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Toni Morrison was one of the foremost American authors of all time. Her talent is irrefutable, her work is legendary, and she stands shoulder to shoulder with the most exemplary authors, like Mark Twain and John Steinbeck. Students read her work for a reason, and she offers valuable lessons about race, sex, and society that will leave any reader introspectively staring at the wall. She’s rightly celebrated for tackling the consequences of color discrimination in the United State. But she didn’t just write about racism. She also tackled the concept of race itself, and how it impacts the black experience. In Toni Morrison’s work we find the black experience in America, stripped of the interests and expectations of the white gaze, and presented without even a self-conscious hand to protect itself from the reader’s mind. She approached racism, sexism, comradery, and community with a razor quill that cut through the muck to pierce the heart of the matter because to her, that was the most interesting thing to write about. For her veracity in the face of a society build on fabrication, we’ve decided to take her birthday as an opportunity to dig into her work and better understand the women behind the words.
History
Toni Morrison was born Chlore Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, February 18, 1931. Her father, who had been a sharecropper during the Great Depression, worked three jobs to support his family. Her parents would tell her traditional African American stories, folktales, ghost stories, and songs, and it was from them that Morrison was instilled with her immense appreciation of black culture. She also loved to read, and “when [she] was in first grade, nobody thought [she] was inferior. [She] was the only black in the class and the only child who could read.” Although Lorain was an integrated community, Morrison’s family wasn’t safe from the absurd, evil violence of racism. When she was 2 her family fell behind on rent, and their landlord set fire to their house with them inside. “If you internalized it you’d be truly and thoroughly depressed because that’s how much your life meant. For $4 a month somebody would just burn you to a crisp.” Though she didn’t remember the experience, she and her family learned to laugh at how absurd it was, and attitude that would influence her for the rest of her life.
In 1949 Morrison enrolled at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She graduated with an English degree, with a minor in the classics, and then worked on her English Masters at Cornell University, which she completed in 1953. She returned to Howard University to teach English, where she met Harold Morrison, an architect originally from Jamacia. They were married in 1958 and had their first child in 1961. In the summer of 1963, she traveled Europe with her family, and then returned to the United States with her son. Her husband decided to return to Jamacia, and the two of them separated. Pregnant with her second child, Slade, Morrison returned to her family in Ohio. Slade was born in 1964, and the next year Morrison began working as a textbook editor for Random House.
While working at Random House, Morrison noted that she had not seen any books about young black girls that depicted them as anything more than shallow characters with nothing going on. Morrison decided that she wanted to read such a novel and decided to write it herself. This was The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, and followed a young African American girl named Pecola Breedlove. She lives in a largely Anglo-Saxon neighborhood, her parents fight physically and verbally, and Pecola is constantly made to feel ugly by the townspeople. Pecola, wishing to be beautiful, decides she would be loved if only she had blue, Anglo-Saxon eyes. The story depicts the damaging effects of being dismissed and trivialized like that, and after she is raped, Pecola becomes increasingly unstable, and believes that she really does have blue eyes. It was Morrison’s first foray into writing about the African American experience, and the novel didn’t sell well, but it laid the groundwork for her literature going forward, and she continued writing.
Sula was published in 1973, which explored the friendship of two women who grew up in Ohio. 4 years later she published Song of Solomon, which became her breakout hit. It was the first work by an African American author to be a featured selection in the Book of the Month club since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940 and followed a young African American man’s search for his family roots and heritage. Arguably her most famous book, Beloved, was published in 1987 and was a critical success, becoming a bestseller for 25 weeks. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The novel carried heavy themes about love and African American history which also showed up in 2 other works, 1992’s Jazz and 1997’s Paradise. The three are sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy because of this. Morrison was also awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
After her work was acknowledged, Morrison began branching out. She returned to Cornell University as a professor from 1997-2003. In 1999 she began writing children’s literature in partnership with her son Slade. She experimented with music, providing texts for classical music, and collaborating with various artists like Andre Previn Sylvia McNair. She returned to the life of Margaret Garner, the basis for Beloved, and wrote a libretto for a new opera about her life. In 2008 she published her essays, reviews, and speeches throughout the years in a collection called Moves at the Margin. Even into her 80s she was writing and publishing novels that sought to show us the truth about the world. 2012’s Home seeks to “take the scab off the ‘50s, the general idea of it as very comfortable, happy, nostalgic…. There was a horrible war you didn’t call a war, where 58,000 people died. There was McCarthy.”
Beloved
Beloved is one of Morrison’s most enduring stories because of the painful decisions Sethe has made and needs to live with. Her decision to kill her children rather then allow them to return to slavery makes it clear, in no uncertain terms, that slavery was worse than death. A fact that is lost on the white slavers who have come to capture her and her children, who can’t understand why she would do such a thing. It paints a startling picture of the ignorance of white people to the suffering of African Americans, even among those directly responsible for their suffering.
