She won’t let go until I do. Like jazz.
Reaffirming that I am beloved,
she sits me in her lap, adopts Maw-maw’s eye,
to loose that circle of iron.
Then she leads me to the clearing as I cry.
Cry to the sound of her calling
“What did Toni Morrison teach you?” I was asked this by a professor after a semester of studying Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and Playing in the Dark. How can I begin to answer such a question? I don’t think I can. And it’s not because I didn’t learn anything, but because what I learned isn’t tangible or enumerable. I feel different, and Toni Morrison has attached herself to some deep part of me, but I struggle to pinpoint exactly what I learned. Beyond the philosophical and emotional, I didn’t “learn” much because a lot of what Morrison showed me was what I already knew but didn’t have language for. I knew about those multifaceted family dynamics, self-segregation disguised as self-preservation, the all-consuming, deep, dark love, and Morrison put it on the page for me to see their structure for the first time. She gave me something to whisper about with a friend and say, “That’s just us.”
And that’s why I read Morrison. Not to learn, but to experience. Maybe I’m splitting hairs since the two go hand in hand, but as I experienced Toni Morrison’s worlds and words, she revealed to me a place for myself that I didn’t have to make. It was reserved for me. My name—my life—is spelled out in the spaces of her language. After every comma, beside every “I.”
Literature was always something I couldn’t get enough of and something I weaved into my life from a young age. It started as an escape, a mode of lucid dreaming. Then I got to high school, and literature started to profoundly affect and shape me. I read Their Eyes Were Watching God when I was sixteen and was immediately intrigued. Zora Neale Hurston’s prose embraced Blackness unlike anything I’d read before; her commitment to writing in dialects and the stories she dedicated her life to made me realize Black narratives weren’t monolithic within the literary canon. Before her, I’d never considered Black folktale as a genre or read Black voices written from an earnest place of complete immersion and not mere observation or mockery. That’s when I started experimenting with voice, including my own. But then the class moved on to Romeo and Juliet, and I didn’t really think about the novel again.
Similarly, I read A Raisin in the Sun and fell in love with the reality of Lorraine Hansberry’s story. The vulnerability and the truth resonated with me like a tuning fork, then and now. Because of her, I started thinking about becoming a writer. But, like with Hurston, we moved on, and I didn’t have time to sit with the play’s impact on me. I now know that these writers inspire and inform a great deal of my work today, but it still felt like I was reaching out for something—someone.
Then Toni Morrison grabbed my hand.
I read her for the first time in college about two years after her death. Recitatif. It was different from what I’d read before. Studying, analyzing, and discussing the short story was the first time I felt comfortable in my decision to pursue an English degree. Even though that was my first time reading her, I was familiar with her name as it appeared on banned books lists and in conversations about the greatest writers of our time. There was a reason her name held so much weight that I was about to discover. I came to know Morrison’s work after her death, as I did with Hurston’s and Hansberry’s, but found she got her flowers while she could smell and water them. I joined the procession of Morrison admirers with a single sunflower—to supplement the fact that I couldn’t blow out the sun for her—and was overjoyed to find she had a garden that was still being tended.
And maybe it wasn’t different, Recitatif, but it rearranged me. It rearranged my idea of literature, writers, The Process, and my self-perception. She was answering a question she asked herself and, in doing so, she was talking to me, writing for me, and allowing me to be my own audience, not just a critic. I’d always been drawn to writing but felt too small and unimportant to write anything substantial. Recitatif emboldened me to take up space—whether in 3 pages or 300—and because I cared enough to write it, my story was valuable. At a time when I’d been deep in an existential nihilistic mood (a high school teacher once described me as an “Eeyore”), Recitatif held a magnifying glass to every pleasure and discomfort that filled my small world and pulled me out of that mood. I’ve never been left at an orphanage, and my mother doesn’t dance all night, but Morrison was writing about little girls, and I’d been one for most of my life.
