MONDAY, AUGUST 19 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
Reimagining that image, ques-
tioning long-established ways of
thinking and challenging struc-
tures of power, Turner said, that
was the lesson Morrison the
professor wanted her students to
learn.
She challenged her students
to ask: “What are we really
trying to do at this place?” said
Turner, 39, who is a musical
theater composer. She wanted
to “further the pursuit of sci-
ence, of philosophy, of litera-
ture.”
Morrison’s teaching career in-
cluded stints at Texas Southern
University (1955-1957), Howard
University (1957-1964) and the
State University of New York at
Albany (1984-1989.) At Howard,
the young professor influenced
a number of students, including
civil rights leader Stokely Car-
michael, future ambassador An-
drew Young and Claude Brown,
author of “Manchild in the
Promised Land.”
Her legacy includes teaching
“black people how to not judge
ourselves by the way white peo-
ple have put us in a box and have
attempted to constrict us,” said
Marilyn Mobley, a professor of
English and African American
studies at Case Western Reserve
University and co-founder of the
Toni Morrison Society. “That
was transformative.”
At Princeton she taught now-
published writers including Da-
vid Treuer, Ladee Hubbard, Kate
Morgenroth, MacKenzie Bezos
and Rachel Kadish, among oth-
ers. But her reach as a professor
went beyond students who were
destined to become novelists.
Morrison’s guiding educa-
tional creed was to encourage
MORRISON FROM C1
her students to be bold. She
didn’t condone settling for easy
answers and urged students to
think more critically, even if it
meant drawing from different
subjects and perspectives, said
Helen Moran, who took Morri-
son’s Studies in American Afri-
canism course in the fall of 1993.
“I got a mediocre grade on a
paper for her once,” recalled
Moran, 47, now the group vice
president of product and de-
sign/user experience for Med-
scape. “When I met with her
about it, she told me to go
deeper and find those truths,not just be satisfied with the
surface.”
Sitting in the presence of a
world-renowned author could
certainly be nerve-racking. In
the first few days of Morrison’s
seminars, there were timid
hands raised and discussions
that barely brushed the core
issues. Morrison would lighten
the mood with jokes and knew
when to laugh at herself.
“We were intimidated by
making ourselves vulnerable to
a mind that great and experi-
enced,” said Symeon K. Davies,
who studied under Morrison atPrinceton and is now chief oper-
ating officer and general coun-
sel for an investment company.
“So she admitted she was also a
little intimidated by our expec-
tations and asked for a fresh
start. She wanted to bring us out
and engage us.”
In a 1993 interview with the
Paris Review, Morrison outlined
the importance she placed on
students figuring out what they
required to be at their best
creatively. Her personal routine
included waking up, making a
cup of coffee while it was still
dark, then drinking the coffee asthe morning light appeared.
“They need to ask themselves,
‘What does the ideal room look
like?,’ ” she told the interviewer.
“Is there music? Is there silence?
Is there chaos outside or is there
serenity outside? What do I need
in order to release my imagina-
tion?”
By all accounts, the seminar
classroom was her ideal room as
a professor. The close quarters
for courses created a space for
developing personalized rela-
tionships with her students.
“She had this physical pres-
ence, this voice, that just took up
space in this very magical way,”
said 46-year-old Jessie Janow-
itz, a New York-based novelist
who in 1992 — as a freshman —
took Morrison’s Long Fiction
course. “She could have been an
actor or a politician.”
Morrison was an instructor,
but careful to not come across as
pedantic, Janowitz said. She of-
fered life advice as resonantly as
literary analysis.
“Nobody at Princeton talked
about how you were going to
make a living as a writer, partic-
ularly as a woman,” Janowitz
said, but Morrison did. “She’d
talk about being a mother. I
appreciated her being honest.
You had to make sacrifices in
order to write.”
Tao Leigh Goffe took a Morri-
son course called “The Foreign-
er’s Home” in the fall of 2008. In
Morrison’s office hours, Goffe
asked her whether she should
become a professor or a lawyer.
One on one, Morrison was in-
tently focused and frank with
her.
“She said I should become a
lawyer because there aren’t
enough women lawyers in the
world,” Goffe recalled. “I thinkshe’s very pragmatic. She under-
stood that there were different
places from which we could
have power.”
