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10 great articles and essays by toni morrison, articles/essays, the site of memory, nobel lecture, rediscovering black history, unspeakable things unspoken, no place for self-pity, no room for feary, can we find paradise on earth, cooking out, what the black woman thinks about women’s lib, on to disneyland and the real unreality, unemcumbered imagination, 15 great essays about writing.

The Source of Self-Regard

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James Baldwin : Collected Essays

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Save $15 when you buy both volumes of the Richard Wright edition in a deluxe boxed set.

Native Son exploded on the American literary scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago’s South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts—including the replacement of an entire scene—that Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared offending their readers. The unexpurgated version of Wright’s electrifying novel shows his determination to write honestly about his controversial protagonist. As he wrote in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” which accompanies the novel: “I became convinced that if I did not write Bigger as I saw and felt him, I’d be acting out of fear.”

This volume also contains Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! , published posthumously in 1963, and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children , which appeared in 1938. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal worker. The text for this edition reinstates Wright’s stylistic experiments, and the novel emerges as a far livelier work of the imagination.

Uncle Tom’s Children first brought Wright to national attention when it received the Story Prize for the best work submitted to the Federal Writers’ Project. The characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks “what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity.” All five stories Wright included in the 1940 second edition are published in this volume, along with his sardonic autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”

Richard Wright was “forged in injustice as a sword is forged,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. With passionate honesty and courage, he confronted the terrible effects of prejudice and intolerance and created works that explore the deepest conflicts of the human heart.

This Library of America edition presents for the first time Wright’s works in the form in which he intended them to be read. The authoritative new texts, based on Wright’s original typescripts and proofs, reveal the full range and power of his achievement as an experimental stylist and as a fiery prophet of the tragic consequences of racism in American society. The volume includes notes on significant changes in Wright’s text and a detailed chronology of his life.

Arnold Rampersad , volume editor, is Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. He has written biographies of Langston Hughes (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Jackie Robinson, and, most recently, Ralph Ellison.

Richard Wright: Early Works is kept in print by a gift from Charles Ackerman to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“With the appearance of the two-volume Richard Wright: Works , published by The Library of America and edited and annotated by Arnold Rampersad, we have a new opportunity to assess Wright’s formidable and lasting contribution to American literature. But this time we have texts intended as the author originally wished them to be read. The works that millions know are, as it turns out, expurged and abbreviated versions of what Wright submitted for publication.” — Charles Johnson, The Chicago Tribune

Buy all three Baldwin volumes and save $42.50.

With such landmark novels as Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room , and the essay collections Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time , James Baldwin established himself as the indispensable literary voice of the Civil Rights era, a figure whose prophetic exploration of the racial and sexual fissures in American society challenged and electrified American readers. But by the late 1960s and ’70s many regarded Baldwin as being out of sync with the political and social currents transforming America: too integrationist for the champions of “Black Power” and others on the Left, yet too “pessimistic” for many white readers. As a result his final three novels— Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979)—have yet to receive the consideration given his earlier fiction. Now, these late novels, carefully annotated to clarify Baldwin’s many musical and other cultural references, are collected for the first time in a single-volume edition, a companion volume to The Library of America’s Early Novels and Stories .

Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone , inspired in part by Baldwin’s unhappy experience collaborating with the Actors Studio for the staging of one of his plays, begins with the sudden heart attack of its thirty-nine-year-old protagonist, the celebrated actor Leo Proudhammer, whose rise to fame from impoverished beginnings in Harlem is recounted as he recuperates. Although wholly fictional, it is a profoundly personal work, as Proudhammer’s conflicted assessment of his life and career mirror Baldwin’s own struggles in the mid-1960s. If Beale Street Could Talk , the only Baldwin novel narrated by a woman, is a love story in which a young couple must weather a false accusation of rape and the predatory misconduct of the police. Baldwin’s final novel, the sprawling Just Above My Head , follows the troubled life and tumultuous times of world-famous gospel singer Arthur Montana; here Baldwin’s continued critical engagement with the African American church and with black music, begun decades earlier with Go Tell It on the Mountain , brings his career full circle.

Darryl Pinckney , editor, is the author of the novel High Cotton (1992) and the critical study Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature (2002). He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , among other publications.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

The stirring and provocative final three novels by the literary voice of the Civil Rights era

“If you wanted a poem,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, “you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.” From the life of Chicago’s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.

“Her formal range,” writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, “is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.” That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry retains its power to move and surprise.

Elizabeth Alexander , editor of this volume, is the author of four books of poems, most recently American Sublime , and the essay collection The Black Interior. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She is a professor at Yale University.

About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

Buy all three Baldwin volumes in a boxed set and save $42.50.

“The civil rights struggle,” said The New York Times Book Review , “found eloquent expression in [Baldwin’s] novels. His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence.

His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.”

Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel.

Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

Toni Morrison , volume editor, was the author of numerous award–winning novels, including Love , Jazz , Song of Solomon , Sula , The Bluest Eye , and Beloved , which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. From 1989 to 2006 she was Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.

James Baldwin: Early Novels and Stories is kept in print by a gift from Frank A. Bennack Jr. to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“James Baldwin’s gift to our literary tradition is that rarest of treasures, a rhetoric of fiction and the essay that is, at once, Henry Jamesian and King Jamesian.” — Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

This landmark two-volume anthology chronicles more than thirty tumultuous years in the African American struggle for freedom and equal rights. Here, in brilliant and inspiring dispatches from some of the finest reporters in the history of American journalism, is a panoramic portrait of the fight to overthrow segregation in the United States. Nearly 200 newspaper and magazine reports, book excerpts, and features by 151 writers—David Halberstam, Carl Rowan, Robert Penn Warren, Gordon Parks, Ralph Ellison, and Anne Moody among them—provide vivid firsthand accounts of all the revolutionary events: the rising activism of the 1940s; the Brown decision; the Montgomery bus boycott; Little Rock; the sit-in movement and Freedom Rides; Birmingham, the March on Washington (August 28, 1963), Freedom Summer, and Selma; and the emergence of “Black Power.”

Each volume contains a detailed chronology of the civil rights movement, biographical profiles of the journalists, notes, an index, and thirty-two pages of photographs, many never before published.

The advisory board for Reporting Civil Rights includes Clayborne Carson , senior editor, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. ; David J. Garrow , Presidential Distinguished Professor, Emory University; Bill Kovach , chairman, Committee of Concerned Journalists; and Carol Polsgrove , professor of journalism, Indiana University.

