Vera gives birth to a surprisingly fair-skinned baby boy and names him Golden Gray.

Mortified, the family packs her off to Baltimore, along with her servant, True Belle. Joe’s story backtracks to 1855 when the owner of a prosperous Virginia plantation discovers his daughter, Vera Louise Gray, is pregnant with the child of her black lover. Having disclosed the foregoing details within the book’s opening pages, the narrative then swings back and forth in time as it voices the thoughts and histories of Joe, Violet, and Dorcas. Violet takes the picture home, where it absorbs her and Joe’s attention. After finally admitting Violet into her home, Alice gives Violet a picture of Dorcas, hoping it will appease her.

Violet’s increasing desire to know more about Joe’s lover drives her to repeatedly contact Dorcas’s unreceptive aunt, Alice. The girl’s apparent feistiness and determination remind Violet of herself when young. Violet finds her own thoughts frequently turn to Dorcas, as well. Having shot Dorcas in a fit of jealousy when she left him for another man, Joe grieves her death and is preoccupied with thoughts of her. After the funeral, Joe and Violet, already detached, emotionally retreat from each other even further. No one knows for certain that Violet intended to kidnap the baby before she was stopped. On another occasion, a woman left her baby in Violet’s care for several minutes, and Violet began to walk away with the child. In one instance, she sat down in the street and remained there, inexplicably, until people carried her to safety. Violet’s outrageous action at the funeral did not surprise local folks, as she had become notorious for strange, even alarming behavior. At the funeral, Violet, Joe’s fifty-year-old wife, attempted to mutilate the dead girl with a knife but was restrained.

Thus, the narrator reveals, upfront, that on January 1, 1926, fifty-two-year-old Joe Trace shot and killed his seventeen-year-old lover, Dorcas Manfred, in Harlem. In subsequent chapters, the characters individually elaborate on this story. As a jazz piece begins with a complete melody that various solo instrumentalists then improvise upon, so Jazz sets down its quasi-complete story in the opening chapter. With a nod to its title, numerous literary critics have described Jazz’s nonlinear structure as improvisational. When Joe takes a lover and kills her, the tragedy precipitates a collision between past and present, paradoxically resurrecting Joe and Violet’s relationship. While the city surrounding them surges with music and vitality, Joe and Violet Trace experience loneliness and despair as their marriage sinks under the weight of past injuries. Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz opens in Harlem, New York in 1926.

Jazz novel by toni morrison