Journeying with Morrison’s Writings: From Being “Girls Together” to
Becoming Mothers in a New Millennium of Global Change
A Tribute
By Riché Richardson
“Should be immoral or a sin,
If it is according to the
skin I’m in”
From Cameo, “Skin I’m In”
It is exciting and inspiring to see Toni Morrison and to, along with others on campus and in the larger community, welcome her back to her home here at Cornell. Today I am deeply honored and humbled to stand here with my colleagues and offer a tribute to her and to her treasured and truly great body of work in and beyond literature. I applaud and celebrate with her and others 105 years of Creative Writing on the campus here at Cornell. Toni Morrison is a premier and exceptional American and African American intellectual whose work has a global reach and impacts the very fabric and definition of world literatures. Her visit to this campus is also timely and important for me as well as for other scholars in the Africana field, a field that has been, over several decades, strongly impacted and even transformed paradigmatically by her body of work, a field that here and elsewhere around the nation is now celebrating the milestone of a 40th anniversary in the academy, while looking ahead to the future.
In the course of my dialogue, I want to offer some snapshots of what this almost lifelong journey with Morrison’s writing has meant to me. One of the reasons that I am very much in a mood to look to the past and future in this way has to do with the backdrop of the incredible histories and legacies that are being marked on campus in areas such as Creative Writing and Africana studies. As a subtext in this brief essay, the geometry and complicated temporality of these personal “snapshots” provide one testimony to the theoretical and critical primacy of Morrison’s work in shaping these academic areas, alongside the primary argument that I submit. That is to say, from the earliest novel The Bluest Eye to her most recent novel A Mercy, Toni Morrison’s repertoire is a compelling, captivating and indispensable resource to draw on and engage with for critical and theoretical meditation on an inexhaustible range of topics and problematics, including a range of concerns in national and global contexts, in light of its persistently deconstructive look at the making of modernity, modernity as conceptualized in the broadest sense. From her novels to her criticism, we can draw on her body of work to reflect on this nation’s path of development, including its days as what this new novel invokes as an “ad hoc territory,” thinking, for instance, of a passage that registers the slave population as entirely “unspeakable,” to draw on one critical term in the discourse of Morrison, which is captured from the point of view of the character Jacob: “In the fields, he reckoned trying to limit the damage sopping weather had wrought on the crop.” Furthermore, we can use it to examine ideologies of race and questions related to citizenship, democracy, freedom, and the problem of slavery, as the nation emerged as a republic in the late eighteenth century.
Perhaps because she is such an extraordinary intellectual, I have journeyed with the work of Toni Morrison more intimately and passionately than with the body of work of any other writer and thinker. This work, a complex and multifaceted discourse in and of itself, is widely admired for its masterful and brilliant form, use of language and narrative force. It has yielded insights so many times when I have needed and sought them. It has been and will continue to be a vital resource in teaching, study, writing and reading, as well as in my art. As someone who was born in Montgomery, Alabama in 1971, just a year after the publication of the novel The Bluest Eye, I’ve literally grown up in most of the time during which Professor Morrison’s work has been produced and published, and amidst the immediate historical moments whose streams they each entered, even if in theme and content they frequently take us on journeys into the past, beckoning us, even, back to the trauma and tragedy of the Middle Passage, or to the time of Beowulf. When I finally had my first encounter with her writing as a freshman at Spelman College (The Bluest Eye was one of the selections on our freshman reading list) her work began to feed into my own process of thinking and becoming a woman; I studied it in my coursework and even cited it in a poem.
Her literary criticism in now classic essays from “Unspeakable Things Unspoken” to Playing in the Dark introduced new perspectives and methodologies in American literature and American studies that have helped to transform these fields and forced them to grapple with questions related to the status of blackness, questions about which many scholars had long remained oblivious, indifferent, and silent. I honestly feel that the best and most compelling approaches to American literature acknowledge perspectives like this, and that to evade them in this day and time, from a scholarly standpoint, is anti-intellectual and even irresponsible. The intellectual harassment and hostility that can sometimes occur when minority scholars dare to teach such topics such as American literature is just one thing that underscores the continuing need for literacy in this area. Her critical approaches innovatively expand a long tradition of dialogues on the meaning of America that have unfolded in American and African American letters. It is work that seems vital and urgent to draw on to address from a philosophical standpoint questions such as “What is an American?” given the increasing anti-immigrant sentiments that are emerging in the public sphere in politics.