“If only civil rights were taught this way in our classrooms! Personal narratives, together with gripping newspaper accounts and essays written between 1941 and 1973, make the two-volume Reporting Civil Rights a vital national resource.”— O: The Oprah Magazine

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A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

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Morrison's "Peril" (2009): Overview

“Peril" is a short essay by Toni Morrison published in both The Source of Self-Regard (2019) and Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word (2009). The essay is, in general, a vigorous defense of the freedom of expression of writers in various states of unfreedom, whether from totalitarian regimes or threats of violence or intimidation.  Here, Morrison writes of three different threats that writers pose. First, writers are a threat to authoritarian regimes, which is why, Morrison suggests, even the most foolish of governments know better than to give “perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts.” Indeed, she argues that “writers—journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights,” serve an important dissident function within the social and political landscapes, for they can “disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace”; moreover, writers can “stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to” ( Source of Self-Regard,  1).

However, Morrison makes a notable distinction—what she describes as “their,” the oppressors’ peril, and “ours,” which “is of another sort” (2). She defines this second peril by first reminding us of how “unlivable” and “insufferable” life would be without the richness of great artwork and writers’ capabilities, in particular, to “translate…trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination” (2; 4). As such, “the life and work of writers facing peril” demands urgent protection—not only for their sake, but for society’s as well, for “the choking off of a writer’s work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us” (2). One important theme Morrison brings up here is the capacity of writers to engage in naming:

I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly--a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. there is also mapping, charting, or devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-of-names geography, landscape, or population." (2)

The theme of naming will of course be familiar to readers of many Morrison novels, where her characters' often-ad hoc names contain the seeds of the stories of their lives (one thinks of Baby Suggs' chosen name in Beloved , Milkman's search for his family name in  Song of Solomon,  and many other instances).  Because “truth is trouble” for “the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system,” and a “comatose public”; and, because writers uncircumscribed by the national silencing of their fingers and minds are “trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world’s resources,” we must recognize, Morrison claims, not only the importance of the dissident capabilities of writers, but what their existence, and, more importantly, what their absence, signifies, foreshadows, warns of (2). As Morrison explains,

The historical suppression of writers is earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear sings that something important has taken place. (2) 

This “something,” for Morrison, may cause the “perception of chaos,” to which there are three responses: naming, violence, and stillness (3). Stillness does not have to mean “passivity and dumbfoundedness” or “paralytic fear”; rather, it “can also be art” (3). Morrison emphasizes, then, that the writers who “construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected” (3). In a call-to-arms, Morrison suggests that this protection begin with other writers themselves.       

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Book Reviews

'the source of self-regard' speaks to today's social and political moment.

Ericka Taylor

The Source of Self-Regard

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Even though the essays, speeches, and meditations in Toni Morrison's most recent nonfiction collection were written over the course of four decades, The Source of Self-Regard speaks to today's social and political moment as directly as this morning's headlines.

Morrison turns her penetrating analysis on the mass movement of people across the globe, foreigners and foreignness, and what it means to be "exiled in the place one belongs." She takes on racism — in the media, society, and American literature — and examines how, step by deliberate step, nations move towards "its succubus twin fascism." Devotees should be happy to know that the Nobel laureate also delves into her own artistic process in addition to exploring the work of the painter Romare Bearden, theater director Peter Sellars, and writers ranging from Toni Cade Bambara to Chinua Achebe to Herman Melville. In short, you can expect virtually every entry in the collection, whether it was written in the 1970s or in this century, to feel strikingly relevant today.

Perhaps intentionally, the book's structure helps underscore the timelessness of its pieces since the work is arranged by theme rather than chronology. The first of three parts is "The Foreigner's Home," which concerns itself with the threats of globalization and our unhelpful compulsion to demonize and ostracize the "other." It opens with a moving prayer to those who died on Sept. 11 and, in its haunting power, is reminiscent of Morrison's fiction.

The remaining sections also begin with recognitions of the dead, and a tender, self-reflexive tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. introduces the interlude, "Black Matter(s)." The primary focus on the interlude is the historical and current role of Africanism, a term Morrison uses to refer to white Americans' "collective needs to allay internal fears and rationalize external exploitation... a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire."

A poignant eulogy to novelist and playwright James Baldwin opens the final part of the book, "God's Language." This section illuminates both Morrison's work and the art of others, addresses the inevitability of cross-genre inspiration, and examines the role of the artist in society. It should be noted, however, that the author's central themes are so connected that each spans the entirety of the collection.

Memorials of a sort may begin each of the book's sections, but Morrison ultimately is less concerned with acknowledging the dead than with presenting a call to action for the living. These are not frivolous pieces and Morrison has no interest in addressing mundane topics. As she puts it in "Hard, Lasting, and True," a 2005 lecture at the University of Miami, "I believe it is silly, not to say irresponsible, to concern myself with lipstick... when there is a plague in the land." Throughout the collection, just as in her fiction, Morrison tackles headfirst the weighty issues that have long troubled America's conscience. (Of course, with reports of children sleeping in cages on our southern border, one can certainly argue that the nation's conscience hasn't been troubled nearly enough.)

Some of the strongest entries in the collection challenge the seemingly eternal human compulsion to move towards separation rather than unity, to elevate superficial difference over shared humanity. Words from her 2009 convocation at Oberlin, "Home," reverberate to the present day, as she observes that "[p]orous borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and certain chaos, and whether real or imagined, enforced separation is posited as the solution." Thanks to the breadth of the collection, it's easy to see how this concern has long preoccupied her. At a symposium in 1976, more than 30 years earlier, she argues that racism, sexism, and classicism are born of the same source — "a deplorable inability to project, to become the 'other,' to imagine her or him."

This "intellectual flaw," as Morrison characterizes it, is perhaps most evident in her 1990 lecture, "Black Matter(s)," included in the interlude of the same name. In all honesty, the entire section is profoundly insightful and includes provocative examinations of the black presence in American literature — and a fascinating consideration of Moby-Dick as an allegory for "whiteness idealized." Yet it is the title lecture itself that is particularly compelling as it explores how "the rights of man, an organizing principle upon which the nation was founded, was inevitably, and especially, yoked to Africanism."

Of course, to highlight every notable observation or intriguing thesis would be to write an entire, if smaller, book itself. There are few pages that don't contain sentences that invite repeated reading, because of their stimulating content, and often because of Morrison's trademark lyricism. Is it a collection worth reading? Undoubtedly.

If there are complaints to be made, they are few. For my part, I would have loved the inclusion of "Making America White Again," an essay that appeared in The New Yorker after the 2016 presidential election. I could also imagine that, for some, recurring refrains could have been culled from the collection. (Others, like me, will be less concerned about repetition and will simply appreciate the opportunity to identify trends and preoccupations in Morrison's work.)

That so much of the book is eerily timely doesn't mean that our only response is to mourn our meager progress over the past 40 years. Morrison is anything but hopeless. She reminds us, in "The Future of Time," that:

"[o]ur everyday lives may be laced with tragedy, glazed with frustration and want, but they are also capable of the fierce resistance to the dehumanization and trivialization that politico-cultural punditry and profit-driven media depend upon."