A lot of her writing is about little girls. She said in the 2015 documentary The Life of Toni Morrison, “Every Black child in literature or in theater was a joke or a pet. A Topsy, like in Uncle Tom’s Cabin… It took five years to write that really small book [The Bluest Eye] to pay attention. Pay attention to this child… take her seriously. Please.” So, she wrote for little Black girls, including herself.
to the children. To the women. To the men. Calling
on God’s word and delivering Sth. I know that woman. Jazz
plays—His arrangement or hers? Cries
fall on bloodied land and beloved
ears from those who broke ground in iron
chains for the children who share their eyes.
And though it’s true that Morrison primarily wrote Black narratives (something she was shamefully criticized for), Blackness isn’t explained and sometimes isn’t even pointed out. It just is. Pointing out Blackness is something done for the white gaze, according to her, and that gaze is expelled from her books. In multiple documentaries and interviews, she has said that she wrote these stories because she wanted to read them and couldn’t find them out in the world. It’s a sort of “I have to know so that we both know” mentality. She wrote to/for herself, so she’s writing to/for Black people. And it’s not in response to white voyeurism that tends to treat Blackness as exotic or subhuman. Her stories are Black even when she’s intentionally vague about her characters’ races, like in Recitatif or Paradise. And it’s like an inside joke or mutual understanding among friends when you notice the subtler elements.
A year ago, a very dear professor asked what classes we’d like to see taught, and my hand shot up. My whispering friend, Camille, was sitting in front of me and said, “She put her hand up so fast, I could hear it.” And it was true; I don’t think the professor finished asking before I raised my hand. I answered, “Baldwin and Morrison.” Two days later, she told me it would happen before I graduated.
That’s one lesson I’ve learned through Toni Morrison: I can make my education work for me. Fully acknowledging that I chose to go to a PWI, my college education has been aggressively white. Later efforts to diversify syllabi had been made by some of my professors, but I wasn’t satisfied. So, I always took it upon myself to look for the Africanist presence in the literature they chose, something I didn’t know I was doing until I read Playing in the Dark. A “face the color of mahogany” and other implied racial themes in Jane Austen’s novels stuck out to me, so I poked, prodded, and scratched at them. Parsing through the Black motifs in Shadowbahn made for exciting class discussions, even though I had to be the one to bring them up. Of course, seeking this presence was intentional, but I didn’t have the language for it until Morrison gave it to me later. My identity wasn’t always being explicitly written for, but I was seeing it in everything everywhere. It was a rare experience to read people who kept me in mind and tucked into their prose.
What does it mean to share an eye?
To look through her and see myself. Shhh. Someone’s calling.
A laugh. Is she the laugher? A laughter that irons
out the kinks, coils, and modulations of jazz.
But whose? Ours? Yours? Dearly beloved,
unburden the heavy notes by crying
And that’s not to say I only value literature I’m most obviously represented in. I relate to poor Gregor in Metamorphosis, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has become one of my favorite pieces of literature. But these authors (presumably) looked like 90% of the authors I’ve read in my lifetime. These narratives shed from me quickly after reading them, and I had to go out of my way to read other voices.
Once, I told a couple of professors that I’d read Joe Turner’s Come and Gone over the break, and they didn’t know what I was talking about. “August Wilson,” cleared the confused look from their faces. At that moment, I realized my “classics” and “essential readings” were different from theirs. (To be fair, I thought Anna Karenina was just a fun name.) Again, these names hold weight, but it’s about the ones you pick up and try out. That doesn’t mean I was any less disappointed. My greats’ voices were unheard in a major way.
I was looking for something that would stick with me, and I decided I had to find it while in this white space of exposed brick and asbestos walls.
Originally, I meant either a Baldwin class or a Morrison class because I truly didn’t believe I’d get both—really, I didn’t think I’d get either—but I’m so grateful to have had a class to facilitate the kind of reading I’d been trying to do all along. Beyond doing these readings to color my education, I was too scared to dive deeper into Morrison’s work on my own.
