While projected as somatic others, black women are also treated as inherent specters and spectators; they are prototypical unobserved observers of much of American Literature. Black women thus endure the watched and guarded environment--always under a narrator's or double's eye--of a typically unidentified or impersonal audience; they grow up where unmarried and unmarriageable pregnancy was end and close of livable life. . . . she wondered about hysteria, violence . . . of pregnancy without marriageability. . . They spoke to her firmly but carefully about her body. . . . The moment she got breasts they were bound and resented, a resentment that increased to outright hatred of her pregnant possibilities and never stopped until she married . . . when suddenly it was opposite. (76) Because a woman can in effect be two different people, herself and her child, doubleconsciousness can also reflect an internalized alienation from her body; perpetual inversion of expectations and identity; and a violent hysteria centered around her disruptive ability to create and identify with another human being. Though primarily a male trait in literary tradition--often imagined as male alienation from or loss of a woman--this self-alienation or doubling for Morrison becomes defining mark of a particularly female black psyche, and this female black psyche defining characteristic of American identity. in Light in August and Native Son, murder of a woman occupies center of Morrison's novel; but in this case it is a black woman killed by, or who decides she will die at hands of, a black man. (Unlike her literary antecedents, Dorcas also figuratively and literally keeps her head.) This obviously doubleedged privileging or reinscription of black female and of black female doubleconsciousness, then represents central assertion of Morrison's text. Though later abstracted from her text's resolution, for Morrison race and gender must first be used to define a doubleconsciousness almost all American writers seem to want to possess as their birthright. For many black women, immediate effect of double-consciousness is then experienced in an alienation from their own bodies. Dorcas feels this music while her aunt worried about how to keep heart ignorant of hips and in charge of both (60). Alice thus breaks self into disconnected parts, trying to keep Dorcas and that life below belt from meeting; in and of themselves, heart, head, and hips represent socialized double-consciousness of black women: There was a [End Page 456] night in her sixteenth year when Dorcas stood in her body, and from then she is an adult, a duality (64). Recalling Charles Johnson's configuration of West's Cartesian double-consciousness, Violet, in a manner parallel to Alice, splits her mind from her body: All my troubles be over if could get my body sick stead of my head (84). This divided self quickly and inevitably loses control of its as discovers when her body begins to hide and attack things of its own volition. When her fiance leaves Neola similarly loses not just her love but her control over arm and hand which he placed ring, an arm which then remains forever poised over her heart: As though she held broken pieces of her heart together in crook of her frozen arm. No part of her was touched by this paralysis (62). These broken bodies are cast to extremes, becoming either wholly animated or wholly inanimated by an internalized double-consciousness. Much like Neola, loses singular possession of her which becomes a force she must wrestle with: instead of putting her left heel forward, she stepped back and folded her legs in order to sit in street. When had stumbled into a crack or two--which narrator calls because cracks is what they were. Not openings or breaks, but fissures in globe light of day--she also immediately felt anything-at-all begin in her mouth. Words connected only to themselves pierced an otherwise normal comment (23). In words, physical fissure experiences, her inability to identify with her body as her self, reflects a fragmentation of language and consciousness; globe is split in half, and falls into a transcendental crack in consciousness itself. From disconnected words soon come disjointed actions: Less excusable than a wayward mouth is an independent hand that can find in a parrot's cage a knife lost for weeks (24). (The loosed household parrot represents a wild yet autonomic and Citybound nature, a voice and language without intention or meaning, reiterating--mimicking, doubling, and of course parroting--to I love which her husband could no longer manage and neither could bear to hear.) Trying to stave off this race music, Alice also encounters a Modernist crack in language, and in fact only cannot connect: What she read seemed crazy, out of focus. Some great gap lunged between print and child. She glanced between struggling for connection, something to close distance between silent staring child and slippery crazy words. (58) The disconnection between print and child, parent and child, word and meaning, self and self and other, are all staged as in need of jazz, of these talking drums which spanned distance, gather[ed] all up and connected them. 11 Though Alice still reaches for this gathering rope with one hand, and balls into a fist--I don't know how she did it-balance herself with two different hand gestures--the music transcends artificial separation between two hands. It is only music--half Nature, half City--which ultimately transcends double-consciousness and restores nature to itself, when, as Morrison tells us with a tip to Charlie, the winds blew and so did musicians. . . . From then bird was a Pleasure to itself and to them (224). [End Page 457] In attempting to disfigure Dorcas' corpse, tries to kill what's already dead and without a will because has lost control of herself; Alice knows that behind act of this woman called Violent lay A terrible and nasty closeness. . . . And of course race music to urge on (79). Consistently described as a compelled and possessed figure, Violet walked past drawn like a magnet to Dorcas' picture; she is possessed by music, by dead, by some other. Violet's conversation with Alice, like Joe's with himself, takes place as if under observation of some third person, an overriding but unidentifiable presence and power, in fact narrator: I'm not one you need to be scared of. No? Who Is? I don't That's what hurts my head. . . . Why did he do such a thing? Why did she? Why did you? I don't know. (80-81) The narrator alleges that most of her characters don't know what they are doing, let alone why they are doing it. (No one save narrator acknowledges being in-charge; as laments, Where grown people? Is it us? [110].) When we discover that Alice also has a figurative skeleton in her closet, that her life has in many ways paralleled Violet's, we are told that Violet listened as closely to what she was saying as did woman sitting by her, split into observer and observed, into double-consciousness. 12 Both women are waiting to find out what they will say and do. In Morrison's fable of double identity, we even wind up with an other Violet: wonders who earth that was that walked about City in her skin; peeped out through her eyes and saw things. . . . that slammed past a whitewoman. . . . She has been looking for that knife for a month. Couldn't for life of her think what she'd done with it. But that knew and went right to it. (89) This Violet--the emphatic Violent of double-consciousness, murder lurking in duality--is also in effect another narrator of Violet's life. When goes to Dorcas' funeral, she is as much a spectator to scene as anyone else, as surprised to see now [her knife] aimed at girl's haughty secret face (91). Her violence represents a public attempt to break through what remains of secret, private and voluntary, though even this desire turns out to be largely a function of involuntary. Like Joe, through most of text speaks less than she is spoken through: got quiet because things couldn't say were coming out of my mouth anyhow. got quiet because didn't know what my [End Page 458] hands might get up to. . . . The business going inside me thought was none of my business and none of