Take those words as encouragement. In various ways throughout the collection she calls on us to do what she knows, what we should all know, is possible: "To lessen suffering, to know the truth and tell it, to raise the bar of humane expectation."

Ericka Taylor is the organizing director for DC Working Families and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Bloom, The Millions, and Willow Springs.

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Stanford Humanities Today

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Toni Morrison remains the most influential theorist of the black past in contemporary letters. Since the publication of Beloved and its companion essay “The Site of Memory” in 1987, Morrison has provided the impetus and vocabulary for those wishing to claim that the past is never past but always present. Indeed, the closest thing to a prevailing method in African American literary criticism could be described as the Morrisonian imperative to read how the past haunts the present, making itself known and felt among the living in ways both explicit and subtle. The field’s current keywords—aftermath, afterlife, repetition, and return—reflect that orientation. Christina Sharpe has gone so far as to describe the object of African American criticism as “the ditto ditto in the archives of the present.” [1]

Ironically, what’s been forgotten in this canonization of the Morrison of 1987 is that she began to formulate her engagement with the black past over a decade earlier, in a project for which she served as editor and makeshift curator of objects. In 1974 Random House brought out a book that Morrison had spent 18 months assembling with four collectors of black memorabilia. Though already a twice-published novelist, Morrison used her status as an influential editor at Random House to see the project through. The result was The Black Book : a 200-page, oversized compendium that conveys the story of African and African-descended people in the New World, from the era of colonization, through the age of chattel slavery, and up to the waning days of Jim Crow. “Conveys” because The Black Book does not offer a textual narrative of events. Instead, it relies on pictures—that is, photographic reproductions of specific objects Morrison culled from her collaborators’ collections—to evoke what Sharpe has called the “total climate” of blacks’ experience of transatlantic slavery and its aftermath. [2] The pictures tell their own story, one that is impressionistic rather than authoritative, fragmentary rather than whole. And that is the point. Unlike books written by academic historians, which tend to ascribe a telos to narratives about the past (i.e., from slavery to freedom), Morrison envisioned her work as a “genuine Black history book—one that simply recollected Black Life as lived.” [3] This notion of recollection—of literally re-collecting and figuratively recollecting “Black history”—is the forgotten materialist basis of what Morrison would famously term “rememory” in 1987.

Though a wide body of scholarship has been built up around Morrison, surprisingly little has been written about The Black Book . The oversight is odd since putting the volume together not only launched Morrison’s theorization of the black past but also introduced her to the source material for her best-known work. A nondescript clipping from the February 1856 issue of the American Baptist relates the story of an enslaved woman, Margaret Garner, who tried to kill her young children rather than have them grow up in bondage. Recounted by the Reverend P. S. Bassett, the episode is didactic, highlighting for a white abolitionist readership the impossible decisions enslaved people were compelled to make between freedom and survival. While this story has long been recognized as the inspiration for Beloved , only the critic Cheryl A. Wall has devoted more than passing attention to its place in The Black Book . Yet even she contends that the clipping’s significance lies in the way it prefigures Beloved ’s imperative to read the past in the present. [4] This despite the fact that the excerpt appears early in the book (page 10), when the reading experience is most disorienting, and is easily missed among two densely packed facing pages of clippings and text. Fifteen independent items—some photo-reproduced from original sources, others quoted and set in uniform type—crowd the layout. Smudges and other errors from the copying process further diminish the readability of the text. In the actual composition of The Black Book , nothing makes Garner’s story stand out, which, again, is the point: it is merely one piece of the dizzying puzzle of history.

What was distinctive about Morrison’s engagement with the black past in 1974? How might a historicist obsession with 1987 obscure what she set out to do in The Black Book ? I take a first step toward answering these questions in what follows. I propose that The Black Book advances a more contingent and discontinuous view of history than the one usually attributed to Morrison. This view, I argue, owes much to the book’s composition, which is pictorial and iconic rather than textual and discursive. By “flattening” history into a series of decontextualized images, The Black Book encourages glossing, skipping pages, reading out of order, and finding meaning only in visual or “surface” resemblances. These (non-)reading practices are further encouraged by the fact that Morrison does not discriminate when it comes to identifying things that evoke the black past. Examples of black ingenuity and perseverance appear alongside those of racial parody and animus, while handcrafted wares and mass-produced commodities vie for attention in the same span of pages, confusing the distinction between folk and market. In short, The Black Book gives one access to the black past only through an inquisitive perusal—an actual looking at things. Accordingly, its view of history is premised on an awareness that readers’ grounding in the present is far from certain. Not everyone can or will want to engage The Black Book ’s arrangement of things. What matters for Morrison, here and in her work to come, is not the fact of recovery but the question of how one re-collects the past at all.

The first thing to note about The Black Book is that it’s chock-full of text. Captions and explanatory notes appear underneath or alongside most pictures. Several types of documents—letters, certificates, applications—naturally feature handwritten or printed text. And newspaper clippings and other text-heavy ephemera take up a lot of space in the book, especially early on. Still, I would maintain that The Black Book ’s composition is essentially pictorial insofar as it decouples “understanding” the text from reading it closely. Morrison lends meaning to any given thing by how she associates it with other things—on a single page, over facing pages, or across successive pages. Think of it like reading a museum catalog: the point is to get the gist of its visual organization, not to linger over every word.

At a pictorial level, certain layouts in The Black Book give a fairly coherent impression of the meaning behind the assembled artifacts. One facing-page layout, for example, combines the following: five fugitive slave ads printed in 1790; two undated classifieds, likely from the mid-1800s; W. H. Siebert’s 1896 historical map “‘Underground’ Routes to Canada”; Samuel Rowse’s 1850 lithograph The Resurrection of Henry Box Brown at Philadelphia ; and an 1857 letter from William Brinkl[e]y, one of Harriet Tubman’s associates in Delaware. All of these things appear under the bold heading “I rode a railroad that had no track. ” [5] True, the individual pictures are decontextualized (supporting information on the lithograph and Brinkley do not appear in The Black Book ), with only Brown’s fugitive plot given an explanatory note. Still, the layout’s overall composition conveys the resolve and resourcefulness of fugitives from slavery as they ran toward freedom, as well as the desperate efforts of white enslavers to retrieve them. Sides are drawn, sympathies are channeled, and the “goal,” Canada, is clearly delineated. In this way, Morrison’s things not only document something called the Underground Railroad; they also evoke, in the present tense, what it would have meant and felt like for an enslaved person to take flight.

