Recitatif By Toni Morrison: Motif Essay

The world is not black and white, but as gray as the smoke from a gun ripping through races dividing them. In Toni Morrison’s short story, Recitatif, there is a constant division of races specifically between blacks and whites. Within this story you learn of two young ladies named Twyla and Roberta growing up whilst the civil rights movement is occurring; and as time goes by racism effects these young ladies more and more until they start to fuse into the racism. In Morrison’s Recitatif she explores the effects of racism causing dissolution between friends, bigotry, and stereotypes. Racism can rip friends apart faster than an ambulance cascading down the street trying to save a life. In this paragraph you will begin to see the cracks of racism tears these old friends apart especially when Morrison speaks about them both protesting on different sides of integrated schools. In Morrison’s short story Roberta states “I used to curl hair” but Twyla states “I hated your hands in my hair” (Recitatif, 257). This example is starts when the two women are talking about their children going to school with other races as one school, and then they start to both argue with one another. Friendships are as …show more content…
The bigotry starts as soon as Roberta’s mother perceives Twyla as less because of her race. In “Recitatif” while Roberta and Twyla along with their mothers Twyla states, “She actually reached in her purse for a mirror to check her lipstick. All I could think was that she really needed to be killed” (Recitatif, 248). When this is said in the text the mothers of Roberta and Twyla are just meeting, and they looked at each other with disgust because of their race. And then Twyla joining in the bigotry talking about killing Roberta’s mother when she does something Twyla would not do in church. Bigotry is the bullet within the gun of stereotypes that have killed so