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When I think of Toni Morrison’s novels, I often think of the poet Lucille Clifton’s response to Gorilla, My Love, the debut short story collection by “the other Toni”, Toni Cade Bambara: “She has captured it all, how we really talk, how we really are; and done it with both love and respect. I laughed until I cried, then laughed again. I loved it! She must love us very much.”
Published in 1972, Bambara’s collection roves through a Black girlhood filled with wit, tenderness, play and betrayal with a rhythmic intensity that moves the way a blues lyric drifts into memory. Morrison edited the book, the first fiction acquisition of her 16-year tenure as an editor at Random House. The Tonis were both single mothers navigating multiple forms of literary labor, and they became fast friends.
Two recent books about Morrison attempt to make sense of her multifaceted legacy as a writer, editor and thinker on Black life. Toni at Random, by the Howard University scholar Dana A Williams, centers Morrison’s work in publishing. On Morrison, by novelist Namwali Serpell, closely reads the author’s fiction, criticism and plays as sites of “doing philosophy”. The two books work in tandem, revealing Morrison’s editorial and literary work as expressions of the same practice, since Morrison’s years at Random preceded (one might even say made possible) her Pulitzer and Nobel prizes for writing.
At the core of Morrison’s career in letters was a listening practice. She listened deeply to the authors whose voices she trusted and nurtured as an editor; to her parents, whose stories she interpreted in The Black Book and Jazz; to the women she overheard speaking with “envy coupled with amused approbation” whose tensions became the seed for Sula. She labored, as she once wrote, to use what she heard: “folk language, vernacular in a manner neither exotic nor comic, neither minstrelized nor microscopically analyzed”. She listened so that the worlds she conjured on the page felt real. The success of her listening practice can be measured in Clifton’s reaction to work that Morrison shepherded into being: “She must love us very much.”
Reading Morrison ‘with the seriousness she deserves’
Community ties sit at the center of Toni at Random, which meticulously traces Morrison’s editorial acquisitions, her involvement in book promotion and marketing and her attendance at conferences aimed at bolstering the pipeline of African American writers. What a delight it is to understand her process: when Bambara was revising what would become her first novel, The Salt Eaters, Morrison temporarily moved Bambara into her home. “She’d write and I’d edit some,” Morrison recalled. With characteristic firmness, she encouraged Bambara to hasten the delivery of her final chapter as they headed toward publication, and advised production teams at Random House on the book’s design. Angela Davis moved into Morrison’s home, too, to revise her autobiography; the two commuted to Morrison’s midtown office every day. Morrison pushed Davis to write less like an academic, with more attention to narrative, scene and feeling.
In On Morrison, Serpell sets out to teach us “how to read Morrison with the seriousness that she deserves”. She recalls a scathing book review the author wrote for the New York Times about a biography of Davis by Regina Nadelson in 1972. Morrison called the author an “enlightened racist” who attributed Davis’s determination and intellect to white influences such as her professors and therapists, assuming that “no black folks influenced her”. The piece is high drama; Morrison even imagines a scene in which the two Black writers are reading the biography while sucking their teeth in exasperation. Serpell close reads Morrison’s rhetorical application of shade – the use of wit, free indirect style and literary parody displayed throughout Morrison’s criticism. This type of reading, in the vein of giving someone a read, means that Morrison combined “her expertise as a bookish scholar with the signifying perfected by the bookless”.
Serpell’s read is complemented by that of Williams. It is helpful to understand that Angela Davis: An Autobiography was “the first autobiography book Morrison edited”. In other words, Morrison was learning on the fly. Her critique of the older Davis text was part of her education; the review was written around the same time they were revising the autobiography. In showing us the rhythm of Morrison’s days – how she listened to her surroundings, what she heard – we become witness to the ways the people with whom she collaborated “sharpened her craft as a writer”.
From Williams, we learn how editing Leon Forrest’s There is a Tree More Ancient than Eden, a nonlinear novel told against the backdrop of Black history, taught Morrison that “there was a market for writers who took chances in their fiction”. We learn about Henry Dumas, whose mythical novel Jonoah and the Green Stone she republished in 1976, and how Morrison saw that “he felt comfortable playing with narrative and form and completely ignored the supposition that every good story had a beginning, middle, and end”. By this time, Morrison had already published The Bluest Eye and Sula, and often used her growing stature as a writer in promoting her editorial pursuits. Her own experiments with narrative form would reach a fever pitch in the years after her work with Bambara, Forrest, Davis and Dumas.
Serpell reads Morrison through the established canon of western thought, including Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Edgar Allan Poe, Sophocles, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, the King James Bible, Susan Sontag, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Her reading of Morrison is thick: layered with frameworks and a sophisticated ability to render critical inquiry legible.
At several points throughout the book, she turns to the blues, recasting The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved and especially Jazz as blues novels, their prose shaped like a score. The scholar Clyde Woods described the blues as a “hearth of African American consciousness”, arguing that the Black southern working class who created the music also forged a system of knowledge: a collective sensibility grounded in “social and personal investigation, description, and criticism”. A standard blues song begins with a sober assessment of a situation – a bad boss, an absent lover – followed by a restatement with a difference and finally a resolution. The pattern echoes Morrison’s method of laying the entire plot of her novels out within the first few pages, returning again and again to the central wound, worrying it and revising it until its meaning shifts or transcends.
Serpell reads the page; Williams narrates the stage. We cannot understand one as fully without the other. The collective sensibility of the blues is most exemplified in Morrison’s three-dimensional listening practice, in which the people who populated her life – the authors she edited, the sister circles she formed, the us and we who lose our breath when we read her sentences and nod knowingly at their odd shapes, the Black working class whose rhythms she interpolated – we also filled her pages.
