I have only read two Toni Morrison novels from cover to cover: The Bluest Eye and Beloved. I cannot give the beat-by-beat plot points of either work because I read them so long ago. At least, that’s the articulable answer. The inarticulable answer is I don’t believe I absorbed those novels with my eyes and brain at all; rather, my spirit and emotions took ownership of the experience. Nevertheless, I remember both novels being a struggle to read, particularly Beloved. I remember feeling profound frustration, grief, and even despair as I read, and after I finished reading both couldn’t hurry enough to escape that pall that had come over me during the reading experience. In fact, I’ve tried hard not to revisit that place those novels took me to as a young woman in my late teens and early twenties. Even now deep into my thirties, I’ve yet to return and investigate either book.
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Cover of THE BLUEST EYE
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Cover of BELOVED
Yet they remain with me, present at nearly every fork of my journey into my full self: the story of a girl who could never be beautiful because the world required her to be the receptacle of its ugliness. The story of a woman who murdered her child because the freedom of that death was the more humane and loving choice, in her eyes, than the literal chains of life. This girl and woman carry traumas, endure them, and choose forks on their journeys from a mindset of surviving instead of thriving, searching and scratching and clawing to move from one end of that spectrum to the other. Often alone. Often in spite of. Often with no end.
Toni Morrison’s constant excavation of Black trauma and resilience, wielding words as her tools of choice with deftness and elegance, and choosing Black women as the primary site of this excavation remains radical even to this day. In the wake of The Bondswoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts (Bonds) and Our Nig by Harriet Wilson, as well as Nella Larsen’s Passing and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Morrison and her contemporaries (such as Alice Walker, Octavia E. Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, Ntozake Shange, and Gayl Jones) put into practice the adage: ”the personal is universal” via Black womanhood. They were among a cohort of emerging voices that made an entire nation pay attention to the experiences of Black women in and of themselves. In return, the nation questioned why this site of exploration to the exclusion of others—particularly white men. Yet few rarely commented on the absence of Black women (or other women of color) from other “great literary explorations” on the condition of humanity.
Still.
And Toni Morrison was not only peak Unbothered™, she volleyed those questions back: Why not Black women? Why must white men be humanity’s envoy? Or, to quote Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Angelica Schuyler, “I’m not here for you.”
Toni Morrison wrote about Black people for Black people, an advocate of “For Us, By Us” before Daymond John, J. Alexander Martin, Keith Perrin, and Carlton Brown turned the term into an acronym, fashion empire, and a cultural touchstone in the 1990s. Morrison gives Black women active participation in their own stories instead of being little more than prop and fodder in someone else’s.[1] Black women are able to see themselves as multidimensional people instead of the three main stereotypes society has shoved them into for its convenience (at most) or apathy (at least). And as I sit here now, a Black woman who is decade-plus into my career as a romance and mainstream fiction author, I am grateful for Morrison, her contemporaries, and her pioneers for providing the example that Black women are not—and should not—be invisible. We deserve to take up space in our own lives, to be the center of it, to be the sun instead of the perpetual moon (or, really, the space debris). We don’t need to “get off the sidewalk” for others. We don’t have to put ourselves last or down. We can do more than simply survive. We have the right to thrive. Especially for ourselves.
This quote drifts through my mind every time I start writing a new story. I want to read about Black women loving and being loved, thriving, and doing so on their own terms. And I want to read about Black women doing this while confronting the traumas and lies they’ve been carrying and telling themselves that have kept them from the love they desire and deserve. I want my characters’ inner Pecolas to see they’re beautiful and lovable without needing to have light skin or blue eyes. I want my characters’ Sethes to realize while past choices cannot be undone, it’s the future ones that truly determine where they can go and who they can be, and that choice must always be themselves and rooted in love.
Toni Morrison crafted her work with precision. Every word was the right word and carefully constructed into sentences that said exactly what she wanted. She wrote the books she wanted to read and invited us—particularly Black audiences, and I would say especially Black American women audiences—to read along with her. But she was going to make us savor it, sink into it, experience it. It took me three attempts before I could finally start Beloved to finish it, and it wasn’t until I got a third into the book that I finally figured out how to read it. That was an effort that left me exhausted and hollowed out at the end because by then I was there with Sethe, grappling through the trauma of the past toward a hopeful future. I think I sat there stunned, not knowing what to do with myself for a long minute or two, before sprinting to what was no doubt Harry Potter fan fiction. Although I haven’t revisited Beloved again as I have with other favorite works, Beloved is still a favorite nonetheless. Actually, as I’m at yet another fork in my journey and Beloved has appeared once again, I will turn toward it this time. As I rediscover the plot, I now realize it was truly a love story all along.
Here’s to a beautiful rest, Ms. Morrison. Thank you for your voice. Thank you for helping me find mine.
[1] See pages 31–32 in particular in the linked pdf.