Goffe, who remained drawn
to the world of the literature,
didn’t take Morrison’s advice
and is now an assistant profes-
sor of literary theory and cultur-
al history at Cornell University.
Turner, who participated in
Morrison’s Princeton Atelier —
an ongoing workshop course
she founded in 1994 that offers
students the chance to collabo-
rate with famous artists and
performers, including Yo-Yo Ma
and Gabriel Garcia Márquez —
said the defining moment for
him was when Morrison came to
the final class and criticized the
results of the semester’s work.
She wanted to see ideas flow
back and forth. She wanted to
see everyone embark on a diffi-
cult journey, taking risks and
learning to be comfortable with
discomfort. Instead, Turner
said, people did only what they
thought would suffice and did
not push boundaries.
He recalled Morrison saying
Princeton is a place where there
were a bunch of grapes in one
place and other bunches spread
out in other places, but they’d
never blend to “make the wine.”
“It was a comment on our
inability to come together and
transcend our subjectivities,”
Turner said. “How do you get
outside of yourself and really
make something with a group of
people?”
Those were the kinds of ur-
gent questions Morrison asked,
queries that linger years later.
[email protected]Roxanne Roberts contributed to this
report.in a mall parking lot when a van
pulls up, snatches one of them,
and speeds off. But it’s not the
child who is taken this time, it’s
the mother, Michelle Spivey, who
happens to be an epidemiologist
with a top-level security clearance
at the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. This hints early of
biological weaponry in the mak-
ing. When the truth of what the
racist nuts (called the Invisible
Patriot Army) have in mind even-
tually comes out — after Sara is
BOOK WORLD FROM C1 also kidnapped and Will goes un-
dercover to rescue her — the exact
scientific nature of what the group
is planning is truly bloodcurdling.
Again, not just in the metaphori-
cal sense.
A few of Slaughter’s plot turns
are shaky, while some are off-the-
wall but still believable. The CDC
scientist Spivey, for instance, is
helping the IPA leader, a psychotic
ex-military man named Dash, cre-
ate a vast store of biological weap-
ons. Spivey is doing this to keep
Dash from kidnapping and raping
her young daughter Emma. But
things go haywire for Dash when
Spivey develops appendicitis, of
all things, and needs surgery in a
hospital so she can live long
enough to finish her job at the
IPA’s secret camp in the Appala-chians. It’s odd complications like
a bursting appendix that keep in-
creasingly desperate investigators
— and pleasurably anxious read-
ers — guessing as to what could
possibly come next.
Dash is among the
all-too-believable characters who
make up the IPA’s leaders and
motley recruits. The dozens of IPA
members like to march around
chanting “Blood and soil! Blood
and soil!” — shades of Charlottes-
ville 2017 — and Dash himself has
devoted his life to “cleansing the
country of the enablers and mon-grels.” To do so, “we must destroy
this corrupt society to remake our-
selves as the Framers intended,”
he says — and by “destroy,” he isn’t
speaking figuratively.
It’s unnerving that a novel as
thoroughly researched as this one
seems to be saying we have to rely
on a couple of near-superhero
types like Linton and Trent to save
us all from cataclysmic mass mur-
der. The FBI is depicted as politi-
cally factionalized and borderline
ineffectual. Slaughter also writes
convincingly about the ease of kill-
ing hundreds of thousands ofAmericans employing science and
technology that’s not all that hard
to come by. One kilo of a particular
substance, Slaughter posits,
would be enough to wipe out the
entire human race. To prevent
that from happening, we
shouldn’t have to rely on an evil-
doer’s helper coming down with
appendicitis.
[email protected]Richard Lipez writes the Don
Strachey PI novels under the name
Richard Stevenson. “Killer Reunion” is
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White supremacists are eerily relevant villains in Karin Slaughter’s new novel
In the classroom, Morrison’s voice ‘took up space in this very magical way’
JULIO CORTEZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ernesto J. Cortes Jr., a community activist, and author Toni Morrison in 2011 during a Rutgers
commencement ceremony. Morrison lectured at universities for more than 50 years.THE LAST
WIDOW
By Karin
Slaughter
William Morrow.
464 pp. $27.99