My Literary Hero: Toni Morrison

If there’s a way to process death properly, I’ve never been privy of it. So, whenever it attacks, I tend to fall into a spiral of emotions that sometimes takes days or weeks to process.

A few weeks ago, I laid lazily across my bed pursuing through the digital edition of “O Magazine” on my iPad when I ran across a feature highlighting a new documentary on the life and works of Toni Morrison. Excitement filled me has grabbed my phone and Googled “The Pieces I Am.” As the results populated, I silently prayed that the film would be showing at one theater within driving distance of the Mississippi Delta. To my dismay (but not my surprise), the closest one was at least four hours away. Irritated, I began to troll the documentary’s Facebook page and vented by commenting that the film should show in more cities or Netflix on several posts.

I was in my late teens when I first became introduced the phenomenon that is Morrison. As I finished her first novel, “The Bluest Eye”, I can remember eagerly walking the aisles of the library in search of another book with her name on the binder. Morrison introduced to me a form of writing so sophisticated and genius that it would forever alter my palette for literature. One sentence of her work could be interpreted differently with each read. Some people despise her for it; others, like me, love her. There were moments when I would quickly read a page and have to re-read it because I had failed to comprehend it consciously. Morrison is not for the lazy reader. Anyone who has divulged in her work knows that it requires you to think. She was the epitome of a wordsmith, skillfully placing words together to build eloquent sentences that combined to create compelling stories.

What I loved most about Morrison is that she was unapologetically black. Even when she received the opportunity to become an editor with one of the largest publishers in the country, she stayed true her purpose. Morrison was one of the very first authors to introduce black imagination. Her characters were crafted so profoundly that you could feel each emotion as they experienced them. I will always admire Morrison for that.

I now feel some measure of closure with the passing of this literary shero. Although I did not obtain my goal of meeting her in person, through her work, I have been able to experience her essence in spirit. For that, I am grateful.  

My favorite Toni Morrison quote is an excerpt from her first novel, The Bluest Eye:

 Love (from The Bluest Eye)

“Love is never any better than the lover. 

Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. 

There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. 

The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”

—Toni Morrison