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A
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (for Beloved,
in 1988), Toni Morrison is also the recipient of
the National Book Critic's Circle Award (1977),
the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award
(1977), the Robert F. Kennedy
Book Award (1987–88), the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award (1988),
the Modern Language Association of America Commonwealth Award
in Literature (1989), the National Book Foundation Medal for
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (1996), and
the National Humanities Medal (2000).
Like
a hometown quick to claim its own, Americans black and white,
rich and poor, male and female, presidents, and common men
and women all clamor to claim Toni Morrison. But Morrison's
rise to greatness did not happen overnight. The Robert F.
Goheen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University
was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931. A native
daughter of Lorain, Ohio, she graduated with honors from Lorain
High School in 1949. In 1953 she received a B.A. in English
from Howard University, where she changed her name
to Toni-an abbreviation of her middle name. Two years later,
she earned an M.A. from Cornell University. In 1958 she married
Harold Morrison, and several years later joined a small writer's
group for which she wrote a short story about a girl who prayed
to God for blue eyes. That story she later developed into
her first novel, The
Bluest Eye (1970).
For
much of the 1960s and '70s, Morrison balanced a writing career
with parenting (she is the mother of two boys) and extensive
careers
in publishing and academe. In 1989, when she accepted the
Robert Goheen Professorship, becoming the first black woman
to hold a chair
at an Ivy League university, she said, “I take teaching
as seriously as I do my writing.”
Since
then, she's taught creative writing and participated in the
African-American Studies, American Studies, and Women's Studies
programs at Princeton. Prior to her appointment at Princeton,
Morrison held teaching positions at Texas Southern University,
Howard University, Yale, and the State University of New York
at Purchase. Simultaneously, she pursued a career as an editor
at Random House between 1965
and 1983.
The balance she strikes between writing and ordinary living
helps create the genius that is Morrison: part ivory tower
intellectual, part commonsensical everyday folks. Both dispositions
make regular appearances in her work. The Bluest Eye,
for example, was certainly influenced by the black-consciousness-charged
civil rights and Black Power movements of the late 1960s.
Yet, according to Morrison, after going out of
print in the 1970s the book made a major reappearance in the
'80s, thanks to the demand by women's studies groups who were
intrigued
by the young girl's coming-of-age story.
In
1998, Morrison's Beloved was made into a
film starring Oprah Winfrey. Influenced by a
true story, Beloved is about an enslaved woman who
escapes with her children to Ohio. When
re-captured, she tries to kill her children rather than have
them return to slavery. Although it's a story about America
and slavery, Morrison directs our attention to the individuals
caught up in the historical drama. “The book was not
about the institution-Slavery with a capital S,” she
told Time magazine in an interview in 1989. “It
was about these anonymous people called slaves. What they
do to keep on, how they make a life, what they're willing
to risk, however long it lasts, in order to relate to one
another-that was incredible to me.”
It's
been said that everyone has at least one
book in them. Morrison has given us seven great novels, two
books of essays, an unpublished play-with the promise of more
to come. Her novels are must reading at colleges and universities
worldwide, and her work challenges each of us to remember
the too-often-forgotten little people.
text
by
Bakari
Kitwana
Fall
2002
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I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry,
and I see summer-its dust and lowering skies. It remains
for me a season of storms. The parched days and sticky
nights are undistinguished in my mind, but the storms,
the violent sudden storms, both frightened and quenched
me. But my memory is uncertain; I recall a summer storm
in the town where we lived and imagine a summer my mother
knew in 1929. There was a tornado that year, she said,
that blew away half of south Lorain. O mix her summer
with my own. Biting the strawberry, thinking of storms,
I see her. A slim young girl in a pink crepe dress.
One hand is on her hip; the other lolls about her thigh-waiting.
The wind swoops her up, high above the houses, but she
is still standing, hand on hip. Smiling. The anticipation
and promise in her lolling hand are not altered by the
holocaust. In the summer tornado of 1929, my mother's
hand is unextinguished. She is strong, smiling, and
relaxed while the world falls down about her. So much
for memory. Public fact becomes private reality, and
the seasons of a Midwestern town become the Moirai
of our small lives.
-The Bluest Eye: a Novel (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1993, ©1970)
Down
on his knees, Richard Misner was angry at his anger,
and at his mishandling of it. Used to obstacles, adept
at disagreement, he could not reconcile the level of
his present fury with what seemed to be its source.
He loved God so much it hurt, although that same love
sometimes made him laugh out loud. And he deeply respected
his colleagues. For centuries they had held on. Preaching,
shouting, dancing, singing, absorbing, arguing, counseling,
pleading, commanding. Their passion burned or smoldered
like lava over a land that had waged war against them
and their flock without surcease. A lily-livered war
without honor as either its point or reward; an unprincipled
war that thrived as much on the victor's cowardice as
on his mendacity. On stage and in print he and his brethren
had been the heart of comedy, the chosen backs for parody's
knife. They were cursed by death row inmates, derided
by pimps. Begrudged even miserly collection plates.
Yet through all of that, if the Spirit seemed to be
slipping away they had held on to it with their teeth
if they had to, grabbed it in their fists if need be.
They took it to buildings ready to be condemned, to
churches from which white congregations had fled, to
quilt tents, to ravines and logs in clearings. Whispered
it in cabins lit by moonlight lest the Law see. Prayed
for it behind trees and in sod houses, their voices
undaunted by roaring winds. From Abyssinian to storefronts,
from Pilgrim Baptist to abandoned movie houses; in polished
shoes, worn boots, beat-up cars and Lincoln Continentals,
well fed or malnourished, they let in the light, flickering
low or blazing like a comet, pierce the darkness of
days. They wiped white folks' spit from the faces of
black children, hid strangers from posses and police,
relayed life-preserving information faster than the
newspaper and better than the radio. At sickbeds they
looked death in the eye and mouth. They pressed the
heads of weeping mothers to their shoulders before conducting
their life-gouged daughters to the cemetery. They wept
for chain gangs, reasoned with magistrates. Made whole
congregations scream. In ecstasy. In belief. That death
was life, don't you know, and every life, don't you
know, was holy, don't you know, in His eyesight. Rocked
as they were by the sight of evil, its snout was familiar
to them. Real wonder, however, lay in the amazing shapes
and substances God's grace took: gospel in times of
persecution; the exquisite wins of people forbidden
to compete; the upright righteousness of those who let
no boot hold them down-people who made Job's patience
look like restlessness. Elegance when all around was
shabby.
—Paradise
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
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