Roberta’s mother was ill, Twyla’s mother danced all night, they were eight years old and ended up in the Saint Bonaventure shelter. They were put together in room 406; Twyla felt that she had been “dropped in a place she didn’t know at all with a girl of a completely different race.” Because one of the girls is black, the other white, and, hardly realizing it, the reader alternates his deduction of what race each one belongs to according to the evolution of their lives and her own prejudices. Because at no time does Toni Morrison let us know.
Toni Morrison (United States, 1931-2019) won the Nobel Prize for Literature for a literary production focused on novels and blackness, and on the situation of women; she only wrote one story, The Two Girlfriends (a recitative), which is now being published by Lumen with an essential epilogue by the writer Zadie Smith, who helps us move through the game, the “experiment”, as Morrison called this narrative. And incidentally learn about our references and about ourselves.
The stay at Saint Bonny’s, as the two girls refer to the center, will only last a few months, during which a bond is formed between them that in the end will reveal more resentment than friendship, despite their discovery that they had a lot of in common, for example, says Twyla, the narrator, that no one else wanted to play with them, because “we weren’t really orphans with great parents and in heaven.” No, they had been “kicked out”, starting with their mothers, who one day will visit each other, one inappropriately dressed, the other demure and with a large crucifix hanging.
This first meeting will be followed by another four of the friends over the years. The unequal fate of both will be revealed in their social achievements, that is, in their class, low middle for one, high for the other by a very appropriate marriage. Is race the key to their different situation? We will never know, but we will know that that difference, which Twyla’s mother referred to as “those people who don’t wash their hair and it smells strange” will grow and end up confronting them on the street when racial integration occurs in the schools. But which side are they on?
And that is where Zadie Smith intervenes to dismantle, one by one, all our clichés, everything we think we know about blackness, but also about whiteness, a concept that the reader does not usually consider but with which he plays, intelligently malevolent, Morrison. The writer would say years later that Recitatif, the English title of the story, “was an experiment in the elimination of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.”
In short, that each reader makes his own idea according to which he believes the distinctive features of each community. When we think of a mother who spends the night dancing, like Twyla’s, do we attribute it to a black or a white one? But then we find out that Roberta, the girl with the sick mother, can’t read or write at eight years old, in which community do we think she is more frequent?
Zadie Smith breaks down this recitative by crossing situations with stereotypes, with the girls successively going from white to black and vice versa depending on the reader’s perception, because as the British writer points out, the reader’s attempts to determine who is who ends up revealing more of them. same as the characters. Is Roberta a white name? Is Twyla more appropriate for a girl of color? Roberta’s mother refuses to shake hands with Twyla’s. Is she white she? Could it not be that she, being so religious, she is because of a moral issue, because of the appearance of the other woman?
In a dark episode at the orphanage, something happens to Maggie, the old cook. Adult girls have different memories, even about the color of the woman’s skin. They remember, but they, like us, will not know it either. But what happened to Maggie?
Toni Morrison The Two Girlfriends (a recitative). Afterword by Zadie Smith. lumen. Translation by Carlos Mayor Ortega. 96 pages. 17 euro
