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Chapter 3
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
After tea with Alice Manfred, Violet heads to the drug store, where—still desperate to return to her youthful curviness—she gets a malted milk. As she sips, Violet reflects on the difference between herself and “that Violet,” the other Violet who sees danger and anger where the regular Violet feels lonely or protective. That Violet was the one who had found Dorcas’s funeral, fighting off the usher boys and stabbing Dorcas before the regular Violet even knew she was holding the knife.
Many of the details in this passage show just how fractured and dissociated Violet’s identity is. Violet cannot reconcile the angry, paranoid part of herself with the maternal, romantic aspects, separating herself into two different figures (Violet and “that Violet”). And touchingly, Violet cannot even seem to accept the contours of her own body, forcing herself to eat fattening foods in the hopes of changing even her physical shape.
Themes
Thought it went against all of the good manners their elders had taught them, those usher boys had fought Violet off, not knowing if she intended just one stabbing or more. As the ushers dragged Violet away, kicking and growling, she was amazed to realize that that Violet still possessed all the power and toughness she’d had back in Virginia.
Though Violet at first seems to loathe this other, dissociated version of herself, she also feels some measure of pride that that Violet has the strength and vivacity of her youth (the very thing she is trying to regain by drinking the malted milk).
Themes
In the days after the funeral, when Joe did not come home, Violet found her parrot’s repeated “I love you” unbearable. But the Violet drinking a malted wishes that Violet hadn’t let the parrot go. Maybe he had been snatched by a passer-by, Violet thinks. Or maybe the bird had gotten the message—“that she said, ‘My parrot,’ and he said, ‘Love you,’ and she had never said it back”—and just decided to fly away.
Violet’s treatment of the parrot echoes her treatment of Joe, as their marriage has similarly turned into a series of routines and unanswered statements of affection. But while that Violet seems committed to letting both bird and husband vanish, the main Violet misses the bird—and implicitly misses her husband, too.
Themes
Violet orders another malted, though her stomach hurts from the last one. As she sips, Violet wonders what magazines Dorcas read, what rituals she and Joe shared. Violet begins to picture the gifts Joe bought Dorcas with his prizes from Cleopatra beauty products, including the lacy underwear Dorcas wore as they slept together or went out to jazz clubs.
Violet’s remove from herself now takes on physically painful dimensions, as she pushes her body to gain curves it does not want to hold. Violet’s obsessiveness with Dorcas’s life, her likes and habits and dislikes, forms a funhouse mirror to the narrator’s obsession with Violet and Joe.
Themes
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The more Violet pictures Joe and Dorcas, the surer she becomes that “that Violet is me!” Violet recalls how sure she was about Joe, how proud and possessive she was of him. But she also wonders if Joe ever loved her and confided in her, or if he was always searching for Dorcas, wanting her even before he met her. In her own way, Violet has to admit that she was always searching for someone, too: the golden-haired boy True Belle used to talk about.
Interestingly, just at the moment when Violet seems most desperate to get away from herself, she chooses to reintegrate these two facets of her personality. Both Violets have always been searching for someone they barely knew yet envied, whether it was the younger Dorcas or the lighter-skinned boy mentioned here. And now, by victoriously putting these two parts of herself together (“that Violet is me!”), Violet is able to extend some new sympathy to Joe, acknowledging that he, too, has been shaped and hurt by the painful events of his youth.
Themes
“I got quiet,” Violet realizes, “because the things I couldn’t say were coming out of my mouth anyhow.” Violet plays with her drink, which makes her think of her mother, drinking coffee after all of their belongings were taken from them. When her mother wouldn’t move from her chair, the repo men tipped the chair over and her mother fell on the floor, with Violet and all her siblings watching.
Presumably, some of the things Violet wants to say are references to this childhood trauma with her mother, so gruesome—and so grounded in white efforts to deprive and dispossess Black people—that it feels unspeakable. Therefore, though Joe has seen Violet’s silence as a sign of her lack of care, this passage reframes it as one of the only possible responses to a life of hardship and prejudice.
