Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 31
Sweet Desolation and Seduction
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sound with “Trombone Blues,” won’t you? Turn Duke to full wail, crank the
Victrola, send Okeh Records twenty-five cents, a small price to pay for the
means to drown out the City’s unceasing call for pain.
Violet’s desire for a child, of her own, leads her to steal a baby on the
street. Rememories of a mother, a “wild black girl” (160), who sequesters
herself deep in the woods, far from the City’s crowds. What is it that Joe and
Violet long for in the City’s impersonal space? Is it anything like Golden Gray’s
search for his father? “Violet started sleeping with a doll in her arms” (129) and
Joe fell for “little half moons clustered underneath cheekbones, like faint
hoofmarks” (130). The pair from the woods seeks love in the City. They seek
beyond themselves and each other: “In this world the best thing, the only thing,
is to find the trail and stick to it” (130). They find the trail, yes, but it leads them
away from that which they seek: Knowledge and love in the “blocks and lots
and sidestreets” (9) of the Promised Land.
They both seek, and find, Dorcas. She is Violet’s child and Joe’s lost
love (even mother love) simultaneously, and, for both, that which is created for
them to destroy. They cannot destroy the dirty City, so they destroy the product
of the City, a child whose parents are consumed in the City’s fire, whose love is
wanton, flighty, deadly. Joe shoots the child and Violet tries to ruin the corpse.
Joe takes his hunter’s instinct, seeks his prey, “rambling, just rambling all
though the City” (130), and he catches it, shoots it, shoots the girl who gave him
her “first time”—“And mine,” says the City’s hunter, “in a manner of speaking”
(134)—shoots her to the sound of tenor saxophones and rent parties and empty
whisky bottles. And Violet picks up the violent thread and follows it back
though the streets, to the corpse, and pulls out her flashing knife. But neither
member of this pair, not Joe with his gun, not Violet with her knife, can kill off
the City’s pain. It’s there in the parades of veterans and in between the slices of
bread in White House sandwiches, waiting, crouching, behind walls and trash
cans, to pounce:
I was sure one would kill the other. I waited for it so I could
describe it. I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an
abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack
and no power on the earth could lift the arm that held the
needle. I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me
( 220 ).
Jazz also serves to restore the love within the marriage it once
contrived to destroy. Yes, Violet remained married to Joe, even after his
adulterous affair with Dorcas and his eventual murder of the girl, but the
underlying relational threads of the marriage had long-since dissipated. Couple
conversation prior to and during Joe’s affair, had emaciated to a language of
transaction, mere grunts of acknowledgement and silence. Part of this waning in