toni morrison essay on work

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Here, Read This: “The Work You Do, the Person You Are.”

This essay by Toni Morrison is fantastic, and you should read the whole thing, but I’ll quote one section here — Toni’s four rules for work:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

Read the whole piece here.

Toni Morrison Let Us Know We Are More Than the Work We Do

Books & Culture

Considering some of the legendary novelist's lessons on the anniversary of her death.

Adapted from remarks given at the Toni Morrison Festival in February 2020. 

About three years ago, Toni Morrison wrote a short and, as is her style, superlative essay in The New Yorker titled “ The Work You Do, The Person You Are .” At a young age, Morrison delineated an understanding of the fear of losing the power of a dollar while also recognizing the burdens of employment even with the financial reward. Morrison didn’t reveal the race of the person she worked for, but the power dynamics beyond employee and employer were clear; the status was clear. The piece concludes with her translation of a quick response from her father when she bemoaned how she was treated as an employee. Morrison condensed her father’s response to the following tenets: 

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself. 2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you. 3. Your real life is with us, your family. 4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are. I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

When we think about Morrison, we most prominently, and for good reason, dissect the writing she’s gifted us, material we can turn to weeks, months, years after her sunset. The New Yorker essay also bestows an understanding of her work ethic—though it’s an ethic we could have intuited from how methodical and responsible she was with the written word. When I read Morrison I don’t only take in the work of a magnanimous writer; I also consider how clearly her editorial framework comes through the control and distinction she pays to text, in pieces and as a whole. The impact she had as an editor further curated her love of books and at the same time distilled how she lived her life, how she represented herself, who she represented. (See Contemporary African Literature, Corregidora, The Black Book, to name a few.) 

In the first chapter of P laying in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , Morrison conveys her early way of reading, when she presumed that Black people were of no consequence in the white American literary imagination. She digs into how Black people were erased in the white-dominated “canon,” and investigates white Americans’ willful refusal to read books about or by African Americans. And if white Americans weren’t reading those books, how could the white literary establishment publish them? “But then,” Morrison writes, “I stopped reading as a reader and began to read as a writer.” By altering her viewpoint, Morrison better informed her reading and empowered herself to acquire more books by Black writers. From the start of her time in publishing, this perspective allowed her to magnify the gaps in contemporary literature celebrated by white audiences, and to elevate books deserving the same shelf space. (See Tenet 2: “You make the job; it doesn’t make you.”)

Earlier this year I became an employee within a division of the publishing house where Toni Morrison once worked. Her name is inextricably linked with this press, due to her publications and the impact she had as an editor in the scholarly and trade divisions. There are many, though trust me not enough , hard-working and dedicated Black women in publishing. Recently, new names are being added to the roster, which we can hope is a lead-in for many more to come. Pre-quarantine we walked the halls and sat in conference rooms. Nowadays we enter virtual rooms where we are still one of a few if not the only. We speak our truths or hold our tongues, all in the name of a larger strategy to see and make a difference. We stay because we love the work and because we want to showcase the intrinsic dedication and brilliance of those of our ilk. We do the work because the work needs to get done. The navigation of being “the only” or “one of the few” requires a singular focus and a clear strategy to keep going. This is not just about the industry, it’s about our belief and love for what we bring to it. 

Morrison more than likely fought in ways subdued, calculated, and blatant when she entered the office environment.

It may not be a surprise that Toni Morrison was one of the first Black women editors at Random House during her 19-year tenure. It may not be a surprise that she was one of the first Black women in this space with acquisitions power. It may not surprise you that she was one of the first Black women in this space to enter a “boys club,” a club I guarantee didn’t know how to recognize her as an equal, even when they shared the same title—though not the same salary. (To this day her adamance of “head of household” in the documentary The Pieces I Am rings true of the battle cry to make a proper and equitable wage to men.) What we can ascertain from this is that Morrison more than likely fought in ways subdued, calculated, and blatant when she entered the office environment as editor and then again outside of it, or adjacently as author when discussing her work again and again and again. Imagine the strength of mind and character it takes to be on both sides of the coin, to uplift Black people in your work each and every day when people don’t always see them the way you do, most notably as equals and most derogatorily as people. Imagine the love for the people one has to pursue this work as adamantly and precisely as she did and bring it in all ways to a deep admiration and honesty day in and day out. (See Tenet 1: “Whatever the work is do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.”)

Black publishing professionals continue to navigate working within the system while also trying to combat an industry that continues to provide roadblocks to access let alone retention, even when it purports to value Black lives. There’s no easy or singular answer to maintaining your own values in a space that does not value you as a person, let alone the work you’re producing or helping to produce. Like Morrison did in these same spaces, we may assert or negotiate or magnify the larger importance of the content and creators we support, not just for the company but for the nation. These may be seen as negotiations and yet they’re also part of the fight. At some point we all come to terms with the fact that negotiation can no longer be about what we will tolerate, but what we will not accept. 

We know how much Morrison achieved—it is worth repeating and the right way to speak of someone who achieved so much. But alongside the achievements we know of, there are many that we do not know about. Ones that may seem small but are monumental in getting through each day. Ones in which we defend and deflect, be it ourselves or whatever opposes us. The ways of navigating what may not, outwardly, appear to be a hostile environment, but one that will not acknowledge that you deserve more. Having experienced this in ways both aggressive and passive-aggressive, I continually think of those who are the sole (or rare) entity carving out a way to be seen and, unintentionally and often unwillingly, representing so many others. As Hilton Als noted in his New Yorker profile on Morrison, she “preferred to publish writers who had something to say about Black American life that reflected its rich experience.” This is the way she published, wrote, and read. This is who Morrison was and how she exemplified an eternal love for Black people. This is who she prioritized in the roles she held and I can only imagine the ways she fought for them in these same halls/rooms/spaces. 

This is who Morrison was and how she exemplified an eternal love for Black people.

This year, at the height of the George Floyd protests, many businesses designated June 2nd as Blackout Tuesday, a day of (optional or enforced) mourning. My company gave me the option to take that day off. I performed my job functions anyway because my grief didn’t start or end on that Tuesday. In the afternoon, I sat at a desk in the corner of my living room. I spoke calmly into a headset for a video conference in recognition of this moment. I spoke into what has felt like a void in quarantine, even more so due to the intense quiet and periodical appearance of teary-eyed/somber faces on my screen. I had no video, so my Blackness was not on display in the way it would be if we all still shared office space. Pledges to be conscious, to be more aware, to make more efforts in the content published and the people present on the line were made. My headphones pulsed with the repetition of how valued Black people were especially as we kept producing. I talked to other Black writers and publishing professionals and we spoke honestly and with uncertainty. At the end of the day several people said to me, “All we have is us” and “Keep doing what you’re doing because it’s important” and “We see you.” The power of those words from those you know beyond a moment makes us take a breath, and a break, before we resume. (See Tenet 4: “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.”)

I began with a quote from Morrison, so it makes sense to end with one: “Being a Black woman writer is not a shallow, but a rich place to write from. It doesn’t limit my imagination, it expands it. It’s richer than being a white male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.” To be a Black women editor in a large publishing world, who you are has to be as distinct as how you read and discuss what you read. Morrison has written extensively of that awareness in her reading, and how it led her to prioritize who she was always trying to reach, and allowed her to broker past the issues of “what could sell” to land on what is needed and desired. It may come as no surprise her contextual awareness of being, not just as writer but as a Black woman, also allowed Morrison as editor, as teacher, as speaker, as observer to conquer the world at large and recognize, as well as continually illustrate, that we could too. (See Tenet 3: Your real life is with us, your family.) 

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'I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and race-free': an essay by Toni Morrison

In this piece from her personal archive, Morrison reflects on how ‘the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting’ powered her novels, and in particular, Beloved

I suspect my dependency on memory as trustworthy ignition is more anxious than it is for most fiction writers – not because I write (or want to) autobiographically, but because I am keenly aware of the fact that I write in a wholly racialised society that can and does hobble the imagination. Labels about centrality, marginality, minority, gestures of appropriated and appropriating cultures and literary heritages, pressures to take a position – all these surface when I am read or critiqued and when I compose. It is both an intolerable and inevitable condition. I am asked bizarre questions inconceivable if put to other writers: Do you think you will ever write about white people? Isn’t it awful to be called a black writer?

I wanted my imagination as unencumbered as possible and as responsible as possible. I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and “race-free”. All of which presented itself to me as a project full of paradox and contradiction. Western or European writers believe or can choose to believe their work is naturally “race-free” or “race transcendent”. Whether it is or not is another question – the fact is the problem has not worried them. They can take it for granted that it is because Others are “raced” – whites are not. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. The truth, of course, is that we are all “raced”. Wanting that same sovereignty, I had to originate my own fictional projects in a manner I hoped would liberate me, the work and my ability to do it. I had three choices: to ignore race or try to altogether and write about the second world war or domestic strife without referencing race. But that would erase one, although not the only, most impinging fact of my existence and my intelligence. Two, I could become a cool “objective” observer writing about race conflict and/or harmony. There, however, I would be forced to surrender the centre of the stage to received ideas of centrality and the subject would always and forever be race. Or, three, I could strike out for new territory: to find a way to free my imagination of the impositions and limitations of race and explore the consequences of its centrality in the world and in the lives of the people I was hungry to write about.

First was my effort to substitute and rely on memory rather than history because I knew I could not, should not, trust recorded history to give me the insight into the cultural specificity I wanted. Second, I determined to diminish, exclude, even freeze any (overt) debt to western literary history. Neither effort has been entirely successful, nor should I be congratulated if it had been. Yet it seemed to me extremely important to try. You will understand how reckless it would have been for me to rely on Joseph Conrad or Mark Twain or Herman Melville or Harriet Beecher Stowe or Walt Whitman or Henry James or James Fenimore Cooper , or Saul Bellow for that matter, or Flannery O’Connor or Ernest Hemingway for insights into my own culture. It would have been equally dim-witted, as well as devastating, for me to rely on Kenneth Stampp or Lewis Mumford, or Herbert Gutman, or Eugene Genovese or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Thomas Jefferson or any of those sages in the history of the United States for research that would enlighten me on these matters. There was and is another source that I have at my disposal, however: my own literary heritage of slave narratives.

For imaginative entrance into that territory I urged memory to metamorphose itself into metaphorical and imagistic associations. But writing is not simply recollecting or reminiscing or even epiphany. It is doing; creating a narrative infused (in my case) with legitimate and authentic characteristics of the culture. Mindful of and rebellious towards the cultural and racial expectations and impositions my fiction would encourage, it was important for me not to reveal, that is, reinforce, already established reality (literary or historical) that the reader and I agree upon beforehand. I could not, without engaging in another kind of cultural totalising process, assume or exercise that kind of authority. It was in Beloved that all of these matters coalesced for me in new and major ways. History versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text. Nobody in the book can bear too long to dwell on the past; nobody can avoid it. There is no reliable literary or journalistic or scholarly history available to them, to help them, because they are living in a society and a system in which the conquerors write the narrative of their lives. They are spoken of and written about – objects of history, not subjects within it. Therefore not only is the major preoccupation of the central characters that of reconstituting and recollecting a usable past (Sethe to know what happened to her and to not know in order to justify her violent action; Paul D to stand still and remember what has helped to construct his self; Denver to demystify her own birth and enter the contemporary world that she is reluctant to engage) but also the narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process. In the final pages memory is insistent yet becomes the mutation of fact into fiction then folklore and then into nothing.

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Toni Morrison: American literary giant made it her life’s work to ensure that black lives (and voices) matter

Tessa Roynon , Teaching and Research Fellow, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article .

Oxford is a subscribing member of The Conversation.  Find out how you can write for The Conversation.  

Toni Morrison: American literary giant made it her life's work to ensure that black lives (and voices) matter

Tessa Roynon , University of Oxford

The peerless novelist and cultural commentator Toni Morrison, who has died aged 88 , never accepted the received wisdom about anything. In a writing career that spanned half a century – from the appearance of the first of her 11 novels, The Bluest Eye, in 1970, to that of her last essay collection, Mouth Full of Blood , in February 2019 – she unfailingly cast in new light both aspects of human experience and moments in American history that, in our complacency, we thought we already knew.

Morrison was born (as Chloe Wofford) in the depressed Rustbelt town of Lorain, Ohio, to a family of modest financial means and rich cultural and emotional resources. Her father worked as a welder at the nearby US Steel plant and her mother was a key member of the American Methodist Episcopal church choir. Her grandparents – who had migrated north from Alabama and Georgia – were also a significant presence and influence. The music, storytelling and reading from the King James Bible that characterised Morrison’s childhood were to indelibly shape the values and aesthetics of her own writing.

As the first member of her family to go to college, Morrison attended Howard University in Washington DC between 1949-53 (where she majored in English and minored in classics) – and was shocked by the segregation and “colourism” she encountered. She went on to complete her MA in English at Cornell in 1955 and, after various teaching and publishing jobs, became a trade editor for Random House in 1968.

Here, in the New York office, she reshaped the American literary scene by actively seeking out and promoting the fiction of black authors such as Toni Cade Bambara , Leon Forrest and Gayl Jones . She also edited the autobiographies of Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali.

Morrison was able to focus full time on her writing after the resounding success of her third novel, Song of Solomon , in 1977. Reputed to be one of Barack Obama’s favourite books , this text – which focused on the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s – is typically Morrisonian in its mock-heroic blending of the Bildungsroman (conventions about an individual’s progression to knowledge through experience), with classical epic paradigms, West African myth and African American folkloric wisdom.

It is notably untypical, at the same time, in its focus on a male protagonist (the strangely named Milkman Dead – names and naming were always all-important to Morrison), and on friendships and family ties between men.

The novel for which Morrison is best known, Beloved , was to follow in 1987 and next came her arguably underrated (because it was insufficiently understood?) masterpiece, Jazz (1992). Each of these continues the intense focus on individuals that both society and history have spurned or overlooked. These are those Morrison has called the “disremembered and unaccounted for”, that she initiated with her examination of the interior life of the abused “ugly” black girl, Pecola Breedlove, in The Bluest Eye .

Both the exploration of an infanticidal, formerly enslaved mother’s quest for atonement in Beloved and the depiction in Jazz of the struggles and triumphs of a middle-aged couple, migrants from rural Virginia, in 1920s Harlem, epitomise Morrison at her uncanny best. Her work is unflinching in her attention to the brutal realities of innumerable black lives and attends equally to their creative resilience – combining broad historical sweep with an intimate knowledge of the individual human psyche.

Nobel laureate

Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and numerous other awards and accolades have followed. She is read, studied and revered in numerous languages all over the world. But our sense of loss at her passing should not blind us to the fact that for far too long she was at once a celebrity and insufficiently acknowledged – particularly in the more conservative wings of academia and the media – as a figure of universal (as opposed to “minority”) significance.

Even now, there persists some resistance to including her work on “high literary” syllabi. She once observed wryly, at a book reading, that she was taught in the African American studies departments, in sociology and even in Law faculties, but rarely in the English departments of elite universities. There continues a failure to recognise the extent of her contribution to intellectual history that both her fiction and her extraordinary essays constitute.

Her reclaiming of modernism as primarily a black experience, as well as her insistence that any distinction between the aesthetic and the political is a false dichotomy, and her illuminations of the way colonialism and imperialism consciously fabricated African culture and history as irrelevant, are among her greatest legacies.

Public intellectual

Morrison herself was acutely aware of the complex and sometimes insidious nature of her reception, repeatedly addressing this in interviews and comment pieces. She frequently mentioned the initial New York Times review of Sula, for example, which implied that such a powerful writer ought really to focus her attention on something more important than the lives of black women in the Midwest. In a 1983 interview with literary critic Nellie McKay , she famously insisted that she was “not like James Joyce, not like Thomas Hardy, not like Faulkner”. Such comparisons at that time, she believed, obscured her specific commitment to black politics and aesthetics.

Never resting on her laurels, throughout her professorship at Princeton , her guest curatorship at the Louvre in 2006-07, in her retirement and until the very end, she remained profoundly alert to the way her books and essays were read, (mis)understood and (mis)represented. In her role as public intellectual and fearless social commentator, she was prescient about the racist violence that precipitated the Black Lives Matter movement and prophetic about the regressions that the Trump era has entailed.