I read Jazz the semester after Recitatif, and that affected me in a way my classmates didn’t understand. Actually, they noticed its effect on me (I would not shut up about it for the duration of the semester), but I noticed a lack of enthusiasm on their part that baffled and disappointed me. And that was fine. I accepted it eventually. I always knew I would be affected by Morrison, but I didn’t anticipate being infected. That’s a nasty word, but it’s accurate.
The Bluest Eye has sat on my shelf, and I’ve only ever taken it in my hands long enough to wipe the dust away. Fear has kept me from embracing the novel, and a deeply innate respect for Morrison’s literary omnipresence has made that embrace inevitable. I’ll get to it one day. I don’t feel any less afraid, but I feel more prepared and open after this semester dedicated to her work.
For a moment, I thought I was projecting a relationship onto her, but then I learned about her editing career as I was introduced to the voices of her time. Her activism, because she wasn’t giving speeches or being particularly active in the Civil Rights Movement, was helping Black creatives and thinkers take up space. She encouraged them to put their lives, hearts, and hurt down on paper. Even posthumously, she’s still doing that work. Reading Recitatif and Jazz early on in my college education and before my creative writing classes showed me exactly how I wanted to write. George Saunders, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Sophocles are all lovely writers, and I engaged with Sea Oak, The Yellow Wallpaper, and Antigone as a reader, but I didn’t connect with them as a writer.
There are two things I work especially hard crafting in my writing: musicality (maybe you’ve noticed a few references here) and a conversational tone, and I’m able to do that because Toni Morrison did. Because she encourages me to. This tone is arguably present in a lot of contemporary Black writing, but there’s something about Morrison’s use of language that sets her apart. Ironically, words fail me every time I try to describe this unique ability. Even “unique” is lacking. For me, it’s somewhere between the folk storytelling of Zora Neale Hurston and the realism of Lorraine Hansberry. It’s almost biblical. It’s allegorical, and there’s a message if you can decipher it. But she also leaves room for the reader to make meaning of her prose.
She doesn’t always have the answers, or the answers depend on your personal experience. Again, she leaves gaps you fill in with yourself. At least that’s how I’ve internalized her narratives.
out. Then write it down. Or improvise. Cry
and play in the dark with closed eyes.
I feel her in the gaps between my ribs. Beloved
space aching to be filled. Listen. She’s calling.
Respond. That’s how it works (jazz).
And I must respond because she’s waiting. Her own iron
This quote from Beloved has challenged me: [Denver] did not know it then, but it was the word ‘baby,’ said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman. The first time I read it, I could recognize Morrison was talking to me, but I couldn’t figure out why or what was really being said. On the surface, it seems simple: Denver is a little girl on the cusp of womanhood (no different from myself, though I’m twenty-two), and she’s slowly realizing it. But it seems deeper than that. It truly boils down to the language being used—so carefully chosen and thoughtfully arranged—that has grasped me and forced me to pay attention.
I have combed through the individual knots of “baby,” “inaugurated,” softly,” “kindness,” “world,” and “woman.” Hell, I’ve detangled “it,” and “know” in a desperate need to understand. A year ago, a friend interviewing me for a class asked how it felt to be a Black woman in such a white department, and I had to sit with that question in silence for a full fifty-seven seconds before answering, “I don’t know.”
And I was appalled that I didn’t know.
It was a valid and important question considering there weren’t any Black female faculty, and I was one of seven Black female students at the time, yet I hadn’t given it much thought beyond, Damn, this department is very white. I return to my friend’s question often and decide on a new excuse for not knowing or an answer ranging from I’ve only ever had 4 Black teachers before college (and 2 Black professors) to I don’t think I know what it means to be a Black woman.” All of my answers carry with them a heavy pain and a confusing menagerie of subtext. In classrooms, I’ve been the minority with few people who look like me to look up to. But in life, I’m surrounded by Black women with different careers, interests, values, and family dynamics. I live in an in-between where my Blackness is exceptional and ordinary.
