Presented by Roman Kacala

1. The Great Migration – historical and

economical background.

2. Jazz – the setting.

3. Migrant protagonists: Joe, Violet and Dorcas .

4. The City and the migrants:

a. Expectations;

b. Isolation/Displacement,

c. Music – jazz,

d. City and communal spaces – streets,

apartments.

6. Conclusion.

What did you think we were before you began to think of us as human

beings?

Well, in a way, we thought of you almost as a very superior pet.

- A deep South dialogue between black and white.

(Groh, 1972, p. 9)

South to North Migration, Both Races, 1900-1930 (after Groh, 1972)

Net Migration in Thousands

Percentage Migrating by Racial Base Population

Black-White Ratio in Proportion

1900-10 Black -213 -2.8

7 – 1 White

-60 -0.4

1910-20 Black -572 -6.9

2 – 1 White

-626 -3.5

1920-30 Black -913 -10.8

31/3 – 1 White

-626 -3

• In the rural South (…) race repression went hand in hand

with an intricate master – servant relationship which

embraced every area of life. (…) It was a closed system,

tightly controlled by both law and custom. Economically,

it amounted at best to dubious paternalism, at worst to

harsh exploitation. In every human sense it was disastrous

(Groh, 1972, p. 10).

• Jim Crow laws – segregation at the turn of the centuries.

• In 1940 only 2 per cent of eligible southern blacks were

permitted to vote in major elections (Groh, 1972, p. 25).

• There were times and places in which the typical black

school received only one-tenth the funds allocated to a

white school down the road (Groh, 1972, p. 26).

• After 1920 there was an absolute decline in ownership [of

the land], which has continued in a steep, almost unbroken

line until the present time (Groh, 1972, p. 32).

• Agricultural disasters helped to prepare the way – floods

and boll weevil devastation produced hard times in the

South – but the larger impetus came from World War I.

Industry boomed, the pipeline of European immigrant

labor was all but choked off, and blacks began streaming

in to fill the vacuum. The next census found black

population up two-thirds in New York, one-and-a-half

times in Chicago, three times in Cleveland, six times in

Detroit (Groh, 1972, p. 49).

• It is difficult to overstate the impact of this migration on

the North and on the course of black history in America.

(…) In the second decade of the century alone, New

York‟s black population increased by 66 per cent,

Chicago‟s by 148, Cleveland‟s by 307, and Detroit‟s by

611 (Katznelson, 1973, p. 32).

• With the exception of Chicago, no city felt the impact of

the black migration from the South more than New York.

In 1890, 36,617 New Yorkers (including those in the yet

unconsolidated boroughs) were black; in 1900, 60,666; in

1910, 91709; in 1920, 152,467; by 1930, New York City's

black population numbered 327, 706. In 1890, one person

in seventy in Manhattan (where most of the city‟s blacks

lived) was black; in 1930, one in nine. By 1910, New

York‟s black population was the second highest for any

American city; by 1920, it was the largest in the country.

In 1890, Harlem was a semi-rural, all-white, upper-class

community; in 1930, James Weldon Johnson correctly

described Harlem as „the Negro metropolis‟ in America

(Katznelson, 1973, p. 62).

• Jazz (1992) is Morrison‟s most explicit migration

narrative to date. It revisits the theme of black mobility

and modernity. In so doing, it explicitly revises some of

the most important tropes of the migration narrative –

tropes that Morrison helped to define through her

creative and critical writings (Griffin, 1995, p.184).

• In Jazz, Morrison still considers the major moments of

the migration narrative: the catalyst to migration, the

initial confrontation with the urban landscape, the

navigation of that landscape, and the construction of the

urban subject. Nevertheless, she challenges her own

notions of the possibility of the city for the migrant and

she introduces a new notion of the ancestor (Griffin,

1995, p. 184).

• 1926, Harlem, New York;

• 1888-1906, the South – Vesper County;

• 1910s East St. Louis.

• The wave of black people running from want and violence

crested in the 1870s; the „80s; the „90s but was steady

stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it. Like the

others, they were country people, but how soon country

people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is for

forever, and it is like forever (Morrison, 2005, p. 33).

• Immediately, now that they were out of Delaware and a

long way from Maryland there would be no green-as-

poison curtain separating the colored people eating from

the rest of the diners (Morrison, 2005, p. 31).

• Joe and Violet Trace, the central migrants of the text,

migrate from Virginia to New York in 1906. Their Virginia

is a place of towns with Old Testament names,

dispossession, violence, and orphaned children. After

arriving in the North, their experiences in the South still

shape their decisions. For instance, because both Violet

and Joe were abandoned by their mothers, they associate

freedom with a childless urban life. Whereas in the earlier

migration narratives the South is often the site of family,

here it is filled with motherless children (Griffin, 1995, p.

185).

• The race riots of East St. Louis are the catalyst of the

migration of the text‟s third significant migrant, Joe‟s

teenage lover, Dorcas (Griffin, 1995, p. 187).

