“A Girl from a Whole Other Race”: Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif,” Beloved, and Paradise

Abstract

Whereas Gibbons and Cox explore the possibilities of interracial friendship and examine its effect on white characters’ conceptions of racial identity, Toni Morrison uses interracial relationships in her fiction to challenge readers’ conceptions of racial identity. Like Williams, she returns to the historical roots of those relationships in slavery in the United States. In her 1983 short story “Recitatif,” as in her 1987 novel Beloved, Morrison emphasizes the intersections of race and economic class. Morrison never identifies which character is black and which is white in “Recitatif,” although much of the story concerns the impact of the women’s racial difference on their relationship. The racial ambiguity in the story creates a mystery that forces readers to confront their racialized assumptions about characters. In Beloved, Morrison explores how the historical construction of women’s interracial relationships situates the interplay of race, class, and bodies through the white girl Amy Denver’s acting as midwife to Sethe at Denver’s birth. And the provocative opening sentences of her 1998 novel Paradise—“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time” (3)—plays with readers’ assumptions about the meanings of racial identity and difference by making a racial distinction that ends up not being meaningful because the novel never explicitly identifies which of the Convent women is white.