Born February 18th, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison would have celebrated her 90th birthday today. She won’t be doing that of course, but very many far and wide will give pause for thought this day and raise a glass in her honour, and remember a most remarkable writer and woman.
And that is what The New York Times does with their “Essential Toni Morrison” today, from which I quote.
…The questions [posed in a 2002 lecture] seem wholly relevant : “To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?”
In everything Morrison wrote, she offered narratives that revealed the journeys of characters, specific but universal, flawed and imperfect, with a deeply American desire for freedom and adventure. One might say that because her characters were almost exclusively African-American, the quest to be free — in mind, body and spirit — was the consistent adventure. She was also a masterful crafter of windows; when you opened a book of hers, the worlds you entered were so rich with detail, you could feel the molecules around you change as if you’d just taken a long flight and were descending onto the tarmac in a town or city where you’d never been…
Veronica Chambers, The New York Times, Feb. 18 2021
The fine introduction by Veronica Chambers leads on to a selection of works, each accompanied by equally thoughtful text. For those, especially younger people who are encountering Toni Morrison for the first time, perhaps at college or of their own volition, the piece offers some guidance as to where to start, and for us others a reminder to return to Morrison again and again, and find in one of her stories or essays that which we only now “get” with the passing of time and an accumulation of knowledge and experience.