Although her unwavering commitment to social justice and radical change perhaps occasionally led her to overexplain – in the forewords she wrote for the Vintage reissues of the novels in the early 2000s, for example, or in her final novel, God Help the Child , which lacks the pitch perfection of its predecessors – we shall ignore her wisdom about power (and how to subvert it) at our peril.

A recent documentary film, The Foreigner’s Home , depicts Morrison drawing parallels between the trauma undergone by captured Africans transported on the slaving ships’ Middle Passage to the Americas, the experience of black residents of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina and the current worldwide migrant crisis. The very making of such connections, and the way she deploys her customary stunning oratory to expose uncomfortable truths about the nature of “home” and “homelessness”, epitomises all that will endure about the phenomenon that was Toni Morrison.

Above all, the insights of this film insist, as does her fiction implicitly, and her Nobel Prize lecture explicitly, that the future is “in our hands”. The power and the responsibility for making the world a better place lies not with the great artists whose passing we mourn, Morrison always maintained, but with ourselves – the readers and thinkers who have so much work still to do.

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Morrison’s Things: Between History and Memory

by   Kinohi Nishikawa

Toni Morrison remains the most influential theorist of the black past in contemporary letters. Since the publication of  Beloved  and its companion essay “The Site of Memory” in 1987, Morrison has provided the impetus and vocabulary for those wishing to claim that the past is never past but always present. Indeed, the closest thing to a prevailing method in African American literary criticism could be described as the Morrisonian imperative to read how the past haunts the present, making itself known and felt among the living in ways both explicit and subtle. The field’s current keywords—aftermath, afterlife, repetition, and return—reflect that orientation. Christina Sharpe has gone so far as to describe the object of African American criticism as “the ditto ditto in the archives of the present.” [1]

Ironically, what’s been forgotten in this canonization of the Morrison of 1987 is that she began to formulate her engagement with the black past over a decade earlier, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia. Though already a twice-published novelist, Morrison used her status as an influential editor at Random House to see the project through. The result was  The Black Book : a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World, from the era of colonization, through the age of chattel slavery, and up to the waning days of Jim Crow. “Conveys” because  The Black Book  does not offer a textual narrative of events. Instead, it relies on pictures—that is, photographic reproductions of specific objects Morrison culled from her collaborators’ collections—to evoke what Sharpe has called the “total climate” of blacks’ experience of transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. [2]  The pictures tell their own story, one that is impressionistic rather than authoritative, fragmentary rather than whole. And that is the point. Unlike books written by academic historians, which tend to ascribe a telos to narratives about the past (i.e., from slavery to freedom), Morrison envisioned her work as a “genuine Black history book—one that simply recollected Black Life as lived.” [3]  This notion of recollection—of literally re-collecting and figuratively recollecting “Black history”—is the forgotten materialist basis of what Morrison would famously term “rememory” in 1987.

Though a wide body of scholarship has been built up around Morrison, surprisingly little has been written about  The Black Book . The oversight is odd since putting the volume together not only launched Morrison’s theorization of the black past but also introduced her to the source material for her best-known work. A nondescript clipping from the February 1856 issue of the  American Baptist  relates the story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who tried to kill her young children rather than have them grow up in bondage. Recounted by the Reverend P. S. Bassett, the episode is didactic, highlighting for a white abolitionist readership the impossible decisions enslaved people were compelled to make between freedom and survival. While this story has long been recognized as the inspiration for  Beloved , only the critic Cheryl A. Wall has devoted more than passing attention to its place in  The Black Book . Yet even she contends that the clipping’s significance lies in the way it prefigures  Beloved ’s imperative to read the past in the present. [4]  This despite the fact that the excerpt appears early in the book (page 10), when the reading experience is most disorienting, and is easily missed among two densely packed facing pages of clippings and text. Fifteen independent items—some photo-reproduced from original sources, others quoted and set in uniform type—crowd the layout. Smudges and other errors from the copying process further diminish the readability of the text. In the actual composition of  The Black Book , nothing makes Garner’s story stand out, which, again, is the point: it is merely one piece of the dizzying puzzle of history.

What was distinctive about Morrison’s engagement with the black past in 1974? How might a historicist obsession with 1987 obscure what she set out to do in  The Black Book ? I take a first step toward answering these questions in what follows. I propose that  The Black Book  advances a more contingent and discontinuous view of history than the one usually attributed to Morrison. This view, I argue, owes much to the book’s composition, which is pictorial and iconic rather than textual and discursive. By “flattening” history into a series of decontextualized images,  The Black Book encourages glossing, skipping pages, reading out of order, and finding meaning only in visual or “surface” resemblances. These (non-)reading practices are further encouraged by the fact that Morrison does not discriminate when it comes to identifying things that evoke the black past. Examples of black ingenuity and perseverance appear alongside those of racial parody and animus, while handcrafted wares and mass-produced commodities vie for attention in the same span of pages, confusing the distinction between folk and market. In short,  The Black Book  gives one access to the black past only through an inquisitive perusal—an actual looking at things. Accordingly, its view of history is premised on an awareness that readers’ grounding in the present is far from certain. Not everyone can or will want to engage  The Black Book ’s arrangement of things. What matters for Morrison, here and in her work to come, is not the fact of recovery but the question of how one re-collects the past at all.

The first thing to note about  The Black Book  is that it’s chock-full of text. Captions and explanatory notes appear underneath or alongside most pictures. Several types of documents—letters, certificates, applications—naturally feature handwritten or printed text. And newspaper clippings and other text-heavy ephemera take up a lot of space in the book, especially early on. Still, I would maintain that  The Black Book ’s composition is essentially pictorial insofar as it decouples “understanding” the text from reading it closely. Morrison lends meaning to any given thing by how she associates it with other things—on a single page, over facing pages, or across successive pages. Think of it like reading a museum catalog: the point is to get the gist of its visual organization, not to linger over every word.

At a pictorial level, certain layouts in  The Black Book  give a fairly coherent impression of the meaning behind the assembled artifacts. One facing-page layout, for example, combines the following: five fugitive slave ads printed in 1790; two undated classifieds, likely from the mid-1800s; W. H. Siebert’s 1896 historical map “‘Underground’ Routes to Canada”; Samuel Rowse’s 1850 lithograph  The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia ; and an 1857 letter from William Brinkl[e]y, one of Harriet Tubman’s associates in Delaware. All of these things appear under the bold heading “I rode a railroad that had no track. ” [5] True, the individual pictures are decontextualized (supporting information on the lithograph and Brinkley do not appear in  The Black Book ), with only Brown’s fugitive plot given an explanatory note. Still, the layout’s overall composition conveys the resolve and resourcefulness of fugitives from slavery as they ran toward freedom, as well as the desperate efforts of white enslavers to retrieve them. Sides are drawn, sympathies are channeled, and the “goal,” Canada, is clearly delineated. In this way, Morrison’s things not only document something called the Underground Railroad; they also evoke, in the present tense, what it would have meant and felt like for an enslaved person to take flight.

Yet the coherence of this particular display is a rarity in  The Black Book . Discordant juxtapositions are far more common, such that any impression of historical perspective is immediately undercut with confounding, contingent details. One page, for example, has a small photograph that shows a black woman holding a white infant in her lap. The original caption reads “Slave and Friend.” But printed next to this image are lyrics for “All the Pretty Little Horses,” and underneath both is Morrison’s clarification that the song is “an authentic slave lullaby [that] reveals the bitter feelings of Negro mothers who had to watch over their white charges while neglecting their own children.” Trying to exert a measure of control over the artifact and its description, Morrison inserts another artifact whose narrativization is supposed to guide the reader toward a “correct” reading of the image. Yet the page’s pictorial composition is irreducible to that gesture, for underneath this tableau are antebellum newspaper clippings addressing black westward expansion (one from the  New York Tribune , the other from the  Liberator ) and a maniculed notice prohibiting “the employment of free colored persons on water-craft navigating the rivers of [Arkansas].” [6]  What these artifacts have to do with each other from a historical perspective is a mystery. But their visual organization does elicit wonderfully weird associations, as one might detect between the white baby’s hand (clasped over the black woman’s) and the indexical manicule. 

This narratively incoherent but visually abundant mélange is not just a function of single-page compositions. It can be seen in facing-page layouts, as when a handwritten letter by Frederick Douglass defending his right to marry “a lady a few shades lighter in complexion than [himself]” appears directly opposite ledgers that list the human property of black enslaver John C. Stanley. It can be seen in successive pages, as is the case with the 16-page color insert, where minstrel-inspired advertising for commodities such as soap and baking powder gives way to photographs of the folk art and handiwork of enslaved people. And, perhaps most spectacularly, it can be seen on the front cover of the book itself (Figure 1): a riot of color and black-and-white images—36 in all—that practically asks (or begs) the question, What is this “black” in  The Black Book ? [7]

In earlier versions of this essay, I was tempted to read such confounding pictorial juxtapositions against the grain of Morrison’s intentions for the project. I assumed she had gathered these different things to make them useful to the present, only to find that their recombination failed to do so. I now think this reading is a mistake, an imposition of the way critics historicize Morrison circa 1987 onto her earlier, far more experimental, engagement with the black past. I now believe that the contingency and discontinuity of  The Black Book —in short, its refusal to make a teleological narrative available to readers—is its  raison d’être . Morrison was well aware that many of the things she had gathered from collections would perplex readers. But rather than force these artifacts into a historical arc, she made their achronicity, or their out-of-timeness, a feature of the book itself. How else can one explain its strange juxtapositions? They were by design, not some unintended consequence of a historicist project.

Morrison said as much in her contemporaneous essays on the project. In them she identified at least two ways in which her work departed from academic historiography. First, it questioned the ideological limitations of historians’ primary research site: the archive. The problem with conventional histories, Morrison implied, was that they were bound to the legitimizing procedures of institutional archives. As such, histories that relied on archives would inevitably reflect the interests and concerns of the powerful, or those deemed worthy of having their effects saved for posterity. By contrast, Morrison wanted  The Black Book  to give voice to the masses, or “people who had always been viewed only as percentages.” To do that, she turned her attention from scholars to collectors—that is, “people who had the original raw material documenting our life: posters, letters, newspapers, advertising cards, sheet music, photographs, movie frames, books, artifacts and mementos.” Collectors Middleton “Spike” Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith were respected keepers of such “raw material,” and so they became her preferred entry point into the black past. Morrison paid her collaborators the highest compliment she could think of when she said all four possessed “an intense love for black expression and a zest wholly free of academic careerism.” [8]

The second way Morrison departs from historiography followed from the first. By operating at the margins of institutional legitimation, collectors risked being cut off from institutional recognition. It was debatable whether collectors had a legitimate claim to history at all. Doesn’t  The Black Book  ultimately only reflect what four collectors of varying interests and dispositions had made available to Morrison? The volume’s most outspoken critic, cultural nationalist Kalamu Ya Salaam, made a similar point when he complained, “[T]o throw all of these images and documents together without a text to explain the meaning, context and original intent does not serve to help us truely [sic] understand what our history,  our real history of struggle  is about.” [9]  Yet Morrison would have welcomed the idea that Salaam did not glean “history,” much less a “history of struggle,” from her book. Historians, Morrison wrote, “habitually leave out life lived by everyday people”; in their writing, they seemed more concerned with “defend[ing] a new idea or destroy[ing] and old one.” [10]  She wanted  The Black Book  to convey something messier, murkier, less institutionally recognized about the black experience in the New World. Rather than a history, she aimed to put together a work of memory.

This goal helps explain  The Black Book ’s artifactual resemblance to a scrapbook. Although the print-heavy layout does suggest a catalog, the variety of pictorial forms—iconic, indexical, textual, and otherwise—makes the volume reminiscent of a collection of ephemera. This perception is lent further credence by the book’s introduction, in which none other than Bill Cosby muses: 

Suppose a three-hundred-year-old black man had decided, oh, say when he was about ten, to keep a scrapbook—a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would keep newspaper articles that interested him, old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks, and posters—all sorts of stuff.

“No such man kept such a book,” Cosby observes, before adding, wryly, “But it’s okay—because it’s here, anyway.” [11] As if passed down through time by a mythic ancestor,  The Black Book  arrives in the contemporary reader’s hands like an anonymous scrapbook. It contains remnants that are random, ephemeral, incomplete—and, precisely because of that, it comes as close as possible to documenting “Black Life as lived.” The illusion being broached here is that of ordinary remembering, or everyday recollection. A scrapbook is indifferent to the sweeps and arcs (much less teloses) of capital “H” history. All it does is keep what an amateur historian decides to set down as worthy of recalling in the moment of composition. This is why when we “read” a scrapbook, we approach it not as a bird’s-eye chronicle but as what Pierre Nora has called a “site of memory” ( lieu de mémoire ) .[12]

Morrison’s commitment to ordinary remembering is so thoroughgoing that her name appears nowhere on or in  The Black Book . The collectors are credited with putting the book together, but even their names are absented from the cover. This is by design, of course, as it supports the illusion that the volume is authorless, the product of a collective mythos rather than a single guiding hand. The one decidedly personal indulgence Morrison allows herself is to insert an oval-shaped, black-and-white portrait of her mother, Ramah Wofford, on the front cover and in an illustrated tableau of anonymous subjects’ portraits .[13]  Nothing calls attention to her mother’s figure in either of these locations, or indeed to the fact that it is the ghost editor’s mother. Though she stares out at the reader, so do a number of the other figures among whom she is clustered. Thus, Wofford blends into the composition as just another picture in the collection. She is one memory among many.

Since 1987, critics have interpreted Morrisonian memory, or rememory, as  Beloved  terms it, as a charge to read the past in the present. The ethos of such criticism presumes a standpoint that can identify how contemporary circumstances are but an extension, or repetitive realization, of the past. Yet, having traced Morrison’s theorization of memory back to  The Black Book , I think this is only a partially correct reading of her work. Morrison did believe in something like collective memory, a sense of the past that bound people to one another in the present. But she consistently refused an absolute knowledge of the past, one that confirms what we believe we already know (Sharpe’s ditto ditto, for example). Instead, Morrison supposed that people could access collective memory only through fragments, traces, the detritus and hauntings of history. This stuff, for Morrison, possessed its own historical weight and was not assimilable to confident determinations of the past. In making  The Black Book , her intention was not to integrate readers into a discourse of “their history” but to confront them with buried memories—things in which they might not even recognize themselves. [14]

It may be fitting that, as I revised this essay for publication,  The Black Book  went out of and came back into print. The original 1974 edition had long been out of print, but the 2009 35 th  anniversary edition followed course in the late 2010s. That second disappearance turned  The Black Book  into something like one of the things it reproduces—a relic of the past, a memory among other memories. For a period, copies of the 2009 edition cost upwards of $150, and as much as $2,500, from online and antiquarian booksellers. Yet  The Black Book ’s obsolescence was short-lived. With the passing of Morrison in 2018 there came renewed demand for her work, including this long-overlooked book. 

The most recent edition (2019) is an artifact of our times. An image of the original cover, showing noticeable shelfwear, is set within a gray frame. The look approximates a well-worn family photo, as if the book itself is being memorialized. Morrison’s name appears front and top-center, her behind-the-scenes work on the project now highlighted in yellow. Yet there is one element that  is  ghosted from the previous editions: Bill Cosby’s introduction. The reasons for this are obvious, even though the exclusion is unannounced in the text. That the change was made at all—silently, posthumously—confirms Morrison’s intuition that history is not ditto ditto but contingent and discontinuous. Reading  The Black Book today is not the same as reading it in 1974, and that is the abiding point. 

[1]  Christina Sharpe,  In the Wake: On Blackness and Being  (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 82. Sharpe’s application of “ditto ditto” to the concept of the archive is adapted from her reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s  Zong! (2008).

[2]  Sharpe, 104-5.

[3]  Toni Morrison, “Behind the Making of  The Black Book ,”  Black World , February 1974, 89.

[4]  Cheryl A. Wall, “Reading  The Black Book : Between the Lines of History,”  Arizona Quarterly  68, no. 4 (2012): 105-30.

[5]  Middleton Harris, et al.,  The Black Book  (New York: Random House, 1974), 68-69.

[6]  Ibid., 65.

[7]  Ibid., 24-25, 89-104, front cover. The last part of this paragraph riffs on Stuart Hall’s field-shaping essay, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in  Black Popular Culture , ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21-33.

