Blended

The noose that Imani finds hanging in her gym locker symbolizes the long, dark history of white racism, but it is more than an artifact from history. In a contemporary society, the noose symbolizes the persistence of bigoted white people and their irrational hatred toward Black people. The noose was an instrument of violence used when white lynch mobs opted to circumvent the justice system and mete out their own form of justice by hanging Black people accused of violating the practices and customs of a white culture. In short, the noose was used to kill Black people. Thus, it is more than a symbol of hate speech. The noose is a tacit threat to visit violence on a Black person.

When Mr. Kazilly attempts to introduce to his sixth-grade class the difficult subject of American racism, he wants to make sure his students understand the threat of racism. He talks about lynching and the moral, legal, and ethical problems inevitable when “people decide to be judge, jury, and executioner without following any laws” (74). The concept is abstract to his class. All Izzy can say is that lynching is “really awful.” Imani, however, because she does not share Izzy’s biracial identity, speaks up in class to expose the bigoted joke by one of her white classmates, who snidely remarks that ropes are no big deal; he sees them in cowboy movies all the time. Imani is angry. When she calls attention to the joke, Izzy thinks her face looks like “somebody who’s lived a thousand years” (75). Imani says to the smirking boy: “Real people were once executed by hanging. With a rope and noose. People like me” (76).

In speaking up, however, Imani exposes herself to the vigilante mindset of white racists. The noose she finds in her locker may be a weak attempt at a prank, but it is intended to intimidate Imani. The noose shocks and traumatizes Imani, a young and proud Black girl raised in a home where African culture is part of her heritage and her identity. The noose terrifies her, not because she feels that her actual life is threatened but because she is suddenly made aware of the depth of the racism in her own classmates. Despite a progressive school with progressive teachers in a suburb that is affluent and reflects cultural diversity, the noose symbolizes the irrational hate that still exists in white people. What is more concerning is that the perpetrator of the prank is an 11-year-old kid, a sign that bigotry is passed from one generation to the next.

Blended is at its core a novel about Izzy leaving behind the innocent perceptions of her childhood and embracing the difficult realities of adult life. As such, it is a kind of a bildungsroman—a novel that tracks the moral and psychological growth of a child into adulthood. Izzy begins the novel with a certain set of assumptions but closes the novel with an entirely different set of assumptions. What is unusual here is that the coming-of-age narrative is told by the child. A first-person bildungsroman allows a child to share their growing awareness directly. There is no larger authority framing the story of Izzy’s growing realization of the complexities of divorce and the reality of racism. Rather, Izzy shares directly, which allows not only for irony but for empathy with her character. The reader can track Izzy’s steady evolution into awareness of complexity and the need for her to open up to others rather than focusing on her own issues. Those are large issues for any child to grasp.

Because the reader understands what an 11-year-old does not, the reader understands the subdued tensions between Izzy’s divorced parents, the implications of the noose, and the logic behind the police stopping Darren’s car. Initially, Izzy sees her parents’ divorce only as it impacts her. She defines her parents’ split in terms of her negotiating between two houses—her split world. She also understands her biracial identity in simplistic terms. However, Izzy has much to learn. Her perceptions fit the limited awareness of a child, even a precocious child such as Izzy. In the end, Izzy realizes what she does not understand about divorce and racism at the beginning of her story. Divorce, she sees, is bigger and broader than a kid shuffling between houses. Her mother and her father are far more complicated people than she suspected. Racism is not something that can be easily remedied by resorting to the metaphors of music. It is a stubborn and ugly reality in the world she must now grow up in.

Izzy is still chronologically a child even at the end of the novel. She is still 11. She, however, has gained a much more mature perception as a result of her experiences over the winter. Like the fragile daffodils in her father’s garden that Izzy coaxes to survive the last few weeks of winter, Izzy survives her experiences and flowers into a stronger young woman, aware now and able to negotiate with a keener sense of the world around her. Thus, the ending is essentially optimistic. Izzy is gifted with awareness. That awareness is beyond her ability to understand completely. Rather than explain what she has learned, her epiphany is registered in her clear-eyed depiction of the members of her blended family hugging each other in prayer in her hospital room and in the complex harmony of a Beethoven piano piece.

When her future stepmother introduces Izzy to the music of the blues and boogie-woogie, the song that serves as the tipping point in Izzy’s discovery of Black music and her own unexpected response to the syncopations and unrestrained melodies of boogie-woogie is a called “Bumble Boogie.” Izzy finds the sheet music in the piano bench of the Steinway at her father’s house. She assumes it is music from when Anastasia played “a million years ago” (122). Long trained in the careful mathematical precision of European classical music, Izzy is surprised by her profound reaction to her first attempts at working through the song’s “deep rumble” bass and tricky syncopations. She is certain her staid piano teacher would “have a heart attack” if she were to hear Izzy playing with such abandon (123), her left hand “dancing.” As she notes, “This is so not Clementi” (122). Playing the Black music, Izzy lets go of the precision and careful discipline of white music, noting, “My fingers know exactly when to pound and exactly when to fly” (122). Darren, who stops at the doorway of the music room to listen, praises her: “Now this here is some real music!” (123).

For all its obviously Black-influenced syncopations and barrelhouse percussive rhythm, “Bumble Boogie” has a complex and very blended history. The melody draws on the familiar tune “The Flight of the Bumblebee” by the Russian classical composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. At first hearing, “Bumble Boogie” would appear to be a Black take on that staid white melody. That arrangement, however, was the work of Jack Fina, a white pianist and bandleader from the Italian working-class neighborhoods of Passaic, New Jersey. Fina, then, was a white artist tapping into the Black sensibility. In ways that Izzy cannot know, the boogie tune is a perfect symbol of the power of blended identity, a work of biracial intensities. Thus, unknowingly, Izzy discovers how expressions of the creative process productively intertwine, or blend, the talents, vision, and energies of both Black and white artists.