y, specifically the history of oppression that marks the African-American life experience in a European-American-dominated society, exerts just as much influence on behavior and attitudes. For example, Violet and Joe come to New York in 1906, the initial maturation period for jazz as an American historical artifact that also coincides with the persistent wave of migration of African Americans from the rural south to the ever-more-industrialized north that began in the wake of Reconstruction and Jim Crow and continued through much of the century:
The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s; the '80s; the '90s but was a steady stream in 1906 when Joe and Violet joined it. Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is for forever, and it is like forever. . . . And in the beginning when they first arrive, and twenty years later when they and the City have grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was lik
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