Themes
For days after that, as the family huddled in an abandoned shack, Violet’s mother Rose Dear would not say a word. It was only through a neighbor, heading north like all the others, that word of Rose Dear’s plight reached Violet’s grandmother, True Belle. True Belle returned right away, with 10 dollars sewn into her skirt, and she helped the family get back on its feet, earning Violet’s abiding adoration.
Though Violet will later express a desire to avoid her mother’s fate (and to spare any of her own potential children from the suffering she herself went through), she also uneasily recognizes how her own life and silence have begun to parallel Rose Dear’s.
Themes
One day, four years after True Belle returned, Rose Dear threw herself into a well. Two weeks after that, Violet’s father returned home with gifts for the children and a silk embroidered pillow for his wife. When he heard that Rose Dear was dead, the only thing Violet’s father could do was say “oh, damn.” Ten days later, he was back on the road, working secretly with the Readjuster Party (which aimed to secure voting rights for Black people).
The irony of Violet’s father’s return, just one week after Rose Dear’s suicide, underscores just how impossible it is to predict or plan for the twists and turns of life. The fact that Violet’s father works for the Readjuster Party, advocating for Black political power, likely explains why anxious white people would target their home for repossession.
Themes
For her siblings, Violet’s father was a symbol of hope, a promise that any day could suddenly be filled with excitement. But Violet could never forget how it felt to see Rose Dear in that narrow, dark well. Violet wonders what motivated her mother to make the leap: was it the memory of that day with the coffee cup, or the news of white violence, or just the knowledge that her children were at last safe with True Belle? Whatever the reason, though, Violet’s memories of her mother make her vow to never have children.
Violet’s decision to remain childless now takes on a new cast, as it is clear this choice is rooted in her own pain (even though the memory of holding a baby helps her cope, temporarily, with her grief at her mother’s death). The young Violet’s inability to predict her own later-in-life desire for motherhood then mimics her inability to understand what motivated Rose Dear to jump at such a seemingly random time. Unlike the narrator, assigning neat cause and effect, the circumstances of Violet’s life have forced her to accept that there are rarely neat inflection points in people’s minds.
Themes
It was memories of Rose Dear in the well that made Violet want to leave her childhood home and pick cotton in Palestine, Virginia. At first, Violet struggled with the rough work, and she thought about going home. But one night, while she was sleeping under a walnut tree, Violet was surprised by a man who rolled out of the tree’s branches, onto the ground.
On the one hand, the novel pushes back against the idea that there is such a thing as fate or destiny. But on the other hand, the tragedy of Rose Dear’s death leads Violet right to Palestine, and then—under this walnut tree—to the man who will become her husband.
Themes
Right away, Violet teases the man about sleeping in a tree and he teases her about her snarky attitude. The two talk all night, and Violet learns that the man’s name is Joe. By the time the sun comes up, Violet has decided that this is the man she wants to spend her life with (“claimed him”). And because Violet met Joe in the middle of the night, she felt that “nighttime was never the same for her,” as she could never again be haunted by thoughts of Rose Dear in the well.
The narrative frequently suggests that childhood, familial experience impacts adult, romantic decision-making, but that link is perhaps clearest and most direct here (in Violet’s decision to “claim” Joe so as to escape the difficulty of “nighttime” memories). Violet’s memories of having agency in this relationship sheds new light on Joe’s feelings that he did not really feel in control of the decision to tie his life to Violet’s.
Themes
In the morning, Violet and Joe vowed to meet each other near the tree again. From then on, Violet thought only of Joe’s two different color eyes, his strong jawline and chest. Violet moved in with a nearby family, doing everything she could to see Joe whenever possible. And though Joe loved the woods he was raised in, he surprised his friends when, 10 years later, he agreed to move with Violet to Baltimore, to the city True Belle had described.
Previously, Joe and Violet have seemed removed, frustrated and a little disgusted by the other’s appearance and behavior. But these memories suggest that once, Violet was passionately, almost obsessively, interested in Joe (fixating on him as she now fixates on Dorcas).
Themes
But before they could move to Baltimore, Joe decided he wanted to go to New York City instead. Violet never quite knew what motivated the decision, other than that Booker T. Washington was eating chicken in the President’s house, and Joe seemed filled with a newfound confidence. Violet was nervous to go to New York, but as soon as she got there she knew she would love “the City” forever.
