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True Belle is Rose Dear’s mother and Violet’s grandmother. After years of being enslaved by Vera Louise’s family, True Belle returns home to provide for Rose Dear and her children. True Belle, with her crafty solutions and willingness to laugh even in the face of tragedy, is a hero to Violet; she teaches Violet that “laughter is […] more complicated, more serious than tears.” As True Belle helps put Violet’s family back together in the wake of Rose Dear’s mental collapse, she tells stories of Vera Louise’s son Golden Gray. The narrator believes that True Belle’s memories of washing Golden Gray’s soft, blonde curls are likely what catalyzed Violet’s decision to become a hairdresser in adulthood.
True Belle Quotes in Jazz
The Jazz quotes below are all either spoken by True Belle or refer to True Belle. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4 Quotes
What did she see, young girl like that, barely out of high school, with unbraided hair, lip rouge for the first time and high-heeled shoes? And also what did he? A young me with high-yellow skin instead of black? A young me with long wave hair instead of short? Or a not me at all. A me he was loving in Virginia because that girl Dorcas wasn’t around there anywhere. Was that it? […] Is that what happened? Standing in the cane, he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see, but his heart knew all about, and me, holding on to him but wishing he was the golden boy I never saw either. Which means from the very beginning I was a substitute and so was he.
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Chapter 6 Quotes
True Belle was the one [Vera] wanted and the one she took. I don’t know how hard it was for a slave woman to leave a husband that work and distance kept her from seeing much of anyhow, and to leave two daughters behind with an old aunt to take care of them. Rose Dear and May were eight and ten years old then. […]
More important, Miss Vera Louise might help her buy them all out with paper money, because she sure had a lot of it handed to her. Then again, maybe not. Maybe she frowned as she sat in the baggage car, rocking along with the boxes and trunks, unable to see the land she was traveling through. Maybe she felt bad. Anyway, choiceless, she went.
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[Golden thought of] the woman who cooked and cleaned for Vera Louise; who sent baskets of plum preserves, ham and loaves of bread every week while he was in boarding school; who gave his frayed shirts to rag and bone men rather than let him wear them; the woman who smiled and shook her head every time she looked at him. […] When the two of them, the whitewoman and the cook, bathed him they sometimes passed anxious looks at the palms of his hand, the texture of his drying hair. Well, Vera Louise was anxious, True Belle just smiled, and now he knew what she was smiling about, that nigger. But so was he. He had always thought there was only one kind—True Belle’s kind. Black and nothing. Like Henry Lestory. Like the filthy woman snoring on the cot. But there was another kind—like himself.
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True Belle Character Timeline in Jazz
The timeline below shows where the character True Belle appears in Jazz. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...client’s head, and the narrator wonders if Violet became a hairdresser because of her grandmother, True Belle . True Belle lived in Baltimore and worked for Miss Vera Louise in a fine,...
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Chapter 4
...Violet has to admit that she was always searching for someone, too: the golden-haired boy True Belle used to talk about.
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...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...
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One day, four years after True Belle returned, Rose Dear threw herself into a well. Two weeks after that, Violet’s father returned...
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...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...
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...when, 10 years later, he agreed to move with Violet to Baltimore, to the city True Belle had described.
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...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...
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Chapter 6
...but that she is determined to try. She notes that Joe likely never knew about True Belle , about what happened after Violet’s father joined a party that advocated for Black voting...
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True Belle stayed with Violet and her siblings for 11 years. During that time, True Belle talked...
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Vera wanted True Belle to come with her, so True Belle had to leave her own small children. Though...
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Now, the narrator pictures Golden Gray, as clever and handsome and fancy as True Belle has described him to be. In the narrator’s mind, Golden has set off from home...
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Finally, Golden arrives at the house True Belle has described to him. He ties his horse up front, then goes in and puts...
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...his father is a Black man named Henry Lestory, the man who owns this house. True Belle had told Golden where to find his father, her final kindness after a lifetime of...
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Chapter 7
...exchange, Wild goes into labor. As Wild struggles through a difficult birth, Golden explains how True Belle helped him find Hunter, and he chastises Hunter for not being more involved in his...
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