Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 29

Sweet Desolation and Seduction
25
The breath of Harlem causes a man’s heart to race not only in sexual
desire, but also in the desire to succeed. The City causes a person’s heart to race
in expectation, to hope and believe he/she can accomplish impossible dreams.
The glamour and promise of the City captivates its dwellers. “That kind of
fascination, permanent and out of control, seizes children, young girls, men of
every description, mothers, brides, and barfly women, and if they have their way
. . . they feel more like themselves, more like the people they always believed
they were . . . the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full
of amiable strangers” (35).
The term “amiable strangers” is unique here; it implies that people in
the City do not know you well enough to be called friends. Meanwhile, they are
friendly enough to permit you to go about your own way, do your own thing. In
their lack of expectations for you, you are free to try and accomplish whatever
you want. In Jazz, Morrison writes, “Do what you please in the City, it is there
to back and frame you no matter what you do. And what goes on, on its blocks
and lots and side streets, is anything the strong can think of and the weak will
admire. All you have to do is heed the design—the way it’s laid out for you,
considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need
tomorrow” (8, 9).
But Morrison’s description on the permissiveness of the City seems to
suggest that the City likes to give its dwellers licenses to drive, even if they may
lack the maturity such driving requires. This calls into question the wisdom—
and patemal/fratemal love—of the City. What parent gives their six-year-old
child a bike and then doesn’t warn them of riding it in the street? Or show them
how to be safe on the street? It would be a negligent parent, a lazy parent, or a
parent who simply doesn’t care. The paradoxical parenting by the City is seen
when we read, “One thing for sure, the streets will confuse you, teach you or
break your head” (72). Similarly, the “amiable strangers” in the City reflect the
City’s attitude of “leave and let live—it is the humanitarian thing to do . . .” Or
is it? The humanitarian way, then, gets people killed everyday!
It has a rhythm—jazz. It has a will.
The American city’s music of choice in the 1920s was jazz. The City
adopted it while welcoming the first waves of migrating African-Americans in
the late 1800s and early 1900s. “Jazz . . . sprang from the mud and blood of the
Delta and traveled west and north with migrating African-Americans to Kansas,
Oklahoma, Illinois, Ohio, New York, and elsewhere” (Ryan 158). When the
City met jazz, it liked it immediately. It took it up and wore it in style—like
John Travolta in his white suit and swagger in Saturday Night Fever.
This suave jazz rhythm became Harlem’s mode of self-expression. The
“love” of the City reached Joe and Violet on the incoming train. “Joe stood up,
his fingers clutching the baggage rack above his head. He felt the dancing better
that way, and told Violet to do the same” (30). And Joe and Violet were
disposed to feel “at home” with the City because its heartbeat was their own