Many of us Ohioans like to claim, as our own, writer and educator Toni
Morrison, who died this past week at the age of eighty-eight. But the fact is
that she belongs to the world.
Be that as it may, Morrison was, indeed, born and reared in Lorain,
Ohio, a town that forms part of the suburban sprawl of greater Cleveland and that
is located about thirty miles west of that great American city. As such, she
grew up on the shores of Lake Erie and at the mouth of the Black River. The sights,
sounds and smells that first entered her mind and spirit were those of the
Great Lakes culture of which Cleveland is a renowned icon.
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| Nobel and Pulitzer laureate Toni Morrison |
To say that Toni Morrison died this past week is actually far from the
truth. While she will no longer be delighting and enlightening us with new
manifestations of her extraordinary talent, insight and culture, the body of
work that she has bequeathed us renders her immortal for the avidly literate.
And her life stands as a shining example for all of those who struggle to
overcome the culturally imposed barriers of racism, sexism and social ostracism
that were so much a part of her writing and her life.
Morrison’s father, George Wofford, moved north to Ohio after two black
businessman on his street in Cartersville, Georgia, were lynched by a group white
supremacists. Wofford was about fifteen years old at the time and left for
Lorain shortly after the murders. Morrison once told an interviewer that her
grandparents had been Southern sharecroppers who could neither read nor write.
Back then, she said, white people in much of the South could be fined or jailed
for teaching blacks how to read and write, so many people of color remained illiterate.
As such, and she herself coming from a working class African America family,
her hunger for knowledge and education was practically a revolutionary act.
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Chloe Wofford (Toni Morrison)
high school yearbook picture
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Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, she
adopted Catholicism at age twelve. She was given the baptismal name of Anthony,
after St. Anthony of Padua, became Chloe Anthony Wofford, “Toni” for short, and
the nickname stuck. She married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison in 1958 and
had two children by him. She and Morrison divorced in 1964, but she kept his
surname.
She was an eager student during her high
school days in Lorain. She was on the yearbook staff and the debate team, as
well as being a member of the drama club at Lorain High School. After secondary
school, she was admitted to the historically black Howard University in
Washington DC, before going on to earn her graduate degree from Cornell
University. She later returned to the Howard English Department as a professor,
before moving on to her career as a gifted editor and writer, as well as
educator.
Morrison leaves a rich legacy as a teacher and editor. Would-be writers
who benefited from her work Howard and as professor emeritus at Princeton
University are surely the better for having absorbed even the tiniest quota of
her guidance. And as the first African American woman to hold a fiction
editor’s post at the emblematic American publishing company, Random House, she
spared none of her meticulous craft and unquestionable genius, in the years
from 1967 to 1983, to vastly improve and promote the work of writers of color.
Her clients included such names as novelists Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara, writer
and poet Henry Dumas (whom she called “an absolute genius”), revolutionary
political activists Huey P. Newton and Angela Davis, as well as legendary boxer
Muhammad Ali, among others.
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| Morrison's childhood home in Lorain, Ohio. |
She literally opened previously locked doors to the publishing industry
for numerous black writers and, in doing so, helped spawn a rich new movement
in American literature, of which she herself was an eminent exponent. It was
while at Random House that her own reputation as a writer of note flourished
and grew.
The important work that she did as a Random House editor focused on black
literature as an authentic and rich genre within the vast body of universal
literature. She complained that all too often, “Black literature is taught as
sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.”
The inevitably shallow question of “why she didn’t write for white
people” clearly vexed her, since her books were indubitably universal, voicing
the reality of many people of her own race, but also educating whites about the
reality of African Americans in the United States. Asked that question in an
interview, she once said, “I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your
life to you [white people]…If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water.”
But the universality was there! Morrison’s legacy has been bequeathed
not only to African Americans, but to America as a whole, and as such, to the
world. What is unique about her work is how it has impelled the US to look
harder at its history of hypocrisy, bigotry, racism and slavery.
Unlike the angry genius of black writers like Richard Wright or James
Baldwin who preceded her, Morrison’s work generates pathos and empathy and does
so by simply telling stories in a harshly realistic yet beautiful and
compelling way. From stories like her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (1987), in which she portrays
the desperate plight of mothers whose infants are taken from them and sold into
slavery, to her debut novel, The Bluest
Eye (1970), in which an eleven 11-year-old African American girl wants blue
eyes so that she can gain the acceptance of a world that caters exclusively to
the white majority, Morrison perfectly pictures a reality in which race is a
constant and all-pervasive factor, while bringing America as a whole face to
face with the travesty of its claims of equality and justice.
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| Random House days - genius editor. |
It wasn’t that the anger wasn’t there for
Morrison, it was just that she incorporated it into her own positive
philosophy. “I get angry about things,” she once said, “and then go on and
work.”
She seemed convinced that great literature
couldn’t help but be political. “I think all good art is political,” she said. “None of the best writing, the best thoughts,
have been anything other than that.”
Today, when the current leadership in the United States causes
commentators to remind the public daily that “words matter”, Morrison also
leaves us with a sage and salient quote. “Oppressive language,” she said, “does
more than represent violence; it is violence;
does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”
In a TV interview, legendary talk show host Dick Cavett asked Toni
Morrison if she minded always being touted as the greatest black female writer. She answered that she had no problem being an
African American woman writer. Cavett said that he just thought that, as a
truly great writer, she might have grown tired of the imposed limitations of
those modifiers before the word writer. To which Morrison answered pointedly
that all she was tired of was being asked that question.
Quoted elsewhere on the subject, the Nobel and Pulitzer laureate said, “Being
a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It
doesn’t limit my imagination; it expands it. It’s richer than being a white
male writer because I know more and I’ve experienced more.”
“We die,” Toni Morrison once said. “That may be the meaning of life. But
we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
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