The Boston Globe - 07.08.2019

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019 The Boston Globe C11

described them.
‘‘The Bluest Eye’’ (1970),Ms.
Morrison’s debut novel, was
publishedas she approached
her 40th birthday, and it be-
came an enduringclassic.It
centered on Pecola Breedlove, a
poor black girl of 11 who is dis-
consolate at what she perceives
as her ugliness. Ms. Morrison
said that she wrotethe book be-
causeshe had encounteredno
otherone like it — a story that
delved into the life of a child so
infected by racismthat she had
come to loathe herself.
‘‘Shehad seenthis little girl
all of her life,’’ readsa descrip-
tion of Pecola. ‘‘Hair uncombed,
dressesfallingapart, shoes un-
tied and caked with dirt. They
had stared at her with great un-
comprehendingeyes. Eyes that
questionednothing and asked
everything. Unblinking and un-
abashed, they stared up at her.
The end of the world lay in their
eyes, and the beginning, and all
the waste in between.’’
Ms. Morrison’s Nobel Prize,
bestowed in 1993, made her the
first native-born American
since John Steinbeck in 1962to
receive that honor.
Ms. Morrison was ‘‘an Afri-
can-American woman giving
voice to essentiallysilent sto-
ries,’’ said Elizabeth Beaulieu, a
deanat ChamplainCollege in
Burlington, Vt., and the editor
of ‘‘The Toni MorrisonEncyclo-
pedia.’’ ‘‘She is writing the Afri-
can-Americanstory for Ameri-
can history.’’
Beyondher own literature,
Ms. Morrison was creditedwith
givingvoiceto blackstories
through her work as a Random
House editorbeginning in the
late 1960s. There was a ‘‘terri-
ble priceto pay,’’ she oncere-
marked, for leaving the com-
fortable familiarity of Lorain,
the Ohio town where she had
grown up, for a career in an un-
welcomingwhite society.
But she wanted to partici-
pate in the creation of a ‘‘canon
of black work,’’ she said.While
raisingtwo sons,and pursuing
her ownwriting in the hours
before dawn, she shepherded
into printworksincludingau-
tobiographies of boxer Muham-
madAli and politicalactivist
Angela Davis.
‘‘There are writers that we
would not know had she not
beenin that very crucial posi-
tion as a blackwoman in pub-
lishing,’’ said Angelyn Mitchell,
a professorof English and Afri-
can-American studies at
Georgetown University.
In addition to professorial
duties at Yale and Princeton
universities, Ms. Morrisonwas
an essayist and lecturer, weigh-
ing in with witheringforceon
race and its role in the events of
her times.
One of her most provocative
public commentaries came dur-
ing what she saw as the perse-
cution of President Bill Clinton
duringthe MonicaLewinsky
scandal. In a polarizing New
Yorker magazineessay, she ob-
served that Clinton, his ‘‘white
skinnotwithstanding,’’ was
‘‘our first black President.’’
‘‘Blacker than any actual
blackperson who could ever be
elected in our children’s life-
time,’’ Ms. Morrisonwrotein
that article,publishedin 1998,
a decade before Barack Obama,
the son of a Kenyan father and a
whiteAmericanmother, occu-
pied the WhiteHouse. ‘‘After all,

uMORRISON
ContinuedfromPageA1

Clinton displays almost every tropeof blackness: single-par- ent household,born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-lov- ing boy fromArkansas.’’ At the end of her life, Ms. Morrison often appearedto fill the role of a sage elder. In 2012, Obamaawardedher the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Obamadescribedher as ‘‘one of our nation’s most distin- guished storytellers,’’ a judg- ment that was nearly unani- mous among literary critics. They tussled, however, over whether Ms. Morrison was best described as an African-Ameri- can writer, an African-Ameri- can female writer, or simply an Americanwriter— and whether the label mattered at all. ‘‘I can acceptthe labels,’’ Ms. Morrison told the New Yorker in 2003, ‘‘because beinga black womanwriter is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from.’’ Ms. Morrison, one of four children, was born Chloe Arde- lia Wofford on Feb. 18, 1931. Her parents,George Wofford and the former Ramah Willis, weretransplanted Southerners. A grandfather had beenborn into slavery. Ms. Morrison’s father held variousjobsand the family movedfrequently. Her mother was hopeful about the futureof race relations,but her father, she wrote in a 1976essay in The New York Times,distrusted ‘‘every wordand every gesture of every white man on earth.’’ Once, she recalled, he threw a white man downthe steps and thentossed a tricycle toward him, believing that the man in- tendedto molest his daughters. ‘‘I thinkmy fatherwas wrong,’’ Ms. Morrison wrotein the Times, ‘‘but considering what I have seensince, it may have beenvery healthy for me to have witnessed that as my first black-white encounter.’’ At 12, Ms. Morrison made the personal step of converting to Catholicism, the faith fol- lowedby a branch of her ex-