[8]  Toni Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History,”  New York Times Book Review , August 11, 1974, 16.

[9]  Kalamu ya Salaam, review of  The Black Book , by Middleton Harris, et al.,  Black Books Bulletin , 3, no. 1 (1975): 73.

[10]  Morrison, “Behind,” 88.

[11]  Bill Cosby, “Introduction,” in  The Black Book , v.

[12]  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History:  Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, no. 26 (1989): 7-24. The subtitle of my essay, and the distinction between history and memory I draw on here, is indebted to this piece.

[13]  Harris, front cover, 196-97.

[14]  This point about (non-)recognition echoes Christopher Freeburg’s analysis of  The Black Book  as fostering a “personalized and contingent” black interiority rather than subjecting readers to a predetermined historical script. Christopher Freeburg,  Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life  (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 130.

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“You Don’t Know Anything.” And Other Writing Advice from Toni Morrison

I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends..

I can’t think of another writer who is quite so universally beloved as Toni Morrison. Her work is magnificent, her legacy is unimpeachable, and she reveals her brilliance at every opportunity. She also taught for many years at Princeton, and I think it’s safe to assume she knows a thing or two about nurturing young minds. So, using the relatively flimsy excuse of her birthday—Morrison turns 88 on Monday, which is also Presidents’ Day (is this a sign?)—I sifted through her interviews and speeches to find out what she thinks about writing. I’ve highlighted some of her wisdom below.

Write what you want to read.

I wrote the first book because I wanted to read it. I thought that kind of book, with that subject—those most vulnerable, most undescribed, not taken seriously little black girls—had never existed seriously in literature. No one had ever written about them except as props. Since I couldn’t find a book that did that, I thought, “Well, I’ll write it and then I’ll read it.” It was really the reading impulse that got me into the writing thing.

–from a 2014 interview with NEA Arts Magazine

Figure out how you work best.

I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?

–from a 1993 interview with Elissa Schappell in The Paris Review

Use the world around you.

Everything I see or do, the weather and the water, buildings . . . everything actual is an advantage when I am writing. It is like a menu, or a giant tool box, and I can pick and choose what I want. When I am not writing, or more important, when I have nothing on my mind for a book, then I see chaos, confusion, disorder.

–from a 2009 interview with Pam Houston in O Magazine

Let characters speak for themselves.

I try really hard, even if there’s a minor character, to hear their memorable lines. They really do float over your head when you’re writing them, like ghosts or living people. I don’t describe them very much, just broad strokes. You don’t know necessarily how tall they are, because I don’t want to force the reader into seeing what I see. It’s like listening to the radio as a kid. I had to help, as a listener, put in all of the details. It said “blue,” and I had to figure out what shade. Or if they said it was one way, I had to see it. It’s a participatory thing.

It’s that being open—not scratching for it, not digging for it, not constructing something but being open to the situation and trusting that what you don’t know will be available to you. It is bigger than your overt consciousness or your intelligence or even your gifts; it is out there somewhere and you have to let it in.

Don’t read your work out loud until it’s finished.

I don’t trust a performance. I could get a response that might make me think it was successful when it wasn’t at all. The difficulty for me in writing— among the difficulties—is to write language that can work quietly on a page for a reader who doesn’t hear anything. Now for that, one has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm, and so on. So, it is what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.

Don’t complain.

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t expect to teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort. . . . [Confidence] I can’t do much about. I’m very brutal about that. I just tell them: You have to do this, I don’t want to hear whining about how it’s so difficult. Oh, I don’t tolerate any of that because most of the people who’ve ever written are under enormous duress, myself being one them. So whining about how they can’t get it is ridiculous. What I can do very well is what I used to do, which is edit. I can follow their train of thought, see where their language is going, suggest other avenues. I can do that, and I can do that very well. I like to get in the manuscript.

–from a 1998 interview with Zia Jaffrey in Salon

Don’t write what you know.

I may be wrong about this, but it seems as though so much fiction, particularly that by younger people, is very much about themselves. Love and death and stuff, but my love, my death, my this, my that. Everybody else is a light character in that play.

When I taught creative writing at Princeton, [my students] had been told all of their lives to write what they knew. I always began the course by saying, “Don’t pay any attention to that.” First, because you don’t know anything and second, because I don’t want to hear about your true love and your mama and your papa and your friends. Think of somebody you don’t know. What about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English? Or what about a Grande Madame in Paris? Things way outside their camp. Imagine it, create it. Don’t record and editorialize on some event that you’ve already lived through. I was always amazed at how effective that was. They were always out of the box when they were given license to imagine something wholly outside their existence. I thought it was a good training for them. Even if they ended up just writing an autobiography, at least they could relate to themselves as strangers.

Beware of overworking.

Those [paragraphs] that need reworking I do as long as I can. I mean I’ve revised six times, seven times, thirteen times. But there’s a line between revision and fretting, just working it to death. It is important to know when you are fretting it; when you are fretting it because it is not working, it needs to be scrapped.

Embrace failure.

As a writer, a failure is just information. It’s something that I’ve done wrong in writing, or is inaccurate or unclear. I recognize failure—which is important; some people don’t—and fix it, because it is data, it is information, knowledge of what does not work. That’s rewriting and editing.

With physical failures like liver, kidneys, heart, something else has to be done, something fixable that’s not in one’s own hands. But if it’s in your hands, then you have to pay very close attention to it, rather than get depressed or unnerved or feel ashamed. None of that is useful. It’s as though you’re in a laboratory and you’re working on an experiment with chemicals or with rats, and it doesn’t work. It doesn’t mix. You don’t throw up your hands and run out of the lab. What you do is you identify the procedure and what went wrong and then correct it. If you think of [writing] simply as information, you can get closer to success.

Learn how to read—and critique—your own work.

People say, I write for myself, and it sounds so awful and so narcissistic, but in a sense if you know how to read your own work—that is, with the necessary critical distance—it makes you a better writer and editor. When I teach creative writing, I always speak about how you have to learn how to read your work; I don’t mean enjoy it because you wrote it. I mean, go away from it, and read it as though it is the first time you’ve ever seen it. Critique it that way. Don’t get all involved in your thrilling sentences and all that . . .

Seek holiness.

What I’m going to say is going to sound so pompous, but I think an artist, whether it’s a painter or a writer, it’s almost holy. There’s something about the vision, the wisdom. You can be a nobody, but seeing that way, it’s holy, it’s godlike. It’s above the normal life and perception of all of us, normally. You step up. And as long as you’re up there, even if you’re a terrible person—especially if you’re a terrible person—you see things that come together, and shake you, or move you, or clarify something for you that outside of your art you would not have known. It really is a vision above, or beyond.

–from a 2017 interview with Granta

Do your best with what you’ve got.

I have an ideal writing routine that I’ve never experienced, which is to have, say, nine uninterrupted days when I wouldn’t have to leave the house or take phone calls. And to have the space—a space where I have huge tables. I end up with this much space [ she indicates a small square spot on her desk ] everywhere I am, and I can’t beat my way out of it. I am reminded of that tiny desk that Emily Dickinson wrote on and I chuckle when I think, Sweet thing, there she was. But that is all any of us have: just this small space and no matter what the filing system or how often you clear it out—life, documents, letters, requests, invitations, invoices just keep going back in. I am not able to write regularly. I have never been able to do that—mostly because I have always had a nine-to-five job. I had to write either in between those hours, hurriedly, or spend a lot of weekend and predawn time. . . .

I’ve tried to overcome not having orderly spaces by substituting compulsion for discipline, so that when something is urgently there, urgently seen or understood, or the metaphor was powerful enough, then I would move everything aside and write for sustained periods of time.

Oppressive language is dead language.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language—all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas. . . .

Language can never “pin down” slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction. But who does not know of literature banned because it is interrogative; discredited because it is critical; erased because alternate? And how many are outraged by the thought of a self-ravaged tongue?

–from Morrison’s 1993 Nobel lecture

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Toni Morrison: Essays

Toni morrison's work ethic in "the work you do, the person you are" ayelén victoria rodríguez 12th grade.

Maintaining her style, Toni Morrison goes over the struggles of class differences in her essay, "The Work You Do, the Person You Are." She produces a reflective piece that puts in evidence the strong mentality and craving she had for mattering, of achieving important things, since she was a child. Having been the first black woman writer to win the Nobel Prize of literature, Morrison goes back to her beginnings to show the readers what work ethics had led her to such success, stating, as the title implies, that the work one does never defines the person one is.

The text begins with the child being grateful for being paid two dollars for doing what she considered as very few chores in the house. This can be understood when she says “all I had to do for two dollars...”. We can see the clear difference between this beginning at the house and the end at it, which seems to be as if she is being exploited by the amount of work she is given, which in the end turns out to be even harmful physically “after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly”.

Toni Morrison is also able to make an impact on the reader, and realize the social differences by the way the child describes the house where she works and how her patroness is...

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Toni Morrison’s Rarely Seen Papers Will Go on View at Princeton

The university is planning a months-long series of exhibitions, programs and performances

Ella Feldman

Daily Correspondent

One of  Princeton University ’s most famous professors will be the subject of a campus-wide program of events and exhibitions next month: Toni Morrison , Nobel Laureate and author of powerful novels about the Black experience. The writer, who died in 2019 , taught at Princeton from 1989 to 2006. 

Morrison’s debut novel was The Bluest Eye (1970), and Song of Solomon (1977) cemented her fame soon after. Her most famous novel, Beloved (1987), is based on the true story of Margaret Garner , an enslaved woman who killed her young daughter to spare her from slavery.

In addition to a rich collection of published works, Morrison also left behind 400 boxes of materials that have never before been publicly displayed: outlines and drafts of her work, speeches, correspondences, photographs and more.

Ninety objects from that archive will be on display in “ Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory ,” which opens on February 22 at Princeton’s Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery . The exhibition was curated by  Autumn Womack , a scholar of African American studies and English, along with a team of graduate students. 

“This project is bringing artists and scholars to Princeton who may not normally have come here and is pushing the thinking about what the archive can inspire,” Womack tells the  New York Times ’ Hilarie M. Sheets.

Per the Times , items on display include paper schedules and day planners from Morrison’s time at Random House, where she was the company’s first Black woman editor. In the margins of the documents, Morrison had also been outlining Song of Solomon .

Another exhibition juxtaposes Morrison’s writing with the multimedia art of  Alison Saar , who creates sculptures and prints that explore the African diaspora and the experience of being a Black woman in America.  “Cycle of Creativity: Alison Saar and the Toni Morrison Papers ” opens on February 25 at the  Princeton University Art Museum .

Morrison and Saar share a “dedication to this idea that they are actively seeking out their ancestors in order to create a platform for their descendants,” Mitra Abbaspour, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, tells the Times .

Saar will elaborate on her art and its relationship to Morrison’s writing in a symposium that will take place on March 23–25, per the Times . The artist will appear alongside some 30 thinkers to discuss Morrison’s archive.

Attendees will also have the chance to see a variety of works inspired by the archive: Performance artists  Daniel Alexander Jones and  Mame Diarra (Samantha) Speis will appear on March 24–25. Jazz singer  Cécile McLorin Salvant will present her original composition on April 12.

Throughout the program, Princeton will also host events for children, a spring lecture series and undergraduate classes on the acclaimed writer. 

“In imagining this initiative—from exhibition to symposium to partner projects—I wanted to show the importance of the archive to understanding Morrison’s work and practice,” says Womack in a statement . “But I also wanted to show how this archive in particular is a site that opens up new lines of inquiry and inspires new kinds of collaboration.”

“ Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory ” will be on view at Princeton’s Ellen and Leonard Milberg Gallery from February 22 to June 4.

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Ella Feldman | READ MORE

Ella Malena Feldman is a writer and editor based in Washington, D.C. She examines art, culture and gender in her work, which has appeared in Washington City Paper , DCist and the Austin American-Statesman .

8 Indispensable Pieces Of Work And Career Advice From Toni Morrison

Senior Reporter, Work/Life

Toni Morrison , the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and the author of 11 novels, left behind a legacy of words that reshaped American culture following her death in 2019. Her writing itself was a singular force, but one detail about Morrison’s career that has always been a guiding light to me is that she did not start working on her writing until later in her life.

Morrison was not someone who would fit on “30 under 30” lists today, or someone who had the luxury of endless time to do her work. Morrison wrote before the sun rose because of child care responsibilities. “Writing before dawn began as a necessity ― I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, ‘Mama’ ― and that was always around five in the morning,” she told The Paris Review in 1993. She was not published until she was 39 years old.

What that taught me is that I could start at any time, that I could grow where I was planted. At work, other people’s time can become what dictates yours. What Morrison’s career told me is that you could make the time you had your own, no matter what stage of life you were in.

Here are other words of career wisdom that she has given in speeches and interviews over the years:

On what her dad taught her about the value of work

“One day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. ... Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, ‘Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.’

“That was what he said. This was what I heard:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well — not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

“I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.” ― The New Yorker, 2017

On her morning coffee ritual and how rituals help us do the work

“I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark — it must be dark — and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. ... Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives . It enables me, in some sense.

“I tell my students one of the most important things they need to know is when they are their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?” ― The Paris Review, 1993

On mentorship

“I tell my students, ’When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” ― O, The Oprah Magazine, 2003

On why the division of ‘better’ work is not a useful label

“I do not make a distinction between the artist and the other world, the ‘real’ so-called workaday world. I do not subscribe to the theory of the artist as a sort of separate aesthetic being sitting in the ivory tower suffering and talking about beauty. It is work, it is hard work and there’s a lot of it, and there’s a lot of it that needs to be done, but that’s exactly what it is. It is not sitting under willow trees and being inspired et cetera. … “It has something to do with work. I am not sure that it’s better work, as a matter of fact, than any other kind of work. I’m not convinced that it is. I think it has been handled and received more elegantly, but I’m not sure that it’s better. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t be just as happy if I were capable, and I am not, of making one perfect chair that would hold a human body properly. And I approach my work the same way I expect chair-makers to approach theirs.” ― Portland State University’s Oregon Public Speakers Collection, 1975

On how she tells college graduates that growing up is not easy but it is glorious

“I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, target of your labors here, your choices of companions, of the profession that you will enter. You deserve it and I want you to gain it. Everybody should. “But if that’s all you have on your mind, then you do have my sympathy, and if these are indeed the best years of your life, you do have my condolences, because there is nothing, believe me, more satisfying, more gratifying than true adulthood. The adulthood that is the span of life before you. The process of becoming one is not inevitable. Its achievement is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard-won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.” ― Wellesley commencement speech, 2004

On the responsibility of artists to keep working

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.” ― The Nation, 2015

On breaking free from labels

“No generation, least of all mine, has a complete grip on the imagination and goals of subsequent generations; not if you refuse to let it be so. You don’t have to accept media or even scholarly labels for yourself: Generation A, B, C, X, Y, majority, minority, red state, blue state; this social caste or that one. Every true heroine breaks free from his or her class — upper, middle and lower — in order to serve a wider world.” ― Rutgers commencement speech, 2011

On being a pioneer

“If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Ohio Arts Council Speech, 1981

Before You Go

Toni Morrison Quotes

From our partner, huffpost shopping’s best finds, more in life.

The Genius of Toni Morrison’s Only Short Story

In the extraordinary “Recitatif,” Morrison withholds crucial details of racial identity, making the reader the subject of her experiment.

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

I n 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her œuvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, “ The Source of Self-Regard ,” was to observe a literary lab technician reverse engineering an experiment. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading of her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certain—page by page, line by line—that nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. With “Recitatif” she was explicit. This extraordinary story was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” 1

T he characters in question are Twyla and Roberta, two poor girls, eight years old and wards of the state, who spend four months together in St. Bonaventure shelter. The very first thing we learn about them, from Twyla, is this: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” A little later, they were placed together, in Room 406, “stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race.” What we never learn definitively—no matter how closely we read—is which of these girls is black and which white. We will assume, we can insist, but we can’t be sure. And this despite the fact that we get to see them grow up, becoming adults who occasionally run into each other. We eavesdrop when they speak, examine their clothes, hear of their husbands, their jobs, their children, their lives. . . . The crucial detail is withheld. A puzzle of a story, then—a game. Only, Toni Morrison does not play. When she called “Recitatif” an “experiment,” she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.

