Sickness and Disability Theme Analysis

Many people read “Recitatif” as a story whose primary theme is disability. Although the main disabled figure in the story, Maggie, at first appears to be a background character, by the end of the story she takes on a central (if still passive) role. Maggie’s disabilities—she is mute and possibly deaf, with “legs like parentheses”—make her even more vulnerable than the children at St. Bonny’s. She is mysterious, and the characters in the story all have different ideas about her. The other children claim her tongue was cut out, but Twyla doesn’t believe them. Roberta and Twyla are also unsure whether she can hear or not, and try to test her by calling her “Dummy!” and “Bow legs!”; however, her lack of reaction is inconclusive, and Twyla is left ashamed at the possibility that Maggie could hear this cruel taunting. Later in the story, it is revealed that Roberta thinks Maggie is black, whereas Twyla thinks she is white. Maggie is thus something of a mystical, surreal figure. Twyla even wonders if “there was somebody in there after all,” with “in there” referring to Maggie’s body. As an adult, she looks back on the incident when Maggie fell and concludes: “Nobody inside.” Because of her disability, Maggie is not considered a person with interior emotions and subjectivity.

Significantly, the children at St. Bonny’s seem to blame Maggie for her disability and defenselessness. Twyla condemns her for wearing “this really stupid little hat”—a hat with earflaps that symbolize her rumored deafness and disconnection from those around her. As an adult, Roberta says that “Because she couldn’t talk—well, you know, I thought she was crazy,” and both Twyla and Roberta admit that even if they didn’t kick Maggie, they wanted the gar girls to do so. Roberta even confesses, “I really wanted them to hurt her.” For the children in the shelter, the sight of someone already suffering from a physical disability causes them to want to inflict even more pain on her. This can be read as a result of the children’s own suffering and marginalization in society; they take out their own feelings of helplessness and rejection on someone who is even weaker and more vulnerable than they are.

Maggie is not the only disabled character in the story, however. In the very first sentence, Twyla declares: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” Roberta’s mother’s sickness makes her unable to take care of her daughter; this is paralleled by Twyla’s mother’s mysterious problem with dancing, a connection that suggests that Twyla’s mother’s obsession with dancing all night is itself a kind of disability that prevents her from properly performing her role as a mother. This idea is emphatically confirmed when Twyla says: “Maggie was my dancing mother… Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night… Rocking, dancing, swaying as she walked.” Maggie and Twyla’s mother are linked by the unusual way they move and from their detachment from the world around them. This in turn suggests that there is something about their ways of moving that is deemed socially inappropriate, which is also a racialized concept; throughout American history, black people have been demonized for dancing and other forms of movement associated with African culture.