Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Thank you, Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison has died. She was 88 years old. I worked with her when she was an editor at Random House in the summer between my junior and senior years of college. She used to come into the office from her home upstate, usually wearing gardening clothes and a big floppy straw hat. She had a deep rumbling laugh that she deployed often, and I remember she sat me down one day and asked what I wanted to do with my life. If you want to write, she told me, make sure you love it, because it won't be worth the pain otherwise. A year later, she was the commencement speaker at my graduation from Barnard, an all women's college. In her address to my class, she charged us never to leave each other writhing on "the killing floor of professional women's worlds." That image stayed with me, a cautionary tale. And she added: "The function of freedom is to free somebody else."

When I was a new mother, she would guide me again. She had been invited to lunch with the editors at the magazine where I worked, and someone asked her if she'd been criticized for paving the way for her son to get published. "If you are in a position to help your child, why on earth wouldn't you do it?" she asked, amazed that it should even be a question. And then she said the thing I will never forget: “You are your child’s source of security in the world,” she told us. “When your children come into a room you are in, your eyes light up in a way that confirms for them the value of their very being.”

The 1993 Nobel Laureate transformed our literary landscape, in part by giving us works rooted in the Black gaze, allowing us to see ourselves in all the ways we show up in this world, and to love ourselves just as we were. This morning, I was asked to write a tribute to mark her passing. Perhaps I will link it when it is posted. In the meantime, here is a quote from the great woman that is so appropriate to the events of the week in which she closed her eyes for good.

"The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing."

Rest in peace, Queen. 

16 comments:

  1. When I saw the news I reeled for a moment. A world without Toni Morrison? Really? It's a little like being told the moon is gone. Not possible. How would that work?
    How fortunate you are to have been able to know her, to learn from her. And what she said about helping her son. Perhaps that it is absolutely the very core of what a mother should be- someone who confirms for her children the value of their very being. The source of their security. For some reason, this tiny bit of wisdom blows me away because I've never pared down the truth of motherhood to such purity.
    She will be missed deeply but what a blessing she has been to this world. Just to look at her face is to look into the eyes of a Wise Woman, a sort of sacred being that the world needs desperately. She was beautiful, she was regal, she was the holder of language.
    She knew the grace of growing things.
    She was so loved.
    Beloved.

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    1. Mary, I know. I have thought about what she said about parenting again and again over the years. She boiled it right down to its essence, she sure did. I love you.

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  2. She was and will remain one of my most revered writers. It is thrilling to know that you knew her. Love
    Rebecca

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    1. Rebecca, it was more that I had met her, three times, I didn't really know her, but even so, she was so powerful a presence, so huge a soul, that even in glancing encounters, she left me with my thinking so utterly transformed by some new insight, some sense of our connection to one another, our humanity. Hard to think of this world without her in it. Love you, friend.

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  3. Thank you, Toni Morrison. Thank you, Rosemarie, for your moving tribute to her. I'm grateful to the English professor who brought Toni Morrison's first books to my attention when I returned to college in 1980. I'm grateful for Toni Morrison's presence in my life for the last 39 years. That presence will live on through her books. It is always startling to hear the news of the death of anyone who has been a vital part of one's life.

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    1. am, she has been a vital part of not just your life and mine, but of our world. I am so grateful she was here in our time. xo

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  4. Thank you for writing this and sharing it here. I will always remember reading Toni Morrison's words and holding them in my heart. These are such challenging times and we have lost a true voice of poetic wisdom. You were very lucky to have crossed paths with her.

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  5. Oh my gosh -- I had not heard this news. I'm so sorry to hear it. She was brilliant and a wonderful writer and, as you so aptly described, a remarkable human being. I will never forget reading "Beloved" while traveling with my family in Glacier National Park -- such an incongruous setting to read that book but I was hooked. I covered a commencement speech she gave at Rutgers in 2011 and it was a joy to listen to her. I'll have to see if I can find that clip somewhere.

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  6. Only last week I was at the film "Toni Morrison: All the Pieces I Am," feeling as if I were getting to know her (more than just revere her from afar). Afterward, in the space of a few minutes as the crowd left the theater, I heard a young black woman, and older white couple, and someone else say exactly the same thing, although none heard the others -- "She changed my life." "Her books were life-changing." And one say that her son's white college professor, as far back as 1995, told his class, "She is the single most important writer of the 20th century."

    She was more than that. Thank you for your tribute. Mary

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  7. This post is a beautiful tribute. I've been fighting tears all day.
    Xoxo
    Barbara

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  8. This is a moving tribute. Thank you.

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  9. how is it that I am totally ignorant of this woman?

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  10. I haven't read any of her work, an omission I need to correct. I am sure you will create a beautiful and fitting tribute, for you have already done so here.

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  11. Oh, No Words, Only Tears... Rest In Peace Toni Morrison.

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  12. She was the same age as my mother when my mother died. I am always in awe of women who live outside the norm. Women who don't let fear rule their lives. Women who speak their truth. How do they do that? Where do they get their strength?

    The world will be less with her gone.

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