Yet the coherence of this particular display is a rarity in The Black Book . Discordant juxtapositions are far more common, such that any impression of historical perspective is immediately undercut with confounding, contingent details. One page, for example, has a small photograph that shows a black woman holding a white infant in her lap. The original caption reads “Slave and Friend.” But printed next to this image are lyrics for “All the Pretty Little Horses,” and underneath both is Morrison’s clarification that the song is “an authentic slave lullaby [that] reveals the bitter feelings of Negro mothers who had to watch over their white charges while neglecting their own children.” Trying to exert a measure of control over the artifact and its description, Morrison inserts another artifact whose narrativization is supposed to guide the reader toward a “correct” reading of the image. Yet the page’s pictorial composition is irreducible to that gesture, for underneath this tableau are antebellum newspaper clippings addressing black westward expansion (one from the New York Tribune , the other from the Liberator ) and a maniculed notice prohibiting “the employment of free colored persons on water-craft navigating the rivers of [Arkansas].” [6] What these artifacts have to do with each other from a historical perspective is a mystery. But their visual organization does elicit wonderfully weird associations, as one might detect between the white baby’s hand (clasped over the black woman’s) and the indexical manicule.

This narratively incoherent but visually abundant mélange is not just a function of single-page compositions. It can be seen in facing-page layouts, as when a handwritten letter by Frederick Douglass defending his right to marry “a lady a few shades lighter in complexion than [himself]” appears directly opposite ledgers that list the human property of black enslaver John C. Stanley. It can be seen in successive pages, as is the case with the 16-page color insert, where minstrel-inspired advertising for commodities such as soap and baking powder gives way to photographs of the folk art and handiwork of enslaved people. And, perhaps most spectacularly, it can be seen on the front cover of the book itself (Figure 1): a riot of color and black-and-white images—36 in all—that practically asks (or begs) the question, What is this “black” in The Black Book ? [7]

In earlier versions of this essay, I was tempted to read such confounding pictorial juxtapositions against the grain of Morrison’s intentions for the project. I assumed she had gathered these different things to make them useful to the present, only to find that their recombination failed to do so. I now think this reading is a mistake, an imposition of the way critics historicize Morrison circa 1987 onto her earlier, far more experimental, engagement with the black past. I now believe that the contingency and discontinuity of The Black Book —in short, its refusal to make a teleological narrative available to readers—is its raison d’être . Morrison was well aware that many of the things she had gathered from collections would perplex readers. But rather than force these artifacts into a historical arc, she made their achronicity, or their out-of-timeness, a feature of the book itself. How else can one explain its strange juxtapositions? They were by design, not some unintended consequence of a historicist project.

Morrison said as much in her contemporaneous essays on the project. In them she identified at least two ways in which her work departed from academic historiography. First, it questioned the ideological limitations of historians’ primary research site: the archive. The problem with conventional histories, Morrison implied, was that they were bound to the legitimizing procedures of institutional archives. As such, histories that relied on archives would inevitably reflect the interests and concerns of the powerful, or those deemed worthy of having their effects saved for posterity. By contrast, Morrison wanted The Black Book to give voice to the masses, or “people who had always been viewed only as percentages.” To do that, she turned her attention from scholars to collectors—that is, “people who had the original raw material documenting our life: posters, letters, newspapers, advertising cards, sheet music, photographs, movie frames, books, artifacts and mementos.” Collectors Middleton “Spike” Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith were respected keepers of such “raw material,” and so they became her preferred entry point into the black past. Morrison paid her collaborators the highest compliment she could think of when she said all four possessed “an intense love for black expression and a zest wholly free of academic careerism.” [8]

The second way Morrison departs from historiography followed from the first. By operating at the margins of institutional legitimation, collectors risked being cut off from institutional recognition. It was debatable whether collectors had a legitimate claim to history at all. Doesn’t The Black Book ultimately only reflect what four collectors of varying interests and dispositions had made available to Morrison? The volume’s most outspoken critic, cultural nationalist Kalamu Ya Salaam, made a similar point when he complained, “[T]o throw all of these images and documents together without a text to explain the meaning, context and original intent does not serve to help us truely [sic] understand what our history, our real history of struggle is about.” [9] Yet Morrison would have welcomed the idea that Salaam did not glean “history,” much less a “history of struggle,” from her book. Historians, Morrison wrote, “habitually leave out life lived by everyday people”; in their writing, they seemed more concerned with “defend[ing] a new idea or destroy[ing] and old one.” [10] She wanted The Black Book to convey something messier, murkier, less institutionally recognized about the black experience in the New World. Rather than a history, she aimed to put together a work of memory.

This goal helps explain The Black Book ’s artifactual resemblance to a scrapbook. Although the print-heavy layout does suggest a catalog, the variety of pictorial forms—iconic, indexical, textual, and otherwise—makes the volume reminiscent of a collection of ephemera. This perception is lent further credence by the book’s introduction, in which none other than Bill Cosby muses:

Suppose a three-hundred-year-old black man had decided, oh, say when he was about ten, to keep a scrapbook—a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would keep newspaper articles that interested him, old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks, and posters—all sorts of stuff.

“No such man kept such a book,” Cosby observes, before adding, wryly, “But it’s okay—because it’s here, anyway.” [11] As if passed down through time by a mythic ancestor, The Black Book arrives in the contemporary reader’s hands like an anonymous scrapbook. It contains remnants that are random, ephemeral, incomplete—and, precisely because of that, it comes as close as possible to documenting “Black Life as lived.” The illusion being broached here is that of ordinary remembering, or everyday recollection. A scrapbook is indifferent to the sweeps and arcs (much less teloses) of capital “H” history. All it does is keep what an amateur historian decides to set down as worthy of recalling in the moment of composition. This is why when we “read” a scrapbook, we approach it not as a bird’s-eye chronicle but as what Pierre Nora has called a “site of memory” ( lieu de mémoire ). [12]

Morrison’s commitment to ordinary remembering is so thoroughgoing that her name appears nowhere on or in The Black Book . The collectors are credited with putting the book together, but even their names are absented from the cover. This is by design, of course, as it supports the illusion that the volume is authorless, the product of a collective mythos rather than a single guiding hand. The one decidedly personal indulgence Morrison allows herself is to insert an oval-shaped, black-and-white portrait of her mother, Ramah Wofford, on the front cover and in an illustrated tableau of anonymous subjects’ portraits. [13] Nothing calls attention to her mother’s figure in either of these locations, or indeed to the fact that it is the ghost editor’s mother. Though she stares out at the reader, so do a number of the other figures among whom she is clustered. Thus, Wofford blends into the composition as just another picture in the collection. She is one memory among many.