• Joe and Violet, like all the novel's characters, are bound to

the track of Northern, urban, African American life. Lured

from their rural Southern roots by the promise of economic

opportunity and racial liberation, they are hooked by the

City's music and throbbing energy (Page, 1995, p. 56).

• Violet and Joe left Tyrell, a railway stop through Vesper

County, in 1906, and boarded the colored section of the

Southern Sky. When the train trembled approaching the

water surrounding the City, they thought it was like them:

nervous at having gotten there at last, but terrified of what

was on the other side (Morrison, 2005, p. 30).

• They weren‟t even there yet and already the City was

speaking to them. They were dancing. And like a million

others, chests pounding, tracks controlling their feet, they

stared out the windows for first sight of the City that

danced with them, proving already how much it loved

them. Like a million more they could hardly wait to get

there and love it back. Some were slow about it and

travelled from Georgia to Illinois, to the City, back to

Georgia, out to San Diego and finally, shaking their heads,

surrendered themselves to the City. Others knew right

away that it was for them, this City and no other

(Morrison, 2005, p. 32).

• The City (…) becomes an acting site of reconstruction, of

potential and actual articulation of some traumatic traces

of the past. And as the controlling entity behind the

distracted and inscrutable voice, it sends the reader on a

frantic, often sterile search for the missing fragments in the

characters' lives, eventually providing a discourse of

replacement (Paquet-Deyris, 2001, p. 221).

• „”Off somewhere trying to sound like they ain‟t from

Cottown.” (…) Knew both of them from way back. Come

up here, the whole family act like they never set eyes on

me before‟ (Morrison, 2005, p. 19).

• Alice had been frightened for a long time – first she was

frightened of Illinois, then of Springfield Massachusetts,

then Eleventh Avenue, Third Avenue, Park Avenue.

Recently she had begun to feel safe nowhere south of 110th

Street, and Fifth Avenue was for her the most fearful of all

(Morrison, 2005, p. 54).

• Without familial ties, Joe, Violet, and Dorcas are migrants

who seek to create themselves anew in the city. Without

the maps provided by Southern ancestors, they are ill-

equipped to navigate the urban landscape. They, along

with all the migrants of Jazz, are like the music for which

the book is named. These migrants explode onto the

cityscape, capturing its character, its rhythm, forever

changing it, and it forever changing them. They go to

Harlem in search of safe space only to find that the safety

of that space is very tenuous (Griffin, 1995, p. 187).

• The music of the city, the black jazz music that comes to

define the city and the era, serves as a source for

constructing a black urban subject. It helps to create a

subject in opposition to the one that the City attempts to

create: in opposition and yet somehow still defined by it.

Power constructs the resisting subject. Jazz music

embodies and gives voice to their experience (Griffin,

1995, p. 191).

• In content, jazz becomes a metaphor for the migrants. The

final vision of this narrative is a vision where migrants and

their music are influenced by but also profoundly

influence and redefine the city to which they migrate

(Griffin, 1995, p. 192).

• The narrative's deliberately ungendered, unspecific voice

and its avatars take center stage against a Harlem

backdrop. But what it consistently calls “the City” with a

capital C only indirectly functions as historical back-

ground. It seems to be doing much more than encoding

Afro- American place. The metropolis in 1926 is a vast

receptacle of actual, historical, vocal, and memorial traces.

(…) Just like the Middle Passage of slaves across the

Atlantic, the City of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s

is some sort of “zero moment” in black history. The

“disremembered and unaccounted for” (…) stories of

times past can only re-emerge as loose fragments patched

up by an uncertain if forceful narrator. And the context the

narrator provides for these migrants' dreams also precludes

any smooth re-presentation of “the glittering city” (…) and

its “race music” (Paquet-Deyris, 2001, p. 219).

• Violet navigates the city by splitting her personality; Alice

Manfred tries to navigate it by becoming deaf and blind to

it. Joe Trace tries to buy “safe space” by buying Dorcas‟s

affections and renting a neighbour‟s apartment for their

weekly trysts (Griffin, 1995, p. 191).

• Harlem is not as safe a space as the migrants anticipated.

Even those spaces considered most safe, those sites of the

“South in the city,” are possible sites of victimization. This

is especially true for women. (…) the apartment buildings

of Jazz seem to constitute community, hospitality, and

home. (…) However, (…) it is significant that this attempt

to describe community lacks specificity of a name. Neither

the neighbourhood nor the city is named, and those five-

story apartment buildings do not even have an address

(Griffin, 1995, p. 189).

• Griffin, Farah Jasmine (1995) “Who Set You

Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration

Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

• Groh, George (1972) The Black Migration.

The Journey to Urban America. New York:

Weybright and Talley.

• Katznelson, Ira (1973) Black Men, White

Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the

United States, 1900-30, and Britain, 1948-68.

London, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Morrison, Toni, (2005) Jazz London: Vintage

Books.

• Page, Philip (1995) ‘Traces of Derrida in Toni

Morrison’s Jazz’ African American Review 29

(1), pp. 55-66.

• Paquet-Deyris, Anne-Marie (2001) ‘Toni

Morrison’s Jazz and the City.’ African

American Review 35 (2), pp. 219-231.