Toni Forever

"It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart." —Toni Morrison, Beloved

 

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God, how she wrote. The way she made words shimmer. I imagine Toni as Baby Suggs in that forever place, holy with her great big heart, the patron saint of questing writers. "You want to be a writer, so write," she said to me the summer I was her college intern at Knopf. A link to my recollections of that summer, which I wrote as a tribute on the occasion of her dying, is here. And now the great Toni Morrison has posthumously been honored with her own Forever stamp. How cool is that?