Since 1987, critics have interpreted Morrisonian memory, or rememory, as Beloved terms it, as a charge to read the past in the present. The ethos of such criticism presumes a standpoint that can identify how contemporary circumstances are but an extension, or repetitive realization, of the past. Yet, having traced Morrison’s theorization of memory back to The Black Book , I think this is only a partially correct reading of her work. Morrison did believe in something like collective memory, a sense of the past that bound people to one another in the present. But she consistently refused an absolute knowledge of the past, one that confirms what we believe we already know (Sharpe’s ditto ditto, for example). Instead, Morrison supposed that people could access collective memory only through fragments, traces, the detritus and hauntings of history. This stuff, for Morrison, possessed its own historical weight and was not assimilable to confident determinations of the past. In making The Black Book , her intention was not to integrate readers into a discourse of “their history” but to confront them with buried memories—things in which they might not even recognize themselves. [14]

It may be fitting that, as I revised this essay for publication, The Black Book went out of and came back into print. The original 1974 edition had long been out of print, but the 2009 35th anniversary edition followed course in the late 2010s. That second disappearance turned The Black Book into something like one of the things it reproduces—a relic of the past, a memory among other memories. For a period, copies of the 2009 edition cost upwards of $150, and as much as $2,500, from online and antiquarian booksellers. Yet The Black Book ’s obsolescence was short-lived. With the passing of Morrison in 2018 there came renewed demand for her work, including this long-overlooked book.

The most recent edition (2019) is an artifact of our times. An image of the original cover, showing noticeable shelfwear, is set within a gray frame. The look approximates a well-worn family photo, as if the book itself is being memorialized. Morrison’s name appears front and top-center, her behind-the-scenes work on the project now highlighted in yellow. Yet there is one element that is ghosted from the previous editions: Bill Cosby’s introduction. The reasons for this are obvious, even though the exclusion is unannounced in the text. That the change was made at all—silently, posthumously—confirms Morrison’s intuition that history is not ditto ditto but contingent and discontinuous. Reading The Black Book today is not the same as reading it in 1974, and that is the abiding point.

[1] Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 82. Sharpe’s application of “ditto ditto” to the concept of the archive is adapted from her reading of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008).

[2] Sharpe, 104-5.

[3] Toni Morrison, “Behind the Making of The Black Book ,” Black World , February 1974, 89.

[4] Cheryl A. Wall, “Reading The Black Book : Between the Lines of History,” Arizona Quarterly 68, no. 4 (2012): 105-30.

[5] Middleton Harris, et al., The Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974), 68-69.

[6] Ibid., 65.

[7] Ibid., 24-25, 89-104, front cover. The last part of this paragraph riffs on Stuart Hall’s field-shaping essay, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Black Popular Culture , ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 21-33.

[8] Toni Morrison, “Rediscovering Black History,” New York Times Book Review , August 11, 1974, 16.

[9] Kalamu ya Salaam, review of The Black Book , by Middleton Harris, et al., Black Books Bulletin 3, no. 1 (1975): 73.

[10] Morrison, “Behind,” 88.

[11] Bill Cosby, “Introduction,” in The Black Book , v.

[12] Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations no. 26 (1989): 7-24. The subtitle of my essay, and the distinction between history and memory I draw on here, is indebted to this piece.

[13] Harris, front cover, 196-97.

[14] This point about (non-)recognition echoes Christopher Freeburg’s analysis of The Black Book as fostering a “personalized and contingent” black interiority rather than subjecting readers to a predetermined historical script. Christopher Freeburg, Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 130.

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Thing Theory in Literary Studies

Sarah Wasserman

Patrick Moran

That things capture our imagination is hardly news. As Andrew Cole wrote in a 2016 issue of October , "materialism is as old as the hills." Cole claims that new approaches to studying things allow us to find similarities where we have too often found difference, and that this method dates back at least to Hegel and Marx. The study of matter has proceeded under a number of names: dialectical materialism, material culture studies, and, more recently, vibrant materialism, and object-oriented ontology. The scope of such studies has likewise been expansive, ranging from the sub-atomic to the galactic, from Lucretius to Latour.

Nevertheless, "thing theory," a term that loosely bundles together a range of approaches to studying material culture, began to gain critical traction in literature departments in the early 2000s. It gave many literary scholars a new way of looking at old things. For some this included tracing the material histories of objects within books (Elaine Freedgood and John Plotz) or tracing the history of the book as material object (Leah Price and Peter Stallybrass). For others, it meant pondering the ways that language and narrative reorganize subject-object relations in the minds of readers (Bill Brown and Allan Hepburn). Not simply a way of tracking the fate of snuffboxes, stamp collections, and kaleidoscopes, thing theory allowed scholars to consider what our relationships to these items reveal.

By now, thing theory may seem to name an academic trend long past, but the expansion of object studies and various post-humanisms across disciplines suggests that it remains as relevant as ever. Many of the most urgent problems of the twenty-first century reveal an entanglement between humans and things. Climate change, biotechnology, intellectual property, drought and famine, even terrorism and war can hardly be discussed without addressing such entanglement. Recent work in affect theory, animal studies, and the environmental humanities (to name just a few contemporary approaches) shares a commitment to thinking of the human subject alongside the object world. This commitment produces deeply interdisciplinary work. Reading the objects in literature and the object of literature has always involved attention to modes of production, consumption, and perception. Earlier work in thing theory and literary studies borrowed methods from anthropology, archeology, and art history; now these disciplines are borrowing back. Anthropologists such as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing ( The Mushroom at the End of the World , 2015) and Kristin Peterson ( Speculative Markets , 2014), art historians like Caroline A. Jones ( The Global Work of Art , 2017) and Jennifer Roberts ( Transporting Visions , 2014) and media archeologists like Johanna Drucker ( Graphesis , 2014) and John Durham Peters ( The Marvelous Clouds , 2015) provide rigorous accounts of materiality; they also attend to the narrative, meaning-making capacities of that materiality.

This Colloquy highlights innovative work situated at the intersection of literary and material culture studies. Weaving together insights from different periods and different disciplines, the scholars whose work is presented here study the particularity of things in order to address larger concerns. Literary things can make human desires, narrative forms, historical contexts, and patterns of circulation legible. New methods and approaches may be taking shape; the thing endures. But as scholars of the Anthropocene have made clear, just how long some of our most precious objects can endure still depends upon human stewardship or disregard. Thinking about the agency of things alongside our own has raised a series of ontological concerns that cross disciplinary boundaries. But literature, which can interrogate things as they are and as they might be, has the capacity to point in new directions. Many questions animate the conversation assembled here: what does it mean to "read" an object across disciplinary perspectives?  How do literary movements (i.e. realism, postmodernism) and literary periods (i.e. Victorian, twentieth-century) stage things differently? Does thing theory entail close or surface reading: what is its relationship to post-critical methods and the descriptive turn? Can thing theory grant us access to narratives of exclusion, marginalization, and subjugation that might otherwise remain invisible? Is there an ethical or political danger in dissolving the subject-object divide? Where can the thing lead us today? What stories does it have left to tell? 

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My Colloquies are evolving: Once you have created a Colloquy, you can continue adding to it as you browse Arcade.

