ESSAYS “Care in the Wake of Jazz” by Benjamin Papsun

Care in the Wake of Jazz

Benjamin Papsun, Vassar College

I was looking for more than the violence of the slave ship, the migrant and refugee ship, the container ship, and the medical ship. I saw that leaf in her hair, and with it I performed my own annotation that might open this image out into a life, however precarious, that was always there. That leaf is stuck in her still neat braids. And I think: Somebody braided her hair before that earthquake hit. (Sharpe 120)

The wake, as theorized by Christina Sharpe in her cultural and critical study In the Wake:

On Blackness and Being, is the set of conditions that create the framework for living while black.

The wake is the afterlife of slavery; it is a “position of deep hurt and deep knowledge” (Sharpe

27), and to live in it is “to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of

slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (Sharpe 14). The wake is a violent realization of

structures of oppression and of ideologies of white supremacy, enacted both subtly and overtly.

Sharpe explores the various manifestations of the wake—through the histories of slave ships and

the transmutation of black bodies into measurable property within their holds, through the

disproportionate effects of natural disasters on black communities and refugees, and through the

militaristic state attack on black people via incarceration and legally-sanctioned murder. These

conditions are the reality of black life, yet they are themselves insufficient to define and describe

it. A resolution is in order then, which bridges the wake itself and the ability for blackness to be

meaningful. As Sharpe herself asked the audience at an October 2018 talk at Vassar College:

“How are we to practice care? How are we to undo these violent relations?” There must be

something we can do to carve a space for the personal into a context laden with violence.

There is something we can do, argues Sharpe, something she terms “wake work.” Wake

work is the action by which the wake is disrupted, which allows us to “imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery” (Sharpe 18). The particular mode of wake work that I would like to draw

attention to is that of “care.” Sharpe describes a photograph of a young Haitian girl lying on a

stretcher, injured by the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that struck her home, who has a piece of

tape stuck to her forehead labeled “SHIP” (indicating to disaster responders that she is to be put

the effect the earthquake had on the Haitian people, and from innumerable other cases of state

actors creating violence under the guise of “care.” Sharpe writes: “I marked the violence … in

the name of care of the placement of that taped word on her forehead, and then I kept looking

because that could not be all there was to see or say. I had to take care” (Sharpe 120).

The care that Sharpe is looking for exists beyond and outside of institutional constructs,

outside of actors like the police and the military, who do work in the name of “care” that too

often manifests as violence against black men, women, and children. This kind of care is

essential to living in the wake, to countering the “violence of abstraction” (to borrow a term

which Sharpe borrows from Saidiya Hartman) with the personal and the material. The care that

Sharpe finds within the photograph of the Haitian girl is in the fact that somebody had braided

her hair before the earthquake hit (see the opening paragraph of this essay). Perhaps, then, a

basic domestic responsibility is all it takes to create a space for the personal within the wake. I

would like to center domestic responsibilities as a spatial and temporal location at which wake

work (in the form of care) is done. Beyond all the structures of oppression that confine

experience, there is a certain level of materiality that defines the substance of quotidian life and

the care that takes place within it.

Toni Morrison’s Jazz revels in the quotidian and the material, and creates an excellent

lens for the theoretical concepts that Sharpe offers and which I hope to expand upon. Basic

performances of domestic habits and care (care here generally meaning an act of empathy or

emotional upkeep) are often the main driving force in characters’ lives in Jazz, the glue that

holds their lives together even when the wake threatens to tear them apart. We know from the

onset that the events of the novel, in particular the murder of Dorcas, take place within the

personal and outside of the institutional: “There was never anyone to prosecute [Joe] because

nobody actually saw him do it, and the dead girl’s aunt didn’t want to throw money to helpless

lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn’t improve anything” (Morrison 4).

Events like Dorcas’s death will not be understood or resolved by institutional actors like lawyers

and police; they will be understood through the ways they impact characters in their roles as

There is another oblique reference to the violence of institutions when Alice (Dorcas’s

aunt) reflects on the motives that drove a group of disgruntled black veterans to riot in East St.

