At the time of her death this past week, Toni Morrison was arguably the most famous American literary author. While there are a few writers who were better known to the U.S. public, Morrison’s international reputation as put her above almost any other American writer on the world stage.
I first encountered Morrison in college. Song of Solomon was assigned reading in one of my literature classes, and I was impressed enough to read Beloved during the following school break. I emerged from Beloved changed. I am still changed now.
Morrison is usually encumbered with the descriptor African-American. This is unfortunate, because more than any other writer of color that I can think of, except possibly Ralph Ellison (who was far less prolific), Morrison was larger than any label. Though she certainly wrote about the African-American experience, it was clear from page one of each of her books that her goal was not to be the best of her genre, but simply the best. She didn’t chase after James Baldwin or Ralph Ellison, her peers in the African American community; she chased after the all time greats — Melville and Twain and Faulkner. This ambition was plain in book after book.
Her books all had one thing in common — a singular devotion to craft and perfection. Unlike most writers, Morrison never wrote a bad book. Her writing style, while relatively conventional, bore the hallmark of high quality. Some of her books were better than others, but all displayed craftsmanship and polish. Even as a Nobel laureate, her reputation permanently secure, Morrison never let up, never let a crack show.
More importantly, she left a permanent mark on American literature, if not all American art. This is not something even some of the greatest of the greats can claim. Her contribution was the historical sensibility she brought to American racial history. Before Morrison, almost all African-American writers focused on contemporary racial conflict. Writers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston wrote about the problems of their own generation, sometimes reaching back to the world of their parents. But Morrison looked further back, into the days of slavery and the slave trade for literary material. By doing so, she was reminding the world that the racial problems we see today are not new. They are rooted in the past, even the distant past.
To be fair, Morrison’s historical approach wasn’t entirely original. She was never an altogether original writer, preferring instead to weave together threads begun elsewhere. Decades earlier, William Faulkner explored the roots of racism, going back to the days before Civil War, but from the white prospective. Alex Haley, in Roots , looked at the African-American story before emancipation. Unlike Faulkner, Morrison wrote her stories from the viewpoint of the slave; unlike Alex Haley, who was interested in proving his family descended from African royalty, Morrison looked at the life of the common slave. She understood that the history of slavery lay in the experience of ordinary black people, with names wiped off the historical books. Her accomplishment was to take Faulkner’s and Haley’s approach to history and to stake a new claim for people who had been forgotten. She took up the threads created by other writers and wove them into something entirely new.
Morrison was old school in her racial thinking, as am I, which is why I admire her so much. Before the modern racial debate about identity and emotional triggers and white privilege, there was a concept in race discussion called multiculturalism. This idea was the rainbow concept — that all races would live together in harmony, side by side, not exactly blending, but learning from one another and complementing one another. Multiculturalists recognize that our histories are different, but that our futures are together. In recent years, multiculturalism has fallen out of favor, replaced with a harder-edged discussion about rights and access, about social justice that not only respects social differences, but insists that ethnic heritage is more important than the things we have in common. The new idea is that I am me and you are you, and I can never understand your experience and you can never understand mine.
Morrison was not against this. Nor am I. But she understood (as I think I do) that social justice begins with mutual respect and acceptance. It begins not with emphasizing how my experience is different from yours, but how it is the same. Human. To read Morrison is not to be struck by how different people of other races are (a hallmark of more recent fiction), but how similar we all are. In Beloved, Morrison’s artistic achievement is make the reader to ache for the loss of a child of color just as much as we would for any child anywhere. Her gift was not to make us see race, but to teach us how not to see it.
I miss that. I miss her. And it hasn’t been that long since she’s been gone.