Toni Morrison's recent passing broke my heart. The world is better off with her, lacking without her. She's voiceful; she is the most voiceful writer I could imagine. Toni Morrison wrote the novels she wanted to read when they didn't exist. In this blog entry, I sing her praises and, because no amount of accolades can do her justice, I provide an annotated list of most of her works. Know your Toni.
Toni Morrison's voice was all. And I mean that. She had everything you could ask for and she had what you couldn't even fathom on your own. Her stylistic choices were astounding. Her language craft was superb; it was always perfect, dancing between spare and exuberant.
That literary voice? All. She commanded the depths of humanity, the near and far reaches of history in expertly chosen words: "this is not a story to pass on" "Her voice, the one issuing from a body? All. Listen to it here or here. It may surprise you the way it surprised me upon hearing it for the first time." As Daphne Brooks says in a recent documentary on Morrison, "If there are aliens on Mars, they're reading Toni Morrison to find out what it is to be human."
A woman of such assured dignity and strength of self seemed to create in my mind's ear the easy growl of a tiger or perhaps the controlled rake of a sword drawing a line in the sand. But Toni Morrison's voice is soft and high, golden buttery. It's warm. Such gentle authority and poise.
When I read Beloved as a sophomore in college, it changed me. I was a white lady from rural Nevada with a little exposure to or knowledge of African American communities, their history, and the way that slavery built America on stolen land. Toni Morrison was one of the reasons that I wanted to go to grad school. She made me feel that the power of language was not just its aesthetic quality but its political power. Language, not bombs. Literature, not war. Invert propaganda. Write novels.
Not only was Toni Morrison the most talented, exquisite, luscious writer in the world, but she exercised her craft in many different arenas. As she was writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she was working as an editor at Random House. She asked Angela Davis to write an autobiography. Toni Morrison edited the work of Lucille Clifton. She privileged African American voices in an industry that didn't give them space nor value. Not only did Toni Morrison edit writing and create fiction, but she wrote some of the best criticism on race and literature (see below; Playing in the Dark). That's right, Toni Morrison, Mama Toni as my friend Korey calls her, was a language goddess reigning in a trifecta of fiction, editing, and theory.
Toni Morrison has stated in multiple interviews that she wrote for black people. When she began writing in the 1970’s, the literature that existed assumed a white subject position. Blackness was “other,” inferior, and texts that privileged or honored that subject position did not get published. Morrison changed that. Not only by publishing the works of black women and men, but by writing prose that didn’t explain racism but took it as a given. She didn’t write from and to a white perspective; she wrote from and to a black perspective.
I could go on and on. No amount of eulogizing can do justice to her, her work, or her legacy. And certainly no white fan girl can ever give an account worthy of Toni Morrison. So as a fellow lover of language, I defer to Toni Morrison. Let her work and words speak for herself.
The Bluest Eye: 1970
Toni Morrison’s debut into the literary world. Lucky us.
The Bluest Eye revolves around the world of young black girls, most importantly the world of Pecola Breedlove. As you may guess from the title, Pecola yearns for blue eyes. This novel explores how racism leads to self-loathing, the brutal kind that a black child can learn early on in a world of white supremacy.
“It had begun with Christmas and the gift of dolls. The big, the special, the loving gift was always a big blue-eyed baby doll. From the clucking sounds of adults, I knew that the doll represented what they thought was my fondest wish..... I had only one desire- to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the darkness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs, all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink skinned doll was what every girl treasured."
"They go to land-grant colleges- normal schools, and learn how to do the white man's work with refinement. Home economics to prepare his food, teacher education to instruct black children in obedience, music to soothe the weary master and entertain his blunted soul. Here, they learn the rest of the lessons begun in those soft houses with porch swings and pots of bleeding heart- how to behave. The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions."
Sula: 1973
Sula tells the story of two best friends, Nel and Sula, from their 1919 childhood in the Bottom, a black community in Ohio, through their adult lives in the 1950s. Their devotion to each other gets complicated as they grow up; Nel becomes a model member of the conservative black community, Sula becomes a wild card who lives and does as she pleases. Betrayal simmers in their future. But is it a betrayal of each other? Respect? Their community? A secret they, and only they, share? That which is betrayed remains an open, rich question.