The Bluest Eye, from its beginning line, suggests that certain times and seasons can make a lasting and unforgettable impression. This past summer began to crystallize as one of those summers that I believe, or at least hope, will be remembered. If the teleological force of history had as much influence these days as it has had in the past, the season would certainly be mentioned down the road as the “Summer of 2009,” in the vein of the ones in the twentieth century that described moments defined by freedom, music, love, and rioting. In general, summer frequently becomes a banner for enshrining in small phrases like this, especially in the media and within historical narrative, what is culturally significant and memorable, obscuring stories lived and witnessed in other seasons, arresting and containing the play and circulation of some narratives. What does it mean to have had to grapple, for example, with the losses of several veritable icons in popular culture such as Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson and in politics such as Senator Ted Kennedy? To have had such widespread public attention and debate drawn dramatically and unexpectedly to the issue of racial profiling in light of the arrest of a distinguished university professor at Harvard such as Henry Louis Gates, Jr.? To have witnessed the heated debates and demonstrations about health care, including what were in some cases concerted critiques by groups such as the Birthers and Tea Baggers of President Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. (Indeed, he is the second one if we think of Professor Morrison’s famous remarks about President Bill Clinton’s “touch of color”).
As we all know, it is crucial to conserve a space for dissent in the nation’s public sphere, which is the sign of a healthy democracy. Yet, the stubborn and persistent questioning of President Obama’s citizenship and therefore the very constitutionality of his presidency by casting him as “foreign” and “other” has been unsettling. The iconography relating him to figures such as “Hitler,” and portraying him hanged in effigy are just a few instances that illustrate that there may be more at stake in these movements than meets the eye. At a symbolic level, this perverse and propagandistic iconography represents a willful displacement, disavowal and repression of the shadowing of these very political movements by vestiges of nativism and fascism.
Though it addresses a very different set of circumstances, there are passages in Toni Morrison’s landmark anthology Birth of a Nation ‘Hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case that came to mind as I witnessed certain events in the public sphere of politics this past summer that unfolded during a range of town meetings, including the following remarks in her fine critical introduction: “Spectacle is the best means by which an official story is formed and is a superior mechanism for guaranteeing its longevity. Spectacle offers signs, symbols and images that are more pervasive and persuasive than print and which can smoothly parody thought. The symbolic language that emanates from unforeseen events supplies media with the raw material from which a narrative emerges-already scripted, fully spectacularized and riveting in its gazeability”(xvi). The allusion in the title of this anthology to D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which is partly based on the novel by Thomas Dixon The Clansman, a novel set in the state of South Carolina, is instructive. I want to argue that this anthology is no less relevant to analyzing aspects of the contemporary public sphere in this nation when we consider that the plots of this novel is shaped, driven really, by a panic over the expansion of black voting rights, perceived “Negro Rule” and the emergence of an interracial democracy, and rallies the Ku Klux Klan to establish a white supremacist social order as the solution for restoring order in the nation. While one can argue that a fracturing of the conventional Solid South in U.S. electoral politics helped to secure the election of the President Obama, it is important to think about what is at stake in the coalition of governors that aligned against the stimulus plan earlier this year, and in the fact that, in more recent times, a South Carolina Congressman, Joe Wilson, accused the President of being a liar before a joint meeting of the House and Senate, an utterance that reflects a will to criminalize him and delegitimize him, and indeed, to position him in the continuum of “’hoods” invoked in this anthology’s title, notwithstanding his obvious exceptionalism. Most frequently, over the summer months, this anthology came to mind as I pondered some of vile propaganda related to the President in the public sphere, along with the taunting and leering line of Sergeant Vernon Waters that helps to frame Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play: “They’ll still hate you.” Indeed, as a scholar of African American literature and Southern studies, this anthology has long been a very valuable resource, to the point that I borrowed the title of the very first essay that I ever published in this profession from it and invoked its introduction epigraphically.
