Toni Morrison’s Unforgettable, Defining Legacy: A Memorial

Toni Morrison — writer, critic, editor, orator, teacher, mother, and more — died on August 5, 2019. With the announcement yesterday, Black readers the world over shared a sigh of grief. She was 88 years old, and surely no one lives for ever, but to lose Morrison now, as the world seems to fall to ever more brutal pieces, feels like a cruel twist. A movie of her life, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, is in limited circulation. She’d just released a new non-fiction work, The Source of Self-Regard: Essays, Speeches, Meditations. And her novels remain as bright and magnetic as ever. The Bluest Eye. Sula. Song of Solomon. Tar Baby. Beloved. Jazz. Paradise. Love. A Mercy. Home. God Help The Child. In the finest tradition of Black folk everywhere, we gathered together to share our favorite memories of Mother Morrison, how we met her, what she meant to us. We cannot stop the world so that we can grieve, but we can honor her and her contribution not just to fiction, but to our collective Black culture. Because she wrote for us, everyone else was just lucky enough to get to read it.

Critic I was introduced to Morrison’s work right around the time she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was in college and read Song of Solomon on assignment. With the faultiness of memory, I think it was the first novel by a Black woman I’d ever read. But that can’t be right (or probably it can be). What is right is that it was the first novel by a Black woman I’d ever read that so fully embraced its…