I have never been to Lo-
rain, Ohio, but it has been on
my bucket list for 20 years at
least. I’m curious about this
town, pop. 64,000, located
roughly 130 miles north of
Columbus, at the mouth of
the Black River. One of my
students drove across the country, passing through
the town with which I was so infatuated. I asked her
to bring me back a small sample of dirt. It isn’t rich
and loamy, as I imagined it would be. Instead, it is
the soft brown of cocoa powder, grainy and dry. Still,
I keep it on my writing desk, sealed in a tiny jar that
once held baby food. This earth, scooped from the
hometown of Toni Morrison, is my totem.
Morrison, who died Aug. 5 at the age of 88, is not
the first black woman writer I ever encountered. Her
first novel, The Bluest Eye, begins with what reads
like an excerpt from the Dick and Jane books, in-
dicting the compulsory whiteness of American ed-
ucation in the 1950s and its sickening effect on chil-
dren. Born in 1970, I grew up with a steady diet of
fiction and poetry by writers who “looked like me.”
Dick and Jane were cast to the dustbin in favor of
African folktales and the nov-
els of Virginia Hamilton and
Mildred Taylor. So, when I
read The Bluest Eye as a teen-
ager and was gobsmacked by
the sheer genius of the work,
it wasn’t because I had never
seen myself in a book. It was
because I had never read a book this good.
In The Bluest Eye and all of her other work, Toni
Morrison writes about ordinary people in a way that
somehow manages to make them mythological with-
out rendering them unrecognizable. Song of Solomon,
her powerful third novel, opens as an insurance sales-
man leaps to his death, wearing a set of wings of his
own fashioning. In the hands of another writer, this
scene could be played for laughs—a crazy man thinks
he can fly! Or it could be used to illustrate the hope-
lessness of Black American life—a man in a soul-
stealing, predatory line of work chooses to end it all.
But Morrison (who sets this scene on the date of her
own birth) renders the doomed salesman as iconic
as Icarus, but still manages to work in a laugh line
or two, “Mr. Smith went SPLAT!” I often use these
opening pages to show my students that a master
△
Morrison, working
on a train in 1978, also taught
writing at Yale University
and Princeton University
during her career
PREVIOUS PAGES: AUGUST; THESE PAGES: TRAIN: PHOTOGRAPH © BY JILL KREMENTZ, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED; OBAMA: ALEX WONG—GETTY IMAGES; PARTY: WILL MCINTYRE —THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
