Toni Morrison: Prophet with a Sharp Pen

By DON ROLLINS

Whatever else we know about slavery in America, we know it has forever stained our collective narrative. Indeed as with the calculated, often grizzly evil inflicted by whites upon native populations, there can be no credible telling of the nation’s history apart from black suffering. Past and present.

But too often since its onset in 1619, slavery’s place in that larger story has been dictated to fit the narrative crafted by whites — a Jamestown worldview in which all others were inferior, of no worth save their economic utility.

This myopic racism has of course been challenged across the centuries, including the many efforts by well intentioned (but often paternalistic) white progressives with a more expansive view of human dignity.

Yet even more critical to dismantling the kind of strident bigotry at work in Washington is the tradition of black prophets with sharp pens — poets and authors in particular — who speak from, not about, the legacy of the slave ships.

The roll call of these resistors is long and stellar, from Frederick Douglass to James Baldwin to Miles Davis; but with the death of novelist and Nobel Prize recipient Toni Morrison, we’re reminded of the unique activism practiced by African-American women and others.

Although different in their art form, backgrounds and voices, Morrison was part of a wave of prophetic black women/other writers like none other. (Her active career overlapped those of bell hooks, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni.) Together they not only confronted the white supremacy shot through everything American; they wrote, read and spoke to blacks.

For Morrison’s part, as early as her days as an editor at Random House (late 1960s) Morrison saw this need to reach beyond black activism to black connection: “We’ve had the first rush of black entertainment, where blacks were writing for whites, and whites were encouraging this kind of self-flagellation. Now we can get down to the craft of writing, where black people are talking to black people.”

Morrison’s dozen novels were also salted with mystical encounters and themes, but always tethered to morally wrenching circumstances as with “Beloved,” in which a former slave so fears her baby will be forced into slavery, she kills the child — a storyline she believed resonated most with a people, like her, whose origin story is rooted in systemic dehumanization, captivity, torture and murder.

It’s unlikely we’ll see such an enclave of prophetic black women/others such as the one that gave us Toni Morrison. Time marches on, even for the boldest among us.

But even as they leave us, their words echo, “written on the winds of time” as a preacher once spoke. Words written with a sharp pen.

Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2019

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