Recitatif

"Recitatif" by Toni Morrison was probably one of my favorite reading assignments to date. I thought it was the perfect length, and overall it was very interesting, thought-provoking, and forward-thinking. The short story is about two girls, Roberta and Twyla, one black and one white, who grow up together at an orphanage but through chance, meet each other several times by chance throughout their adult life.
One of my favorite parts about the story is how ambiguous Toni Morrison is with her character descriptions. This piece is a clearly a story about race, but we have no idea whether the narrator, Twyla, is black or white. Morrison leaves so much description out that no clear argument can be made about who is black and who is white in the story, and when this ambiguous writing style is utilized in a story partially about racial tensions during the Civil Rights movement and several other riots that occurred afterwards.
But then I got to thinking... does it really matter? I've come to the conclusion that it doesn't. I found this story tragic because two childhood friends inevitably drifted farther and farther apart from each other to the point where their relationship became hostile, and this was due to racial tensions. When Twyla encounters Roberta for the first time since their childhood at St. Bonny's, Twyla is extremely excited to see Roberta but Roberta brushes her off, and gives this explanation to Twyla about why that was later on in the story, "you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was."
What I found most touching about this story was Roberta and Twyla's initial friendship at St. Bonny's. Back then, they were innocent and probably not entirely aware of race. One of the workers at St. Bonny's, Maggie, is teased by a lot of the girls there, but when Roberta and Twyla meet up later in life, they have no idea whether Maggie was black or if she was white. This because they never payed close enough attention to the color of Maggie's skin to begin with, they lived in a world where divisions between black and white didn't exist. Roberta and Twyla were very similar in their childhoods, they both had mothers who were unfit to take care of them. It is a shame that Roberta and Twyla eventually began to dislike each other when they began protesting on opposite sides when it came to segregation is schools, and that at the end of the day, when it came to that incident, they were more loyal to their "race" as opposed to being more loyal to their prior friendship. Because of issues like race, which shouldn't really be issues at all,  a rift was caused between the two former friends. I believe through the overall plot of the story, as well as the ambiguity of both main characters' races, as well as the confusion over Maggie's race at the end of the story, Toni Morrison is encouraging society to live in a world where issues like race shouldn't be that big a deal, and to just let people be who they are, and that people should be classified in terms of the color of their skin.