look where your hands are.

A Fan Blog for Toni Morrison's Jazz. Stay Tuned ....

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Morrison’s {Jazz} + Instagram | Harlem 

I'm crazy about this City. 

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is shadow were any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It's the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over, you all, and everything’s ahead at last.

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Toni Morrison’s {Jazz} + Instagram | Alice Manfred

Growing up under that heated control, Alice swore she wouldn’t, but she did, pass it on. She passed it on to her baby sister’s only child. And wondered now would she have done so had her husband lived or stayed or if she had had children of her own. If he had been there, by her side, helping her make decisions, maybe she would not be sitting there waiting for a woman called Violent and thinking war thoughts. Although war was what it was. Which is why she had chosen surrender and made Dorcas her own prisoner of war. Other women, however, had not surrendered. All over the country they were armed. Alice worked once with a Swedish tailor who had a scar from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth. “Negress,” he said. “She cut me to the teeth, to the teeth.” He smiled his wonder and shook his head. “To the teeth.” The iceman in Springfield had four evenly spaced holes in the side of his neck from four evenly spaced jabs by something thin, round and sharp. Men ran through the streets of Springfield, East St. Louis and the City holding one red wet hand in the other, a flap of skin on the face. Sometimes they got to a hospital safely alive only because they left the razor where it lodged. Black women were armed; black women were dangerous and the less money they had the deadlier the weapon they chose. 

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Toni Morrison’s {Jazz} + Instagram | Golden Gray

He is lying, the hypocrite. He could have opened his big fat trunk; removed one of the two hand-embroidered sheets, or even his dressing gown, and covered the girl. He’s young. So young. He thinks his story is wonderful, and that if spoken right will impress his father with his willingness, his honor. But I know better. He wants to brag about this encounter, like a knight errant bragging about his coolness as he unscrews the spike from the monster’s heart and breathes life back into the fiery nostrils. Except this monster without scales or flaming breath is more dangerous for she is a bloody-faced girl of moving parts, of luminous eyes and lips to break your heart.

[dancing-with-anonymity-blog]

the hopelessness that comes from knowing too little and feeling too much (so brittle, so dry he is in danger of the reverse: feeling nothing and knowing everything)

Jazz, Toni Morrison

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Toni Morrison’s {Jazz} + Instagram | Felice

We had just renewed our friendship after she stopped seeing Mr. Trace and was running around with her ‘catch.’ Somebody a lot of girls older than us wanted and had too. Dorcas liked that part—that other girls were jealous; that he chose her over them; that she had won. That’s what she said. ‘I won him. I won!’ God. You’d think she had been in a fight. “What the hell did she win? He treated her bad, but she didn’t think so. She spent her time figuring out how to keep him interested in her. Plotting what she would do to any girl who tried to move in. That’s the way all the girls I know think: how to get, then hold on to, a guy and most of that is having friends who want you to have him, and enemies who don’t. I guess that’s the way you have to think about it. But what if I don’t want to?

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Toni Morrison’s {Jazz} + Instagram | Joe Trace

He became a Thursday man and Thursday men are satisfied. I can tell from their look some outlaw love is about to be, or already has been, satisfied. Weekends and other days of the week are possibilities but Thursday is a day to be counted on. I used to think it was because domestic workers had Thursday off and could lie abed mornings as was out of the question on weekends, when either they slept in the houses they worked in or rose so early to arrive they had no time for breakfast or any kind of play. But I noticed it was also true of men whose women were not servants and day workers, but barmaids and restaurant cooks with Sunday-Monday free; schoolteachers, café singers, office typists and market-stall women all looked forward to Saturday off. The City thinks about and arranges itself for the weekend: the day before payday, the day after payday, the pre-Sabbath activity, the closed shop and the quiet school hall; barred bank vaults and offices locked in darkness.

[heartstormquotes]

He became a Thursday man and Thursday men are satisfied.

Toni Morrison, Jazz (via heartstormquotes)

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Toni Morrison’s {Jazz} + Instagram | Violet Trace

Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband too. He fell for an eighteen-year- old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral, to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, though all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out of the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, “I love you.”

[gardenvarietytigershark]

It could have worked, I suppose, but the children of suicides are hard to please and quick to believe no one loves them because they are not really here.

A mix for the life of Violet Trace of Toni Morrison’s “Jazz”. The real Violet, the old Violet, and the new one too.

+[listen]

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Toni Morrison’s {Jazz} + Instagram | Dorcas

Drocas should have been prettier than she was. She just missed. She had all the ingredients of pretty too. Long hair, wavy, half good, half bad, Light skinned. Never used skin bleach. Nice shape. But it missed somehow. If you looked at each thing, you would admire that thing -the hair, the color, the shape. All together it didn’t fit. Guys looked at her, whistled and called out fresh stuff when we walked down the street. In school all sorts of boys wanted to talk to her. But then they stopped; nothing came of it. It couldn’t have been her personality because she was a good talker, liked to joke and tease. Nothing standoffish about her. I don’t know what it was. Unless it was the way she pushed them. I mean it was like she wanted them to do something scary all the time. Steal things, or go back in the store and slap the face of a white girl who wouldn’t wait on her, or cuss out somebody who snubbed her. Beats me. Everything was like a picture show to her, and she was the one on the track,or the one trapped in the sheik’s tent when it caught on fire.

[blackgirlflymag]

Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

-Toni Morrison (Jazz)

Beautiful @styledbykami and her king by @kelbpics Happy Monday lovelies. Stay FLYY! Don’t forget to join us at 12pm PST for our Twitter chat!! More info on panelists to follow. #BlackLove #BlackCouple #Queen #King #QueenlyMoments #CultivateQueens #KinglyMoments #CultivateQueens #Melanin #MelaninMonday #Inspire #Love #Couple

[miscellaneous-quotes-blog]

Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it.

Toni Morrison, Jazz

[tonimorrisonjazzaes]

Stay Tuned.

This (mostly) aesthetic blog dedicated to Toni Morrison’s Jazz is a work-in-progress.