In 1901, Black civil rights activist and educator Booker T. Washington was invited to dine with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. To Joe, even this small gesture towards racial equality made him feel hopeful and energized, giving him the push he needed to go north (or at least, that is Violet’s theory of what happened; Joe himself later tells the story differently).
Themes
Joe didn’t want children either, so he wasn’t sad about Violet’s three miscarriages. But as Violet aged, she thought more and more about babies. Now, Violet sometimes gets so distracted by thoughts of cradling a child that she singes her client’s curls. And as Violet, menopausal, stares at the picture of Dorcas, she asks herself if Dorcas was “the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb?” Violet even considers what might have happened had her aborted baby survived the castor oil and soap she drank—had the imagined child “braved […] mammy’s urgent fists, she might have had the best-dressed hair in the city.”
At first, Violet seems to have miscarried—but then it becomes clear that she decided to terminate her pregnancies, hoping to spare potential children the pain she herself felt at Rose Dear’s collapse. In this essential section, Violet admits that her feelings about Dorcas are muddled, combining her desire for motherhood, her childhood loneliness, and her romantic and sexual envy. Even Violet’s hairdressing gets caught in this swirl, as Violet—long critical of Dorcas’s split ends—imagines caring for this hair as if it belonged to one of her aborted baby girls.
Themes
Today, just before she came to get her malted, Violet told Alice that she could have loved Dorcas like a daughter, had they met in a different context. At the same time, though, Violet still wonders what Joe saw in Dorcas—was it her light skin? Her wavy hair? Alice hates this line of questioning, and she insists that Violet is too old to think this way. Laughing, Violet wonders aloud if they will ever feel like grown-ups; privately, she wonders if this was the place her mother got to before giving up.
Earlier, Joe’s conversations with Dorcas hinted that childhood trauma might stunt adults, making them struggle to feel like the “grown-ups” Violet describes. Now, Violet gives voice to those thoughts, wondering if it is ever possible to shed childhood pain—certainly her mother never did.
Themes
Alice, having noticed the torn lining in Violet’s coat, gets to work repairing it. As the two women talk about ironing strategies and how they learned to do chores, Alice tells Violet that she thinks Joe will continue to betray her. Even so, Alice thinks Violet should stay with her husband: “you got anything left to you at all to love,” Alice advises, “you do it.”
In this exchange, Alice continues to act like a mother of sorts to Violet, tending her to coat and giving her advice. Fascinatingly, though the narrator earlier emphasized the importance of “knowing when to quit” in love, Alice takes the opposite approach, emphasizing the importance of persistence. After all, isn’t Alice, too, finding the only thing “left to [her] to love” through this unlikely friendship with Violet?
Themes
Violet feels that to love something is to fight for it, but Alice is not so sure. After all, should Violet be fighting a teenaged girl who lost both her parents in a fire? Alice gets so worked up as she poses this question that she burns right through the cloth she is ironing, making Violet laugh with delight. Alice joins in, laughing so hard that their shoulders shake.
Continuing to defend a treasured relationship, Alice suggests in her questions here, does not always look like conflict. And accordingly, falling back in love with Joe does not mean Violet needs to tarnish Dorcas’s memory.
Themes
Now, having finished her malted, Violet leaves the drugstore, chuckling at the image of herself with the knife at the funeral. Laughing makes Violet think of True Belle, who laughed when she arrived in the aftermath of Rose Dear’s collapse. This response might have caused Violet to hate her grandmother, but instead, it gave her strength. “Laughter is serious,” Violet realizes. “More complicated, more serious than tears.” As she buttons her coat, she notices, “at the same moment that that Violet did, that it was spring.”
Instead of choosing the stubborn, fearsome path that Violet has been taking, True Belle tried to find humor wherever she could, a moment of pleasure to alleviate the pain. In other words, True Belle understood that people were “complicated,” full of contradiction—as emblematized by laughter in grief, for example. Now, Violet is able to similarly link the contradicting versions of herself (buttoning her coat at the same time as “that Violet” does). And in doing so, she moves into a kind of rebirth—spring, at last, has come.
Themes