tended family, and took Antho- ny as her baptismal name.For short, she became Toni. As a writer, Ms. Morrison woulddraw on her experiences as a child. Once, she and anoth- er black child discussed whether therewas a god. ‘‘I said there was,’’ Ms. Morrison toldthe New Yorker, ‘‘and she said there wasn’t and she had proof: she had prayed for, and not been given, blue eyes.’’ She enrolled in Howard Uni- versity in Washington, D.C., re- ceivinga bachelor’s degree in English in 1953and, two years later, a master’s degree in Eng- lish from CornellUniversity. She soonjoinedthe Howard faculty. Whileat Howard,she married a Jamaican architect, Har- old Morrison.They had two sons, but theirmarriage was an unhappy one, in part, she told the Times, because ‘‘women in Jamaicaare very subservient in their marriages.’’ ‘‘I was a constant nuisance to mine,’’ she said. She sought escape through writing. One early story was about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. After divorcing, Ms. Morri- son movedwith her sons to Syr- acuse, N.Y., where she became a textbook editorbefore joining the Random House headquar- ters in New York. She said that, as an editor, she avoided the si- multaneous release of books by multiple black authors so that reviewers wouldnot be enticed to dumpthem into a single re- view. Later, as an author, she en- countered someof the same prejudices. ‘‘I was readingsomeessay aboutthe ‘Black Family,’ ” she once recalled, ‘‘and the writer went intoa comparison between one of my novelsand ‘The Cosby Show.’ ” The analogy, she told Timemagazine, was ‘‘like comparingapplesand Buicks.’’ Ms. Morrisonrewroteher old short story as the novel ‘‘The Bluest Eye’’ in part, she said, to counter the prevailing credo of the time,‘‘Blackis

beautiful.’’ ‘‘Whenpeople said at that timeblackis beautiful— yeah? Of course,’’ she told the Guard- ian. ‘‘Whosaid it wasn’t? So I was trying to say... wait a min- ute. Guys. There was a time when blackwasn’t beautiful. And you hurt.’’ In that book, Pecola is raped by her father, Cholly Breedlove. But even that event is complex, the result of the father’s lifetime spent in oppression. Ms. Morrison’s next book was ‘‘Sula’’ (1973), about two womenfrom a black communi- ty called the Bottom who di- verge in their decades-long friendship. In that work and others, Ms. Morrison said she tried to capture black sister- hood. It was ‘‘so critical among black women because there wasn’t anybodyelse,’’ she once told the publication Poets and Writers.‘‘We saved one anoth- er’s lives for generations.’’ Ms. Morrison ventured into the experienceof black men in ‘‘Song of Solomon’’ (1977), a familyepic centeredon Macon Dead, known as Milkman, who searches for his identity through his family lineage. Widely acclaimed, the novel, with its far-reaching story line, was comparedwithGabriel García Márquez’s ‘‘One Hun- dred Years of Solitude.’’ After ‘‘Song of Solomon’’ came ‘‘Tar Baby’’ (1981), set on a Caribbeanisland, and then ‘‘Beloved.’’ The novelwas in- spired by the story of a real run- away slave, Margaret Garner, who was caught as she escaped fromKentucky to freedomin Ohio in the 1850s and slit the throat of her 3-year-olddaugh- ter before being returned to her master. ‘‘I wantedto translate the historical into the personal,’’ Ms. Morrison told the Paris Re- view. ‘‘I spent a long time trying to figure out what it was about slavery that made it so repug- nant, so personal, so indiffer- ent, so intimate, and yet so public.’’ The intensity of her booksat