"Although it was she alone who saw this magic, she did not wonder at it. She knew it was all due to Sula's return to the Bottom. It was like getting your blind eye back, having a cataract removed. Her old friend had come home. Sula, who made her laugh, who made her see old things with new eyes, in whose presence she felt clever, gentle, and a little raunchy. Sula, whose past she had lived through and with whom the present was a constant sharing of perceptions. Talking to Sula had always been a conversation with herself."
"At 30 her hot brown eyes had turned to agate, and her skin had taken on the sheen of maple struck down, split and sanded at the height of its green. Virtue, bleak and drawn, was her only mooring."
Song of Solomon: 1977
Morrison creates a male protagonist for the first time here. Song of Solomon explores the experience of a young black man coming of age in Michigan in the 1930’s through the 50’s. The protagonist Milkman is alienated by his father and struggling to maintain his precarious friendships while navigating racial tensions and his family’s history. Throughout the novel, Morrison riffs on the myth of flying Africans. This myth, in which enslaved African Americans could finally escape their masters by taking flight through a transcendent faith (in home, family, God), structures Milkman’s relationship to his friends and family. The novel ends with a mystery that you’ll interpret depending on your understanding of what it means to believe
"Milkman could hardly breathe. Hagar's voice scooped up what little pieces of heart he had left to call his own. When he thought he was going to faint from the weight of what he was feeling, he risked a glance at his friend and saw the setting sun gliding Guitar's eyes, putting into shadow a slow smile of recognition."
"It was not enough. The word needed a bottom, a frame. She straightened up, held her head high, and transformed the plea into a note. In a clear bluebell voice she sang it out, the one word held so long it became a sentence and before the last syllable had died in the corners of the room, she answered in a sweet soprano 'I hear you'."
Tar Baby: 1981
This is one of Morrison’s most underrated novels, as few people talk about it in academic or social circles. Tar Baby is about seduction, trickery, and the thick, sticky business of love, or being stuck on someone. It follows the black fashion model Jadine from Manhattan to the Caribbean as she falls for Son, a black fugitive.
"Staring at a heart-red tree desperately in love with a woman he could not risk loving because he could not afford to lose her. For if he loved and lost this woman whose sleeping face was the limit his eyes could safely behold and whose wakened face threw him into confusion, he would surely lose the world. "How long have you been with us, Mr.-? I'm sorry I don't know your name."
The man looked up from his plate. His mouth was full and he chewed silently and swallowed before he answered.
"5 days. A week maybe."
"And before that?" Asked Valerian.
The man removed the pit of a black olive from his mouth, "swamp."
"Oh, yes Sein de Vieilles. It couldn't have been very comfortable for you there. The local people avoid it entirely. Spirits live there, I'm told."
The man didn't answer.
"Did you see any ghosts while you were there?" Jadine asked him.
He shook his head but did not look at her. "No, but I guess they saw me."
Valerian laughed heartily. "Are you a believer then?"
"Sometimes," said the man.
"Sometimes? You pick and choose when to believe and when not?"
"In a swamp, I believe," said the man.
Beloved, 1987
Beloved is Toni Morrison’s best-known novel. It won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. The novel’s dedication says it all: Sixty million and more. The novel is dedicated to the slaves that built America, the Africans that did and did not survive the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Beloved is inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman in the 19th century. With her children, Margaret escaped, but a few weeks later her slave master found her. Rather than see them put into chains and returned to bondage, Margaret killed one child and tried to drown herself with her second child.
Morrison has said in interviews that she found reference to this story in newspaper clippings that covered the court proceedings (the case went to trial because Margaret’s master didn’t know whether she should be charged with murder or with destruction of property; chattel slavery at its finest). The question of judgment came to Morrison’s mind; she has said that the only person who has the right to judge Margaret was her dead children. Beloved was then born. The novel imagines the experiences and recovery of newly freed slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation, and Sethe’s family’s encounter with the ghost of the child she killed in order to prevent it from being sold back into slavery.
In my opinion, Beloved is one of the most important novels to come out of the United Statesin the past fifty years. People have written books, essays, dissertations about this novel. It won a Pulitzer Prize.
"In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on barefeet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick 'em out.....And O my people, they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them.Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You got to love it, you!"
Jazz: 1992
This gem is about Harlem in the 1920’s, as the name suggests. Not only does Jazz explore the interior lives of characters living in Harlem during this period, but it is a meditation on the great migration. It contextualizes and animates the movement of black people from the rural south to northern cities. Watch out for Violet.