B ut before we go any further into the ingenious design of this philosophical 2 brainteaser, the title itself is worth a good, long look:

Recitatif, recitative | ˌrɛsɪtəˈtiːv | noun [mass noun] 1. Musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note: singing in recitative . 2. The tone or rhythm peculiar to any language. Obs.

The music of Morrison begins in “ordinary speech.” Her ear was acute, and rescuing African American speech patterns from the debasements of the American mainstream is a defining feature of her early work. In this story, though, the challenge of capturing “ordinary speech” has been deliberately complicated. For many words are here to be “sung . . . on the same note.” That is, we will hear the words of Twyla and the words of Roberta, and, although they are perfectly differentiated the one from the other, we will not be able to differentiate them in the one way we really want to . An experiment easy to imagine but difficult to execute. In order to make it work, you’d need to write in such a way that every phrase precisely straddled the line between characteristically “black” and “white” American speech, and that’s a high-wire act in an eagle-eyed country, ever alert to racial codes, adept at categorization, in which most people feel they can spot a black or white speaker with their eyes closed, precisely because of the tone and rhythm “peculiar to” their language. . . .

And, beyond language, in a racialized system, all manner of things will read as “peculiar to” one kind of person or another. The food a character eats, the music they like, where they live, how they work. Black things, white things. Things that are peculiar to our people and peculiar to theirs. But one of the questions of “Recitatif” is precisely what that phrase “peculiar to” really signifies. For we tend to use it variously, not realizing that we do. It can mean:

That which characterizes That which belongs exclusively to That which is an essential quality of

These three are not the same. The first suggests a tendency; the second implies some form of ownership; the third speaks of essences and therefore of immutable natural laws. In “Recitatif” these differences prove crucial, as we will see.

M uch of the mesmerizing power of “Recitatif” lies in that first definition of “peculiar to”: that which characterizes . As readers, we urgently want to characterize the various characteristics on display. But how? My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick . Well, now, what kind of mother tends to dance all night? A black one or a white one? And whose mother is more likely to be sick? Is Roberta a blacker name than Twyla? Or vice versa? And what about voice? Twyla narrates the story in the first person, and so we may have the commonsense feeling that she must be the black girl, for her author is black. But it doesn’t take much interrogating of this “must” to realize that it rests on rather shallow, autobiographical ideas of authorship that would seem wholly unworthy of the complex experiment that has been set before us. Besides, Morrison was never a poor child in a state institution—she grew up solidly working class in integrated Lorain, Ohio—and autobiography was never a very strong element of her work. Her imagination was capacious. No, autobiography will not get us very far here. So, we listen a little more closely to Twyla:

And Mary, that’s my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean. So when the Big Bozo (nobody ever called her Mrs. Itkin, just like nobody ever said St. Bonaventure)—when she said, “Twyla, this is Roberta. Roberta, this is Twyla. Make each other welcome,” I said, “My mother won’t like you putting me in here.”

The game is afoot. Morrison bypasses any detail that might imply an essential quality of , slyly evades whatever would belong exclusively to one girl or the other, and makes us sit instead in this uncomfortable, double-dealing world of that which characterizes , in which Twyla seems to move in a moment from black to white to black again, depending on the nature of your perception. Like that dress on the Internet no one could ever agree on the color of . . .

W hen reading “Recitatif” with students, there is a moment when the class grows uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character. 3

For example: Twyla loves the food at St. Bonaventure, and Roberta hates it. (The food is Spam, Salisbury steak, Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it.) Is Twyla black? Twyla’s mother’s idea of supper is “popcorn and a can of Yoo-hoo.” Is Twyla white?

Twyla’s mother looks like this:

She had on those green slacks I hated. . . . And that fur jacket with the pocket linings so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them. . . . [But] she looked so beautiful even in those ugly green slacks that made her behind stick out.

Roberta’s mother looks like this:

She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross I’d ever seen. I swear it was six inches long each way. And in the crook of her arm was the biggest Bible ever made.

Does that help? We might think the puzzle is solved when both mothers come to visit their daughters one Sunday and Roberta’s mother refuses to shake Twyla’s mother’s hand. But a moment later, upon reflection, it will strike us that a pious, upstanding, sickly black mother might be just as unlikely to shake the hand of an immoral, fast-living, trashy, dancing white mother as vice versa. . . . Complicating matters further, Twyla and Roberta—despite their crucial differences—seem to share the same low status within the confines of St. Bonaventure. Or at least that’s how Twyla sees it:

We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped. Even the New York City Puerto Ricans and the upstate Indians ignored us.

At this point, many readers will start getting a little desperate to put back in precisely what Morrison has deliberately removed. You start combing the fine print:

We were eight years old and got F’s all the time. Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher.

Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorly—or are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both?

As a reader you know there’s something unseemly in these kinds of inquiries, but old habits die hard. You need to know. So you try another angle. You get granular.

• Twyla’s mother brings no food for her daughter on that Sunday outing
• Cries out “Twyla, baby!” when she spots her in the chapel
• Smells of Lady Esther dusting powder
• Doesn’t wear a hat in a house of God
• Calls Roberta’s mum “that bitch!” and “twitched and crossed and uncrossed her legs all through service.”

Meanwhile, Roberta’s mother brings plenty of food—which Roberta refuses—but says not a word to anyone, although she does read aloud to Roberta from the Bible. There’s a lot of readable difference there, and Twyla certainly notices it all:

Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe that’s why I got into waitress work later—to match up the right people with the right food.

She seems jealous. But can vectors of longing, resentment, or desire tell us who’s who? Is Twyla a black girl jealous of a white mother who brought more food? Or a white girl resentful of a black mother who thinks she’s too godly to shake hands?

C hildren are curious about justice. Sometimes they are shocked by their encounters with its opposite. They say to themselves: Things are not right . But children also experiment with injustice, with cruelty. To stress-test the structure of the adult world. To find out exactly what its rules are. (The fact that questions of justice seem an inconvenient line of speculation for so many adults cannot go unnoticed by children.) And it is when reflecting upon a moment of childish cruelty that Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the system—whatever their position may be within it—and those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody. Because there is a person in St. Bonaventure whose position is lower than either Twyla’s or Roberta’s—far lower. Her name is Maggie:

The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses. . . . Maggie couldn’t talk. The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. I don’t know if she was nice or not. I just remember her legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked.

Maggie has no characteristic language. She has no language at all. Once she fell over in the school orchard and the older girls laughed and Twyla and Roberta did nothing. She is not a person you can do things for: she is only an object of ridicule. “She wore this really stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with earflaps—and she wasn’t much taller than we were.” In the social system of St. Bonaventure, Maggie stands outside all hierarchies. She’s one to whom anything can be said. One to whom anything might be done. Like a slave. Which is what it means to be nobody. Twyla and Roberta, noticing this, take a childish interest in what it means to be nobody:

“But what about if somebody tries to kill her?” I used to wonder about that. “Or what if she wants to cry. Can she cry?” “Sure,” Roberta said. “But just tears. No sounds come out.” “She can’t scream?” “Nope. Nothing.” “Can she hear?” “I guess.” “Let’s call her,” I said. And we did. “Dummy! Dummy!” She never turned her head. “Bow legs! Bow legs!” Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby-boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn’t let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us.

T ime leaps forward. Roberta leaves St. Bonny’s first, and a few months after so does Twyla. The girls grow into women. Years later, Twyla is waitressing at an upstate Howard Johnson’s, when who should walk in but Roberta, just in time to give us some more racial cues to debate. 4

These days Roberta’s hair is “so big and wild” that Twyla can barely see her face. She’s wearing a halter and hot pants and sitting between two hirsute guys with big hair and beards. She seems to be on drugs. Now, Roberta and friends are going to see Hendrix, and would any other artist have worked quite so well for Morrison’s purpose? Hendrix’s hair is big and wild. Is his music black or white? Your call. Either way, Twyla—her own hair “shapeless in a net”—has never heard of him, and, when she says she lives in Newburgh, Roberta laughs.

G eography, in America, is fundamental to racial codes, and Newburgh—sixty miles north of Manhattan—is an archetypal racialized American city. Founded in 1709, it is where Washington announced the cessation of hostilities with Britain and therefore the beginning of America as a nation, and in the nineteenth century was a grand and booming town, with a growing black middle class. The Second World War manufacturing boom brought waves of African American migrants to Newburgh, eager to escape the racial terrorism of the South, looking for low-wage work, but with the end of the war the work dried up; factory jobs were relocated south or abroad, and, by the time Morrison wrote “Recitatif,” Newburgh was a depressed town, hit by “white flight,” riven with poverty and the violence that attends poverty, and with large sections of its once beautiful waterfront bulldozed in the name of “urban renewal.” Twyla is married to a Newburgh man from an old Newburgh family, whose race the reader is invited to decipher (“James and his father talk about fishing and baseball and I can see them all together on the Hudson in a raggedy skiff”) but who is certainly one of the millions of twentieth-century Americans who watched once thriving towns mismanaged and abandoned by the federal government: “Half the population of Newburgh is on welfare now, but to my husband’s family it was still some upstate paradise of a time long past.” And then, when the town is on its knees, and the great houses empty and abandoned, and downtown a wasteland of empty shop fronts and aimless kids on the corner—the new money moves in. The old houses get done up. A Food Emporium opens. And it’s in this Emporium—twelve years after their last run-in—that the women meet again, but this time all is transformation. Roberta’s cleaned up her act and married a rich man:

Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich. I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.

For the reader determined to solve the puzzle—the reader who believes the puzzle can be solved, or must be solved—this is surely Exhibit No. 1. Everything hangs on that word “they.” To whom is it pointing? Uppity black people? Entitled white people? Rich people, whatever their color? Gentrifiers? You choose.

N ot too long ago, I happened to be in Annandale myself, standing in the post-office line, staring absently at the list of national holidays fixed to the wall, and reflecting that the only uncontested date on the American calendar is New Year’s Day. With Twyla and Roberta, it’s the same—every element of their shared past is contested:

“Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.” But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. . . . You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.

Their most contested site is Maggie. Maggie is their Columbus Day, their Thanksgiving. What the hell happened to Maggie? At the beginning of “Recitatif,” we are informed that sandy-colored Maggie “fell” down. Later, Roberta insists she was knocked down, by the older girls—an event Twyla does not remember. Later still, Roberta claims that Maggie was black and that Twyla pushed her down, which sparks an epistemological crisis in Twyla, who does not remember Maggie being black, never mind pushing her. (“I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”) Then Roberta claims they both pushed and kicked “a black lady who couldn’t even scream.” It’s interesting to note that this escalation of claims happens at a moment of national “racial strife,” in the form of school busing. Both Roberta’s and Twyla’s children are being sent far across town. And as black—or white—mothers, the two find themselves in rigid positions, on either side of a literal boundary: a protest line. Their shared past starts to fray and then morph under the weight of a mutual anger; even the tiniest things are reinterpreted. They used to like doing each other’s hair, as kids. Now Twyla rejects this commonality ( I hated your hands in my hair ) and Roberta rejects any possibility of alliance with Twyla, in favor of the group identity of the other mothers who feel about busing as she does. 5

The personal connection they once made can hardly be expected to withstand a situation in which once again race proves socially determinant, and in one of the most vulnerable sites any of us have: the education of our children. Mutual suspicion blooms. Why should I trust this person? What are they trying to take from me? My culture? My community? My schools? My neighborhood? My life? Positions get entrenched. Nothing can be shared. Twyla and Roberta start carrying increasingly extreme signs at competing protests. (Twyla: “My signs got crazier each day.”) A hundred and forty characters or fewer: that’s about as much as you can fit on a homemade sign. Both women find that ad hominem attacks work best. You could say the two are never as far apart as at this moment of “racial strife.” You could also say they are in lockstep, for without the self-definition offered by the binary they appear meaningless, even to themselves. (“Actually my sign didn’t make sense without Roberta’s.”)

A s Twyla and Roberta discover, it’s hard to admit a shared humanity with your neighbor if they will not come with you to reëxamine a shared history. Such reëxaminations I sometimes hear described as “resentment politics,” as if telling a history in full could only be the product of a personal resentment, rather than a necessary act performed in the service of curiosity, interest, understanding (of both self and community), and justice itself. But some people sure do take it personal. I couldn’t help but smile to read of an ex-newspaper editor from my country, who, when speaking of his discomfort at recent efforts to reveal the slave history behind many of our great country houses, complained, “I think comfort does matter. I know people say, ‘Oh, we must be uncomfortable.’ . . . Why should I pay a hundred quid a year, or whatever, to be told what a shit I am?” Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you . As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives?

The long, bloody, tangled encounter between the European peoples and the African continent is our history. Our shared history. It’s what happened. It’s not the moral equivalent of a football game where your “side” wins or loses. To give an account of an old English country house that includes not only the provenance of the beautiful paintings but also the provenance of the money that bought them—who suffered and died making that money, how, and why—is history told in full and should surely be of interest to everybody, black or white or neither. And I admit I do begin to feel resentment—actually, something closer to fury—when I realize that merely speaking such facts aloud is so discomfiting to some that they’d rather deny the facts themselves. For the sake of peaceful relations. To better forget about it. To better move on. Many people have this instinct. Twyla and Roberta also want to forget and move on. They want to blame it on the “gar girls” (a pun on gargoyles, “gar girls” is Twyla and Roberta’s nickname for the older residents of St. Bonaventure), or on each other, or on faulty memory itself. Maggie was black. Maggie was white. They hurt Maggie. You did . But, by the end of “Recitatif,” they are both ready to at least try to discuss “what the hell happened to Maggie.” Not for the shallow motive of transhistorical blame, much less to induce personal comfort or discomfort, but rather in the service of truth. We know that their exploration of the question will be painful, messy, and very likely never perfectly settled. But we also know that a good-faith attempt is better than its opposite. Which would be to go on pretending, as Twyla puts it, that “everything was hunky-dory.”

D ifficult to “move on” from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed. Citizens from Belfast and Belgrade know this, and Berlin and Banjul. (And that’s just the “B”s.) In the privacy of our domestic arguments we know this. We must be heard. It’s human to want to be heard. We are nobody if not heard. I suffered. They suffered. My people suffered! My people continue to suffer! Some take the narrowest possible view of this category of “my people”: they mean only their immediate family. For others, the cry widens out to encompass a city, a nation, a faith group, a perceived racial category, a diaspora. But, whatever your personal allegiances, when you deliberately turn from any human suffering you make what should be a porous border between “your people” and the rest of humanity into something rigid and deadly. You ask not to be bothered by the history of nobodies, the suffering of nobodies. (Or the suffering of somebodies, if hierarchical reversal is your jam.) But surely the very least we can do is listen to what was done to a person—or is still being done. It is the very least we owe the dead, and the suffering. People suffered to build this house, to found that bank, or your country. Maggie suffered at St. Bonaventure. And all we have to do is hear about that? How can we resent it? 6

It takes Twyla some time to see past her resentment at being offered a new version of a past she thought she knew. (“Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”) But, in her forced reconsideration of a shared history, she comes to a deeper realization about her own motives:

I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. . . . And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me and I was glad about that.

A few pages later, Roberta spontaneously comes to a similar conclusion (although she is now unsure as to whether or not Maggie was, indeed, black). I find the above one of the most stunning paragraphs in all of Morrison’s work. The psychological subtlety of it. The mix of projection, vicarious action, self-justification, sadistic pleasure, and personal trauma that she identifies as a motivating force within Twyla, and that, by extrapolation, she prompts us to recognize in ourselves.