Louis, Illinois, killing so many whites that “the paper would not print the number” (Morrison

57). The soldiers “came home to white violence more intense than when they enlisted and, unlike

the battles they fought in Europe, stateside fighting was pitiless and totally without honor”

(Morrison 57). This is the wake of war; the battle for black soldiers does not end when they leave

the battlefield, rather, a new one begins. When their bodies are not authorized for violence by the

state, their self-defense is seen as riotous incivility. These points are not central to the text, but

they are important for orienting the discussion of care in Jazz. As Sharpe describes, there is a

critical distinction to be made between the care that she calls for as response to “quotidian

atrocity” and the “care” of “state-imposed regimes of surveillance” (Sharpe 20). These regimes

are recognized in Jazz, but they exist on a plane separate from the intimacy and overall sense of

daily life which brings the plot into being.

So where, then, is the care in Jazz? We already see hints of care even in something as

mundane as the layout of Violet and Joe’s house. Morrison describes their home: “Violet and Joe

have arranged their furnishings in a way that might not remind anybody of the rooms in Modern

Homemaker but it suits the habits of the body, the way a person walks from one room to another

without bumping into anything, and what he wants to do when he sits down” (Morrison 12). The

city home that has housed Joe and Violet’s marriage for twenty years is anchored in physical

comfort, a reflection of the crystallized daily habits and expectations the two share. Violet’s job

as a hairdresser means that she is constantly connected to her community, constantly providing a

literal form of care to those who live around her. It is well-established that Violet cannot imagine

being without a pressing errand or task (Morrison 15), and that she has no desire for rest,

although she finds the idea “attractive” (Morrison 16). Violet feels a compulsion towards

domestic labor because “the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of

[her] own thoughts … would knock [her] down” (Morrison 16).

This feeling of obligation comes from the tension between the wake (which is at least in

part expressed via Violet’s “cracks,” or her moments of emotional paralysis) and the reassurance

and to continue in her usual way of life, and so the habits themselves become life-sustaining on

an emotional level as well. The fact of their necessity may reflect something more

sinister—might Violet’s race and class structure her way of life so that she feels labor is her only

emotional outlet?—, but Violet’s domestic rituals ultimately do more to stabilize her life than

almost anything else can. Habits become the things that help one sleep all the way through the

night, like the reassuring touch of a familiar body in bed next you— “[a]nd rituals help too: door

locking, tidying up, cleaning teeth, arranging hair, but they are preliminaries to the truly

necessary things” (Morrison 27-28). What these “truly necessary things” are is not specified, but

whatever they may be—love, meaning, happiness, fulfillment—they cannot be achieved before a

requisite amount of material care is taken.

In scenes where Violet meets to spend time with Alice, the role of care via the domestic

and the material is also centered. The relationship between the two is complicated beyond

classification: Alice, the prudish, strait-laced aunt whose young niece was killed by Violet’s

husband, and Violet, the aging, demon-haunted wife whose life was ruined by Alice’s niece, both

united in the wake of Violet’s violent urge to slice Dorcas’s corpse at her own funeral. The bond

between them lies not only in their shared loneliness nor in their intertwined pasts, but also in

Alice’s proclivity to repair Violet’s clothing. Their conversations threaten to burst at the seams

with emotional gravity, and yet their interactions, like Violet’s daily routines, are rooted in

material habit. When a conversation between Violet and Alice about what Dorcas might have

grown up to be reaches a tense climax, the only security left for Alice to cling to is (literally) in

the material: “They looked away from each other then. The silence went on and on until Alice

Manfred said, ‘Give me that coat. I can’t look at that lining another minute’” (Morrison 111).

