70 The EconomistAugust 17th 2019
S
he did not look away. When Toni Morrison’s clear imagining
gaze met uncomfortable things, she faced them down. A poi-
soned dog jerking round the yard like a toy. Human placenta in a
field. The transparent underskin of a bobcat gutted on a kitchen ta-
ble. The greyish panties, still round her ankles, of an 11-year-old
girl raped by her father as she washed the dishes.
Especially she did not look away from the images of slavery she
had been slowly, painfully dragged towards by the time she wrote
“Beloved”, in 1987. A man hanged in a sycamore tree, known by his
shirt, but with head and feet missing. A red ribbon, fished from the
river, with a curl of wet woolly hair attached to it and, to that, its bit
of scalp. A fugitive slave crunching the breastbone of a dove before
its heart had stopped beating. The wildness that shot up in a man’s
eye when his lips were yanked back to take the bit. Sethe, her hero-
ine in “Beloved”, serenely continuing to hold on her baby’s face
after she had cut its throat to save it from a slave’s life.
Because these scenes sometimes brushed against beauty—the
sycamores tall and soughing, the dove eaten under flowering plum
trees—and because her novels won prizes, notably the Nobel in
1993, critics tended to call them lyrical and poetic. Nothing made
her madder. Lyricism meant that literary language was getting in
the way. It had to be stripped down, freed up, opened up and teased
to get the writerly-ness out. First drafts of her word-work, in num-
ber-two pencil on yellow legal pads, then went through as many as
13 revisions on the word-processor. Those 18 years as an editor at
Random House had not been for nothing. She knew exactly what
was needed to lead, sometimes throw, the reader into an alien
world. It was not merely words but the silences between them, the
unsaid things and the smoke they sent up, that gave her phrases
their rhythm and their power.
Hers was a work to reclaim lost black voices. Slaves in wagons
singing under their breath, ghosts and haints staring silently fromtree stumps, ancestors whose names were hidden in children’s
chants. Or simply girls like herself raised to womanhood in the
Midwest, beside a steel mill, in a small house obsessively painted
and sluiced with Fels-Naptha as though at any moment they might
be forced to leave. Read as she might, there were no books about
this world, in which someone like her took centre-stage. She deter-
mined to write one, whether or not it sold; this became “The Bluest
Eye”. Along with the voices she recovered black experience, but
through culture, not the easy, lazy colour-fetish: through the sweet
smell of Nu Nile Hair Oil, the sharp tang of mustard greens cook-
ing, the inevitability of entering by back doors. The protagonist of
“The Bluest Eye” longed to be like Shirley Temple, but in this book
and those that followed her creator rejoiced in dark eyes, thick lips,
flared noses. Who had instructed blacks in self-loathing? Who told
them they were not beautiful? When she cleaned house for a richer
woman as a girl, and paid her for cast-off clothes, she still felt
proud. When she wrote, she felt magnificent.
Anger was not useful to dwell on. It was not creative. In inter-
views she suppressed it with steeliness, just as she guarded her
words and herself from meddlesome intrusion. But she could ex-
plode at the craziness of racism, its distorting power, its pernicious
notions of “purity”, when the screaming red-mouthed baboon
whites evoked lived under their own white skin. Disappointingly
she found it even among blacks, with their talk of mocha, hazel-
nut, onyx, tar- and silt-black. There was such compulsion in hu-
man beings to classify by type and clan, to suspect and hate the
Other, to refuse to vault the mere blue air that separated them. If
oppression was no longer by actual ownership or actual violence,
then language could be used to do the job with some efficiency.
Politicians, misogynists, lawyers all knew how.
Who could rescue language, ensure it stayed supple, strong and
alive? That it was un-arrogant, and would keep reaching towards
the ineffable? Women could. Black women could. In her novels it
was inevitably mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters who kept
families and communities together with that mesh of loving boss-
iness: pull up your socks, comb your head, do your chores, hush
your mouth. (She’d done the same, raising two sons, fitting her
writing into chinks in the endless round of work and domestica-
tion.) In kitchens across the land black women stitched grey cot-
ton, or poured soda into the crease of a palm to make biscuits. They
brought order out of chaos, as her writing did. Women told the sto-
ries, superstitious, chill-inducing, full of myth and colour, that
preserved links with dead generations. They made Memory sit
down at the table with them. She had dismissed those tales for
years before finding, especially in “Song of Solomon”, deep grist
for the worlds she had to recreate. She learned to watch for shad-
owy figures by the water at her Hudson river place and to listen for
their whispers.
In particular she felt a reverence for old women, sometimes
half-crazed, who nonetheless seemed to have a lock on wisdom.
Her own great-grandmother, for one, for whom all the males in the
family stood up without urging. Or Baby Suggs in “Beloved”, who
preached to her people in the woods that if they, the whites yonder,
“do not love your neck unnoosed and straight...Yougot to love it...
put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up.” Or the old woman
she evoked in her lecture when she received the Nobel, who re-
minded her young interrogators that the future of language, a bird
fluttering between life and death, was in their hands.
She gave lectures and advice when she was asked. Her post at
Princeton required it from time to time. But writing fiction was her
true freedom. She did it in the hours when no one had a claim on
her. She owned it, and the characters were hers to control. If she
wanted the hero of “Song of Solomon” to lift his beautiful black ass
up in the sky and fly, he would. Shut up, she would tell him. I’m do-
ing this. Steadily, morning by morning, she would get up in the
dark and make a mug of coffee, drinking it as the light gathered.
When it came, full-bore, enabling, she did not look away. 7Toni Morrison, writer, died on August 5th, aged 88Inhermagnificence
Obituary Toni Morrison