L ike Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of “Recitatif” is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identities—the fact that they are both “somebody”—they simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies. The “fags who wanted company” in the chapel are nobodies to them, and they are so repelled by and fixated upon Maggie’s disability that they see nothing else about her. But there is somebody in all these people, after all. There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human. Which acknowledgment is often misused or only half used, employed as a form of sentimental or aesthetic contemplation, i.e., Oh, though we seem so unalike, how alike we all are under our skins . . . . But, historically, this acknowledgment of the human—our inescapable shared category—has also played a role in the work of freedom riders, abolitionists, anticolonialists, trade unionists, queer activists, suffragettes, and in the thoughts of the likes of Frantz Fanon , Malcolm X, Stuart Hall , Paul Gilroy, Morrison herself. If it is a humanism, it is a radical one, which struggles toward solidarity in alterity, the possibility and promise of unity across difference. When applied to racial matters, it recognizes that, although the category of race is both experientially and structurally “real,” it yet has no ultimate or essential reality in and of itself. 7

B ut, of course, ultimate reality is not where any of us live. For hundreds of years, we have lived in deliberately racialized human structures—that is to say, socially pervasive and sometimes legally binding fictions—that prove incapable of stating difference and equality simultaneously. And it is extremely galling to hear that you have suffered for a fiction, or indeed profited from one. It has been fascinating to watch the recent panicked response to the interrogation of whiteness, the terror at the dismantling of a false racial category that for centuries united the rich man born and raised in Belarus, say, with the poor woman born and raised in Wales, under the shared banner of racial superiority. But panic is not entirely absent on the other side of the binary. If race is a construct, what will happen to blackness? Can the categories of black music and black literature survive? What would the phrase “black joy” signify? How can we throw out this dirty bathwater of racism when for centuries we have pressed the baby of race so close to our hearts, and made—even accounting for all the horror—so many beautiful things with it?

T oni Morrison loved the culture and community of the African diaspora in America, even—especially—those elements that were forged as response and defense against the dehumanizing violence of slavery, the political humiliations of Reconstruction, the brutal segregation and state terrorism of Jim Crow, and the many civil-rights successes and neoliberal disappointments that have followed. Out of this history she made a literature, a shelf of books that—for as long as they are read—will serve to remind America that its story about itself was always partial and self-deceiving. And here, for many people, we reach an impasse: a dead end. If race is a construct, whither blackness? If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself? I think a lot of people’s brains actually break at this point. But Morrison had a bigger brain. She could parse the difference between the deadness of a determining category and the richness of a lived experience. And there are some clues in this story, I think. Some hints at alternative ways of conceptualizing difference without either erasing or codifying it. Surprising civic values, fresh philosophical principles. Not only categorization and visibility but also privacy and kindness:

Now we were behaving like sisters separated for much too long. Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh—and an understanding nod.

That people live and die within a specific history—within deeply embedded cultural, racial, and class codes—is a reality that cannot be denied, and often a beautiful one. It’s what creates difference. But there are ways to deal with that difference that are expansive and comprehending, rather than narrow and diagnostic. Instead of only ticking boxes on doctors’ forms—pathologizing difference—we might also take a compassionate and discreet interest in it. We don’t always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don’t have to take it personally. We can also just let it be. Or we can, like Morrison, be profoundly interested in it:

The struggle was for writing that was indisputably black. I don’t yet know quite what that is, but neither that nor the attempts to disqualify an effort to find out keeps me from trying to pursue it. My choices of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture. 8

Visibility and privacy, communication and silence, intimacy and encounter are all expressed here. Readers who see only their own exclusion in this paragraph may need to mentally perform, in their own minds, the experiment that “Recitatif” performs in fiction: the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial . To perform this experiment in a literary space, I will choose, for my other character, another Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. I am looking at his poems. I am looking in. To fully comprehend Heaney’s œuvre, I would have to be wholly embedded in the codes of Northern Irish culture; I am not. No more than I am wholly embedded in the African American culture out of which and toward which Morrison writes. I am not a perfect co-conspirator of either writer. I had to Google to find out what “Lady Esther dusting powder” is, in “Recitatif,” and, when Heaney mentions hoarding “fresh berries in the byre,” no image comes to my mind. 9

As a reader of these two embedded writers, both profoundly interested in their own communities, I can only be a thrilled observer, always partially included, by that great shared category, the human, but also simultaneously on the outside looking in, enriched by that which is new or alien to me, especially when it has not been diluted or falsely presented to flatter my ignorance—that dreaded “explanatory fabric.” Instead, they both keep me rigorous company on the page, not begging for my comprehension but always open to the possibility of it, for no writer would break a silence if they did not want someone—some always unknowable someone—to overhear. I am describing a model reader-writer relationship. But, as “Recitatif” suggests, the same values expressed here might also prove useful to us in our roles as citizens, allies, friends.

R ace, for many, is a determining brand, simply one side of a rigid binary. Blackness, as Morrison conceived of it, was a shared history, an experience, a culture, a language. A complexity, a wealth. To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimist’s right but an activist’s indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done. And what is the purpose of all this work if our positions within prejudicial, racialized structures are permanent, essential, unchangeable—as rigid as the rules of gravity?

The forces of capital, meanwhile, are pragmatic: capital does not bother itself with essentialisms. It transforms nobodies into somebodies—and vice versa—depending on where labor is needed and profit can be made. The Irish became somebodies when indentured labor had to be formally differentiated from slavery, to justify the latter category. In Britain, we only decided that there was something inside women—or enough of a something to be able to vote with—in the early twentieth century. British women went from being essentially angels of the house—whose essential nature was considered to be domestic—to nodes in a system whose essential nature was to work, just like men, although we were welcome to pump milk in the office basement if we really had to. . . . Yes, capital is adaptive, pragmatic. It is always looking for new markets, new sites of economic vulnerability, of potential exploitation—new Maggies. New human beings whose essential nature is to be nobody. We claim to know this even as we simultaneously misremember or elide the many Maggies in our own lives. These days, Roberta—or Twyla—might march for women’s rights, all the while wearing a four-dollar T-shirt, a product of the enforced labor of Uyghur women on the other side of the world. Twyla—or Roberta—could go door to door, registering voters, while sporting long nails freshly painted by a trafficked young girl. Roberta—or Twyla—may practice “self-care” by going to the hairdresser to get extensions shorn from another, poorer woman’s head. Far beneath the “black-white” racial strife of America, there persists a global underclass of Maggies, unseen and unconsidered within the parochial American conversation, the wretched of the earth. . . .

O ur racial codes are “peculiar to” us, but what do we really mean by that? In “Recitatif,” that which would characterize Twyla and Roberta as black or white is the consequence of history, of shared experience, and what shared histories inevitably produce: culture, community, identity. What belongs exclusively to them is their subjective experience of these same categories in which they have lived. Some of these experiences will have been nourishing, joyful, and beautiful, many others prejudicial, exploitative, and punitive. No one can take a person’s subjective experiences from them. No one should try. Whether Twyla or Roberta is the somebody who has lived within the category of “white” we cannot be sure, but Morrison constructs the story in such a way that we are forced to admit the fact that other categories, aside from the racial, also produce shared experiences. Categories like being poor, being female, like being at the mercy of the state or the police, like living in a certain Zip Code, having children, hating your mother, wanting the best for your family. We are like and not like a lot of people a lot of the time. White may be the most powerful category in the racial hierarchy, but, if you’re an eight-year-old girl in a state institution with a delinquent mother and no money, it sure doesn’t feel that way. Black may be the lower caste, but, if you marry an I.B.M. guy and have two servants and a driver, you are—at the very least—in a new position in relation to the least powerful people in your society. And vice versa. Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them. Morrison is the great master of American complexity, and “Recitatif,” in my view, sits alongside “ Bartleby, the Scrivener ” and “ The Lottery ” as a perfect—and perfectly American—tale, one every American child should read.

Finally, what is essentially black or white about Twyla and Roberta I believe we bring to “Recitatif” ourselves, within a system of signs over which too many humans have collectively labored for hundreds of years now. It began in the racialized system of capitalism we call slavery; it was preserved in law long after slavery ended, and continues to assert itself, to sometimes lethal effect, in social, economic, educational, and judicial systems all over the world. But as a category the fact remains that it has no objective reality: it is not, like gravity, a principle of the earth. By removing it from the story, Morrison reveals both the speciousness of “black-white” as our primary human categorization and its dehumanizing effect on human life. But she also lovingly demonstrates how much meaning we were able to find—and continue to find—in our beloved categories. The peculiar way our people make this or that dish, the peculiar music we play at a cookout or a funeral, the peculiar way we use nouns or adjectives, the peculiar way we walk or dance or paint or write—these things are dear to us. Especially if they are denigrated by others, we will tend to hold them close. We feel they define us. And this form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the human—the insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as “nobody.” A direct descendant of slaves, Morrison writes in a way that recognizes first—and primarily—the somebody within black people, the black human having been, historically, the ultimate example of the dehumanized subject: the one transformed, by capital, from subject to object. But in this lifelong project, as the critic Jesse McCarthy has pointed out, we are invited to see a foundation for all social-justice movements: “The battle over the meaning of black humanity has always been central to both [Toni Morrison’s] fiction and essays—and not just for the sake of black people but to further what we hope all of humanity can become.” 10

We hope all of humanity will reject the project of dehumanization. We hope for a literature—and a society!—that recognizes the somebody in everybody. This despite the fact that, in America’s zero-sum game of racialized capitalism, this form of humanism has been abandoned as an apolitical quantity, toothless, an inanity to repeat, perhaps, on “Sesame Street” (“Everybody’s somebody!”) but considered too naïve and insufficient a basis for radical change. 11

I have written a lot in this essay about prejudicial structures. But I’ve spoken vaguely of them, metaphorically, as a lot of people do these days. In an address to Howard University, in 1995, Morrison got specific. She broke it down, in her scientific way. It is a very useful summary, to be cut out and kept for future reference, for if we hope to dismantle oppressive structures it will surely help to examine how they are built:

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

• Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
• Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
• Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.
• Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
• Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
• Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
• Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
• Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its males and absolutely its children.
• Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
• Maintain, at all costs, silence. 12

Elements of this fascist playbook can be seen in the European encounter with Africa, between the West and the East, between the rich and the poor, between the Germans and the Jews, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the British and the Irish, the Serbs and the Croats. It is one of our continual human possibilities. Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting. But it is still a man-made structure. The capacity for fascisms of one kind or another is something else we all share—you might call it our most depressing collective identity. (And, if we are currently engaged in trying to effect change, it could be worthwhile—as an act of ethical spring-cleaning—to check through Toni’s list and insure that we are not employing any of the playbook of fascism in our own work.) Fascism labors to create the category of the “nobody,” the scapegoat, the sufferer. Morrison repudiated that category as it has applied to black people over centuries, and in doing so strengthened the category of the “somebody” for all of us, whether black or white or neither. Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation—as cathartic as it may feel. 13

Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody. 14

S till, like most readers of “Recitatif,” I found it impossible not to hunger to know who the other was, Twyla or Roberta. Oh, I urgently wanted to have it straightened out. Wanted to sympathize warmly in one sure place, turn cold in the other. To feel for the somebody and dismiss the nobody. But this is precisely what Morrison deliberately and methodically will not allow me to do . It’s worth asking ourselves why. “Recitatif” reminds me that it is not essentially black or white to be poor, oppressed, lesser than, exploited, ignored. The answer to “What the hell happened to Maggie?” is not written in the stars, or in the blood, or in the genes, or forever predetermined by history. Whatever was done to Maggie was done by people. People like Twyla and Roberta. People like you and me.

This essay is drawn from the introduction to “ Recitatif: A Story ,” by Toni Morrison, out this February from Knopf.

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Home › Literature › Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Novels

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Novels

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 11, 2018 • ( 4 )

In all of her fiction, Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931- August 06, 2019) explored the conflict between society and the individual. She showed how the individual who defies social pressures can forge a self by drawing on the resources of the natural world, on a sense of continuity within the family and within the history of a people, and on dreams and other unaccountable sources of psychic power.

In the novel, the most extreme victim of these destructive ideas is Pecola, who finds refuge in madness after she has been thoroughly convinced of her own ugliness (confirmed when she is raped by her own father, Cholly). Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola’s mother, is another victim who gets her idea of an unvarying standard of beauty from romantic motion pictures that glorify white film stars. When she realizes the impassible gap between that ideal and her physical self (she has a deformed foot and two missing teeth), she also gives up any hope of maintaining a relationship with Cholly, her husband, except one of complete antagonism and opposition. Mrs. Breedlove even comes to prefer the little white girl she takes care of at work to her own daughter, Pecola, whom she has always perceived as ugly.

The ideal of unattainable physical beauty is reinforced by the sugary, unattainable world of the family depicted in the school readers—of Mother and Father and Dick and Jane and their middle-class, suburban existence. The contrast between that false standard of life and the reality lived by the children makes them ashamed of their reality, of the physical intimacy of families in which the children have seen their fathers naked.

Although Pecola is thoroughly victimized, Freida and Claudia MacTeer, schoolmates of Pecola, do survive with some integrity and richness. Freida seems to accept Shirley Temple as the ideal of cuteness, but her sister Claudia, a center of consciousness in the novel, responds with anger and defiance, dismembering the hard, cold, smirking baby dolls she receives at Christmas. What Claudia really desires at Christmas is simply an experience of family closeness in the kitchen, an experience of flowers, fruit, and music, of security.

Claudia’s anger at the white baby dolls springs from a conviction of her own reality and her own worth. In defense of her own individuality, Claudia rejects Shirley Temple and “Meringue Pie,” the high yellow princess, Maureen Peal. It is that defense of her own reality that makes Claudia sympathize with Pecola and try to defend her, even to the point of sacrificing Freida’s money and her own.

Claudia is especially puzzled and regretful that nobody says “poor baby” to the raped Pecola, that nobody wants to welcome her unborn baby into the world. It would be only natural, “human nature,” it seems, for people to sympathize with a victim and rejoice at the creation of a human life. Instead, the springs of human sympathy have been dammed up by social disapproval. Suffering from the self-hatred they have absorbed from the society around them, the black community maintains inflexible social standards and achieves respectability by looking down on Pecola. The two MacTeer sisters appeal to nature to help Pecola and her unborn baby, but nature fails them just as prayer did: No marigolds sprout and grow that year. The earth is unyielding. The baby is stillborn. Eventually, even the two girls become distanced from Pecola, whose only friend is an imaginary one, a part of herself who can see the blue eyes she was promised. Pecola functions as a scapegoat for the society around her, and Claudia’s sympathy later grows into an understanding of how the community used Pecola to protect themselves from scorn and insult. What finally flowers in Claudia is insight and a more conscious respect for her own reality.

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Sula Sula also explores the oppressive nature of white society, evident in the very name of the “Bottom,” a hillside community that had its origin in the duplicitous white treatment of an emancipated black slave who was promised fertile “bottom land” along with his freedom. In a bitterly ironic twist, the whites take over the hillside again when they want suburban houses that will catch the breeze. In taking back the Bottom, they destroy a place, a community with its own identity. In turn, the black community, corrupted by white society, rejects Sula for her experimenting with her life, for trying to live free like a man instead of accepting the restrictions of the traditional female role.

Sula provokes the reader to question socially accepted concepts of good and evil. As Sula is dying, she asks her girlhood friend Nel, “How do you know that you were the good one?” Although considered morally loose and a witch by the townspeople, the unconventional Sula cannot believe herself to be an inferior individual. Contrasting the traditional role of mother and church woman that Nel has embraced, Sula’s individuality is refreshing and intriguing. Despite her death, Sula maintains an independence that ultimately stands in proud opposition to the established network of relationships that exist within conventional society.

The novel shows that the Bottom society encompasses both good and evil. The people are accustomed to suffering and enduring evil. In varying degrees, they accept Eva’s murder of her drug-addict son, Plum, and Hannah’s seduction of their husbands, one after another. The community, nevertheless, cannot encompass Sula, a woman who thinks for herself without conforming to their sensibilities. They have to turn her into a witch, so that they can mobilize themselves against her “evil” and cherish their goodness. Without the witch, their goodness grows faint again. Like Pecola, Sula is made a scapegoat.

Growing up in the Bottom, Sula creates an identity for herself, first from the reality of physical experience. When she sees her mother Hannah burning up in front of her eyes, she feels curiosity. Her curiosity is as honest as Hannah’s admission that she loves her daughter Sula the way any mother would, but that she does not like her. Hearing her mother reject her individuality, Sula concludes that there is no one to count on except herself.

In forging a self, Sula also draws on sexual experience as a means of joy, as a means of feeling sadness, and as a means of feeling her own power. Sula does not substitute a romantic dream for the reality of that physical experience. She does finally desire a widening of that sexual experience into a continuing relationship with Ajax, but the role of nurturing and possession is fatal to her. Ajax leaves, and Sula sickens and dies.

A closeness to the elemental processes of nature gives a depth to the lives of the Bottom-dwellers, although nature does not act with benevolence or even with consistency. Plum and Hannah, two of Eva’s children, die by fire, one sacrificed by Eva and one ignited by capricious accident. Chicken Little and several of those who follow Shadrack on National Suicide Day drown because acts of play go wrong and inexplicably lead to their destruction. Sula’s supposed identity as a witch is connected to the plague of robins that coincides with her return to the Bottom. The people of the Bottom live within Nature and try to make some sense of it, even though their constructions are strained and self-serving.

