Content area
Full text
women with knives
February 8,1928, front-page headline in the New York Amsterdam News - "Jealous Man Kills Woman and Self in Basement Apartment"; the following week, February 15,1928, front-page headline once again in the News - "Husband Under Arrest But Denies Part in Slaying"; February 22,1928, front-page headline-"Woman Stabs Man to Death with His Knife After Party, held by Police When Went to Ask About Him." February 29,1928 front-page banner headline -"[Police] seek Husband as Brutal Slayer, Woman's Body Found with Head Nearly Severed"; March 7,1928, front-page headline-"Jealousy Caused Near Tragedy When Repulsed Downtown Lover Returns."
In Toni Morrison's Jazz one of the novel's key notes sounds when the staid and proper Alice Manfred relents to admit the woman behind the tabloids and the gossip, "Violent" (Violet) Trace, into her home and her heart. Confessing to this wild woman who represents all she has eschewed from her own secure and respectable life that "I don't understand women like you[, Violet]. Women with knives," Alice agrees, nevertheless, to let her in after "having heard how torn up the man was and reading the headlines in the Age, the News, the Messenger" (81). While Morrison comments in this scene upon a redemptive sisterhood that bridges the Harlem community's color and class divides (Kubitschek 150), she also tellingly captures an historical tie between female subjectivity and domestic violence stories in the weekly black press. Toni Morrison's Jazz asks us to step outside the public and monumental history of the Harlem Renaissance to bear witness to the "private," lived experience of black women (Nancy Peterson 205). To the casual skimmer of the popular press's often sensational headlines, the Harlem Renaissance would, as Morrison indicates, not only have been the era of Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker, and the National Negro Business League, but also of a "New Negress"-a "woman with knives." As the opening list of front-page headlines from the New York Amsterdam News for five consecutive weeks at the beginning of 1928 witnesses as well, such stories of domestic violence with their frequent portrayal of "women with knives" recur as a telling complement to the more highbrow political and social commentaries of the Opportunity or the Crisis. It might be tempting to dismiss these stories as sensationalism-titillating...