free at last.” -Martin Luther King Jr.