Remembering Toni Morrison

On August 5, 2019, Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford), beloved African American author and cultural historian who grew up in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1930s, took flight. Perhaps it was a flight like Milkman Dead, a surrender to the air. But Toni Morrison, like Pilate in Song of Solomon, flew “without ever leaving the ground” (337). Morrison was the “ancestor” she spoke of in her paper, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” that is so desperately needed in American culture, literature, and history. “When you kill the ancestor, you kill yourself,” she wrote in that 1984 paper (“Rootedness” 202). As a Nobel Prize winner, a Pulitzer Prize winner, among other distinguished awards, and author of eleven novels, children’s fiction, nonfiction, and criticism, just one of Toni Morrison’s major accomplishments was to take the art form of the novel and make it fly, make it “black art.” Hers was the type of art that managed to combine the oral cultural traditions and the rhythms of African American music with the language of the novel, in order to reorient and revision the novelistic form.

As an ancestor, Morrison brought to life strategies of survival for how her characters would respond to situations of “enormous duress,” a “crisis” (“An interview” 417) that forces them to either find the community and resources to survive, or not, as she noted in an interview. A radical act in itself, a reorientation and defamiliarization of American fiction and indeed culture was achieved in her novels by creating black locations and spaces to explore the complexity of black character development: there were no angels offered to appease the normative white gaze or the frequent expectation that black characters conform to white ideals, be morally upright, or be exceptional. African American readers were the center of her texts, while white readers and critics were prompted to re-evaluate the norm, to listen, and to learn. Her most famous novel, Beloved, courageously explored infanticide under slavery, understood as “an excess of maternal feeling,” without endorsing, forgiving, or judging, though the community in the novel does judge the “pride” and inflexibility (“Conversation” 6).

Morrison was also a cultural critic who profoundly affected the way many of us teach American literature, and especially nineteenth-century American literature. Her cultural critiques of Poe, Melville, and Twain loom large in the reshaping of the American canon. The reorientation of the literary tradition occurred in her early discussion of “classic” white American fiction in the nineteenth century in Playing in the Dark, which had never imagined a reader as anything else but white, while the black characters, the presence of millions of African enslaved persons for hundreds of years, haunt the American Republic, and came to shape the very fabric of its national literature and culture. “The contemplation of this black presence,” she wrote, “is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination” (5). Indeed, as she further remarked, “nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery” (38). While Toni Morrison’s major achievements are often placed in her fiction, she equally provoked American cultural critics and historians to view the presence of Africans and the institution of slavery as central to the creation of their prized democratic foundations.

Flyers are peregrines who tend to be migratory. In the case of Toni Morrison, we are certain she will always return to the places of her ancestors to inspire and bring forth new literary and historical imaginations.