Toni Morrison’s novels elicit powerful feelings of fear, grief, and anger.
Friends and colleagues at the College of New Jersey, Bennett (Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts, 2014, etc.), Brown-Glaude (Higglers in Kingston: Women’s Informal Work in Jamaica, 2011, etc.), Jackson (Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body, 2010, etc.), and Williams (co-editor: Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, 2012) gathered informally for several years to discuss the novels of the iconic Nobel laureate: “Morrison is our griot, a singer and social commentator, the keeper of traditions and the exemplary engaged citizen of our world.” Black and white, three women and one man, all parents anxious about their children’s futures, they discovered that Morrison’s works spoke to each of them directly, helping them to understand what it means to be black in America and to “live whole in times of uncertainty.” To structure the conversations conveyed in this insightful group memoir, they agreed to focus on four novels—The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and A Mercy—assigning each to two writers to show how the same novel affects different readers. Besides offering close, fresh readings of Morrison’s narratives, the authors share personal stories about the experiences that have shaped them as readers. Bennett, for example, grew up knowing he was an anomaly in his racist military and law enforcement family. Reading Song of Solomon, he writes, gave him a “feeling of floating outside myself” that allowed him “to feel comfortable as an outsider.” Jackson, writing about Beloved, and Brown-Glaude, about Song of Solomon, reveal their fears as mothers, consumed by worry about how to keep a child safe in a world where so many unarmed young black people have been killed by police. “My fear is borne out of the unpredictability of those deaths,” Brown-Glaude writes. “And my fear, at times, turns to anger toward those mothers of white sons who do not have to live this way.”
Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.