In 2008 in Charleston, Southern Carolina, as he gave a keynote address to the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Toni Morrison Society, Houston A. Baker, Jr., cautioned against any superficial comparisons between Toni Morrison and William Faulker’s novels. In this respect, we can think, for example, of the kind of logic that might, in the case of a novel such as A Mercy, lead some critics to try to establish quick and easy analogies between characters such as Jacob Vaark and Thomas Sutpen. At a meta-critical level, and with the cautions against this critical fallacy in mind, I am tempted to allude very provisionally and very momentarily here, in the time that I have remaining, and through some autobiographical anecdotes, to the compelling model that Baker provides in his landmark essay “Traveling with Faulkner” as a strategy for pondering my own intellectual journey with a few more works in Toni Morrison’s rich literary repertoire.
As a freshman at Spelman, the World Civilization classes of Trinidadian scholar Russell Andalcio captivated many of his students, and even drew visitors to every class session to participate in rich class discussions and to view films such as the “Gods Must Be Crazy.” His engaging approach was designed to address misperceptions of Africa as having been uncivilized. I had a roommate from South Africa, Palesa Mohajane, and we, along with another student, Gvanit Efua Godare, first bonded as friends in part through what we learned in and shared from Mr. Andalcio’s class, and discussed him constantly. (I will never forget the silent aura with which the diaspora from this lively class greeted a historian the following semester who informed us on the first day of class that Africa had no civilization because it lacked a written language; after this, he seemed to ensure that the second lecture and the ones thereafter sounded more progressive). Working with Mr. Andalcio that foundational first semester, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye was the main centerpiece as I grappled with how and why blackness at an aesthetic level has been “progressively negated” in Western culture. It was also a point of reference as I, as a sophomore and working as campus news editor at the Spelman Spotlight, prepared to interview the famed psychologist Kenneth B. Clark about the doll experiments that he conducted alongside his wife Mamie Clark, which helped to shape the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling of 1954. When Professor Morrison visited Spelman my junior year and did a reading, my first time seeing her in person, I stood in the very long line and got my copy of The Bluest Eye signed, and remember saying, “Thank you for everything that you’ve taught me.” I was certainly not pleased the following year when one of my sorority sisters needed the book for a class assignment and I let her borrow mine, for I was shocked when I got it back to see that she had actually written in the margins in some places, in ink! I know I was thinking something to myself akin to, “Father, forgive her, for she knows not what she does.”
Sula I first read freshman year, as our required novel for Freshman Composition, which I took from Christine Sizemore. I remember being unsettled some by the title character Sula as a woman; in some ways, I remember feeling that she was a “bad” woman, whatever that means. As a junior, when I read it again, on the path to a second minor in women’s studies, I had a much deeper interpretation and appreciation of the character and wondered if I’d read the novel carefully enough in the first place. As a professor, I have taught this novel many times over the years, and am enraptured by the narrator’s voice, especially in passages where we hear about the woman in a flowered dress and the elements that would shape the spontaneity of the dancing ritual that a valley man just might see in her community on any day, which reminds me of the beauty and rhythm in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Malindy’s song. When I taught the novel in summer of 2008 to a graduate seminar of high school teachers in the Breadloaf School of English in Asheville, North Carolina-a class for which Toni Morrison Society vice-president A.J. Billingslea, also a former Spelman professor, helped me to arrange a trip to the aforementioned Charleston conference-two students drew on images in American material culture and offered a compelling presentation on the novel’s critique of stereotypes of black children through representations of Chicken Little and the Deweys, and also played clips from the film Ethnic Notions.
