That is what is beneath their undercover whispers.” They are inward toward the other, bound and joined by carnival dolls and the steamers that sailed from ports they never saw. They are under the covers because they don't have to look at themselves anymore there is no stud's eye, no chippie glance to undo them. The pears they let hang on the limb because if they plucked them, they would be gone from there and who else would see that ripeness if they took it away for themselves? How could anybody passing by see them and imagine for themselves what the flavour would be like? Breathing and murmuring under covers both of them have washed and hung out on the line, in a bed they chose together and kept together nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary, and the mattress, curved like a preacher's palm asking for witnesses in His name's sake, enclosed them each and every night and muffled their whispering, old-time love. They are remembering while they whisper the carnival dolls they won and the Baltimore boats they never sailed on. They reach, grown people, for something beyond, way beyond and way, way down underneath tissue. Their ecstasy is more a leaf-sigh than bray and the body is the vehicle, not the point. All relationships are complicated, but they're also all worth it.“It's nice when grown people whisper to each other under the covers. At the end (literally), Jazz is about all sorts of love: romantic, familial, maternal, paternal, friendship.

The narrator spends the last four paragraphs of the book talking about how nice lasting marriage is, and how s/he (who is this narrator, anyway?) wishes s/he had somebody to love. Much as our hands have always been with us-much as we can all carry the past forward-so, too, are they with us now.

So the last lines of the novel are both a reminder of where Joe and Violet are by the end and a warning to the reader: Remember the past but don't let it haunt you. And where are Joe and Violet's hands at the end of the novel? Touching each other with the tender love of a long marriage. Except, of course, they couldn't completely flee racism or the past.Īt the end of the novel, Joe and Violet have decided to let the past be the past and forgive each other for their bad choices and craziness-they've decided to stop living in the past and concentrate on the now. They're also part of the Great Migration, a huge historical event that saw thousands of black people move out of the post- Civil War South and into less hostile Northern cities. Violet and Joe are two individuals that are under siege by their own histories: Joe is perpetually a lost boy hunting his mama, and Violet is so terrified of becoming crazy like her own mom that she decides against having any babies. Let's start by remembering Jazz's preoccupation with history. The last two lines of the book are 'Look where your hands are.

Jazz by toni morrison