times attracted criticism, and no workmorethan‘‘Beloved.’’ Stanley Crouch,the cultural critic, called the worka ‘‘black- face Holocaust novel.’’ He de- scribedMs. Morrisonas ‘‘im- mensely talented’’ but re- marked, accordingto Time magazine, that she would bene- fit from‘‘a new subject matter, the worldshe livesin, not this world of endless black victims.’’ Outside of suchcriticism, however, ‘‘Beloved’’ was praised as one of the most significant works of the century. ‘‘If she wrote only ‘Beloved,’ that would have beenenough,’’ said Mitchell, of Georgetown, ‘‘because in that she is able to take her readers to a moment in American history that is un- thinkable.’’ Ms. Morrison’s later novels included ‘‘Paradise’’ (1997),set in an all-blacktownin the Western United States; ‘‘Love’’ (2003),aboutthe many lives af- fected by a deceased hotelown- er; ‘‘A Mercy’’ (2008),an explo- ration of early American slavery; ‘‘Home’’ (2012),a portrait of a returning KoreanWar vet- eran; and ‘‘God Help the Child’’ (2015), the story of a black woman rejected becauseof the darknessof her skin,and the far-reachingeffects of child- hood pain. She leaves her son Harold Ford Morrisonof Princeton, N.J., and three grandchildren. One of her most enduring messages wasdelivered through its absence. In ‘‘Para- dise,’’ Ms. Morrison forced readers to guess whichcharacter was the white womanwhose murderis foretold in the book’s first words. ‘‘I did that on purpose,’’ Ms. Morrison told Time. ‘‘I wanted the readers to wonder about the race of thosegirls untilthose readers understood that their race didn’t matter. I want to dis- suade people fromreading literature in that way.’’ She continued:‘‘Raceis the least reliable information you can have about someone.It’s real information, but it tells you next to nothing.’’

Obituaries

By Emily Langer
WASHINGTONPOST
WASHINGTON — Growing
up on her family’s Oregon farm,
Dorothy Olsenwouldscale the
barnand then leap downinto a
pile of hay for the thrillof those
few glorious seconds when it
felt as if she were flying.
‘‘I just love to fly,’’ she re-
called decades later to the Chi-
nookObserver of Long Beach,
Wash. ‘‘From the time I was a
little girl... untilthe time I was
flying nightmissions as a Wom-
an Airforce Service Pilot over
moonlit Texas during World
War II, I just lovedto fly.’’
Mrs. Olsen,one of the few
surviving WASPs, the long-un-
recognizedcorpsof femalepi-
lots who flew vital domestic
missionsfor the Army Air Forc-

es duringWorld War II, died July 23 at her homein Universi- ty Place, Wash. She was 103. Her daughter, Julie Stranburg, confirmedher death but did not cite a specific cause. Mrs. Olsen — then Dorothy Kocher — was working as a dance instructor in Portland, Ore., whenshe joinedthe WASPs in 1943, the yearthe program was established. ‘‘World War II was a total war,’’ Molly Merryman, the au- thorof the volume‘‘Clipped Wings: The Rise and Fall of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPS) of World War II,’’ said in an interview. ‘‘And what that meant was that all men, women, children, citizens neededto have a war role.’’ Mrs. Olsen, whothrough

her 20s had scrimpedto pay for the flightlessonsnecessary to obtaina private flyinglicense, was one of more than25,000 women whoappliedto be WASPs, one of 1,879candidates accepted, and one of 1,074 to complete the trainingprogram, according to Army statistics. She traced her interest in airplanes to a bookshe had read as a girl, ‘‘The Red Knight of Germany,’’ aboutBaronMan- fred von Richthofen, a German flying ace during World War I. WASPs weretreated as civil- ians and were limited to domestic flights, which freed moremen to fly in combat. But the women’s missions— whichtotaled 60 million miles, according to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Muse-

um — wereof critical impor- tance and sometimesof life- threateningdanger. The womenferried planes fromfactoriesto their points of embarkation for the war, per- formedtest flights,and towed targets for gunnery practice. In some cases, Merryman said, they flew German or Japanese planes that had been captured and transported backto the United States to be tested for vulnerabilities.A totalof 38 WASPs died during the course of the program. ‘‘The government didn’t treat us so well,’’ Mrs. Olsen told the Chinook Observer. ‘‘A bay mate was killed in a planecrash and the rest of us had to take up a collectionto get her body backhometo Portland because