Through Beloved’s eyes, we see an untampered view of Blackness just existing. She calls the white men who came for her family “men without skin.” She recognizes the white men as human—or near human—but something is off or different about them: their skin. The interesting thing is Morrison doesn’t have Beloved ascribe to them a color at all. She doesn’t call them red or green or gold or something much more colorful like that. They’re skinless. Blank. Morrison has centered Blackness, defaulted to it, and treated whiteness as the other (something we don’t see often in Western literature) by not focusing on color, “race,” but on a shared physical quality that makes us human. So why am I struggling? Is the difficult question really asking, “How does it feel to be a Black woman?” or “How does it feel to be Black and a woman in a white space?” Is it okay that I don’t have an answer? Will you fill this gap with me?
circle in hand. Mistaken for brass, but no. Iron.
Rusted. Why hold onto it? Why cry?
Because tears bore the Blues. Brother Man is Jazz.
Both are rejected by the bloodthirsty land, and their eyes
fall to me on my knees. Here, I can only call,
What harm did I do you on my knees, beloved?
Circling back to Toni Morrison being a Black woman writer is something I’ve done a lot recently. We live in a media event where creatives ask to be called a comedian, not a “Black, female comedienne.” They’re asking questions like, “Why should I be boxed into, defined, and limited by my appearance?” I see and respect that they’re asking to be seen as part of the normal ideal of whichever art realm they belong to, but I don’t see these designations as limiting. Morrison gladly accepted and preferred them. She said in one interview, “I regard my responsibilities as a Black writer as someone who must bear witness… but I want to make sure that a little piece of the world that I knew doesn’t get forgotten.” In this interesting zeitgeist of colorblindness where people seemingly want to flatten themselves and blend in, I much prefer Morrison’s take. We’re being encouraged to lose ourselves, not preserve ourselves! Because I’m Black, a woman, and a writer, I have things I must record. Things I must question and expose. Who sees them isn’t a concern of mine because I selfishly write for myself, with the added pleasure of whomever else consuming my art feels something too. Not necessarily what I’m feeling, but something.
Toni Morrison did the cultural work of her time. Her experience as a Black woman allowed her to empathetically explore the motives of a woman who loves her children so much that she’d rather see them dead than enslaved. She told us of a woman who cut the face of a dead girl and who couldn’t bear to hear the words “I love you” anymore. Her pen detailed the heady effects of whiteness in Black bodies that blur their self-perception and cause them to think of themselves as dirt. She taught us exactly how to fly through the eyes of a man weighed down by the fact that he couldn’t connect to any place or anyone.
What harm could I do you on my knees, beloved?
Answer me, “tall” man without skin and hot hands. Iron
bends to your will, but I no longer will. She’s calling
Us. We must answer. But first, I ask that you cry.
If you can’t, then improvise, for you must confront the eye
you share. That’s how it works, and I’m not talking about jazz.
Ultimately, I learned a lesson in resistance. Not as some grand demonstration of activism—I’ve never been much of an activist or militant—but as a way of staying true to myself and making my interests my priority. I often say I majored in English and minored in creative writing to chase a dream, not to find a job. I just want to write, which isn’t the most stable career choice, but it’s what I want. It’s the only thing I can do. And that’s scary, but I know I’ll be all right. In Jazz, Morrison wrote this exchange between Felice, a young girl who doesn’t know who she is, and Violet, an older woman who is finally accepting herself:
“[Violet] said, ‘What’s the world for if you can’t make it up the way you want? If you don’t, it will change you and it’ll be your fault ‘cause you let it. I let it. And it messed up my life.’
“‘Messed it up how?’
“‘Forgot it was mine. My life. I just ran up and down the streets wishing I was somebody else.’”
I’m not alone in asking such questions. Reading Morrison, I’ve never felt alone precisely for this reason. It feels like she and I are going through this story together. She has something to tell me and something to discover for herself. Because of her, I know I can make the world up however I want to. I will embrace my Black womanhood and all the paradoxes and revelations that come with it. Maybe a better question would have been, “What did you gain from Toni Morrison?”
She whispers, “Beloved, daughter, sit down and listen. It’s okay to cry.
That iron circle was heavy, I know, but you still have a calling.”
We lock eyes. She holds my hands. I won’t let go. Just like jazz.
************
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