Toni Morrison: Diving Into Darkness on Wings of Light

Tags

authors, Beloved, books, humanity, inspiration, racism, slavery, Song of Soloman, Toni Morrison, writing

Last in my series “Brushes With Blackness” on how Black lives and Black Culture colored my Whiteness.

I’d always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t really know how I wanted to write or what I wanted to write until I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Soloman.

What I mean by how and what is this: Sentences so carefully crafted they grab and bite. Images  so sharp and powerful they cleave you to the bone. That lift you up and tear you apart with one clean stoke. Characters that are utterly human and yet larger than life. Story-telling that is a kind of myth-making. Themes that capture the heartbreaking beauty and gut-wrenching brutality of an oppressed people.

Song of Solomon is the coming of age tale of a Black man in the 1930’s, Macon Dead, III, otherwise know as Milkman, because his mother nursed him until his his legs were dangling toward the floor. It’s about his strange aloof family, a wealthy bitter father and a secretive, passive mother, a bootlegger Aunt born with no novel, a beautiful cousin he lusts after and abandons. It’s about his best friend Guitar who joins other angry young men bent on revenge killings, and his own quest to escape that violence and a dead-end life and learn to fly, as his own  great-grandfather, Soloman, is reported to have done. All the way back to Africa.

It’s tale that reminds us about the possibility and need of transcendence, to find something within ourselves that lifts us beyond where we ever thought we could go.

Morrison’s novel Beloved, which won a Pulitzer Prize, struck me in similar ways. So much so that I taught the book in my freshman literature and composition courses for many years. Reading that book was an experience that I believed my students must not miss out on. “A book like an axe,” as Kafka recommended, “to break the seas frozen inside our souls.”

Beloved tells the story of slavery, its escape, and its aftermath. It’s based on the true story a a woman who would rather kill her own than to see that child return to the horrors they’d just escaped. And it’s the tale of how the horrors of the past, in this case a dead child, can come back to haunt us.

In the end though, it’s about love. About loving others, being loved, and learning to love ourselves, despite all that would argue against it or try to stop us. This is the great theme that runs through all her books.

In one moving scene, Baby Suggs, Holy, a backwoods preacher in a sunlit meadow, offers up to those who come to hear, her great big heart:

Here in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder, they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, You!

Morrison’s writing is a kind of “diving into darkness on wings of light.” She does not flinch away from the darkness, but at the same time shows us how it’s pierced with light.

She has inspired me as a writer on not only how and what to write, but also why. To write large, and write deep, in language that sears and soars. To write stories that matter, that make a difference, that must be heard. To write in nuanced and meaningful ways about both the beauty and brutality of the human experience. Stories that inspire us to rise above our smaller selves.

You want to fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down. –Toni Morrison

Brushes with Blackness: Best Friends and Bullies

Tags

Black Lives Matter, Blacks, bullies, childhood, Friends, personal, prejudice, race, racism, Whiteness, whites

Second in series in how Black lives and Black culture colored my Whiteness.

As a child I was completely color blind. I know today people would say that was unlikely. Or even problematic. White people declaring they are color blind is seen as a kind of whitewash, or cop-out, a way to refuse to deal with the problem of systemic racism. People of color born into racist societies do not have the luxury of being color blind.

But it is my recollection of my personal experience as a young child. Certainly I saw differences in skin color, but it meant no more to me than differences in body size, hair color, gender, age. I assigned no value to these things other than appreciating that there was difference. It was a natural part of life.

My first “brush with Blackness,” as I call it, happened in third grade. We were living in Omaha, Nebraska in the late 50’s, in an old haunted house that I write about in another series of blog posts.

On the school playground I befriended an older girl named Barbara in the 4th grade who happened to be Black. She was kind and fun and we shared a love of books. As she lived nearby, sometimes she walked home with me, and occasionally came to my house to play. Eventually she became my best friend. She was beautiful, tall and slim and had the loveliest smile. One day she invited me to her house to spend the night.