On one level, Sula refuses any connection with history and family continuity. Her grandmother Eva says that Sula should get a man and make babies, but Sula says that she would rather make herself. On the other hand, Sula is a descendant of the independent women Eva and Hannah, both of whom did what they had to do. It is at least rumored that Eva let her leg be cut off by a train so that she could get insurance money to take care of her three children when BoyBoy, her husband, abandoned her. When her husband died, Hannah needed “manlove,” and she got it from her neighbors’ husbands, despite community disapproval. In their mold, Sula is independent enough to threaten Eva with fire and to assert her own right to live, even if her grandmother does not like Sula’s way of living.

To flourish, Morrison suggests, conventional society needs an opposite pole. A richness comes from the opposition and the balance—from the difference—and an acceptance of that difference would make scapegoats unnecessary. The world of the Bottom is poorer with Sula dead and out of it.

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula

Song of Solomon In  Song of Solomon , Morrison again traces the making of a self. The novel is a departure for Morrison in that the protagonist is not female, but a young man, Milkman Dead. Milkman grows up in a comfortable, insulated, middle-class family, the grandson of a doctor on his mother’s side and the son of a businessman, whose father owned his own farm. Son of a doting mother, Milkman is nursed a long time, the reason for his nickname, and is sent to school in velvet knickers. Guitar Baines, a Southside black, becomes Milkman’s friend and an ally against the other children’s teasing.

As the novel progresses, though, and as Milkman discovers the reality of his family and friends as separate people with their own griefs and torments, Milkman comes to feel that everyone wants him dead. Ironically, Milkman’s last name actually is “Dead,” the result of a drunken clerk’s error when Milkman’s grandfather was registering with the Freedmen’s Bureau.

Milkman learns that his mere existence is extraordinary, since even before his birth, his father tried to kill him. Milkman survived that threat through the intercession of his mother and, especially, of his aunt, Pilate, a woman with no navel. After having been conjured by Pilate into making love to his wife again, years after he had turned against her, Macon Dead wanted the resulting baby aborted. Ruth, the baby’s mother, out of fear of her husband, took measures to bring about an abortion, but Pilate intervened again and helped Ruth to find the courage to save the child and bear him.

In the present action of the novel, Hagar, Milkman’s cousin, his first love and his first lover, pursues him month after month with whatever weapon she can find to kill him. Hagar wants Milkman’s living life, not his dead life, but Milkman has rejected her, out of boredom and fear that he will be maneuvered into marrying her. At this point, he does not want to be tied down: He wants freedom and escape.

Hagar, like Pecola of The Bluest Eye , feels unlovely and unloved, rejected because Milkman does not like her black, curly hair. Pilate says that Milkman cannot not love her hair without not loving himself because it is the same hair that grows from his own body. Hagar is another victim of an absolutely univocal standard of beauty, and she is a character who needs a supporting society, a chorus of aunts and cousins and sisters to surround her with advice and protection. Instead, she has only Pilate and Reba, grandmother and mother, two women so strong and independent that they do not understand her weakness. Unhinged by Milkman’s rejection of her, Hagar chases Milkman with various weapons, is repeatedly disarmed, and finally dies in total discouragement.

Trying to find out about his family’s past, Milkman travels to Virginia, to Shalimar, a black town, where the men in the general store challenge him to fight, and one attacks him with a knife. Milkman does not understand why these people want his life, but they think he has insulted and denied their masculinity with his powerful northern money and his brusque treatment of them, by not asking their names and not offering his own.

The most serious threat to Milkman’s life, however, turns out to be Guitar, Milkman’s friend and spiritual brother. When Guitar tries to kill Milkman, he is betraying the reality of their friendship for the idea of revenge against whites and compensation for the personal deprivation he has suffered. Guitar thinks that Milkman has a cache of gold that he is not sharing with him, so he decides to kill him. Guitar rationalizes his decision by saying that the money is for the cause, for the work of the Seven Days, a group of seven black men sworn to avenge the deaths of innocent black people at the hands of the whites.

Milkman’s being alive at all, then, is a triumph, a victory that he slowly comes to appreciate after coming out of his comfortable shell of self-involvement. Unwillingly, Milkman comes to know the suffering and griefs of his mother and father and even his sisters Magdelene and Corinthians. The decisive experience in his self-making, however, is the quest for Pilate’s gold on which his father sets him. In the first stage, the men are convinced that Pilate’s gold hangs in a green sack from the ceiling of her house, and Guitar and Milkman attempt to steal it. The two friends succeed in taking the sack because the women in the house are simply puzzled, wondering why the men want a sack that is really full of old bones. In leaving the house, though, the two men are arrested, and Pilate must rescue them and the bones by doing an Aunt Jemima act for the white policemen. Milkman’s father, Macon, is convinced that the gold still exists somewhere, and Milkman sets out to find it by going back to Pennsylvania, where Macon and Pilate grew up, and later to Virginia, where the previous generation lived.

Milkman’s making of a self includes many of the archetypal adventures of the heroes of legend and myth. Like other heroes of legend, Milkman limps, with one leg shorter than the other, a mark of his specialness. Like Oedipus’s parents, his parents try to kill him early in his life. There is a wise old lady who gives him help and advice. He goes on a quest for a treasure, and he hopes for gold and the hand of a beautiful princess. He solves a puzzle or riddle to achieve his quest and confirmhis identity.He has a transcendent experience and reaches heights of prowess (he can fly). When his people turn against him, he gives his life for them.

Like Sula, too, Milkman creates a self from the reality of physical experience, the processes of nature, a connection to history and family continuity, and springs of human possibility through myth, dreams, legends, and other sources of psychic power. Milkman reaches an understanding of physical experience and the processes of nature in a struggle against the physical environment. As a rich city boy, Milkman was insulated from nature, but in his trip south to try to get the gold, he overcomes a series of physical obstacles to reach the cave where Macon and Pilate in their youth encountered white people and gold. Milkman gets there only after falling into the river and climbing up twenty feet of rock, splitting his shoes and the clothes that mark him as a city man. During the trip, Milkman loses his possessions—trunk, clothes, and whiskey—and he makes it on his own, in a place where his father’s name and father’s money do not protect him. Milkman succeeds in finding Circe, who years ago sheltered Pilate and Macon when their father was killed, and he reaches the cave where there is no longer any gold.

Milkman also encounters nature as an obstacle to be overcome when, after the knife fight in Shalimar, he is invited to go on a coon hunt into the woods with the older men of Shalimar. Again, Milkman undergoes a test, having to move through the woods in the dark, having to show the courage and physical endurance necessary to be one of the hunters. Milkman also experiences the music of the hunt, the communication between the men and the dogs, the language before language, of a time when people were so close to their physical reality that they were in harmony with all creatures.

Milkman also creates himself in searching for his origins. In searching for his fathers, he discovers himself; like the Telemachus of Greek mythology and James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Milkman must find the reality of his fathers to know his own potential. Milkman’s original pursuit of the gold seems to be an impulse he gets from his father, the man of business, and even from his father’s father, who was a lover of property. The quest, however, changes as Milkman pursues it, finding the thread of his family’s history. Stopping in Pennsylvania, Milkman hears the stories of the men who knew his father and grandfather and who rejoice in their successes. The story of the Dead family dramatizes the dream and the failure of that dream for black people in America. When the older Macon Dead was killed by white men for his flourishing farm, the possibilities of his neighbors were narrowed and their lives scarred. Seeing his father and grandfather through their former neighbor’s eyes helps Milkman to understand better the pride that Macon had when he said that his father had let Macon work side by side with him and trusted him to share in his achievements.

In Shalimar, Milkman also learns about his great-grandfather by piecing together the memories of people there and by deciphering the children’s game and song, a song about Solomon and Rynah that seems to be interspersed with nonsense words. Milkman matches this song to a song that he had heard Pilate sing about Sugarman. He solves the riddle of the song, and he even figures out what the ghost of Pilate’s father meant when he said, “Sing,” and when he told Pilate to go get the bones. Finally, he discovers that his grandmother was an American Indian, Singing Bird, and that his great-grandfather, Solomon, was one of the legendary flying Africans, the father of twenty-one sons, a slave who one day flew back to Africa. His grandfather Jake had fallen through the branches of a tree when Solomon dropped him, trying to take his last baby son back with him. Learning about that magic enables Milkman himself to fly when he surrenders to the air and lets himself be upheld.

Milkman creates a self so that he can share it and even sacrifice it for a friend. With Pilate, Milkman buries the bones of Jake, his grandfather, on Solomon’s Leap. Guitar, who has continued to stalk Milkman, shoots and kills Pilate, but Milkman, saying to Guitar, “Do you want my life? Take it if it is any good to you,” leaps into the air and flies. Guitar is free to kill his friend, but Milkman soars.

The ending of the novel shows the transcendence of the spirit, as the hero achieves his destiny. The satisfaction of the ending, which also soars into legend, comes from the triumph of the human spirit, the triumph that even death cannot destroy. Song of Solomon is a beautiful, serious, funny novel that moves beyond the social to the mythic.

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Tar Baby Tar Baby explores three kinds of relationships: the relationship between black and white people; the relationships within families, especially between parents and children; and the relationship between the American black man and black woman. In the epigraph to the novel, Saint Paul reproaches the Corinthians for allowing contentions to exist among their ranks; the quote serves to foreshadow the discord that abounds in the novel’s relationships.

In Tar Baby , Morrison depicts not a self-contained black society, but an onstage interaction between black and white people. The novel juxtaposes two families, a white family of masters and a black family of servants. The white family includes a retired candy-maker, Valerian Street, and his wife Margaret, once the “Principal Beauty of Maine,” who is now in her fifties. The couple’s only son Michael lives abroad; his arrival for Christmas is expected and denied by various characters.

The black family consists of the husband, Sydney Childs, who is Valerian’s valet and butler, and the wife, Ondine, who serves as cook and housekeeper. They are childless, but their orphan niece Jadine plays the role of their daughter. (Valerian has acted as Jadine’s patron, paying for her education at the Sorbonne.)

The pivotal character, however, who enters and changes the balance of power and the habitual responses of the families, is a black man who rises out of the sea. His true name is Son, although he has gone by other aliases. The veneer of politeness and familiarity between the characters is shaken by Son’s abrupt appearance. Uncomfortable racial and personal assumptions are put into words and cannot be retracted. The Principal Beauty is convinced that Son has come to rape her: What else would a black man want? (Jadine is convinced that if Son wants to rape anyone, it is she, not Margaret.) Sidney finds Son a threat to his respectability as a Philadelphia black because when Son appears, the white people lump all black people together. Ondine seems less threatened, but most of her energy goes into her running battle with the Principal Beauty. Jadine is apprehensive at Son’s wild appearance, and later she is affronted by his direct sexual approach. Only Valerian welcomes Son. He sees him as a vision of his absent son Michael, and he invites him to sit down at the dining table and be a guest.

Son’s coming is the catalyst that causes time-worn relationships to explode when Michael does not come for Christmas. His failure to appear leads to the revelation that the Principal Beauty abused her son as a child, pricking him with pins and burning him with cigarettes. Ondine, the black woman, finally hurls this accusation at Margaret, the white, and makes explicit what the two women have known mutually since the beginning. Valerian, who has been haunted by the memory of Michael as a lonely child who would hide under the sink and sing to himself, is hit with a reality much harsher than he has known or admitted.

Structured as it is in terms of families, the whole novel revolves around family responsibilities, especially between parents and children. Michael Street does not come home for Christmas, but the abuse he suffered as a child seems to justify his absence. Thus, the undutiful mother Margaret has thrown the whole family off balance. In the black family, later in the novel, attention is drawn to the undutiful daughter Jadine, although it seems implied that she has learned this undutifulness, partly at least, from whites, wanting her individual success to be separate from family ties and responsibilities.

This undutifulness also springs from a question of identity. In Paris, even before she comes to Valerian’s island, Jadine feels affronted by a beautiful, proud, contemptuous African woman in yellow, who buys three eggs and carries them on her head. She is herself and embodies her tradition consummately, exhibiting balance and physical grace that symbolize spiritual poise. Jadine feels diminished and threatened by the African woman, who spits at her. The scorn sends Jadine back to her family, Sydney and Ondine.

Jadine is similarly disturbed by her dream of the women with breasts, the mothers, who reproach her for not joining that chain of mothers and daughters who become mothers with daughters. Although Jadine herself is an orphan, reared by Ondine and Sydney and owing much to their care, she refuses to take the self-sacrificing role of the woman who cares for her family. Jadine wants money and the power it brings in the white world. After a little more modeling, she wants to run her own business, perhaps a boutique. Also, she may choose a white husband, like the man who bought her a seductive sealskin coat.

Jadine is the Tar Baby of the novel, and Son is Brer Rabbit from the Uncle Remus stories. As the Tar Baby, Jadine acts as a possible trap for Son set by his enemies, white society. Jadine, who has absorbed many white values, wants money and success. Son wants something purer, something associated with nature (he is associated with the sea and the beauty of the savannahs) and with family tradition. Nature, direct physical experience, and family traditions that are integral to personal identity are all important values in Son’s existence. Son has a home—the completely black town of Eloe—and there he abides by the ideas of respectability held by his father and his Aunt Rosa. (He asks Jadine to sleep at Aunt Rosa’s, apart from him, and he comes to her secretly only when she threatens to leave if he does not.) To amuse herself in the traditional town, in which she is uncomfortable, Jadine takes photographs of the people and steals their souls, stealing their individual beauty and grace. In the photographs, they seem graceless, poor, and stupid, even to Son, who usually sees them with loving eyes.

Individually, Son and Jadine love each other, but they seem unable to find a world in which they can both thrive. However, Son is an undaunted lover, unwilling to let Jadine go, even when she flees from him. Son tries to return to Isle de Chevaliers, Valerian’s island, to get news of Jadine, but the only way he can get there seems to be through the help of Thérèse, the half-blind, fifty-year-old black woman who says that her breasts still give milk. Thérèse takes him by boat to the island of the horsemen. Son has said that he cannot give up Jadine, but Thérèse tells him to join the fabled black horsemen who see with the mind. At the end of the novel, Son is running toward his destiny, whether that be Jadine and some way to make her part of his world or the black horsemen who ride free through the hills. Readers do not know what Son’s fate is to be; they only know that Son is running toward it, just as Brer Rabbit ran from his enemy Brer Fox and from the Tar Baby. Like Milkman Dead at the end of Song of Solomon , Son leaps into mythic possibility; like Brer Rabbit, Son, the black man, is a figure with the power to survive.

Beloved In editing The Black Book , a collection of African American historical memorabilia, Morrison discovered an article that would serve as the foundation of her fifth novel. Beloved is based on a true account of a runaway slave mother who, rather than allowing her children to be taken back into slavery, murders three of the four. As the novel begins, Sethe’s sons, Buglar and Howard, have already run away, while Denver, the youngest child, survived the murder attempt and still lives with her mother in a house beset by her murdered sister Beloved’s spirit. Morrison deliberately disorients the reader as she delves into the “interior life” of slavery, creating an experience similar to that of slavery, as the narrative breaks apart, shifts, and confounds. The author personifies 124 Bluestone Road as a tormented being when Beloved returns, emerging from a lake, fully clothed, the same age she would have been had she survived the infanticide. What the spirit wants initially is unclear. Morrison uses metaphorical imagery with tremendous skill, for example when describing Sethe’s back, a relief map of scars from savage beatings, as resembling the branches of a chokecherry tree. When Paul D, a former slave whom Sethe once knew, moves in, Beloved wreaks havoc. The spirit behaves like an enraged toddler, but the damage she does is that of a full-grown woman. As the ghost continues to threaten her mother and sister, the characters’ thoughts intertwine until one cannot be certain which character is which.

