ENGL 102 Week 4 Homework

Autry 3

Kendra Autry

Professor Mark Freeman Price

English 102

31 August 2021

Week 3 Assignment

Thesis statement: Toni Morrison’s Recitatif provides a window for readers into a young black girl’s view of racial differences. The story “Recitatif” challenges our perceptions of race as well as identity through hiding the race of the main characters unsaid. The idea that we get from the Twyla who is the speaker is that Roberta is a lady from another race and they were similar to salt and pepper. However, I believe that racial ambiguity does not exist. Recitatif’s characters, time period and setting, and plot provide a great example of literary art.

Claim: The story “Recitatif” challenges our perceptions of race as well as identity through hiding the race of the main characters unsaid. The idea that we get from the Twyla who is the speaker is that Roberta is a lady from another race and they were similar to salt and pepper. However, I believe that racial ambiguity does not exist.

Warrant 1: During Twyla and Roberta stay at St. Bonny’s their racial difference don’t affect the girl’s relationship, and the reader has the potential to forget that they are ladies from various cultural background. Nevertheless, Easter comes, getting a visit from the ladies’ mothers, racial tensions are noticed in the narration. Roberta is triggered to introduce her parent to Twyla, however things do not go as planned and her parents were rude to both Twyla and Mary (Morrison, 132).

Warrant 2: This fact is as well brought about during Twyla and Roberta’s second event when Roberta treated Twyla in a dismissive way. Twyla tends to be angry with this character, however the issues of race does not rise till an encounter when Twyla asks Roberta about her character. Roberta’s feedback on Twyla was “Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.” In addition, this shows that she has always been effectively knowledgeable on their racial differences and had the perspective that Twyla understood. Twyla doesn’t speak up and argue the point with Roberta, but remembers that during her stay in Howard Johnson’s, the blacks were close with the white people in those periods. Though Twyla does not care on what races are, this isn’t the case for Roberta.

Warrant 3: The engagement between Twyla and Roberta on Maggie maintains that the racial distinctions tend to be clear. Roberta says that Maggie is black and Twyla tends to be confused on this outline. She later wonders if or not this true and she says that when she thought about it she could not be certain. She was not pitch-black; she was aware of or she would have recalled that. Though this may tend to promote the ambiguity of race, the perception that Twyla would’ve have identified if Maggie was pitch-black outlines that in a certain race there are identifiable racial differences.

Work Cited

Morrison, Toni. “Recitatif.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11thed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. Las Vegas: Norton. 2014. 131-147.