I only found out later what a ruckus that created between my mother and stepdad, who did not like the idea at all. But my mother insisted that I should be allowed to go. She met with Barbara’s mom, a nurse at the local hospital only a few blocks away. She was also a beautiful woman, fuller figured than her daughter, but with the same upswept hair and regal bearing, the same sweet smile and soft, warm voice.

It was my first sleepover and I was so excited. Barbara lived in a large home with several stories and a basement. Lots of her relatives lived there with her, including an uncle younger than she was, a fact that amazed and delighted me. How was such a thing possible? He was a fresh-faced boy with cute grin who liked to tease us. At dinner time we all sat around a huge dining room table eating the most delicious food I had ever tasted—barbequed pork ribs that melted off the bones. Everyone was friendly and laughed a lot, and made me feel a part of the family. My first sleep-over was a huge success.

But later that month I learned in a very personal way what racism was all about. In those days it was popular to wear dresses with full petticoats that made them flare out. While I loved them, they were also a nuisance. When I walked down the aisle of my classroom the dress would swish papers off desks if I wasn’t careful. So I got into the habit of holding the sides of my dress in when passing between desks or in crowded hallways. It seemed the polite thing to do so I wouldn’t be bothering anyone.

One day I was walking home from school on a narrow sidewalk. The girls in front of me were walking slower than I wanted to go, so I passed them by, politely pulling in my skirt as I did so. When I was in front of them, one of the girls began yelling at me and calling me names. Then she kicked me and made me fall. All I remember is being so hurt and angry and scared. I took off running as they laughed at me. When I got to the corner (my home was only a few houses away down the adjacent block) I turned around and yelled back at her the worst name I could think of, the one my mother had told me to never call anyone. I didn’t know what that word meant, but I felt she deserved it. I called her the N-word.

The next day I was called into the Principal’s office. My mother was there along with the girl who had kicked me and her 6th grade teacher. I thought we were there because she was in big trouble for being so mean to me. But instead I found out that I was in big trouble for calling her that horrible name. It seems she had thought I was holding my skirt in because I did not want it to touch her black body. And the fact that I had called her the N-word proved it. My mother explained that I did not know what that word meant, that I had nothing against Blacks. My best friend was Black.

Barbara and her mother came in to testify in my defense, and I was so grateful to see them there. Barbara told me later that the girl who kicked me was a bully who was always getting into trouble. She came from a bad home and her teacher was trying to help her.

I can’t remember what happened after that. Whether the girl and I had to apologize to each other or what the consequence was. Barbara and I remained friends. But I never got another sleepover at her house.

My colorblindness was shattered that day in the Principal’s office. Skin color became a thing that tainted all of us, me most of all. My whiteness set me apart from my Black friends. It made me suspect. It tainted me with the guilt of my forefathers and of my own prejudiced step-dad and other family members. It did not change my feelings for my Black friend or her kind family. But it changed my feelings for that Black girl who kicked me. I learned how my whiteness had marked me as a member of a race whose prejudice had scarred her, and how I had unwittingly contributed to that. I had a crash course in race relations, and from what I could see it was the White race, who had enslaved and oppressed others who were the tainted race, not the people who we had oppressed and continued to discriminate against.

Not long after that my stepdad was transferred to Vandenburg Airforce Base on the central coast of California. There were no Black children in the school I attended there, and very few in the small town I grew up in.

I feel for the girl who had kicked me, the hurt and outrage she must have felt as I passed her holding in my skirt, calling her that name. I feel for my friend and her mother, that they had been put into the position of defending me against another Black child, even a trouble-maker. I wonder what damage I did to race relations in that family who had welcomed me into their home with such loving-kindness, only to hear about what I had called another child, and feel betrayed.

The experience only deepened my empathy toward others and my commitment to fight for equality and justice for all people, whatever our race or ethnicity, gender or faith, economic status or sexual preference. But it also made me realize how easily we can misjudge each other, how a sense of injustice (hers and mine) can make us say or do hurtful things, things we wouldn’t if we knew better. How difficult it is to win trust and sustain it.

The worldwide protests against racial injustice, the insistence that Black Lives Matter, the kneeling of police officers with protesters, the public outrage against the senseless, violent deaths of Black men and women, make me hopeful that change is possible, that change is coming. None of us are free until all of us are free. That’s a lot of freedom yet to win. We’ve no time to lose.