Jazz Morrison intended Jazz , another novel inspired by a news article, to follow Beloved as the second of a trilogy, although the narrative does not pick up where Beloved ends. Joe Trace, a married man and cosmetics salesman, shoots his teen lover, Dorcas, at a party. She dies refusing to reveal his name. At her funeral, Violet, Joe’s wife, a hairdresser, defaces the girl’s corpse. Set in 1926, Jazz begins after Violet has cut the dead girl’s face, twenty years after she and Joe arrived in Harlem from the South, where they scraped out a living as sharecroppers. After Dorcas’s funeral, Violet returns home and releases her caged parrot, the only creature in her life who says “I love you” anymore. The deep, unrealized passion for human contact in Beloved takes root in Jazz , but it too becomes messy, dangerous, and out of control. Violet’s mind unravels, and, strangely, she turns to Alice Manfred, Dorcas’s aunt, for comfort. Beloved ’s theme of mother loss, profound and frustrated, continues in Jazz : Dorcas’s mother burns to death in an intentionally set fire; Violet’s mother throws herself down a well from despair over not providing for her children. Years later, Violet longs so achingly for a child she considers stealing one. It is only at the end of Jazz , when Violet and Joe reconcile and Violet buys a sick parrot that she nurses back to health by playing jazz for it, that there is some hope of a lasting human connection.

Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Paradise Paradise , Morrison’s seventh novel, like her previous two, was inspired by a little-known event in African American history, this time the 1970’s westward migration of former slaves set on establishing their own all-black utopia, known in the book as Ruby. Shifting back and forth across a century of time, Paradise begins in 1976, when a group of the settlers’ male descendants attack a mansion-turned convent of women, convinced it is the women’s eschewing of male companionship and their questionable pasts that threaten the town’s survival. Ruby is founded as a response not only to white racism but also to other African Americans who turned away settlers for having skin that was “too black.” Twin brothers Deacon and Steward, the town’s elders, are deeply committed to keeping Ruby as pristine and trouble-free as possible. Together, they symbolize Ruby’s twin identity and conscience.

Initially, the town has no crime and therefore needs no police. There is no hunger; everyone assists those in need. However, such total isolation from the outside world proves to be the town’s undoing, as the rebellion of the 1960’s youth movement seeps into Ruby. A ragtag group of women, most escaping either abusive relationships or responsibilities of motherhood, settle outside Ruby. Among others, there is Consolata, the maternal leader; Seneca, abandoned as a child by her teen mother; and Pallas, a white woman fleeing from her wealthy but negligent parents. The violent confrontation between the men of Ruby and the self-exiled women is, in part, brought on by the black men’s anger at women who have willfully chosen a life without them. Paradise is a significant addition to Morrison’s body of work.

Major works L ong fiction • The Bluest Eye, 1970; Sula, 1973; Song of Solomon, 1977; Tar Baby, 1981; Beloved, 1987; Jazz, 1992; Paradise, 1998; Love, 2003.   A Mercy . 2008. Home . 2012.  God Help the Child . 2015. Play : Dreaming Emmett , pr. 1986. Nonfiction : Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination , 1992; Conversations with Toni Morrison , 1994 (Danille Taylor-Guthrie, editor); Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case , 1997; Remember: The Journey to School Integration , 2004. Children’s literature : The Big Box , 1999 (with Slade Morrison and Giselle Potter); The Book of Mean People , 2002 (with Slade Morrison); The Ant or the Grasshopper? , 2003 (with Slade Morrison); The Lion or the Mouse? , 2003 (with Slade Morrison). edited texts: To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton , 1972; The Black Book: Three Hundred Years of African American Life , 1974; Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality , 1992; Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations , 1996 (of Toni Cade Bambara).

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Tags: African Literature , American Literature , Analysis of Beloved , Analysis of Jazz , Analysis of Love , Analysis of Paradise , Analysis of Song of Solomon , Analysis of Sula , Analysis of Tar Baby , Analysis of The Bluest Eye , Analysis of Toni Morrison's Novels , Beloved , Black Feminism , Character study Bluest Eye , Chloe Ardelia Wofford , Cholly Breedlove , Claudia MacTeer , Essa Sula , Essay Beloved , Essay The Bluest Eye , Eva Peace , Feminism , Hannah Peace , Jadine , Jazz , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Macon Dead III , Paradise , Pecola Breedlove , Song of Solomon , Sula , Sula Peace , Sydney Childs , Symbolism in Beloved , Symbolism in Jazz , Symbolism in Song of Solomon , Symbolism in Sula , Symbolism in The Bluest Eye , Symbolism in Toni Morrison's Novels , Tar Baby , The Bluest Eye , Themes in , Themes in Beloved , Themes in Jazz , Themes in Song of Solomon , Themes in Sula , Themes in The Bluest Eye , Themes in Toni Morrison's Novels , Toni Morrison

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Discovering Toni Morrison

Toni morrison: sites of memory.

• Who Was Toni Morrison?
• They've Got Game: The Children's Books of Toni & Slade Morrison
• Morrison in the Press
• Exhibitions & Events at Princeton
• How to Visit
• Discovering and Accessing the Toni Morrison Papers

Firestone Library Milberg Gallery, February 22 - June 4, 2023

In 2016, Princeton University announced the opening of the Toni Morrison Papers. Comprised of manuscript drafts, editorial notes, correspondence, speeches, photographs, and research material, the collection registers the importance of the archive within Morrison’s decades-long career. In her writing practice, she gathered archival objects like popular photographs, advertisements, newspaper clippings, and historical documents as source material for her novels, essays, and speeches. These were the sites from which she began to “reconstruct the worlds” that her characters dwelled in, worlds that the dominant historical record had neglected or obscured. In this archive we can glimpse her own writing practice, professional interests, and changing creative investments. In its breadth, the collection invites us to consider how history, memory, and the literary imagination relate to one another anew.

Taking inspiration from her 1986 essay “the site of memory,” this exhibition brings together select objects from the toni morrison papers — from early outlines of her first published novel the bluest eye (1970) to the only extant drafts of song of solomon (1977) to hand-drawn maps of ruby, the fictional center of paradise (1998). the exhibition’s materials illuminate how her creative process was a deeply archival one, and spotlights this archive as a site that records unknown aspects of her writing life and practice. rather than offering a career retrospective, the exhibition’s organization challenges notions of chronology and plays with time in much the same way that morrison’s own writing does. the objects are arranged according to six interrelated “sites” that, together, elaborate the crucial place of the archive within morrison’s own dynamic career, and also in black life itself., learn about visiting the exhibition in person on the how to visit page., learn more about the digital restrictions of this collection.

Unless otherwise noted, all items on exhibit are from The Toni Morrison Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library and are the original work of Toni Morrison.

Wealth of Geeks

A Beginners Guide to Toni Morrison

Posted: March 21, 2024 | Last updated: March 21, 2024

One of the world’s most famous and influential authors, Toni Morrison’s canon spans decades and topics. Morrison’s work dedicates itself to examining the Black American experience, from short stories to essays and speeches to her beloved novels. The author mines the systems of racism and how they can be fixed and explores the depths of complex human emotions like grief, trauma, love, and joy.

Morrison is the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first Black woman to serve as senior fiction editor for Random House, and an incredible force known as the “ Conscience of America. ” 

1. The Bluest Eye (1970)

Morrison’s debut novel,  The Bluest Eye , occasionally appears on the banned books list because of the controversial topics it explores, such as incest, racism, and child molestation. Set in Lorain, Ohio, the novel follows the life of Pecola, a young Black girl growing up in the United States after the Great Depression.

Unafraid of difficult conversations, Morrison doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable subjects and allows those uncomfortable subjects to guide her into an important conversation about perception beyond beauty and how perception can negatively impact us all. Pecola, the main character, desires nothing more than blue eyes, but the blue eyes she wants represent her desire to see the world differently just as much as she would like to be seen differently.

2. Sula (1973)

Sula tackles the ideas of gender, race, community, and that strange place between “good” and “evil” as Morrison tells the story of Nel and Sula in the small Black community of Bottom, Ohio. 

Using Nel and Sula as opposing characters, Morrison makes room for a conversation about “good” and “right” versus “evil” and “bad.” She sets up a dynamic that specifically allows readers into the moment that divides the two women, which will provide the framework for the judgment of their adulthood to allow readers room to formulate their thoughts on Nel and Sula outside of the community’s judgments.

While Morrison still examines race in  Sula , the deeper purpose of the novel rests in exploring one’s self, the enduring love of friendship, and how our histories affect us all.

3. Song of Solomon (1977)

Song of Solomon follows the life of Macon “Milkman” Dead III, a Black man living in Michigan who seeks to understand his ancestry. At its core,  Song of Solomon , the title pulled from a book of the Bible, confronts racism and the intergenerational scars it leaves. 

While Morrison’s work mostly consists of female protagonists,  Song of Solomon tells the story from Milkman’s perspective. In Conversations with Toni Morrison , she wrote, “I chose the man… because I thought he had more to learn than a woman would have. I started with a man and was amazed at how little men taught one another in the book… So that the presence of Pilate, and the impact that all the other women had on Milkman’s life, came as a bit of a surprise to me.” Though it might not be told through a woman’s perspective, Song of Solomon is a powerful story to explain the oft-overlooked significance of Black women in the Black man’s experience.

4. Tar Baby (1981)

In her fourth novel, Morrison explores the intersections of race and privilege, wealth and class, and love and reality. 

In  Tar Baby , Morrison puts Black and White relationships front and center and, in doing so, allows room to play with and peel back the layers of the Black female experience in a racialized world. Tar Baby is a more metaphorical examination of the racism of gender and race, with the more literal examination focused on identity.

To read  Tar Baby is to understand Morrison’s transition from the literal and bold statements she made in her first three novels. 

5. Recitatif (1983)

“Recitatif” focuses on Twyla and Roberta, two girls who meet in a children’s shelter. One girl is Black, and the other is white, though Morrison intentionally forgoes explaining which is which. Twyla and Roberta stay friends throughout their time at the shelter but eventually go their separate ways.

They reunite multiple times in their lives, many times at high tension points in racial relations in the United States, and they continue to explore their relationship with one another because of and despite their race and the climate of the country. 

6. Beloved (1987)

One of Morrison’s most famous novels,  Beloved, tells the story of Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman living in a haunted Cincinnati home. The novel grapples with the trauma of slavery and what that does to individuals and families.

The non-linear narrative follows Sethe and her daughter, Denver. Eight years before the start of the book, Sethe and Denver lost Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother, and Howard and Buglar, Sethe’s sons, ran off. At the start of the book, Paul D., a formerly enslaved man who was enslaved on the same plantation as Sethe, arrives. He quickly moves in with Denver and Sethe, and a few days later, a strange woman named Beloved arrives. Paul D. and Beloved butt heads throughout the novel, and as tensions rise in the house, the entire household risks falling apart at the seams.

Beyond the fact that  Beloved stands as Morrison’s most famous work, it earns a spot on any Morrison beginner’s reading list because of the challenge reading it offers.  Beloved is not easy. It defies the “warm and fuzzy” feelings fiction so often provides. In  Beloved , Morrison leans into the teaching and less into the gratification, hoping that readers understand humans as flawed, complex, and not always “good.”

7 . Jazz (1992)

Jazz plays out against the backdrop of the Harlem Jazz Age of the 1920s. Morrison explores another non-linear narrative as she tells the story of a love triangle between Violet, Joe, and Dorcas.

As the second in Morrison’s  Beloved trilogy,  Jazz continues the theme of violence as romance and the challenging ways that love works in life. Critics have called Jazz one of Morrison’s most challenging works as it seeks to cover a lot in a short period. Still, Morrison also said it was her favorite novel to write, earning it an essential spot on any Morrison lover’s reading list.

8. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

Morrison’s first work of nonfiction, Playing in the Dark, explores “the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries .” She writes about the place of Black Americans in the overall American literary landscape, exploring the way white authors represent them and the way Black people represent themselves.

As a Black woman author writing in a post-Civil Rights Movement era, Morrison’s perspective on whiteness and the literary imagination couldn’t be more important. In addition to her experience as a writer, Morrison served as the senior fiction editor for Random House and deeply understood how whiteness affected literature, making her particularly well-poised to dive deep into the conversation.

9. The Nobel Lecture in Literature (1993)

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Upon accepting her award, Morrison gave an incredible speech to the gathered audience in Stockholm, Sweden. The speech she gives tells a folk story that serves as a representation of the work Morrison sought to accomplish with her writing.

While her Nobel Prize speech might not feel as grand as some of her other writings, it still deserves a read by anyone seeking to get to know Morrison’s writing and her canon overall. Even in her death, her incredible, history-making success as a writer deserves to be celebrated at every opportunity.

10. Arguing Immigration: The Debate Over the Changing Face of America (1994)

This essay collection spans political parties and covers a host of issues. While Morrison didn’t write all of  Arguing Immigration , she contributed an essay titled “On the Backs of Blacks,” which confronted the United States’ systemic historical racism.

Morrison’s essay alone puts  Arguing Immigration squarely into the “must-read” category for Morrison’s canon, but what makes it stand out especially is how the book serves as a representation of how Morrison continued to work in conversation with the world around her even as she moved back in time to plumb the depths of history for understanding.

11. The Dancing Mind (1996)

In 1996, Morrison accepted The National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.  The Dancing Mind collects Morrison’s speech on the importance of writing, the challenges, and the beauty of writing.

Reading  The Dancing Mind allows audiences to understand Morrison’s perspective on the art of writing. Reading this book allows for a look behind the curtain of her craft and stands out as especially essential for her fans, who are also aspiring authors.

12. Paradise (1997)

Morrison’s first novel, after winning the Nobel Prize, centers on the town of Ruby, Oklahoma , an all-Black town founded by the descendants of formerly enslaved individuals.  Paradise completes Morrison’s  Beloved trilogy and, like the two other titles in the series, examines the idea of violence as love. 

In this final installation, Morrison explores religion and holiness in a way none of her other novels quite manage. Paradise centers on a building that historically served as a Native American boarding school. These institutions were notorious for the trauma they inflicted, and then they became a haven for women on the fringes of society. 

13. The Big Box (1999)

Morrison’s first illustrated children’s book tells the tale of three children confined to a cardboard box by adults. The children want freedom and to express themselves, but they have to figure out how to do so within the confines of the cardboard box.

Not all titles by famous authors have to be serious, and while  The Big Box certainly possesses underlying adult themes, overall, it feels fun and lighthearted. When diving into an author’s canon, reading their off-the-wall, out-of-the-norm titles serves just as important of a purpose as reading their prize winners.

14. Love (2002)

Set in a small town in Ohio,  Love tells the story of Christine and Heed, two women brought together by their love for the same man, Bill Cosey. Christine, Cosey’s granddaughter, and Heed, his widow, once loved one another, but after a fight divides them, they have to learn how to live with each other in Cosey’s mansion after his death. Confronted with the pressures of society as well as the other women of Cosey’s life, the two women face their demons and struggles.

Love presents exactly what the title would suggest – many forms of love. Throughout the novel, the emphasis on platonic and self-love takes center stage. While this novel didn’t receive the critical acclaim others did, it still can’t be missed in a quality read of Morrison’s work.

15. Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004)

Over decades, Morrison collected countless archival photos that depicted major historical moments in the work to desegregate school systems. Remember tells the fictional story of the children who experienced schooling in the era of “separate but equal.” The fictional representation of the children allows audiences to enter an otherwise underexplored perspective.

Reading Morrison’s take on a child’s perspective during an incredibly traumatic time in American history allows audiences to understand both the time and Morrison’s feelings on desegregation. 

16. What Moves at the Margin (2008)

This collection of Morrison’s non-fiction writing gathers her essays, reviews, and speeches from 1971 to 2002. The first section, “Family and History,” includes writings about Black women, Black history, and her own family. The second section, “Writers and Writing,” explores writers she admired and books she reviewed or edited at Random House. Finally, “Politics and Society” allows Morrison to share her feelings on the role of literature in the greater American society. 

Getting the best understanding of a writer and their ability requires reading all of their work, even their speeches or the reviews they wrote for other authors. Truly knowing them as a writer and author begins with digging into the work that doesn’t get as much exposure as their popular works. Morrison’s  What Moves at the Margin allows readers to see into her mind more and her character’s less. 

17. A Mercy (2008)

In  A Mercy , Morrison traces the evils of slavery back to the budding nation’s earliest days, furthering the work she did in  Beloved by examining a fraught mother-daughter relationship and the effects of trauma through generations. Set in a small town in Oklahoma,  A Mercy follows the story of Florens, a young enslaved woman sold to Jacob Vaark, an enslaver who seems to collect women, including his wife, whom he purchased. 