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A Brutal—and True—Piece of Writing Advice from Toni Morrison

A. j. verdelle recalls a memorable q&a with an iconic writer.

The very first time I saw Toni Morrison in person was at an event in Boston, at a church, along with hundreds of people. The Beloved tour. I attended as a reader, as a Morrison fan. I’d had plenty of reader-only experience with books, but I knew next to nothing formal about writing then. Reading as a writer is a higher calling, and a whole different world. I had no writing tools at the time, though I did have some facility; I loved words—but the tools you need to write stack up and can be complicated. I could identify and define imagination, but I did not know the concepts of setting or drama or scene. I knew that language was critical, but how few words I knew then! I was hungry, eager, reaching—but I was ignorant of exactly what writers needed to know and do.

I was working as a statistician in the social sciences at the time. I consulted with clients who needed numbers turned into measurable questions. We’d create the questions, collect the data, and then turn those numbers back into words. I liked my work sufficiently, but I was a writer in corporate dress.

The Boston church was large, a fairly cavernous sanctuary, and packed. My awed memory estimates eight hundred in attendance. People sat close together, many of them women, with their pictureless copies of Beloved clutched in their hands, sometimes held to their hearts. Microphones waited vacantly for Morrison to complete her presentation, invitations at the top of aisles for the coming Q&A. While Morrison read, but for the sanctuary carpet, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.

Beloved is a difficult read, especially the first time. The novel had not been out long by that evening. This was before it had been widely read, or deeply discussed, or passed from hand to hand, or canonized. Not having yet read it, we were mostly mystified by what the novel laid bare, but mesmerized by the woman who stood before us, who—the reviews of Beloved told us—had created yet another powerful, riveting narrative meditation on the depths and pressures of our American experience.

From her earlier novels, we knew that Toni Morrison put Black women in novels in gowns and crowns, with lithe flexibility, with the most nuanced and frenetic lives. Morrison wrote about Black women as if we were real, and important, and conflicted, and brainy, and righteous, and determined, and unafraid of running off. Beloved flowed from the ascendant to the enraged to the elegiac to the frightening to the rueful to the anticipated to the outraged to the treacherous; from past to future, through the netherworld.

The past was Morrison’s landscape. Though we lived in the present tense, we were the future of the past. She gave us our history without sugar or disdain, and through her work, we watched ourselves struggle and survive. She did use pretty language, but pretty is not sugar; her words lean—tough, pointed, and sometimes mean. You were caught when you read Morrison. It was impossible to read and look away.

Back there, back then, in Boston, the book I held in my hand in that sanctuary positively shook with mystery. Long before the event, I had loaned my copy to an old friend who also attended that day; she had wanted to read the book right away. Because I knew I needed the time and space to work with the novel, I had agreed, but I insisted that she not wreck my copy, especially not the dust jacket. A clean, intact dust jacket gives a hardcover value over time. My silly friend took the dust jacket off to protect the dust jacket—per my instructions, she said—and then sullied the actual cloth cover of the book with lipstick and cereal, both unhealthy substances for books. My friend was alarmed by my alarm. “You said the dust jacket needed to be clean!” she said. “I kept the dust jacket clean!”

In time, in life, you learn that you have to be specific, explicit, sometimes almost stupidly blunt. Or, you have to not lend people books. I lend books. I want people to read. My library is a thousand books deep. Too much power there to be selfish and grabby. However, to be clear, the dust jacket is important to a hardcover book’s value over time. A hardcover without a dust jacket may as well be an airport paperback. That said, the book under the dust jacket should be kept clean, too. Liquids and lipstick are bad for books. I hold esteem for books.

Morrison read from the novel with her husky voice and Black woman’s authority. She was an author among us, a higher-up, a guiding light. Many of us in attendance had read her other books; that was how I knew I was going to need time with this one. The passage she read from Beloved that day did not disabuse me of that notion. Even if we’ve never read a book in our lives, every one of us has a read on slavery. Morrison’s manner of spearing history with her sharpened pencil in previous books made me know I’d likely be slayed by Beloved and that the time for that would need to be carefully arranged. I was in no rush.

During the Q&A, one young woman made her way to the microphone to ask one of the earliest questions. She might have been the first in line, with the first question. In my memory, she rushed her speech; she may have been breathlessly waiting. She described her interest in writing, her aspirations, and her failure to accomplish the fiction she aimed for. She described her struggle with making her stories “just right.” Likely trying to be succinct and yet communicate directly with the greatest of writers, she sounded hurried, even as she sought direction. She then joined the rest of us in silence, to hear what Morrison advised.

“Well, it sounds like you don’t know what you’re doing,” Morrison began.

Quiet in the sanctuary. I drew in my breath. The huge audience almost gasped in unison. I remember the hiccup of my own heartbeat; the whole scene went instantly wavy before my eyes.

My anxiety pounded in my ears, which made hearing hard. My embarrassment for her echoed and bounced around the chambers of my mind.

I empathized: I understood not knowing what to do. But I would not have asked the great Ms. Morrison such a question—so nakedly personal, and too particular to be answerable, really. Especially over the heads of hundreds. And in front of God and everybody. And in such a public space. And when the great writer was expecting to be asked about her own masterful novel—just published, just read from, the whole reason for the tour.

Narcissism can cause mistakes. What could Toni Morrison possibly know about that woman’s struggles with her own blank page? Not knowing the definition of complete self-absorption can make you foolish in the context of community. The young woman might have obtained a different or better response if she had asked a writing question about the author’s work. She could have asked about her own writing under cover:

Ms. Morrison, how do you make the impossible believable?

Ms. Morrison, how do you get your characters so tied to the invented place?

Ms. Morrison, what are the best strategies for research?

Or, even, What writing suggestions do you have for an aspiring writer, for a dreamer like me?

I slid down, trying to hide, mortified and wanting to be invisible for the young woman who had asked the ill-considered question. The spirit in me, the spunkette, the woman who wanted to know what Toni Morrison did and thought, harbored a hungry curiosity over how this would turn out, but I couldn’t help but dream of a hole opening up to swallow the awkwardness.

You don’t know what you’re doing . Morrison did say this aloud.

I don’t , I thought to myself, as if this were my conversation. You’re right. I have no idea what I’m doing. What am I even thinking?

Who did that reaching aspiring writer think she was? To be so personal, publicly? Showing all she didn’t know? And now likely having to slink back to her seat in that crowded church, having been told off or, more benevolently, told to practice and learn— and by Toni Morrison . This was a public event, so, relatively quickly, the line for the microphone shifted. The aspiring writer left the mic; I could not see the exit well. Maybe the questioner walked straight out the sanctuary doors. That is what I might have done.

I, too, worried about whether I understood the terms of writing. I had not yet begun to write seriously or in form. I had pages of words, observations of my little travels, my tiny thoughts. Occasional poems. But books and long stories need shape and scaffolding. It takes knowledge, experience, study, apprenticeship. It takes architecture.

This young woman needed the basics. Morrison continued, pointing her, and us, toward some fundamentals:

You need to study what writing requires . And:

Writing has rules, conventions, requirements. There is form . And:

Writing is more than your thoughts about characters. Drama has structure. You can learn.