they wouldn’t pay for it.’’ Mrs. Olsen,whosaidshe flew more than 20 types of planes,becameknownfor the moxie she brought to the sky. At least once, she flew her plane upsidedownfor a thrill. Anoth- er time,the beauty of the night sky overcameher. ‘‘The moonlight came over Texas, and I was able to get big bandmusic.It was the closest to heaven I have ever been,’’ she said. ‘‘When I saw the lightsof Coolidge Runway, I was excited and I camein low and buzzed the base before landing. It was 11 o’clock during wartime, and I guessI woke up everybody. The commanderhad a few wordswith me.’’ The WASPs disbanded in 1944, the year before the war

ended. Only in 1977 did they receive full veterans’ benefits and only in 2010did they receive the recognitionthat their admirersthought to be their due, with the conferral of the Congressional Gold Medal. Dorothy Eleanor Kocher was bornin Woodburn, Ore., on July 10, 1916. In 1945, weeksafter the end of the war in Europe,Dorothy Kocher married Harold Olsen. After raisingtheirchildren, she ran antique shopsnear her Uni- versity Placehome,whereshe had lived since the 1960s. Her husband diedin 2006. She leaves their children,Stran- burg, of Beaverton, Ore., and Kim Eric Olsen, of University Place; a grandson;and a great- grandson.

Dorothy Olsen,103, daringWorld War II aviatrixandoneof few suriving WASPs

MANDELNGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES/FILE 2012 Toni Morrisonreceivedthe PresidentialMedal of FreedomfromPresidentBarack Obamain 2012.

From heart of black America, a voice for the voiceless

By SamRoberts NEWYORK TIMES NEWYORK — Morton Bahr, a national laborleader who helpedhis fellowcommu- nicationworkers survive threats to theirjobs posed by digital technology and corpo- rate revamping, diedJuly 30 at his home in Washington. He was 93. From 1999to 2001, Mr. Bahrwas also the president of the JewishLabor Committee, a national advocacy group, which said the cause of death was pancreatic cancer. Mr. Bahr, who beganhis career as a telegraph operator, was presidentof the Commu- nications Workers of America from 1985 to 2005, runninga union that today represents about700,000public and private sector employees in technology, media,airlines,and law enforcement. He presided during the convulsive breakupof AT&T’s Bell System as a telephoneser- vice monopoly, as mandated by a 1982consentdecree.Bell had employed a half million union workers. By formingpartnerships with educational institutions and negotiating withmanage- ment, Mr. Bahrstarted job re- trainingprograms.He also se- cured child care benefits and flexible schedulesto give employees morelatitudefor work, study, and family. In 2001, the Morton Bahr Distance LearningScholarship was establishedin his honorat SUNYEmpire State College to helpadult workers with full- timejobs pursuecollege studies. Mr. Bahr also expandedhis baseby recruiting members from beyond the volatile tele- communication industry, in- corporating the Association of FlightAttendants, the Inter- national Typographical Union, the International Union of ElectricalWorkers, the Newspaper Guild, and the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians. “Morty understoodthat the CWA’s powerdependedon economicleverage,” Harry Charles Katz, director of the ScheinmanInstituteon Con- flict Resolutionat Cornell Uni- versity, said in an e-mail, “and he cleverly foundways to counteract the loss in tradi- tional sources of union power that occurredwhentelecom- municationstechnology made switchboardoperators obso- lete and when microelectron- ics alteredthe workof telecom network technicians.” His successoras union president, Chris Shelton,said in a statement, “Morty was comfortablewhether he was in the company of presidentsof the United States, in the halls of Congress,or on a picket line.” After he retiredin 2005, Mr. Bahr was on the board of the NationalHousingPartner- ship Foundation. Mr. Bahrleaves his wife, Florence; a son, Daniel; a daughter, Janice Bahr; four grandchildren; andeight great-grandchildren.

Morton Bahr,

93; led union

workers into

digital age

The Boston Globe - 07.08.2019

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