"By-and-by longing became heavier than sex; a panting, unmanageable craving. She was limp in its thrall or rigid in an effort to dismiss it."
"The wave of black people running from want and violence crested in the 1870s, the 80s, the 90s, and it 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 forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn't love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves- their stronger, riskier selves. And in the beginning when they first arrived, and twenty years later when they and the City had grown up, they love that part of themselves so much they forget what loving other people was like if they ever knew..."
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992
These are fabulous lectures on the way white American authors have created and used an "Africanist presence" to signal certain undesirable, mysterious, or unspeakable concepts.
"...these images [of whiteness in literature] seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness- a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of American literature with fear and longing."
Lecture and speech of acceptance, upon the award of the Nobel prize for literature, 7th December 1993 (published in 1994). Don't take my word for it. Listen or read here.
“Home” from The House that Race Built, 1997
An excellent companion essay for Paradise. If the home is a metaphor for race, Morrison writes about "how to convert a racist house into a race-specific yet nonracist home."
Paradise: 1997
I’m obsessed with this gorgeous, difficult novel. Paradise tells the story of an all black town, Ruby. Ruby's founders are the children of “exodusters,” or black newly freed slaves who left the south to find new communities. Morrison was inspired by an old early 1900’s newspaper clipping that advertised to colored people interested in coming to olored towns with the line “Come prepared or not at all. This novel ruminates on the violence that undergirds the “exclusiveness” of purity. Whether that purity is dark black skin, whiteness, old traditional values, or masculine might, Paradise shows us setting up paradise involves erecting violent, often hierarchical and masculinist walls.
The novel tracks the story of the founders of Ruby; the town's history extends to the 1890’s, and this history affects the town even in the 1970's, in the midst of the Black Power movement. As Ruby tries to keep light skinned folks out, conservative values in, and block the influence of the radical politics shaping the Civil Rights movement, trouble comes to paradise.
This novel is wildly difficult. The way Morrison tells the story resists linearity and individuality. Instead of telling the plot in a straight line from one character’s perspective, Morrison fractures everything. The story begins in the 1970’s but quickly goes back and forth in time, explaining the story of Ruby’s founding while detailing the back stories of multiple characters.
"There are great rivers in the world and on their banks and the edges of oceans children thrill to water. In places where rain is light the thrill is almost erotic. But those sensations bow to the rapture of holy women dancing in hot sweet rain."
"In ocean hush a woman black as firewood is singing. Next to her is a younger woman whose head rests on the singing woman's lap. Ruined fingers troll the tea brown hair. All the colors of seashells- wheat, roses, pearl- fuse in the younger woman's face. Her emerald eyes adore the black face framed in cerulean blue."
"The town's official history, elaborated from pulpits, in Sunday School classes and ceremonial speeches, had a sturdy public life. any footnotes, crevices or questions to be put took Keen imagination and the persistence of you mind uncomfortable with oral histories."
“The Site of Memory” from Inventing the Truth, ed. William Zissner, 1998
A brilliant meditation on the craft of writing. This is also an excellent companion piece to read with Beloved. In this essay, Morrison elaborates on the way that her work in Beloved is in part to imagine the interiority of the slaves that, up until recently, were kept hidden. Since slave narratives were written for a white abolitionist audience, the intimacies and humanity of black people were often unstated.
"The crucial distinction for me is not the distinction between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot."
"You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. 'Floods' is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that...."
Love: 2003
This novel is also underrated. I find that Tar Baby and Love don’t get much attention when it comes to talking about Morrison’s oeuvre. Love is about all the women that Bill Cosey brings together in a mess of love and passions. When Bill dies, many women have a stake in his estate. We see a wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, and mistress come together under one room and negotiate their lives together.
"You're always thinking about death, I told her. No, she said. Death is always thinking about me. ...... Death was trying to pry open the door, and she needed all her cunning to stave him off."
"Correctional girls knew better than to trust a label; let set for 5 minutes, then rinse thoroughly was a suggestion, not an order. Some products needed 15 minutes others would cook the scalp instantly. Correctionals knew all about grooming, hair braiding, curling, shampooing, straightening, cutting, and before coloring privileges were taken away- Fawn practically blinded Helen with a deliberate blast of Natural Instinct- they practiced tint and dye with professional single-mindedness."