After this session, I wondered about my own most primal girl friend in life, in the sense that Nel and Sula were childhood friends? And though I had several, Liletta Nunnery, the girl who became my best friend beginning when I was 11 and she was 10, is one I'll focus on here. This friendship began when she and her mother came over to visit my family on the Fourth of July in 1982. By the fall, Liletta and I had matching olive green corduroy ski jackets and would wear them with designer jeans, like Calvin Kleins, to the mall on Saturdays with our mothers, walking around, in moments spontaneously arm in arm, as we looked around and pretended to be rich sisters, pointing to the clothes that we liked and would buy, or undesirable outfits that we would cast off to “the lady who scrubs the floors.” With others kids we knew, we spent countless Saturdays at Chuck E. Cheese’s playing ski ball and video games like Turbo, Pac Man and Defender, and it was the place where I had my 12th birthday party. We felt endlessly cool and like queens of the world when our whole Girl Scout troop, 535, participated in Alabama State University’s annual “Turkey Day Classic” Thanksgiving Parade wearing olive green sweatshirts, head bands, and pocket towels that said “Girl Scouts Property,” for we two, along with our friend Teri, as the troop marched, rode in the hatchback of a decorated 280z and waved and enjoyed the admiration of the crowd. We were beyond excited one day at the Shoe Emporium when we found spectators like the ones Michael Jackson had worn in the video “Billie Jean,” picked out our sizes and tried them on, and ran show our mothers, exclaiming, “Look!” Indeed, in her pretty, sunny room at her grandparents’ house just two doors from the house of her mother and stepfather down the street, she and her grandfather had a long silent war over the poster from the “Billie Jean” video that she kept putting up on the ceiling over the bed. He’d take it down and put it on the wall; she’d put it up again. It got to the point where he would even just hear her back in her room putting it up and would calmly say, without even going back there, “Take it down, Liletta.” (Indeed, when I was growing up, most of my girl friends lived with their grandparents most if not all of the time, even those whose mothers who had apartments, an arrangement that, I have suspected, was the informal way in some black families of either ensuring that no girls in their family ever lived in a home with a stepfather, or anywhere out of their watchful supervision; for example, my grandparents refused to allow my mother to take me to Chicago when she went to work teaching nursery school for several years in the early 1970s). I had my own Michael Jackson troubles, too. I remember not speaking to my grandfather for three whole days after he refused to allow me to watch The Making of Thriller again because “You’ve seen it once.” Liletta is the only person with whom I think I can most honestly mourn Michael Jackson, other than how I did alone after watching his moving memorial service, when I began to cry in the privacy of my room at the Hilton Garden Inn downtown in Ithaca, exclaiming “Oh God, he’s really gone!”
Our Barbie doll paradise, unlike Pecola Breelove’s ideal, was black, and it was at the center of our friendship. Indeed, it began to come together just as the black Ken was first introduced in 1982. We played for hours and created many characters and voices. They set one foundation for how, even today, I am able to keep my focus and vision as an artist and work for long hours in my art studio. When I got a Michael Jackson doll and she joked about how scrawny it was, I remember saying that “I will pretend that Prince is taller if you pretend that Michael Jackson has more muscles.” (Interestingly, we noticed how much lighter the doll was than him and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if he ended up looking like this doll?) There was the time that I finally had it when a set of twins named Chris and Christopher had remained two weeks old for a whole summer, so she promised to begin to age them; already, Liletta had changed these grocery store-bought miniature baby dolls’ racial identity to black, just as she changed Spanish Barbie’s and made her Vanity from Vanity 6 (now Denise Matthews), whom she adored. Later on, I was stunned that when Prince changed leading ladies, she changed her doll’s identity, too, making her Appolonia, and I had to put up with her refreshing the mole on her every time our play began; she would make lace ensembles for her to wear; I’d insist that everyone be dressed in regular outfits before coming to my full service restaurant in Beverly Hills called DeMirado, and that they order properly from the menu I created, whose many food items I’d drawn and cut out. Her dolls lived in Minneapolis and mine lived in California.
She was a friend so close that she’d come over and go in the refrigerator to get herself something to eat, and then would ask, what happened, so we could set the scene for our doll play. Once my aunt’s husband stepped in to say hi when I was playing with my dolls and, looking in on the paradise of my Barbie Townhouse where I had fixed up several dolls in maids’ uniforms, decorated with elaborate bedding ensembles and had sports cars parked out front, he seemed to fade into another zone, remarked more to himself than to me, that “If I had everything those dolls have I’d be set,” and left the room. Years later, when I read Beloved, and how Paul D. felt when he saw the chicken named Mister, an animal with more freedom than he had as a man, I thought back to this moment. When Liletta lost her grandfather in 1999, she left the guests at her home and came to mine to talk, in part, I think, to hear some of the stories that I’m telling now. Though the years have separated us, she is the kind of friend whose voice I always know, who says I love you and who calls me her “sister.” When I think of Sula and Nel, I think of us; we were “girls together,” in the way that Nel thought of herself and Sula at that novel’s end.
