JAZZ 

Toni Morrison

[...]Or else he feels sorry about himself for being faithful in the first place. And if that virtue is unappreciated, and nobody jumps up to congratulate him on it, his self-pity turns to resentment which he has trouble understanding but no trouble

focusing on the young sheiks, radiant and brutal, standing on street corners. Look out. Look out for a faithful man near fifty.

Because he has never messed with another woman; because

he selected that young girl to love, he thinks he is free. Not free to break loaves or feed the world on a fish. Nor to raise the war dead, but free to do something wild.

Take my word for it, he is bound to the track. It pulls him like a needle through the groove of a Bluebird record. Round and round about the town. That’s the way the City spins you. Makes you do what it wants, go where the laid-out roads say to. All the while letting you think you’re free; that you can jump into thickets because you feel like it. There are no thickets here and if mowed grass is okay to walk on the City will let you know. You can’t get off the track a City lays for you. Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor,

ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back

where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses— young loving. That was Dorcas, all right. Young but wise. She was Joe’s

personal sweet—like candy. It was the best thing, if you were

young and had just got to the City. That and the clarinets and even they were called licorice sticks. But Joe has been in the City twenty years and isn’t young anymore. I imagine him as one of those men who stop somewhere around sixteen[...]