The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Remembering Toni Morrison’s legacy
She is gone now. On Monday, Aug. 5, 2019, Lorain’s — and Ohio’s and America’s — Great Bard, Toni Morrison, entered the great realm of memory, passing away after gifting our region, her country, and the world with a magical literary heritage in many ways unmatched.
I first learned of her passing the day after her death, when I visited the Different Strokes barbershop (in Columbus), and my dear friend Otis Sharpe said to me, “Cash, I am sorry about your girl.” I didn’t know what he was talking about. “Who? What happened?” In this current age of ubiquitous media, it feels like all “big news traveled like light,” but Brother Sharpe quickly saw I had not heard. In a reverent tone of love and respect, he gently said, “Toni Morrison. She died.”
We were outside the barbershop, and I suddenly felt the August beam of heat around my head. I sat next to him on the bench. There was an immediate quietude between us; a kind of spiritual tribute and to honor this woman — this artist — who meant and means so much to so many.
Morrison was 88, so I was not shocked. But when a Mountain is removed from a landscape that you have seen all of your life, and that view — that majestic presence — shaped you, and gave you strength, and wisdom, and special Way of Knowledge of my people and this country, well, the depth of loss calls for silence and reflection.
Even while mourning I was uplifted when I considered Morrison’s profound literary legacy to Ohio, America, and the world. Toni Morrison’s work is large in spirit, generous in application, loving in character, imaginative in possibilities, and intelligent in principles. Morrison’s fiction, literary nonfiction, scholarly essays, and insightful oral commentaries on the hue and heart of this nation in particular, and love and literature in general is a reflecting mirror that unearths the past, connects the present to history, and provides a most remarkable roadmap to a viable future for this country.
At her fictional best — Song of Solomon — Morrison extends and expands our voices (“We the People”), and her visions on the Jazz of Black American’s lives interweaves timeless tales many we will be read, remember, and relive for centuries to come (like we still view Hamlet, and read tales of Anansi the trickster). Toni Morrison is an essential testament of what imaginative writing can do for a culture and country. She was extraordinary artist who transported us to new places and heights (Sula and Paul D), and in so doing, transformed us along the Way (Beloved and Bluest Eye).
These past six years has been of great loss to the intellectual, spiritual, political, and cultural foundations not only of Black Americans, but the country and world: Nelson Mandela in 2013; Amiri Baraka in 2014; Muhammad Ali in 2016; and now Toni Morrison in 2019. Yet, God always leaves tomorrow.
When James Baldwin died in 1987, Morrison was deeply saddened and gave a most elegiac eulogy at his service (Life in His Language). After mourning Baldwin, Morrison went on to live for 32 years, and write at fiction at the highest level in the history of the United States.
In October 1993, Toni Morrison, of Lorain, Ohio, was recognized globally for her acclaimed work when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The award was a special honor because Morrison is only the eighth North American writer, the second writer of African descent (whole Soyinka, of Nigeria, was the first in 1986), and the first African American to receive this renowned honor. What is of paramount importance with this prestigious recognition of Morrison’s work is the fact that it is not possible to honor her creative genius without - on some level — giving homage to the beauty and power of the cultural context of her novels: Black people (nationally and globally).
Morrison’s stories unearth the rich and textured layers of African sensibility, especially the African American testimony to the complexity of the power of memory, conquest, tragedy, and the shadow of the European crime of slavery which remains with us.
One example of Morrison’s capacity to elevate North America life and history is her majestic novel Beloved. To read this book is to encounter a lyrical song and myth which probes the depth of language as vision, love as redemption, and memory as a telling of what is reduced to the “Black slave experience in America.” In Beloved we are not given repeated lectures of the unspeakable cruelties of European enslavement of Black people, but instead we are presented with what appeared to be a simple story (and on one level is simple): a mother’s refusal to have her children endure her experience as a slave. The Mother’s way of expressing her determined commitment for a better future for her children is to escape from the dreaded plantation of Kentucky to the freer land of Ohio. Shortly after her family’s escape, they are tracked — hunted – down by her former slaveowner and trapped in a barn with her four children. Seeing all ways to freedom being cut off, the mother attempts to kill all her children; she succeeds in killing one of them.
Morrison’s dramatization of Mary Gardner’s true story is myth in the Biblical sense of love as presence. In one of the pinnacle moments of all of Morrison’s work, Baby Suggs, an ex-preacher, tells her congregation that “the only grace you can have is he grace you can imagine. If you cannot see it, you cannot have it.” Being a writer of resolute vision, Morrison is wise enough to place this ancient wisdom — this word of life- in the only place we could possibly miss it: in the mouth of an ex-slave woman preacher who could not read books, but who was immersed in the Spirit. In her time — and nearly ours - women were not supposed to preach, and Black women were not supposed to selfaffirming freedom fighters, only to provide unpaid labor to Whites and perpetuate their own woe of life — their children to continue the cycle. This mother said no in way which reverberates to this day and caught the imagination of Morrison to use as a plot for his novel.
Morrison’s choice of Baby Suggs is clearly intentional, but not to prove the point of the wisdom of those who suffer; Morrison’s choice simply reflects a certain artistic point of view where the genesis of love is located, and the reality that love is the defining force which transforms life on the most basic and profound levels.
Morrison’s larger point is that love is made visible by the imagination and by an individual’s capacity to fore-see, and even more, to bear love at all cost. In the White world of slavocracy, Baby Suggs is the center of redemption, and her wisdom is the healing grace for her people - assuming their willingness to listen and be transformed- and her country.
In this novel and nearly all her stories, Morrison leads the reader to partake and share the imaginary grace which holds us through the internal and external violence of our hearts and actions. Today Black children are dying in the streets of North America in large measure because of the foundational history outlined in Morrison’s novel.
Despite the aching pain of most of Morrison’s fiction (not nonfiction), if we honor the source of Morrison’s genius then there is hope for a better tomorrow. On the other hand, if we provide her with praise and with singular honors in ways which disconnects her stunning work from her historical and cultural roots, then we shall continue to build more prisons, which, yes, circle the builder as well as those whom there are designed for, and, all disclaimers aside, Black people know the why and how of America’s commitment to the construction of prisons dotting the 21th century USA landscape.
This nation’s collective future depends on our ability to imagine as wisely as that ex-slave who knew that the truth is small, and to ignore small things often means bearing large consequences. Morrison’s entire literary canon is a vivid reminder that any true writer loves the world, and to reach the world as its center the writer must search and explore the heart of an individual, and the world in which she lives.
In showing us the hue and cry of African-American life, Toni Morrison has given us a profound and joyful understanding of our national soul.
She is gone now, but her work reminds; and for those willing to take time and seriously read Morrison will see that sacred grace is not the singular domain of the church but is formed in the dwelling space of each of our hearts and imaginations.
And where we are now standing in history, the expansion and transformation of our imagination may be our last hope to reclaim the wisdom of those Africans formerly called slaves in America.
If we do this, we will succeed at what this great North American artist achieved: wholeness in life, and a beautiful legacy for those who comes after us.
Even while mourning I was uplifted when I considered Morrison’s profound literary legacy to Ohio, America, and the world.