Pilate is my all time favorite Morrison character, and I’ve always had the fantasy of her being cast as Whoopi Goldberg in a film, mainly because I think that she is the actress who could sit at the open window, calmly watch Milkman and Guitar running away with a bag of bones after robbing her house, and say the line “What the devil they want that for?” with just the perfect expression. And there’s something about Morrison’s Hagar in Song of Solomon always makes me think of myself in terms of how I am loved, possibly times like when I was nine and my grandparents took me out shopping for Easter dresses at the fine Montgomery boutiques where they always bought my clothes, in this case, the Junior Vogue, they could not decide which one of three they liked most, and so decided to buy them all.
As a senior at Spelman, I was intrigued by thoughts of Professor Morrison on the difference that the presence or absence of an ancestor has made in the development of characters in African American literature. I was so thankful that my professor, Donna Akiba Sullivan Harper, obliged me as a junior when I asked to write on all of Toni Morrison’s novels though we were only required to discuss one writers’ novel for African American literature term paper. For with Morrison, I found it impossible to choose just one. By then, I had read Beloved, and had so much to say. Dr. Harper said that it was an excellent paper, and I even ended up submitting it as my writing sample with my application to graduate school.
I will never forget the excitement that I felt when, as a professor at UC Davis, I first read Love at the end of 2003; when a colleague in African American literature asked me what it was about, I told him I’d give him just one clue, that he should “heed Heed.” And in November 2004, after Professor Morrison visited our campus, I developed my first graduate seminar on her novels. During a panel for the students at the Robert Mondavi Center, at a point, Professor Morrison looked to the participants and told us that we, as the future mothers of children who would inherit the world in which we lived, needed to be concerned about what had been at stake in the recent election, and its agendas such as the War on Terror, for all of this had a profound impact. She also talked at that night’s lecture, by drawing on Grendel of Beowulf, about mothers and the influence that they can have for better and for worse, a talk to which many people in Northern, California had driven from miles around, coming to hear her, to see her, to be in her presence; sitting in the huge audience, I thought to myself, as I took in the words of this powerful lecture that “This is the reason that God allows greatness.” Her words have remained with me, and increasingly, have shaped my current perceptions. Indeed, I get it, at last. That is to say, though I am not a mother as yet, I have begun to increasingly think as one might as I, as a woman, have pondered the nation’s public sphere, for example, analyzing the questions about President Obama’s national belonging, the panoply of hostile responses to the changes that he has brought to the nation and to the world’s stage, as well as to the change that he himself represents given his racial background. For in every way, these responses are a barometer for how my children, any son and any daughter, might well be treated in the future, and in fact, for all children who look like him, children destined to live out their lives in this new millennium and who all deserve a world in which they are judged by content of their character and nothing else. For I agree that to be judged by the color of one’s skin, as the epigraph from Cameo suggests, “should be immoral and a sin.” They are one reason that visionary approaches to policy-making are so important. These heated public debates, which at their most extreme are tinged with segregationist and secessionist logic that hearkens back to the Civil War and civil rights eras, encompass what is at stake for them, for you, for me, and ultimately, for all.
I suppose I have incorporated some reflections on Obama as I have discussed Professor Morrison’s work because as an artist, a seed for the “Always” on the backdrop of my Obama art quilt, which articulates my own perception of the significance of his leadership, was planted in part by the curious, mystifying and singular “Always” of Shadrack in Sula. I should say, too, that Professor Morrison has inspired a portrait art quilt that I have decided to develop within my black history series, and hope to share at the Toni Morrison Society conference in Paris next year. Today, I am inspired to say to her, as I first said at Spelman when I saw her at 20, “Thank you for all that you’ve taught me.” I am thankful to be almost twice that age now. Thank you for giving us so much writing to think and grow on as men and women for all the seasons of life, and for being such a woman and intellectual for all seasons. You have my deepest honor, appreciation, admiration and respect.
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