Jazz

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.”

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.

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.

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.”