Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (review)

This review was filed prior to Morrison's death on 5 August 2019 and has not been altered. The outpouring of eulogies in the days that followed underscored the rare blessing that Morrison represented to the world. This documentary will surely serve as a timely tribute to her memory.

Toni Morrison is, by her estimation and surely hers alone, an unlikely subject of a biography. She has insisted for years that her own life is not interesting. In a 1980 interview with Anne Koenen, she commented, "I've never been able to get very interested in writing about any event that I'd lived through. . . . My imagination is more interesting than my life." Even more recently, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported that Morrison acknowledged having signed an agreement to write her memoirs: "'But then I canceled it,' she said. 'My publisher asked me to do it, but there's a point at which your life is not interesting, at least to me. I'd rather write fiction.'" But over the second half of her fifty-year writing career, Morrison has shown intermittent interest in personal narrative. In "The Site of Memory," a lecture that was published in William Zinsser's Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (1987), she connects her fiction to a conscious effort to capture the wisdom of her ancestors. Her prefaces to updated editions of her novels reveal an even more personal side. In the preface to the Vintage International reprint of Beloved, she talks about finally leaving her position as an editor when her success as a writer had eclipsed her other work: "A few days after my last day at work, sitting in front of my house on the pier jutting out into the Hudson River, I began to feel an edginess instead of the calm I had expected. . . . Then it slapped me: I was happy, free in a way I had never been, ever." Morrison does not belabor the implied comparison, but when the novel depicts newly freed Baby Suggs with a "knocking in her chest" that startles her into laughter, the reader can grasp that the author and character have this sensation in common.

Morrison's memory of resigning her editorial position at Random House, which resonates as her rite of passage, also surfaces in the new documentary portrait, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the film is an affecting tribute to a once-in-a-generation talent. The title itself alludes to Beloved. Paul D, the romantic interest of the protagonist Sethe, finds himself associating her with the way his friend Sixo mused about his own partner: "The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind." The metaphor seems almost to concede that the director has done something for Morrison that she could not do alone. Indeed, documentaries are a form of piecework, and this one cobbles the usual sources—previous interviews, newer reflections from Morrison voiced over photographs of her family, and charming testimonials from writers and scholars with a personal connection.

One of the earliest stories that Morrison tells in the film is how her grandparents migrated from Alabama to Morrison's home state of Ohio. Her grandmother so feared for the safety of her adolescent daughters that she sent word to her husband that they were fleeing immediately, and that if he ever wanted to see them again, he would have to meet them on the train. (He did.) The biting fear of Southern racism exists in contrast to Morrison's memories of the totally integrated Midwestern community in which she was raised. She describes scarcely witnessing true racism until her undergraduate years at Howard University, and there it was not confined to white/black relations. She pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority by their invitation, only to learn too late of the...