In Praise of Toni Morrison

Like much of the world, yesterday was a bit sadder with the announcement of Toni Morrison's death.  But as with the death of many a luminary, remembering why she was so important made me feel a bit better.

I think that the first Toni Morrison book I read was Tar Baby.  Back then, I checked it out from the library to have something to read on my commute from the Virginia suburbs to inner city DC where I had a summer job as a social worker in 1984.  That was during the year that D.C. had the worst murder rate in the country, but I met wonderful people that summer.  If those people managed to stay in their homes, those homes that we spent a summer winterizing, they could be very rich now.

That summer I also read Sula(or was it Song of Solomon?), but I remember not liking it as much as I liked Tar Baby.  My mom and I were both reading her work.  I read Beloved soon after it came out, and I liked it, but I didn't realize what made it an amazing book back when I first read it.  I think I read it after both of my parents read it and passed it on to me.  My memory says that my mom really loved the book, while my dad found it a tough read.

I read The Bluest Eye in grad school.  What an amazing--and painful--book.  But my favorite one of her books of all that I've read is A Mercy.  No other work has so powerfully made me realize how perilous life in the colonies was.

When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I cheered.  As with so many of these developments, I thought it was a sure sign of progress, how far we had come.  I assumed we would keep zooming on to a bright future where a much wider cross section of artists would gain recognition and society would be changed by their art.

I still want to believe that--but with midlife comes the knowledge that the way forward is much murkier than I first thought and the road to the bright future may take much longer than I thought.

But let me lift my coffee mug to Toni Morrison, who in her life and in her art showed us that a different way is possible.