"Rectatif"

I never saw it coming. Even after reading it, I couldn't believe what I had read. "What the hell happened to Maggie?" Why is Maggie such a pivotal character in Toni Morrison's "Rectatif?" What does she represent? Was she black or white? Did she fall or was she beaten?

I tried reading Alice Walker's "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" after reading "Rectatif," but I couldn't get Maggie out of my head. So I figured I had to blog about it...get it out of my system.

Maggie, the mute (and apparently, deaf) cook at the orphanage where Twyla and Reberta first meet when they are eight, never actually makes much of an appearance in the story. It is only long after we leave the orphanage scene that Maggie starts to make it to the forefront of the plot, that is, when Roberta and Twyla meet each other for the second time after the orphanage and have lunch together. Roberta thinks Maggie was beaten by the "big girls" in the orchard while Twyla is convinced that Maggie fell on accident. Later we find out that Roberta thinks Maggie was black while Twyla thinks she was white.

Here's my interpretation. Twyla and Roberta look towards Maggie as a friend when they live in the orphanage. They see her as a struggling woman among the "orchard" of "big girls" and "real orphans." Both Twyla and Roberta sympathize with Maggie, and being as young, innocent, and isolated as they were, they did not see Maggie for her color, they saw her for who she was.

Between Twyla and Roberta, Twyla seems to have a much more mature outlook on life in general. She despises her mother for her inappropriate clothing, works at Howard Johnson in her young days, and eventually marries a fireman and has a child. It is interesting, then, to see that Twyla does not remember the hostility of Maggie's incident, but rather remembers feeling sympathy for Maggie for falling.

Roberta, on the other hand, tends to be a very aggressive person. She attends Jimi Hendrix concerts, grows up to marry a widowed man (obviously for the money), and has two servants and a limousine. She specifically remembers Maggie being black and being knocked down and beaten up by the "big girls." Again, we see that Roberta's recollection of Maggie's incident parallels her personality.

These recollections converge towards the end of the story when both Roberta and Twyla are nearly convinced that Maggie was black and that she was beaten up. This conclusion comes just after both women attend protests over black-white integration in public schools. Having been exposed to the true cruelties of racism and other forms of oppression, both women are subconsciously veered into accepting that Maggie was black and that she was in fact beaten.

My interpretation doesn't explain the last paragraph of the story, however. I'll share my thoughts on that later.