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Chapter 1
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jazz, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Romantic Love
Jazz, Improvisation, and Reinvention
Motherhood
Racial Violence and Protest
Gossip vs. Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
Now, Violet no longer has the routines of caring for the birds. And Joe, too, has lost his daily ritual of spending time with Dorcas, though he knows he was losing that intimacy even before he killed Dorcas. Dorcas wanted to dance and go to parties, and Joe had killed her—had “hunted her down”—because he could tell their days together were coming to an end. At night, he spends hours just trying to sear the memory of her into his brain.
Though Joe’s murder of Dorcas is common knowledge in the novel, this is the first time that the narrator gives any insight into his motivations. Joe’s desperate desire to possess Dorcas, to “hunt her down” and catch her, is disturbing here, but will eventually be explained in more detail.
Themes
Joe cannot remember anything about his life with Violet in Vesper County, Virginia, but he remembers meeting Dorcas with perfect clarity. After seeing her at the drug store, he ran into her again at her aunt Alice Manfred’s house, when he was delivering someone’s Cleopatra beauty products order. Right away, Joe made his interest to Dorcas known: “he did not yearn or pine for the girl, rather he thought about her, and decided.” This courtship was very different than when he met Violet, who Joe feels had chosen him (instead of the other way around).
As will become clear over the course of the story, Joe has had very little agency in his own life: even his marriage to Violet felt almost forced upon him, led by Violet’s own confidence and decisiveness. So Dorcas represents Joe’s feeling of control over his destiny, a novelty in his life thus far.
Themes
When Joe and Violet first came up to New York City from Virginia, they were so excited, almost dancing as the train brought them to the skyscrapers. The train attendant came in, telling everyone there was breakfast in the dining car if they wanted it. But much to the attendant’s dismay, almost none of the Black passengers ever went to the dining car, instead eating the food they brought from home.
The fact that very few Black passengers enter the dining car, even after it has stopped being legally segregated, speaks to the diffuse, almost omnipresent legacies of racism and slavery.
Themes
Waves of Black people had started migrating to New York in the 1870s, escaping violence and poverty in their hometowns. And people were also leaving behind the specter of the war, “betrayed by the commander for whom they had fought like lunatics.” No matter the reason they came, though, most of the country people soon embraced “the City.” No one in New York could tell if they were falling in love with one another or with the “curved stone” of the buildings and the lit-up night sky, “more like the ocean than the ocean itself.”
The Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War entailed some of the worst anti-Black violence in American history (with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, and widespread arson). Then, the fact that Black soldiers returned from having served the U.S. in deadly combat in World War I to find even more violence and segregation on the home front added insult to injury. On a different note, the imagery of “curved stone” and the lit-up night sky paints the city as feminine and romantic, with an almost sexual attraction.
Themes
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Joe thinks Violet has forgotten their early days in New York. When Dorcas was still alive, he would tell her about these memories. And he would tell Dorcas things he never told Violet, or anyone: how he waited in the bushes, smelling hibiscus, for a wild woman in the woods to give him some sign that she was indeed his mother. Joe would have felt so ashamed and so happy to just get this moment of recognition. Dorcas, too, would cry, remembering waking up at a friend’s house to the smell of something burning. Dorcas had run home and begged her mother to rescue her dolls, but neither Dorcas’s dolls nor her mother had made it out of the house.
Both Joe and Dorcas were deprived of their parents at an early age (Joe because his “wild” mother abandoned him, and Dorcas because her parents were seemingly killed). A big part of their time together, therefore, involves them bonding over this shared loss (and particularly over how much they miss their mothers). The almost childlike way that Joe and Dorcas talk about this trauma suggests that both of them have been in some way stunted by it; the fact that Joe has never shared any of this pain with Violet testifies to the ways in which the couple struggles to find true intimacy.
Themes
Dorcas and Joe would comfort each other, and then they would have sex, laughing and shouting and pampering each other with Joe’s Cleopatra products. Before they left Malvonne’s small apartment, Dorcas heading home to her aunt Alice Manfred and Joe returning to Violet, Dorcas would make Joe promise to take her to Mexico, even though it was loud there.
Mexico will later be revealed to be the name of a night club, but the confusion about the word “Mexico” is intentional—everything about Joe and Dorcas’s affair feels foreign and hazy, as if at any moment they could be going to listen to jazz or to elope to a new, tropical country.
Themes
Malvonne works the night shift as a cleaning lady in a big office building, but she is more interested in the “neighborhood people,” especially her nephew Sweetness. Sweetness has now changed his name and headed west somewhere, but Malvonne still goes through the mail he used to collect. Sometimes, she gets involved in the letters she reads, adding an extra stamp in the hopes that the messages will reach their intended audiences more quickly.
This strange digression into Malvonne’s story suggests just how much the people in Harlem invest in others’ lives (it also nods to the novel’s non-linear, jazz-like structure). Many scholars wonder if Malvonne is actually the narrator herself, as both get so caught up in the gossip of the “neighborhood people.” Other experts, however, believe that the narrator is a more amorphous, less literal figure than Malvonne.
Themes
One day, Joe arrives to Malvonne’s small apartment with a proposition: he will give her two dollars a month, and she will let him bring a girl to her apartment while she is at work. Malvonne hesitates at first, protesting that she doesn’t want to betray Violet. But Joe is adamant that he won’t involve Malvonne at all, and that he has never done anything like this before. Besides, he complains, Violet pays more attention to her birds than she does to him.
On the one hand, Malvonne’s involvement in Joe’s affair might make Violet feel that she was betrayed not only by her husband but by her whole community. On the other hand, Joe feels that he is justified in his affair, as he has always tried to be loyal—until Violet started ignoring him entirely, choosing instead to commune with her birds.
Themes
Malvonne agrees, and Joe becomes what the narrator calls a “Thursday man,” seeking not the intensity of the weekend but the “satisfaction pure and deep” of this middle of the week. The narrator reflects that there are always Thursday men walking around the city, filled with so much energy that it can change the air around them, “from freezing to hot to cool.”
The novel lapses almost into poetry here, its phrases (“pure and deep,” “from freezing to hot to cool”) expertly mimicking the phrases of jazz music. Joe’s “Thursday,” peaceful satisfaction stands in stark contrast to Dorcas’s “weekend” desires, which the novel will describe in more detail later.
Themes