A Mercy reaches further in history than any of Morrison’s other novels and feels almost like a tie that brings together all of her other novels. 

18. Burn This Book: Notes on Literature (2009)

Edited and contributed to by Toni Morrison,  Burn This Book: Notes on Literature explores censorship and the value of the American right to free speech. The essays cover a range of topics, all relating to literature and how authors exercise their right to free speech, even as they challenge censorship and how their speech is hindered.

Sure, Morrison’s essay contribution to  Burn This Book can’t be missed, but the most important reason to read it lies in the fact that she edited the collection. She selected all the essays, choosing exactly what she knew would connect everything and tell the story of literature that she sought to express.

19. Home (2012)

Morrison tackles the United States’ treatment of Black veterans in  Home , a novel centered on Frank Money and his relationship with his family. Frank comes home from the Korean War only to realize that nothing about the status of Black men in the United States changes, even as veterans. Returning to his small hometown in Georgia to rescue his sister, Cee, from an abusive situation, Frank must confront the physical and mental scars of his time at war and his subsequent return home. 

Home addresses PTSD in Black soldiers in a way so few novels do. Morrison beautifully weaves together the systemic oppression and racism Black people endured in the South with the painful and challenging situation that Black veterans endured when they returned from the war.

20. God Help the Child (2015)

The last novel Morrison wrote, God Help the Child, explores childhood trauma and the way it shapes lives. The story focuses on Bride, a woman with skin so dark it almost appears blue. A successful, bold, and beautiful woman, Bride struggles internally with the effects of her mother’s abuse. Light-skinned and angry at her child, Bride’s mother failed to offer her the sort of love and kindness she needed until Bride told a lie that changed the life of a woman and forever affected her own.

At the core of God Help the Child rests an understanding of colorism that Morrison navigates incredibly. She examines the way colorism exists as systemic in the wider community of the United States while also examining how it impacts Black people within Black communities specifically.

21. The Origin of Others (2017)

In this non-fiction work, Morrison tackles the idea of the “Other,” exploring how and why Othering occurs and addressing why it plays such a big role in her writing. She digs into the subjects and situations that impact her work, including race, fear, love, borders, and the human condition.

In any upper-level English course, the word “Other” (capital “O”) often gets bandied about. That “Other” comes under incredible scrutiny in  The Origin of Others . Morrison does some of her finest academic, exploratory work in this book. She leaves nothing on the table, digging into every situation and setting to get to the heart of “Other.” 

22. Mouth Full of Blood (2019)

Mouth Full of Blood collects four decades’ worth of Morrison’s non-fiction work into one edition. The book covers everything from her speech to graduates and visitors at America’s Black Holocaust Museum, a prayer for those lost in 9/11, her Nobel lecture, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and so much more.

Released the same year Morrison died,  Mouth Full of Blood is a crucial read for many reasons, but most importantly because it collects never-before-published non-fiction that reflects huge moments in literary history, world history, and Morrison’s personal life. To read Mouth Full of Blood is to understand Morrison.

23. Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019)

In a deep and powerful exploration, Morrison digs into what goodness is, where it comes from, and how it exists in literature and the literary imagination. Morrison mines handfuls of texts for the essence of and creation of literary goodness, seeking it in texts from across time.

So many of Morrison’s novels confront the idea of “goodness,” and so it feels like a natural next step that she would explore “goodness” in a non-fiction setting.  Goodness and the Literary Imagination focuses all of Morrison’s fiction work into a beautifully crafted, academic exploration that continues and completes the hard work her fiction began.

24. The Source of Self-Regard (2019)

The Source of Self-Regard pulls a smaller and more concise selection of Morrison’s best non-fiction works, hitting the highlights and collecting them all in a slim, accessible edition. The curated selection brings together what many consider the essential Morrison works.

While nothing new comes from  The Source of Self-Regard , the book’s power lies in the precise selections to create the title. Published in the year of Morrison’s death, the book is a tribute to the incredible work completed throughout her career .

25. Morrison’s Eternal Influence

Taught in classrooms worldwide, Toni Morrison’s titles bring together her singular experience as a Black woman and a literary giant and the Black experience throughout the United States. Morrison’s steadfast, unwavering desire to truly understand and examine the Black experience will keep her forever as a pillar of American literary influence and one of the world’s most incredible women.

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Replacement Chapter for Collection in contract: Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Repair

Colleagues: My forthcoming collection,  Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Repair , is in contract and due out late 2024 / early 2025. 

Please review the original CFP for the book, copied below, and let me know if you have work that would be appropriate for it. Please, proposals only for work that fits clearly within the rubric of the book.

Proposals due by end of April , or sooner, and full chapters by  end of May, early June 2024 . I will respond right away to any and all proposals. 

Thanks a million for considering this important project--

~Maureen Ellen Ruprecht, CUNY

This Call for Papers  is for a new collection that is in contract:  Imperial Debt: Colonial Theft, Postcolonial Repair.  This would be the first collection of its kind, forwarding a case for reparations—restorative, reparative justice—for modern era imperialism. This is my second book on reparations, the first a  monograph  on Morrison’s  Beloved . The question now, for this collection, is how develop such plans in the context of imperialist histories across modernity? This book will offer chapters that consider that matter from various disciplinary, national, theoretical, historical, or material points of view, some comparative, all likely interdisciplinary. That is, it will take up the matter of restorative justice “after empire” in consideration of the  longue durée   and in both national and international contexts.   What economic equilibrations should be being called for today? How do we consider, assess, and theorize modern imperialism, including settler and administrative forms and including slavery—a structure of and in empire—through the triptych of  theft, debt,  and  repair?  

Work collected here asks criticall questions that have for too long been obfuscated in the study of empire: that is, “what is owed and to whom?,” as Declan Kiberd writes in  After Ireland [i] , or, as the editors of  The Debt Age  ask, whose debt is acknowledged and whose is ignored? [ii]  These enquiries regard both sides of the wealth coin: what was profited and how did it profit, and, what was taken and what did that takenness/tookenness do or wring or bring about? “Who gets and who don’t get… you know it’s all divided up… Between the takers and the ‘tooken.’ …Some of us always getting ‘tooken.’” [iii]  The critical other side of racism is white privilege; the critical other sides of empire call for similar scrutiny, not only of the damages inflicted on colonized peoples and places but the capitalist appropriation (of resources, trade, under- or uncompensated labor). Empire produced massive security in the form of wealth legacies and massive precarity and poverty, disenfranchisements perhaps best evidenced by today’s wildly unequal national and global distributions of wealth.

So, we think of materialist readings of imperialist chattel enslavement that develop a clear, convincing case for restorative justice, unpacking the institution as not merely a humanitarian emergency but as an economic one—massive labor theft, massive injuriousness of every other kind in connection with processes of remuneration, restitution, and repair remain outstanding, are owed as debts are owed. A like analysis is needed regarding colonizations of First Peoples. We think too of some of less researched colonial histories—Armenia, Palestine and Israel, or the former Soviet bloc, places like Cyprus, Scotland and Ireland, or Hong Kong, as well as under-researched African nations perhaps including Tunisia, Sudan, Angola, or Liberia. However, given that such readings are generally unfamiliar to the scholarship, all locations are under consideration.

For example, what does Britain owe South Asia in the light of just the one incident in which they loaded up the entire treasury of the state of Bengal on ships and absconded with it? That treasury was never brought back or paid back. Nor were the piles of gemstones mined and appropriated by Elihu Yale, who served as magistrate in Madras, India for a number of years and also bankrolled the founding of Yale University. Far beyond their erroneously charging Haiti “reverse-reparations”  for  decolonization, what else does France owe Haiti, for the colonial plunder itself? What is owed numerous African nations for the “scramble” sanctioned at the Berlin conference and carried out in the decades following that barbarous meeting? How begin to taxonomize “land reform” or restoration in the context of Native North America? What does the U.S. owe mass incarcerated America, endemically police-brutalized America? Quite apart from civil suits, what is owed Kalief Browder’s family, Eric Garner’s family, in the name of the nation-state? Beyond the U.S. and what  we  owe the descendants of slaves, what does Britain owe those same American descendants? For it was under the British empire—with its  laissez faire  posture regarding  how  the colonizers built the colonies—that chattel slavery became an unbridled, terrifically brutal force in the North American colonies, later the new republic. 

Residues of this past “[bind] present injustice to unaddressed wrongs,” as Katherine Franke notes, [iv]  thus we remember too that one reason for the passing of the fugitive slave laws was “economic” in a way beyond the economics of the institution itself: that is, that slave owners, much like today’s prison industrialists, had  mortgaged  their slaves, and investors had invested in these “slave-backed securities,” much like today's mortgage-backed securities. And this changed literally everything about the history of slavery, making it far more horrible for enslaved persons and far more profitable for Americans owning and abusing slaves or for those with money to invest and who were willing to invest it in enslavement. 

All that said, what other forms of injury, other damages occurred under imperialist sway? There are the obvious (but understudied) thefts of goods and trade. But additional thievings or attenuations, what have also been called "extractivisms," took place to which matters of debt and repair also attach: history and memory; language; education; epistemology, human life, full stop, many colonized individuals having died in the throes of subjugation. How were entire local eco-systems or sustainabilities damaged, and how does that coil and wend across time? How reckon with the systemic failure to keep historical records—of names, faces, places of origin or residence—reckon with the denials of education, local knowledges and knowledge systems, the erasures of language, purloined possibility and opportunity, or even simply pleasure, reverie, and love?: “[Paul D] knew exactly what she meant: to get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now,  that  was freedom.” [v]  Of course the development of capital was achieved using land, roads, bridges that did not belong to colonizers, even if built by them, and through the uncompensated, enforced labor of the colonized. But empire involved the pilfering not just the wealth of nations but also of privately owned land, assets, and even industry through plantation and other schemes. What is the ‘work’ of such repair, how is it constituted, especially now facing the global climate crisis?

These are the questions we need to be asking and finding (scholarly) ways to answer. Still, few are taking on the matter of reckoning for empire; there is some research in Economics, surprisingly little in Postcolonial studies where one assumes they’d find more work taking the question of imperial reparations seriously. Work appropriate to this volume would likely fall within the rubrics of Postcolonial, North-South, Atlantic, Decolonial, and Black or First Peoples studies approaches. However any discipline or framework could work—historical, literary studies, political science, economics, feminist theory, social scientific approaches, public or urban policy or peace and conflict studies approaches, memory or trauma studies as it relates to theft, debt and repair—as Atwood wrote: “Without memory, there is no debt” [vi] —as well as the new histories of capital and the new materialism, or posthumanist / nonhumanist readings, etc.—and any geographic or national history, any methodology, data or material, as long as it is probing and theorizing the questions outlined.

To whatever extent such assertions of a necessary repairing are heeded or might succeed; whether the equilibrations occur, the return of goods, whether the trade routes and betrayed treaties are remunerated, the uncompensated labor compensated; still, documenting the debt and the non-started or unfinished processes of reparative justice, taking account of imperial injuriousness—to colonized people  and  their communities  and  their property  and  their quality of life, their economies and their economic sustainability, the ability to bounce back as Ireland’s Celtic Tiger proved ultimately unable to do—these must all be represented, must enter the historical record, the archive, the public policy work, and indeed the conversation quite broadly. As argued in my 2021 collection, edited with Dr. Michael O'Sullivan,  The Economics of Empire , such forms of materialist analysis are vital and we hope defining for the future of postcolonial studies, empire studies, policy studies, legal studies, economic studies, and the many other research areas touching empire and the racial capital developed with it.

I’d like to have any new proposals by 4/30/24.   Full chapters are due during end of May, early June, and should range between 6 - 8,000 words. Please respond with a one or two page abstract and your Bio to: [email protected]  as soon as possible.

With my thanks—

~Maureen Ellen Ruprecht, The City University of New York

[i]  Declan Kiberd,  After Ireland:   Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present  ( Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2018).

[ii]  Jeffrey Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock, and Sophia McClennen,  The Debt Age  (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).

[iii]  Lorraine Hansberry,  A Raisin in the Sun  (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

[iv]  Katherine Franke,  Repair: Redeeming the Promise of Abolition  (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).

[v]  Toni Morrison,  Beloved: A Novel  (New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

[vi]  Margaret Atwood,  Payback : Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth  (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, Inc., 2008).

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Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools

More books were removed during the first half of this academic year than in the entire previous one.

By Alexandra Alter

Book bans in public schools continued to surge in the first half of this school year, according to a report released on Tuesday by PEN America, a free speech organization.

From July to December 2023, PEN found that more than 4,300 books were removed from schools across 23 states — a figure that surpassed the number of bans from the entire previous academic year.

The rise in book bans has accelerated in recent years, driven by conservative groups and by new laws and regulations that limit what kinds of books children can access. Since the summer of 2021, PEN has tracked book removals in 42 states and found instances in both Republican- and Democratic-controlled districts.

The numbers likely fail to capture the full scale of book removals. PEN compiles its figures based on news reports, public records requests and publicly available data, but many removals go unreported.

Here are some of the report’s key findings.

Book removals are continuing to accelerate

Book bans are not new in the United States. School and public libraries have long had procedures for addressing complaints, which were often brought by parents concerned about their children’s reading material.

But the current wave stands out in its scope. Censorship efforts have become increasingly organized and politicized, supercharged by conservative groups like Moms for Liberty and Utah Parents United, which have pushed for legislation that regulates the content of library collections. Since PEN began tracking book bans, it has counted more than 10,000 instances of books being removed from schools. Many of the targeted titles feature L.G.B.T.Q. characters, or deal with race and racism, PEN found.

Florida had the highest number of removals

Florida’s schools had the highest number of book bans last semester, with 3,135 books removed across 11 school districts. Within Florida, the bulk of bans took place in Escambia County public schools , where more than 1,600 books were removed to ensure that they didn’t violate a statewide education law prohibiting books that depict or refer to sexual conduct. (In the sweep, some schools removed dictionaries and encyclopedias.)

Book removals have spiked in Florida because of several state laws, passed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and a Republican-controlled legislature, that aim in part to regulate reading and educational materials.

Florida has also become a testing ground for book banning tactics around the country, said Kasey Meehan, the program director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read Program.

“In some ways, what’s happening in Florida is incubated and then spread nationwide," she said. “We see the way in which very harmful pieces of legislation that have led to so much of the book banning crisis in Florida have been replicated, or provisions of those laws have been proposed or enacted in states like South Carolina and Iowa and Idaho.”

Books depicting sexual assault are increasingly being targeted

With the rise of legislation and policies that aim to prohibit books with sexual content from school libraries, books that depict sexual assault have been challenged with growing frequency. PEN found that nearly 20 percent of books that were banned during the 2021-2023 school years were works that address rape and sexual assault.

Last year, several books that deal with sexual violence were removed from West Ada School District in Idaho, among them a graphic novel edition of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the poetry collection “Milk and Honey” by Rupi Kaur, Jaycee Dugard’s memoir, “A Stolen Life” and Amy Reed’s young adult novel, “The Nowhere Girls.”

In Collier County, Fla., public school officials — aiming to comply with a new law that restricts access to books that depict “sexual conduct” — removed hundreds of books from the shelves last year, including “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” by Zora Neale Hurston; “A Time To Kill,” by John Grisham; and “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.

A movement to counter book bans is growing

Opponents of book bans — including parents, students, free speech and library organizations, booksellers and authors — are leading an organized effort to stop book removals, often with the argument that book bans violate the First Amendment, which protects the right to access information.

Last fall, hundreds of students in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District staged a walkout to protest challenges to more than 50 books. At a school board meeting last October in Laramie County, Wyo., students held a “read-in” to silently protest book bans. Elsewhere, students have formed banned books clubs, held marches and created free community bookshelves in their towns to make titles more accessible.

Legislatures in California and Illinois have passed “anti-book ban” laws. In several states, including Texas and Florida , lawsuits have been filed in an effort to overturn legislation that has made it easier to ban books.

“In nearly every case that’s come forward, judges have been finding that these laws are unconstitutional,” said Jonathan Friedman, who oversees PEN America’s U.S. Free Expression programs. Still, Friedman said it could take years for the laws to be challenged and possibly overturned, and noted that new legislation keeps proliferating.

“I don’t have the sense that this issue is about to go away,” he said.

Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times. More about Alexandra Alter