That nameless young woman who had scurried to be first at the mic prepared me for what I did not know my future would bring: stinging quips and side-eye admonishment from the greatest living writer. All these years, Morrison’s first spoken sentence (from the first time I remember seeing her), her whip of a reply, has stayed with me. In that huge sanctuary, I felt personally stung, even if only empathetically.

You don’t know what you’re doing . Yes, this is true.

Yowzah and ouch!

__________________________________

Excerpted from Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison by A. J. Verdelle. Published by Amistad. Copyright © 2022 HarperCollins.

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Lessons on Black Art Writing From Toni Morrison

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She had just died, and I couldn’t stop looking at a photograph of her. She held me there: in her Random House office in 1974, outstretched arms, open palms, eyes cast upwards, mouth widening into a shape of jubilation. I do not know what she is reacting to in the picture, but I still can’t get over the way that ecstasy gathers on her face. My gaze cannot let go, for I am committed to looking at her with the kind of uncompromising affection with which she looked at Black life.

Five years ago, I was arrested by that image of Toni Morrison, captured by photographer Jill Krementz. She had passed the night before on August 5. We were all learning of her death the morning after, and a hollowness was growing in my stomach as the reality set in that there would be no more pages unfurling from the wideness of her imagination, no more of her pen loving and lingering on Black life in the way she did.

I return to Morrison’s writings — novels and non-fiction alike — several times a year. With each encounter, she gives me a new set of eyes and imbues my sight with deeper shades of Blackness. Morrison is salient always, but particularly so when I am looking. And looking is among the principal investments in my life as a writer responding to and thinking alongside artworks — for the most part, artworks by artists of the Black diaspora.

Almost a year after Morrison’s death, in that 2020 summer convulsing with Black protests and elegies, after the unrelenting tides of anti-Blackness had once again swelled with death and then with the futile promises of White guilt, a video of the writer — clipped from a 1998 interview with Charlie Rose — began circulating widely on the internet. She is majestic in leopard print as she speaks about how White people see — or cannot see — her writing. Rose had asked Morrison to respond (again) to a question that Bill Moyers had asked in an interview in 1990: Would she ever write a book that didn’t center Black people? Morrison had answered Moyers with a surefire “absolutely.” She elaborates in her interview with Rose that the problem was not that she couldn’t write such a book but rather Moyers’s question itself, for it was asked “as though our lives have no meaning and no depth without the White gaze.” Morrison goes on, emphasizing each word with a gesticulating hand: “And I have spent my entire writing life trying to make sure the White gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.”

For that commitment, we can only be in excess of gratitude.

Morrison reminds all of us who are Black, reminds those of us who look and write in this art world — which, no matter how much it insists otherwise, remains almost preternaturally attached to the proclivities and demands of White people and institutions — of our responsibility. Namely, to dwell in Black visions, to give ourselves over to them entirely, and to do so in language that does not ask for permission or plead for understanding. The beating heart of conventional art writing — often delimited to interpretation and judgment — must take on a different rhythm if it is to take this charge seriously. By this, I do not mean that Black art writing should abandon critique. Rather, I mean that we ought to keep getting swept up in the complexity of the art and the vision, in the places where it intransigently resists interpretation, in the way that it moves and torques, and in the feeling of words dancing with it; that we heed its call for winding, wayward sentences that are often accused of being too poetic, as Morrison’s own writing often was. I relish this accusation.

In The Bluest Eye (1970) — Morrison’s book about gazes and a Black girl’s desire for a White girl’s blue eyes — Pecola Breedlove, the girl with black and “tight, tight eyes,” encounters a racist shopkeeper who refuses to fully see her. “Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover … he senses that he does not need to waste the effort of a glance,” Morrison writes. “He does not see her because there is nothing to see.”

There are no conditions for recognition in the shopkeeper’s gaze. So Morrison dedicates the entirety of The Bluest Eye to recognizing Pecola. If the shopkeeper rescinds his gaze, Morrison extends hers with full and attentive generosity, devotedly stretches it out over the expanse of Black life. She deals with it all — with the beauty and the poetry but also with Pecola Breedlove’s supposed ugliness, with Sethe’s ghosts in Beloved (1987), with the general accretion of hurt and violence that bleeds from her pages. Her principal endeavor is not to render an expression of these worlds that agrees with any judgment of the beautiful, but instead, to witness them.

This is also the work of Black art writing: to generate and expand the conditions wherein words can witness images and their makers, and we can witness one another, with completeness. The task is all the more urgent now, as the jaws of the art world voraciously consume Black art and aesthetics while holding the disturbed and bruised flesh of its underbelly at bay, and continuing to exclude people like Pecola. This kind of constrained hunger is accompanied by a gaze different from that of the shopkeeper who could not even glance at Pecola. But it is certainly not, in my view, a gaze that witnesses Black art in its depth and entirety.

Morrison’s literature was animated by her burning desire to give Blackness wings, to chart its path of flight from the asphyxiating hold of the White imagination, to look at Blackness in the places where it stands in this freedom. There is no shortage of what we can learn from her solicitude as we seek to narrativize visual forms that have been brought into the world by Black hands.

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Zoë Hopkins

Zoë Hopkins studies Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art. More by Zoë Hopkins

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Well done Praise be! Lest we forget bell hooks’ advice about Black art writing also.

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• Toni Morrison: Essays Summary

by Toni Morrison

These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own.

Written by Timothy Sexton

“Clinton as the First Black President”

First published in New Yorker magazine, this essay was motivated by Morrison having taken an extended hiatus from watching or listening to the news. Her return coincided with the Monica Lewinsky scandal, prompting Morrison to wonder how this could be such enormous news considering the past transgressions for former Presidents. Her conclusion is that it was the degradation and humiliation the scandal offered on a platter to his opponents, thus stimulating her titular contention Bill Clinton “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

“On the Backs of Blacks”

Published in Time Magazine , this essay references an obscure Elia Kazan film chronicling the history of his Greek ancestry immigrating to America as an accessible example of the way that the denigration of blacks was instrumental in the assimilation of white Europeans coming to America.

“Rediscovering Black History”

New York Times Magazine published this essay in 1974 resulting from an awakening of national consciousness—of sorts—about the seemingly inherent racism in the portrayal of black stereotypes over the past century. Morrison takes a decidedly contrarian view toward actions ranging from the removal of black lawn jockeys to banning book about Little Black Sambo. Her argument is that removal accomplishes nothing whereas informing white society and exposing new generations of black children on the contributions to culture and entertainment represented by these elements would be far more fruitful.

“Memory, Creation and Writing”

Morrison crafted an essay for publication in Thought: A Review of Culture and Idea on the subject of her own goals and desires for how readers respond to her writing. The central goal at work is Morrison’s railing against passive consumption of literature in preference for a more active engagement with it on a level outside the literary one.

“Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in America Literature”

This expansive essay stretches across thirty-four pages in the Michigan Quarterly Review . It is a broad-based—yet highly specific—analysis of where African-American literature fits into the official canon of American fiction, whether there is anything fundamentally recognizable as “black literature” and whether that canon is one which embraces ethnic literature or separates such literature in order to maintain the “protected reserve” of the narrative of white society.

“Black Matters”

This essay began as a lecture delivered by Morrison in 1990, one year after the publication of “Unspeakable Things” and takes up much the same subject. Reduced in length and narrowed in focus, the subject here is a critique of the lack of African-American writing in the official canon of American literature.

“The Dead of September 11”

Vanity Fair published a special commemorative edition two months after the tragic events of the 9/11 terrorist assault on American. Morrison’s contribution was this unusual essay in which she confronts the challenge of trying to directly address the dead in language neutral way since the victims represent cultures and ethnicities from all around the globe.

“A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say) Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say)”

The world as it existed in 1976 is the context for this essay published in New York Times Magazin e. The kicking off point is predictions made by Ardelia (Morrison’s grandmother) and John (her grandfather) over the future of race relations in America. John speaks from the experience of being swindled out of his property and forced to barely make ends meet working as a carpenter while Ardelia’s prescience is informed by a strong religious belief and deep-seated faith. John sees no hope whatever for American ever being a just place for blacks to live. While admitting the movement has been slow, Ardelia’s prediction for the future is more optimistic on the basis of having already seen incremental progress.

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Toni Morrison: Essays Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Toni Morrison: Essays is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

The downtown streets are wide and empty except for some glamorous people coming out of a hotel. They make Twyla feel tired. She decides to stop in at a small diner for a cup of coffee and a few minutes of peace before going home and getting things...

Toni Morrison

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Study Guide for Toni Morrison: Essays

Toni Morrison: Essays study guide contains a biography of Toni Morrison, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Toni Morrison: Essays
• Character List

Essays for Toni Morrison: Essays

Toni Morrison: Essays essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Toni Morrison: Essays by Toni Morrison.

• Comparison of “Harlem” and Toni Morrison’s “Sweetness” on Systemic Racism
• Toni Morrison's Work Ethic in "The Work You Do, the Person You Are"

Notes on Writing a Novel from "God's Language" by Toni Morrison

Toni morrison's brainstorming process as laid out in the beginning of her essay "god's language".

All the time I am ruminating on these things I am not searching for a theme or a novelistic subject; I am just wondering. Most of this wondering is wandering, and disappears sooner or later. But occasionally, within or among these wanderings, a larger question poses itself. I don’t write it or my musings down because to do so would give them a gravity they may not deserve. I need to be or feel pursued by the question in order to be convinced that the further exploration is bookworthy. When that happens, at some point a scene or a bit of language arrives. It seems to me a waste of valuable time to sketch or record that when, if it is interesting enough to embellish, I could be tracking it by actually turning it directly into a fictional formulation. If I learn that I am wrong about its staying power or its fertility, I can always throw it away. So I get out of the yellow legal pad and see what happens. —Toni Morrison, “God’s Language,” from The Source of Self-Regard, pg. 247

Start with an image, an incident, a remark, or an impression that provokes a recurring curiosity.

Let these images, incidents, remarks, or impressions lead to questions and let these questions lead to larger, more nuanced questions.

In other words, begin to wonder and allow your wondering to transform into wandering. Wander alone in “a pasture of thought” 1 for a while: study the sky; smell the flowers; look for the animals. 

Once a larger question appears like a fox in the pasture of thought, let it pursue, hunt, stalk—but do not feed it.

Feeling “pursued” by the question is key to being convinced of a project being bookworthy.

Ask yourself: Does the question need to be answered in a novel? Can it be answered in a novella or a short story or an essay or a poem?

If the question persists, then pull out a notebook and write from any images and/or scenes to see if these images will “wax or wane, yield or implode,” 2 or, in other words, if the idea will be fruitful.

Thanks for reading Little Secrets! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a phrase lifted from Amina Cain’s A Horse at Night: On Writing

This is a phrase lifted from Toni Morrison’s “God’s Language” from her book The Source of Self-Regard .

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The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations Kindle Edition

• Print length 369 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Vintage
• Publication date February 12, 2019
• File size 2289 KB
• Page Flip Enabled
• Word Wise Enabled
• Enhanced typesetting Enabled
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Editorial Reviews

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07D246D25
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage (February 12, 2019)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 12, 2019
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 2289 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 369 pages
• #37 in Letters & Correspondence
• #41 in Literary Speeches
• #132 in American Literature Anthologies

About the author

Toni morrison.

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of several novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize. She is the Robert F. Goheen Professor at Princeton University.

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Customers find the writing style beautiful and enlightening. They also say the content is deep to the soul.

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"...Intellectually profound as well as delightful in the artistry which stitches these essays together. Easily a five star rating." Read more

"An uneven read for me so a little disappointing. Some of the essays were brilliant and what I had looked forward to...." Read more

"...continues to guide and enlighten through the use of creative yet precise language ...." Read more

"i’ve sat on this review for weeks now. there’s no simpleness to this text and thus there should be no simple ways to express how bitingly..." Read more

Customers find the book very enlightening, profound, and spiritually centered. They also say the author is learned, poetic, and an important interlocutor.

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More States Are Passing Book Banning Rules. Here’s What They Say.

Discussion about what books children should access has diminished on the national stage. But most rules pertaining to schools and libraries are made at the state and local level.

By Elizabeth A. Harris

While the effort to restrict access to books has been getting somewhat less attention on the national stage, it remains a potent issue on the state and local level, where most decisions about schools and libraries are made.

Over the past few weeks, new laws or regulations have gone into effect in Utah, Idaho, South Carolina and Tennessee that will make it more difficult for young people to access books and library materials that could be considered obscene or harmful.

Proponents say these rules are necessary to protect children from encountering sensitive topics, like sexual content, sexual violence or graphic depictions of nudity, on their own. Detractors say these rules make it difficult for students to view a range of books, including those that reflect real world experiences and some classics with more mature themes that have long been taught in high schools.

Here’s what to know about the new state rules:

An amendment to an existing law that went into effect on July 1 aims to “identify and remove pornographic or indecent material” from school classrooms and libraries. This includes any book or other classroom or library material that includes descriptions of sex or masturbation.

Traditionally, schools have been allowed to take into consideration whether a book has artistic merit or would be otherwise valuable to students. “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison, for example, has been challenged repeatedly around the country, but is widely considered to a be masterpiece. The new law explicitly addresses this question, saying that local education agencies, which includes school boards and the governing boards of charter schools, should prioritize “protecting children from the harmful effects of illicit pornography over other considerations.”

Under the law, each local education agency must tell the state whenever it removes material from circulation. If the same material is removed by three school districts — or two school districts and five charter schools — the Utah State Board of Education will order it to be removed statewide.

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