Paradise
The last of Morrison’s Beloved Trilogy, the story explores how the hate and violence African Americans suffer is imprinted on them, and how that informs their own lives and choices. In it, black families suffering from racism retreat from the world and build their own isolated town, Haven, where they can live in peace. But as generations pass, this idea of creating a black community for themselves morphs into creating a community free from whites, and a prejudice against anyone with lighter skin even if they aren’t white. Their attitude deteriorates, and the men of its newly founded sister city Ruby, where much of the novel takes place, refuse to look for outside help when a light skinned women named Delia Best has a medical emergency. The town is further divided when the youth take an interest in the civil rights struggle happening outside their town, and rebel against the founder’s insular attitude. We see the founding families, who built the town to escape from oppression, now turning the tools of power against the youth, mirroring the oppression they experienced in the outside world.
In parallel to this story, is one of a nearby convent full of women running away from all manner of horrifying pasts, be they accidental filicide, domestic violence, unwanted children, or unhappy relationships. Where Haven and Ruby break down because of their isolationist culture and exclusionary attitude to anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of black, the Convent women are able to find peace with each other specifically because they don’t cast judgment and come and go as they please. The story’s climax, where the men of Ruby conclude that the Convent women are to blame for the town’s troubles and attempt to kill them, is a chilling realization of just how much these men have been warped by hate and violence they’ve tried to distance themselves from. Their attitudes pushed them to see the worst possible outcome, and their actions and reasoning are startlingly similar to those of white mobs who lynch African Americans. The racism Haven’s founders experienced has become a generational trauma, and their isolation transformed the men of Ruby into narrow minded bigots who implement the same racist practices as the wider United States, but in a community with an inverted an inverted power dynamic. If we show people nothing but hate and contempt, they will learn nothing but hate and contempt.
The implications of the story, and how the cycle of violence and discrimination can transform victims into oppressors, is so potent that Morrison keeps “a little framed document in my bathroom, a letter from, I think Texas Bureau of Corrections, saying that Paradise was banned from the prison because it might incite a riot. And I thought, how powerful is that? I could tear up the whole place!”
Writing Style
Morrison’s novels are characterized by their protagonists. Rather than telling a story with her characters, the characters are the story. The Bluest Eye is about a young black girl, the least acknowledged and privileged people in America, so the story explores how this lack of acknowledgment and privilege affect Pecola, her self-worth, and her image of herself. In Beloved, Sethe struggles to carve out a live for herself, and is constantly confronted about, and literally haunted by, her decision to kill her daughter rather than let her be taken by slavers. The novel is likewise about the kind of lives enslaved people live, the decisions they make because of their conditions, and how freedom from bondage doesn’t mean freedom from the ghosts of your past. Each of her novels focus on characters with specific qualities, and the stories are simply vehicles that allow Morrison to examine those qualities and consider what they mean.
Toni Morrison’s Writing Advice: Don’t Write What You Know
When you’re staring at a blank page, aware of every second ticking by while you try and fail to assemble something passable out of the fragmentary words you can conjure up in your mind, you inevitably wonder where to start. Ask most anyone, and they’ll tell you to write what you know. Did you help your team win a game, or go down to the burger joint with coworkers after work? Start there. Write about those times you can remember. But as you become better at writing, it’s important to remember that other people exist. You might be the main character of your life, but no one is interested in the Tom Howard show and his decision to eat bran flakes over cheerios, unless you are an exceptional writer and your name isn’t Tom Howard. So, after you’ve figured out how to put words on the page and can string together a sentence to write what you know, what’s next? Why does everyone else in your story feel so flat?
This is a question that Toni Morrison tackled when she taught creative writing at Princeton. She noticed that “so much fiction, particularly that of 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.” Stories are pure imagination. Thought made real. When you’re writing what happens next, you can make it up. It can be a little penguin who gets lost and tries to climb Mount Everest, a peasant woman living in prerevolutionary France, or a corporate executive who literally has no idea how he’s running the company. By writing what you don’t know and choosing a character and setting so completely divorced from yourself, you stop limiting yourself to what you know. You can’t know everything, so you need to see things from someone else's perspective. You put yourself in the mind of someone else, and once you understand them and write them, you realize that everyone else in your story is just like that. They’re all people. They see things a certain way, or they don’t see it at all. They have their own wants, desires, and personalities, even if the reader doesn’t see them. Once you write what you don’t know, you can see beyond yourself, empathize with others, and kick your writing up a notch.
Toni Morrison in Memory
Toni Morrison cut through 20th century muck to write about the true black experience and explore how racism and sexism have damaged our society. Her death on August 5, 2019, halted her efforts but it has not stopped them. Her stories are lessons, and her words are tools. In her life she wrote all she could to prepare us to take up her cause and provided us with the tools to do so. We must take up our tools and become the muckrakers of society, exposing discrimination and corruption, and highlighting the reality of our lives, so that we can scrape away the 21st century muck before it has a chance to build up.
Discussion Questions
1. Toni Morrison prominently wrote about the effects of racism in America. In the future, how will her work be relevant in a time and place that has completely moved beyond all forms of racism?
2. Toni Morrison was born on February 18, 1931. As of her birthday on February 18, 2024, we are rapidly approaching her 100th birthday. How have things changed in America, and the world at large, since she was born?
3. As Toni Morrison gained prominence, white readers began to give her work more attention. While Morrison was quite vocal about what she wrote about, do you think the attention of white readers has elevated certain themes and characteristics of her work above other aspects in mainstream conversation?
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