Title: Jazz
Description: It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are in the scintillating City, around Lenox Avenue, "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one... At last, at last, everything's ahead... Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." But amid the euphoric decisiveness, a tragedy ensues among people who had train-danced into the City, from points south and west, in search of promise.

Joe Trace--in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband--shoots to death his lover of three months, impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas ("Everything was like a picture show to her"). At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, herself a hairdresser--who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, and who talks mostly to birds--tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse.

In a dazzling act of jazz-like improvisation, moving seamlessly in and out of past, present, and future, a mysterious voice--whose identity is a matter of each reader's imagination--weaves this brilliant fiction, at the same time showing how its blues are informed by the brutal exigencies of slavery. Richly combining history, legend, reminiscence, this voice captures as never before the ineffable mood, the complex humanity, of black urban life at a moment in our century we assumed we understood.
Subjects: Social life and customs, Middle-aged persons, Psychological fiction, Funeral rites and ceremonies, Vida social y costumbres, Fiction, Afro-Americans, Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Historical fiction, Afronorteamericanos, Romance fiction, Crimes of passion, African Americans, Ficción, Love stories, Homicide, Love, Moeurs et coutumes, Noirs, Reading Level-Grade 11, Reading Level-Grade 12, 1000blackgirlbooks, American fiction (fictional works by one author), African americans, fiction, New york (n.y.), fiction, Large type books, Fiction, historical, general, Fiction, psychological, 18.06 Anglo-American literature, Noirs américains, Romans, Crimes passionnels, Personnes d'âge moyen, Funérailles, Rites et cérémonies, Relations humaines, Quartier de Harlem, Psychological, African americans--fiction, Crimes of passion--fiction, Middle-aged persons--fiction, Funeral rites and ceremonies--fiction, Triangles (interpersonal relations)--fiction, Ps3563.o8749 j38 2004, 813/.54
Places: Harlem (New York, N.Y.), New York (State), Harlem, New York