"Washing utensils, folding towels, she listened to Heed's drone, the voluptuous murmur that always accompanies hairdressing. Massage caressed by devoted hands are natural companions to a warm water rinse, to the shy squeak of clean hair."
Remember: The journey to school integration, 2004
A Mercy: 2008
If I had to pick a second Toni Morrison novel that I’m obsessed with, it would be A Mercy. Also extremely difficult in terms of structure, this novel is another history lesson. It could have been subtitled “The Invention of Race.” A Mercy tracks the story of the Vaark farm in the late 1600s in what would now be Maryland. Jakob and Rebecca Vark buy an indigenous servant Lena, own two white male indentured servants, are given a slave in payment, and are gifted a pregnant mixed race girl. As they work together to survive the brutal wilderness, we see how enslavement historically involved white, indigenous, brown, and black people. That is, until the colonies recognized the power of the subjugated people and enacted laws that criminalized being black/mixed race and congregating together or bearing arms. By making it criminal to do certain things while colored, these laws made being non-black seem privileged and preferable, effectively splintering any potential alliance enslaved white and non-white people could have had with each other.
The novel follows the story of young slave Florens, who tries to understand why her mother gave her away to the farmer Jacob. At the end of the novel, we understand that Florens’ mother was trying to save her enslaved daughter from a life of sexual abuse under a different master.
"I am become wilderness.... In full. Unforgiven. Unforgiving. No ruth, my love. None. Hear me? Slave. Free. I last."
"Don't die, Miss. Don't. Herself, Sorrow, a newborn and maybe Florence. Three unmastered women and an infant out here all alone, belonging to no one, became wild game for anyone. None of them could inherit, none was attached to a church or recorded in its books. Female and illegal, they would be interlopers squatters if they stayed on after mistress died, subject to purchase, higher, assault, abduction, exile."
What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, 2008
Home: 2012
Have you ever heard of the black soldiers who served in the Korean War? Morrison tackles this little-discussed topic in her 2012 novel that explores Frank’s traumatized memories of the war and his homecoming to Georgia. As he seeks his sister Cee, we realize that the family’s buried secrets also brutalize his memory.
"They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood......their raised hooves crashing and striking, their manes tossing black from wild white eyes. They bit each other like dogs but when they stood, reared up on their hind legs, their four legs around the withers of the other, we held our breaths in wonder....Since you're set on telling my story, whatever you think and whatever you write down, know this: I really forgot about the burial. I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men."
"When on the fourth day I caught my reflection in a store window I thought it was somebody else. Some dirty, pitiful looking guy. He looked like the me in a dream I kept having where I'm on a battlefield alone. Nobody anywhere. Silence everywhere."
Desdemona: 2012
Morrison’s first play! It takes Desdemona, the wife of Shakespeare’s Othello, as a person of interest. The work of drama explores Desdemona’s relationship with the African nurse who raised her.
God Help the Child: 2015
This strange, sometimes lovely, sometimes restrained novel is about Bride. Bride is a late 20th century supermodel, sorting through the pain of being abandoned by her mother. The novel's opening tells us that Bride's mixed race mother abandoned her because Bride had dark black skin. God Help the Child tells a story of Bride’s metamorphosis from the point of view of Bride, her mother Sweetness, and Booker, the man Bride loves. What kind of metamorphosis does Bride undergo? You’ll have to read the novel to find out.
"You should always wear white, Bride. Only white and all white all the time" Jerry, calling himself a total person designer, insisted. "Not only because of your name," he told me, "but because of what it does to your licorice skin," he said. "And black is the New Black. Know what I mean? Wait you're more Hershey's syrup than licorice....."
At first it was boring shopping for white only closed until I learned how many shades of white there were- Ivory, oyster, alabaster, paper white, snow, cream, ecru, champagne, ghosts, bone."
"I wasn't a bad mother, you have to know that, but I may have done some hurtful things to my only child because I had to protect her. Had to. All because of skin privileges. At first I couldn't see past all that black to know who she was and just plain love her. But I do. I really do."
The Origin of Others 2017
The title says it all. This slim volume is a series of lectures in which Morrison eloquently explains the way "others" are socially constructed and useful to the group who claims social/economic superiority.
The source of self-regard: selected essays, speeches, and meditations, 2019
As well as a slew of children’s books, many of which she authored with her son Slade.
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