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Chapter 4
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
The narrator describes springtime in New York City: everybody notices one another more, and the warm air and budding trees fill them with contradictory impulses. Musicians play guitar on the street (“blues man,” the narrator thinks. “Black and bluesman. Blacktherefore blue man”). But this spring, on Lenox Avenue, Joe Trace just sits at home and cries. Violet barely speaks to her husband, but she still washes his handkerchiefs, not wanting them to get too dirty.
By painting Joe’s tears as so at odds with the springtime season, the narrator suggests there is something almost unnatural about the degree to which his grief persists (and perhaps the degree to which Violet continues to tend to him). The link between being “Black” and “therefore blue” once more suggests the harmful prevalence of racial prejudice, and links that discrimination to the sounds of Black music.
Themes
The narrator is confident that she knows Joe better than anybody. Joe has a reputation for being kind, but the narrator believes that he is actually vain and proud, ogling women on the street and resenting Violet for all the years he has been faithful to her. In the narrator’s mind, Joe “is bound to the track,” as if he is a record going around and around. In other words, the narrator thinks Joe’s affair with Dorcas was fated, though she is still puzzled by some aspects of Joe’s character, like his love of sweet, stale candy canes and peppermints.
In this vital passage, the narrator feels that even though she does not have any experiential connection to Joe, merely studying him and gossiping about him has given her deeper knowledge than even Violet possesses. Records now emerge as an important symbol of fate and predictability, as the narrator frames Joe’s life as a recorded song, “bound” to repeat the same “track” forever.
Themes
Now, Joe tells the story from his perspective. He was born in Vienna, in Vesper County, in 1873, and was taken in by neighbors named Rhoda and Frank Williams, though he was not actually their son. On the first day of school, when the teacher asked Joe his last name, he said that it was Trace (because he had heard Rhoda say that his parents “disappeared without a trace”). The Williams couple had a son, Victory, who was near Joe’s age, and the two became best friends. Every so often, Joe used to boast that his parents would come looking for him, but nobody ever did.
Joe’s sense of childhood abandonment is such a big part of his life that it even shapes his last name, Trace. Symbolically, then, the entire “Trace” marriage is founded on the absence Joe struggled with in early childhood. The fact that the story transitions to Joe’s perspective suggests that he is taking his solo, much like a musician in a jazz band might.
Themes
As teenagers, Joe and Victory were mentored by the best hunter in their small town, a man everyone called Hunter’s Hunter. But Joe’s quiet life ended when white supremacists set Vienna on fire, nullifying Black people’s deeds to their properties and destroying the land. So Joe and Victory moved to Palestine, a nearby town, which is where Joe met and married Violet. A decade later, Joe tried to buy a piece of land, but the people who sold it to him ran off with the paper that proved it was his.
Now, some parallels between Joe and Violet’s early lives emerge. Both struggled with parents who were absent, and both felt abandoned; both also struggled to retain their homes and sense of normalcy against the tides of white violence. That kind of dispossession (in which white people exploited the legal system in order to take Black people’s land) was a fixture in the post-war South.
Themes
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In 1906, Joe and Violet took the train to New York City. By the time they got to Harlem, the once-rural area had developed into a prosperous Black community, where Joe and Violet could rent houses that “looked like castles in pictures.” The couple decorated their new apartment with plants and birds, and as the cost of living rose, Joe got a job with Cleopatra beauty products to make some extra money (beyond what he made as a waiter).
The luxury and foreignness, to Joe and Violet, of life in Harlem is made clear both in Joe’s description of the “castle”-like homes and in the fancy words (“Cleopatra”) given to clubs and beauty products. In this early stage of the Trace couple’s New York City life, birds and plants represent vitality and bustling, future-oriented promise (though that symbolism will later shift).
Themes
In 1917, Joe was attacked and nearly killed by white men in a riot. Fortunately, Joe recovered, but by 1925, Violet was falling asleep with a doll in her arms and Joe realized how sad his wife was becoming. Shortly after, his affair with Dorcas began. Joe is careful to note that he does not blame Violet for the affair; he only blames himself, both for betraying his wife and for killing Dorcas. “I changed once too often,” Joe thinks. “Made myself new one time too many.”
The fact that Joe is not safe from white violence even in Harlem speaks, upsettingly, to the unavoidable nature of white bigotry. Interestingly, while Joe notes Violet’s longing for a child as one of the things that creates distance between them, he seems more preoccupied with his own constant invention and reinvention as the source of their divide. Like jazz as a musical genre, Joe seems to be making himself up all the time, a process that once felt invigorating but now exhausts him.
Themes
Dorcas had acne, but the little hoof-mark scars on her face only endear her more to Joe. Joe reflects on the day he killed her: he had a sense that she was betraying him, so he tracked her like a hunter from borough to borough, just as he had once tracked his mother back in Vesper County. Joe recalls, with pain, his embarrassment and confusion that day, as he visited all of Dorcas’s favorite spots in his quest to find her. Though he had a gun with him, it was more his habit from hunting than anything else; Joe did not intend to kill Dorcas, just to touch her.
Even as Dorcas divides Joe and Violet, she also brings them together, uniting them in their obsessions as they separately visit her favorite spots. Joe’s desire to track Dorcas down just like he tracked his mother once more shows how childhood memories of abandonment have influenced Joe’s patterns in his grown-up intimate relationships; his desire to touch Dorcas rather than kill her speaks to his longing for connection above all else.
Themes
Several days before Joe shot Dorcas, they had a terrible fight. From then on, Joe saw every young man on the street—“roosters,” as he calls them—as competition. Joe knows that if he were younger and had more swagger, he wouldn’t have to track Dorcas down; she would “track” him. Again, Joe remembers trying to figure out why Dorcas was making a hair appointment, worrying that she was getting dressed up for someone else. The jazz in the back of the beauty salon confirmed Joe’s worst suspicions.
Joe wishes that Dorcas would chase after him just as Violet once did, all those years ago under the walnut tree. Ironically, however, Joe seems to resent Violet for her pursuit of him, feeling that she deprived him of some kind of agency in their marriage. So the novel thus questions if he would he feel the same thing if Dorcas tried to “track” him down.
Themes
Finally, Joe thinks back to his first date with Dorcas. They had gone to a park, ignoring the dirty looks from white people, and scratched their initials into a rock. Joe recalls all the little presents he bought Dorcas, hoping desperately to ensure that she would visit him again. Dorcas lost her virginity to Joe, but in many ways, having sex with Dorcas felt like a first time for Joe, too. With pleasure and pride, Joe recalls that his affair with Dorcas was his decision alone, just like how he used to find prey in the woods: “I chose you. Nobody gave you to me.”
This is the second time that Joe has emphasized his feeling of “choosing” Dorcas, an agency that has been denied to him in almost every part of his life. But even as Joe celebrates the power this choice gives him, it also causes him a great deal of pain and insecurity, as can be seen in his desperate desire to maintain Dorcas’s affection with little presents and carefully planned dates.
Themes