Brushes with Blackness, 1

Tags

America, Black Lives Matter, humanity, racism

Jerry Holt / AP

All of us who are white in America were born into a country steeped in racism. Even for those of us who were taught that racism is wrong, that we are all equal, all God’s beloved children, regardless of the color of our skin, racism was something dark and deeply troubling we had to contend with, something that colored our whiteness.

It shaped our sense of self, our sense of justice, fair play, and compassion for others. It fostered a sense of collective guilt and shame for white ancestors who enslaved others or looked askance at those who did. For those today who persist in holding racist views. Even for beloved grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins who ought to know better, and yet through the occasional disparaging remark and negative attitude revealed a meanness of spirit toward a whole race of people simply because of the color of their skin.

I learned at an early age that good-hearted people, people I loved and admired and thought I could trust, held racists views. That they could be, God-forbid, racists themselves. Who held views that filled me with shame and sadness.

I was fortunate to be raised by a mother who was not prejudiced, who spoke out against those who were, and who taught me through her words and actions to understand how wrong racism is.

I have been fortunate in that all of my brushes with “blackness,” black people and black culture, have been positive, enriching experiences, and have colored my view of blackness with a deep admiration and respect. My one negative experience was no exception.

Today, when the whole world is rising up to reject racism, to protest against its continued brutality, is a time for all of us to reflect upon our own “Brushes with Blackness,” as I call it here, the experiences that have colored our view of what black lives and black culture mean to us, to examine if we in any way contribute to those negative connotations implicit in racists views.

Do we merely look askance at the racist views and systems embedded in our society? Or do we do what we can in our small corner of the world to not only oppose those views, but to celebrate the beauty and braveness and wisdom found in black communities and black culture?

That’s what I’m hoping to do on these pages in a short series examining my “Brushes with Blackness.” This is the first. Three more follow.

Brushes with Blackness: Best Friends and Bullies

Brushes with Blackness – Feminist or Womanist?

Turning Anger into Action, in Ferguson and Elsewhere

Tags

anger, Ferguson, injustice, Michael Brown, police officer, political action, racism, social justice

I am so angry at the outcome in Ferguson, that there was no indictment to allow a court of law to settle the matter of guilt or innocence in the killing of an unarmed young Black man. It seems this tragedy was bungled from day one in every way imaginable. At the very least a special prosecutor should have been brought in rather than allowing a district attorney that the community did not trust lead the investigation.

I do not know, now does anyone, whether Officer Wilson was justified in shooting Michael Brown. If he was truly so in fear of his life that he shot an unarmed man who in self-defense–a man who some witnesses say was surrendering and that others say was charging him. No one will know now, because the case will not go to trial to determine that guilt. It was a small thing for a grieving family to ask for–a trial. How could such a simple thing be denied?

I feel for the family of Michael Brown, for a community that lives in fear of the police, who seek justice for their dead sons. I can’t imagine what that would be like–to raise a black son knowing that any kind of brush with police could end in his arrest or shooting or death. And that it was far more likely for my son than for the son of my white neighbor, or the son of a police officer, or the son of a mayor.

When I look at how angry this injustice makes me–when I am so removed from the situation–I can fully understand how the anger of those who are intimately affected could turn into a rage that would upturn police cars and set them on fire. I can understand, without condoning, because anger, unchanneled, is wild and destructive.

My prayers now are that this justified anger is channeled into action, into changing an unjust system of law that allows community oversight of police departments, that requires body cameras for police officers, that ensures members of law enforcement represent demographically the community they serve. And that channels that anger into political action that unseats mayors and governors who are as tone-deaf as these in Ferguson, Missouri, were.

Today I am trying to channel my anger into action by writing this blog post. I know that not all my readers may feel the same as I do about the outcome of that Grand Jury, but I hope that all can sympathize with the mothers of Black sons the way that I do. And pray for the day when all our sons and daughters, whatever their skin color or economic status, will be treated equally in the eyes of the law, with justice and restraint and compassion.