“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody…
Category: Beloved
It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve started to read the novels of Toni Morrison— Beloved, Sula, Jazz, and just recently her debut The Bluest Eye—and for…
There was this one summer, I must have been about 12, when I discovered the writing of both Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou. Maya’s writing was open, honest, embracing. Toni’s,…
Light dances over the page, sun shifting through shadows, fine leaves filtering the light. I sit in the half-shade, between classes, ignoring homework and assigned reading. I am 17, and…
The first time I read Toni Morrison’s work, I knew immediately that language was power. I found myself lost inside of its arms. I never wanted to apologize for this.…
I didn’t read a book by Toni Morrison until 1992. Song of Solomon was on the reading list of my African American Literature class; I became an ardent convert from…
In the fall of 2009, I taught a fourth-year undergraduate course on Toni Morrison. I haven’t looked at my course materials in over a decade. Here’s what I found. From…
Toni Morrison’s books entered my life in the late 1970s, when I was a wife and mother in a very busy household, and still in my 20s. I was not…
Toni Morrison has been gone now for going on three years but it seems that she is with us still, made eternal through every word and phrase she committed to…
I first read Beloved more than thirty years ago. What stayed with me was the haunting, the three women who sat together in their front yard, and the beauty of…