Where Pain Lands

When I was a little girl, and felt lonely, my initial reaction was to keep my sadness inside, which eventually transformed into anger after a few days or weeks. I became very upset by things that usually wouldn't normally bother me and took it out on the wrong people. During these moments, having someone to listen and offer validation was comforting. Conversely, I remember occasions when I'd huddle with friends and engage in gossip or not-so-nice behavior. This all came from the need for connection. Sometimes I was at the bottom of the pyramid and other times I wasn't, but in adolescent girl land someone had to be on the outs. It's just how it was. This same scenario unfolds in Toni Morrison’s short story Recitatif, where Isolation slowly turns into anger, and that anger ends up spilling onto the most vulnerable person. The story follows two girls, Twyla and Roberta, who meet as children in an orphanage for girls, called St. Bonny’s. Both of them have been left there by their mothers for different reasons, and because they are the only girls in the school who are not real orphans, they don't fit in.

At St. Bonny’s, a woman named Maggie, working in the kitchen is mute and might even be deaf. Morrison describes her as a child trapped in an adult’s body. The older girls laugh at her and call her names like "bow leg". Twyla and Roberta admit later that they didn’t stop it or help her, and instead, even joined in. Although Twyla and Roberta didn't fit in, Maggie was the most vulnerable person in their space and because Maggie can’t and doesn't fight back, winds up the target of everyone else's insecurities and pain.

Morrison brings the reader to a scene Years later, when the women meet again. Twyla, while working as a waitress, spots Roberta and her friends sitting at a table in the restaurant. When Twyla approaches her old St. Bonnie's roommate, Roberta snubs Twyla, laughing with her friends because Twyla doesn't know who Jimi Hendrix is. Twyla laughs along, even though it hurts. Because of her past, this is a pattern ingrained in Roberta, and in that moment, Twyla was the easy target. Morrison shows that bullying doesn’t always look like pushing someone down. Sometimes it’s the small ways people make others feel less than. Roberta's actions show that she is still carrying anger within her over her childhood, perhaps because her mother "never got better".

The guilt over how Maggie was treated, stays with Roberta and Twyla years later. Roberta eventually admits she might have lied about an earlier interaction, where she told Twyla that it wasn't just the older girls who pushed Maggie down in the Orchard, but they did as well. But by then, the truth almost doesn’t matter. What matters is how that memory keeps returning, forcing both women to face who they were and what they did or didn’t do.

Morrison never tells us the full truth of what exactly happened to Maggie because the story isn’t just about her, it’s about all of us. About how we handle our anger, where we put it, and how easy it is to forget the people we hurt when we were just trying to survive.

Because if no one teaches us what to do with our pain, it doesn’t disappear. It just finds someone else to land on.

It is important to note that Morrison discloses, in the beginning of the story that one of the girls is white and the other is Black but never lets the reader know which is which. This forces the reader to examine their reasons for their assumptions about race. Also, Morrison creates ambiguity around the race of Maggie, saying she is the color of "sand". Taking race identity out of the story, forces the reader to take it into theirs, adding another layer of that hierarchy ingrained in Americans.