Rare Toni Morrison short story to be published this month

“Recitatif” refers to a musical expression defined by Merriam-Webster as “a rhythmically free vocal style that imitates the natural inflections of speech,” a style Morrison’s often suggested. The story tells of a series of encounters between Roberta and Twyla, one of whom is Black, the other white, although we are left to guess which is which.

They meet as girls at the St. Bonaventure children’s shelter (“it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race,” remembers Twyla, the story’s narrator). And they run into each other on occasion years later, whether at a Howard Johnson’s in upstate New York, where Twyla was working and Roberta comes in with a man scheduled to meet with Jimi Hendrix, or later at a nearby Food Emporium.

“Once, twelve years ago, we passed like strangers,” Twyla says. “A black girl and a white girl meeting in a Howard Johnson’s on the road and having nothing to say. One in a blue and white triangle waitress hat — the other with a male companion on her way to see Hendrix. Now we were behaving like sisters separated for much too long.”

As Womack notes, “Recitatif” includes themes found elsewhere in Morrison’s work, whether the complicated relationship between two women that was also at the heart of her novel “Sula” or the racial blurring Morrison used in “Paradise,” a 1998 novel in which Morrison refers to a white character within a Black community without making clear who it is. Morrison often spoke of race as an invention of society, once writing that “the realm of racial difference has been allowed an intellectual weight to which it has no claim.”