63 pages • 2 hours read
Toni MorrisonJazz
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1992A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
On a spring day, the streets of Harlem are filled with music. Violet has returned the photograph of Dorcas to her aunt. She sees Felice coming up the front steps and begins to worry. The narration then shifts to Felice’s perspective. The young woman thinks about her own past and the loss of her friend. Felice believes that Joe does not see Dorcas for who she really was. Dorcas was self-involved and vapid, always worrying about her clothes or who was popular. When Dorcas began seeing Joe, she stopped spending time with Felice. She believes Dorcas was only interested in Joe for the thrill of having an affair with a married man.
Felice arrives on Joe and Violet’s doorstep for two reasons. First, she hopes to find a ring Dorcas borrowed from her on the night she died. This ring was given to Felice by her mother. Felice suspects that her mother stole the ring after a clerk at Tiffany’s treated her poorly. Second, she wants to tell Joe the truth about Dorcas and convince him to stop feeling sad.
Felice tells the couple that Dorcas was selfish and that she let herself die. She would not let anyone move her or take her to the hospital. Joe tells Felice he shot Dorcas because he was scared and did not know how to love people then. He and Violet are working on their marriage, and he is learning how to love in a new way. Felice tells Joe that just before Dorcas died, she said, “There’s only one apple. Just one. Tell Joe” (213). When he hears this, Joe smiles. Joe tells her that Dorcas was buried with the opal ring, and Felice decides she is glad.
Felice visits the couple repeatedly. Felice admires Violet, who never had children and pursued a career. The more time she spends with Violet, the more she appreciates the woman’s honesty and sense of self. Violet tells Felice that she lost herself once and became someone else, but she has killed that woman and is now living an authentic life. Violet advises Felice to make her life what she wants it to be. If she does not, life will mold her instead. Felice also likes Joe Trace. She believes that he likes women more than most men and sees them as people rather than objects. Together, the three characters laugh and dance.
Chapter 10 Summary
In the closing chapter, the narrator draws attention to their own unreliability. They are frustrated that they have spent their lives waiting for Joe Trace to do to Felice what he did to Dorcas. They believe they should leave the city because they have become too entrapped in the pain of others. The narrator suggests that some of the story may be fabricated: “They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness” (220). The narrator wanted to believe that people were dangerous and damaged. The friendship of Felice, Joe, and Violet challenges this perception. The narrator fantasizes about living with Wild in the woods, free for the first time.
The final pages of the chapter offer tidbits about what happens to the characters. Alice moves to Springfield and meets someone. Felice continues to visit Joe and Violet. Joe takes a new job and enjoys his evenings with Violet. The couple sleep together and whisper under the covers. The couple adopt a sick bird and heal it by bringing it to the rooftop to listen to the music outside. Joe recalls a day when they were young and he returned home to find Violet asleep on the bed, naked except for a single boot.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
The final two chapters provide a tonal shift, emphasizing that this is a new period in the characters’ lives. Chapter 9 opens in spring with the sounds of men playing brass instruments on their rooftops. Felice, whose name means “happy,” offers pieces of Dorcas’s story that help both Joe and Violet move on. When she arrives at their door, she carries meat and a record, bringing sustenance and music back into their lives. Both Joe and Violet find redemption. Felice explains that when Violet refers to herself, she does so in a way that suggests she trusts and likes herself. Violet tells her that she had to go searching for her authentic self and leave behind the false self that she had been clinging to. This refers to “that Violet,” the version of herself who enacted with violence and anger in the past. Now, Violet dances and pays attention to her appearance. She follows Alice’s advice and chooses to love her husband, despite what he has done.
Violet’s love for Joe is redemptive, and Joe begins to heal. He learns to let go of his attachment to Desire and Possession, as well as the connection between violence and love that drove his actions. Instead, he learns to love in a new way and see women as more than animals to be tracked or possessed. This is why Felice is drawn to Joe. She has never met another man who looked at women when they spoke and took an interest in what they had to say. Violet, too, learns that she does not need to hold on to Dorcas’s picture or try to keep her pain alive. The new bird Joe and Violet care for exhibits their break from possession. The bird is ill, and nothing Violet tries restores it. Violet decides to take the bird to the rooftop so it can listen to the music outside. They do this each day, and the bird gets better. By giving the bird freedom, Violet and Joe provide it with the restoration it needs.
Felice also offers Joe new ways of thinking about Dorcas and his relationship with her. When he learns that Dorcas refused to name him in her final words, he is content that he was not alone in his love. He tells Felice that he must live with what he has done, and his confrontation of his actions allows him to be free. Dorcas’s final words about the apple are significant. Early in their relationship, Joe tells Dorcas that he would have bitten the apple in Eden to be with her. With her final words, Dorcas’s comment reveals that she still cares for Joe despite his inappropriate, violent behavior. This confession heals the trauma of Joe’s rejection.
The relationship between Felice and the couple is a stark contrast to the relationship foreshadowed in the first chapter by the narrator: “Violet invited her in to examine the record and that’s how that scandalizing threesome on Lenox Avenue began. What turned out different was who shot whom” (6). The narrator is established to be unreliable, confirmed in the final chapter. The narrator expects others to be cruel, dangerous, and unfeeling. Their bias shadows the way they describe the characters in the novel:
I was so sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human (220).
The narrator lives out the rest of their life, waiting for others to make a mistake. They are so preoccupied with what others are doing that they fail to live their own life. Violet juxtaposes the narrator’s approach by choosing to love and live for herself. When Alice tells her that she should devote her time loving who she can, she realizes that means she should love herself as much as Joe. Felice comments on the way Violet neatly fixes her hair, contrasting earlier references to Violet’s disheveled appearance. When Violet lets go of Dorcas and her concerns about what other people think, she heals and finds happiness. She offers advice to Felice who, like the narrator, has a limited view of others. She believes that Dorcas was only drawn to danger and that she never cared about anyone but herself. She is critical of her mother who stole an opal ring after a clerk was rude to her. Felice fails to see both her mother and Dorcas as whole people with histories and traumas of their own.
Violet and Joe help Felice to see others in a more empathetic and comprehensive way. When she learns that the ring was buried with Dorcas, she is glad. The ring is symbolic of racial hatred and what it can drive a person to do. Like Felice’s mother, the other characters are driven to violence because of racial hatred and trauma. The burying of the ring symbolizes healing from this trauma.
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