The subtext here is pregnant—domestic responsibility to another person can provide care beyond

the repair that words can afford. This resonates with Sharpe’s proposal of care “as a way to feel

and to feel for and with, a way to tend to the living and the dying” (Sharpe 139). Alice here is

providing the same kind of care that Violet routinely provides Joe when she washes his

tear-soaked handkerchiefs (“...it tired everybody out waiting to see what else Violet would do

We see this kind of care from Joe’s perspective as well during his narrative monologue,

when he describes the scene of the apartment where he saw Dorcas for the second time. “The

women gathered around and I showed them what I had while they laughed and did the things

women do: flicked lint off my jacket, pressed me on the shoulder to make me sit down. It’s a

way they have of mending you, fixing what they think needs repair” (Morrison 122), Joe

remembers. This domestic “mending” is light-hearted, flirtatious, and ultimately expresses that

these women care, in some way, for Joe. Joe also reflects on his role as one who provides care to

his community: “I sell trust. I make things easy. That’s the best way. Never push. Like at the

Windemere when I wait tables. I’m there but only if you need me” (Morrison 122). For both Joe

and Violet, their roles as providers of care bring them closer to their communities, and give their

lives some degree of meaning within the wake of black city life.

The analysis of care in Joe and Violet’s lives does not end here. The kind of care that Joe

seeks is further complicated by his relationship to Dorcas. Dorcas to him is a sweet, a candy, a

commodity, a relic which demands conservation by whatever means possible. He attempts,

though unsuccessfully, to find care for himself within the memory of her, by searing her into his

mind “[s]o that neither she nor the alive love of her will fade or scab over the way it had with

Violet” (Morrison 29). Joe wrongheadedly believes that the act of killing Dorcas will preserve

her. He misplaces his care by succumbing to the same measures of violence that care is meant to

resist. However, Morrison’s characters are meant to be complicated, and the murder of Dorcas

reflects not only Joe’s failure to control his impulses, but also the failure of time to preserve

experience. Joe was not only trying to kill Dorcas—he was trying to kill time, the greatest threat

to the freshness of young love.

Dorcas, although she is not alive for most of Jazz, is the common thread that runs through

the events and the characters of the novel. She exists outside of linear time, for time is dissolved

within the wake, and “the past that is not past appears, always, to rupture the present” (Sharpe 9).

Alongside materiality, time is another key aspect to care, and when care is practiced properly,

time loses its ability to control experience. It is through the performance of care in the material,

and the ahistorical braiding of narratives in In the Wake. The reader does not experience time in

Jazz as it might be measured by a clock, they experience time with the hypnotic push and pull of

a jazz trio. But this subjectivity would not have a danceable rhythm without the reliable pulse of

domesticity and material care. I am reminded of a passage from Richard Wright’s short story

“Long Black Song,” when a white clock salesman is amazed to find out that Sarah, a rural black

matriarch, lives without a clock.

“‘Haven’t you got a clock?’

‘Naw.’

‘But how do you keep time?’

‘We get erlong widout time.’

‘But how do you know when to get up in the morning?’

‘We jus git up, thas all.’

…‘Well, this beats everything! I don’t see how in the world anybody can live without

time.’

‘We jus don need no time, Mistah.’” (Wright 131)

The measurement of time is one more “regime of surveillance,” of transfiguring life into a

metric. Therefore, the destructuring and restructuring of time is a vital element of wake work.

Sarah does not live her life in metric time because she has created her own structure of time, one

based (like Violet and Joe’s house) on the needs of the body. Time is rebuilt to suit the domestic

habits of her, her husband, and her child. The way that Morrison drifts through time, uses it as a

medium for the expression of black life and the care that occurs within it, is itself an exercise of

wake work. The reclaiming of time via domestic work and material needs is a rebellion against

the wake and the way it attempts to define and confine experience. Care disrupts the wake,

allowing for the creation of a space for the personal in spite of the abstract institutions that make

it seem impossible to attain. Beyond the impositions of time and state legitimization lies the

sphere of the personal—and this is where the music of Jazz can be played.

Works Cited

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

———. “Black. Still. Life.” 9 October 2018. Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Lecture.

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. HarperCollins, 2008.

“In My Room,” Madison Golden, University of Wisconsin-Madison