The narrator reveals in an opening rush of gossip that Joe Trace shot his young lover Dorcas and was never prosecuted for her death.

Violet attends Dorcas's funeral and attempts to slash the dead girl's face with a knife before being pinned to the floor.

Violet returns home from the funeral and releases all of her caged birds, including the parrot that tells her it loves her.

Obsessed with her husband's dead lover, Violet places a photograph of Dorcas on the family mantelpiece.

Joe and Violet separately sneak downstairs at night to stare alone at Dorcas's photograph on the mantelpiece.

Violet begins repeatedly visiting Dorcas's aunt Alice Manfred, and the two grieving women form an unlikely friendship.

Joe rents neighbor Malvonne's apartment for a few hours each night to secretly meet with Dorcas.

Joe recalls his affair beginning when he sold cosmetics at Alice Manfred's apartment and first met Dorcas at the door.

Dorcas breaks up with Joe, telling him she is tired of sneaking around and wants a boyfriend she can be seen with.

Joe tracks Dorcas for five days and confronts her at Malvonne's apartment, where she says cruel things to him.

Joe finds Dorcas dancing with another man named Acton at a party and shoots her.

Dorcas refuses to name her killer or allow anyone to take her to a hospital, and she slowly bleeds to death.

Dorcas's friend Felice arrives at Joe and Violet's door carrying meat and a record, wanting to tell them the truth about Dorcas.

Felice reveals to Joe that Dorcas's dying words were a message about an apple meant for him alone.

Joe and Violet fully reconcile their marriage, and Joe watches Violet's shoulders transform into the wings of a red-winged blackbird.

Jazz opens with an act of intimate gossip, revealing that Joe Trace shot his young lover Dorcas and was never prosecuted for her death. Joe's wife Violet responds with violence of her own, attacking Dorcas's body at the funeral before retreating home to release her caged birds. Both Joe and Violet become haunted by Dorcas's photograph, which Violet places on the mantelpiece, each seeing a different person in the girl. As the story unfolds, Joe's passionate but doomed affair with Dorcas is revealed, ending when she left him for a younger man and he tracked her down across the city. Joe's search ends in tragedy at a party, where he shoots Dorcas, and she quietly bleeds to death rather than name him to anyone. The arrival of Dorcas's friend Felice, who carries the girl's final message of love, ultimately allows Joe and Violet to forgive themselves and each other, healing their long-estranged marriage.

Joe's affair, Dorcas's murder, and the Traces' path to healing.

Young Violet sits down in the middle of a busy street and refuses to move or speak, an early sign of her fragmented mind.

Joe Trace first spots Dorcas buying candy at a Harlem drugstore, an image he carries with him long after.

Joe and Violet leave Virginia for New York City and fall immediately and deeply in love with the energy of Harlem.

Dorcas's father is beaten to death and her mother dies in a house fire during the East St. Louis riots.

Alice Manfred holds young Dorcas's hand during a silent march and quietly transfers her own deep fear onto her orphaned niece.

White men enter Violet's childhood home and repossess all the furniture, pulling the chair out from beneath her mother Rose.

Violet's mother Rose Dear jumps into a well and drowns, leaving grandmother True Belle to move in and raise the children.

Violet meets Joe in Palestine, Virginia, when he falls out of a walnut tree directly above where she is sleeping.

Violet feels an overwhelming and unshakeable longing for a child at age 40 and begins sleeping with a doll at night.

Alice accidentally burns a shirt while distracted during a conversation with Violet, and both women burst out laughing together.

Vera Louise Gray is given money and told to leave home by her father after becoming pregnant by an enslaved Black man.

Vera Louise and True Belle move to Baltimore and raise Golden Gray as a beloved mixed-race orphan with golden curls.

Golden Gray finds a naked and unconscious pregnant woman on the road and reluctantly places her in his carriage.

The pregnant woman bites Henry LesTroy on the cheek while giving birth, and Henry gives her the name Wild.

Wild refuses to look at or nurse her newborn son, and Henry LesTroy finds another family to raise the infant.

The secondary events of Jazz form a rich tapestry of backstory, tracing the traumas that shaped each character long before the murder at the novel's center. Violet's childhood is marked by poverty, white violence against her family, and her mother's suicide, leaving her raised by her grandmother and desperate for love. Joe grows up as a foster child in Virginia, never knowing his true parents, and migrates north with Violet in search of a new life in the electric city of Harlem. Dorcas, orphaned by racist riots in East St. Louis, comes to live with her fearful aunt Alice and is immediately captivated by the sensual energy of city life. The novel also weaves in the story of Golden Gray and the mysterious woman called Wild, whose abandoned newborn grows up to become Joe Trace. These interlocking histories reveal how violence, loss, and longing travel through generations and communities, shaping every relationship in the book.

The histories and backstories that shaped Joe, Violet, Dorcas, and Golden Gray.

Violet is accused by a neighbor of stealing a baby she had been asked to watch, exposing her desperate longing for a child.

Joe recalls hiding as a teenager in a hibiscus bush, silently begging a woman he believed was his mother to acknowledge him.

Joe gives himself the surname Trace after learning that his biological parents disappeared without leaving one.

Neighbor Malvonne fails to conceal her laughter, and Joe realizes Dorcas has been secretly seeing another man.

True Belle reveals to Golden Gray before leaving Baltimore that his father is a living Black man named Henry LesTroy.

Golden Gray reacts to news of his parentage with fury, destroys his mother's clothes, and sets out to confront his father.

The narrator harshly judges Golden Gray's cold treatment of Wild, then reverses course and sympathizes with his shattered sense of identity.

Henry LesTroy confronts Golden Gray and tells him he must choose to live as a white man or accept being Black and grow up.

Joe searches for his mother Wild in the Virginia woods by following four red-winged blackbirds, exactly as Henry LesTroy instructed.

Joe shoots through hibiscus leaves toward the woman he believes is his mother Wild, only to find the shells still in his pocket.

Joe finds Wild's empty cave in the woods containing a green dress, a rocking chair, and a pair of men's trousers.

Dorcas admits to herself that she prefers Acton over Joe because Acton controls and criticizes her, which she mistakes for deeper love.

Joe confesses to Felice that he shot Dorcas out of fear and declares he is now learning a completely new way to love.

Violet tells Felice she once lost her true self to anger but has killed that Violet and is now living authentically again.

The narrator admits to expecting Joe and Violet to repeat their cycle of violence with Felice and confesses to being an unreliable storyteller.

Pool 3 focuses on the moments of discovery and decision that quietly redirect each character's fate throughout Jazz. Joe's earliest traumas — his unknown parentage, his desperate attempt to connect with the woman he believes is his mother in the woods — reveal the psychological roots of the violence he later enacts against Dorcas. The parallel story of Golden Gray's furious journey to find his Black father, and Henry LesTroy's blunt challenge to Golden's sense of self, mirrors Joe's own lifelong search for belonging. Key revelations — Dorcas's preference for Acton's controlling affection over Joe's kindness, Joe's failed shot at Wild, and the discovery of Wild's empty cave — expose the forces driving the novel's central tragedy. In the aftermath, Felice's honesty about Dorcas and Joe's own confession of fear mark the turning point toward genuine healing for all three characters. The pool closes with the narrator's reckoning, as they admit to bias and unreliability and acknowledge that Joe and Violet ultimately resisted the violent ending the narrator had anticipated.

The pivotal discoveries, confessions, and emotional shifts that drive the story's arc.