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Unpaid Film Critic

“toni morrison: the pieces i am” (wendy moscow).

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June 20, 2019.  Nobel prize-winning writer, teacher, book editor and mother, Toni Morrison stands proudly as the latest in an ancestral line of African American women whom she remembers as having fearlessly confronted the world with a clear sense of who they were, despite having suffered horrendous indignities. These are the women who populate Morrison’s novels – “The Bluest Eye,” “Sula,” “Song of Solomon,” “Beloved” – written unapologetically in the language of the African American experience. Troubled by the cultural assumption that the reader is always white, she defied the norms of her time, writing stories with which Black people could resonate – unconcerned by the hegemony of the white gaze. Exemplifying this paradigm change, Morrison cites Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” an earlier novel whose white gaze is explicitly implied. “Invisible to whom?” she asks.

The new and splendid documentary “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” celebrates not only the author’s writing, but the many other facets of her accomplished life. Using interviews, archival film, photographs and artwork (oh, the artwork!) director Timothy Greenfield-Sanders paints a portrait of someone who, at 87, is warm, slyly funny, intellectually brilliant, sure of her worth and uncompromising in the face of injustice. Awed by the power of the word at an early age (especially having come from folks who, only two generations back, were not allowed to read and write), Morrison revels in the ability of books to change society and alter the stream of history. Her personal journey, from an Ohio steel town to Howard and Cornell Universities, to New York (as an editor at Random House raising two sons on her own) to her professorship at Princeton is told by Morrison herself – her rapport with the director (who is an old friend) readily apparent. She faces the viewer directly (as contrasted with the other interviewees, who speak at an angle to the camera), a directorial choice that privileges her narrative over the others and allows us to feel as if we are a guest at her table. She shares her wisdom with us on many topics, including the toll racism takes on the psyches of African American children (a theme explored with great sensitivity in “The Bluest Eye”), her initial marginalization by the white male literary establishment (which insisted on comparing her with other Black writers, their only commonality being skin color), the power of imagination to bring historical worlds to life, and her unsurpassed carrot cake.

I did not know that Morrison, in her time as a book editor, had nurtured the writing careers of Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali and other African American authors, especially women. Robert Gottlieb, her longtime editor, describes Morrison’s activism as being covert rather than overt. Not one for protests and picket lines, Morrison’s lifting up of African American life and culture in all its complexity in her own work, combined with her mentoring (and centering) of voices that had not yet been heard or taken seriously, helped to expand the literary canon beyond whiteness and maleness.

The interview with Gottlieb is one of a dozen beautifully shot, portrait-style interviews with an extraordinary group of Morrison’s colleagues and friends, including Oprah Winfrey, Fran Lebowitz, Angela Davis, Walter Mosley and Sonia Sanchez – their insights, anecdotes and humor providing additional layers to the chronicle of her life.

Another inspired directorial choice is the use of works by African American artists to tell the story of Black life in America, giving visual shape to the poetry of Morrison’s language. Interspersed throughout the film is Jacob Lawrence’s incredibly evocative “Migration” series, illustrating not only Morrison’s familial tale of having come up North (her description of her grandparents’ departure and the reasons for it is both chilling and riveting) but the Great Migration of so many Black people for whom the Jim Crow South had become untenable. Works by Kara Walker, Romare Bearden, Faith Ringgold, Charles White and others make palpable a people’s beauty, struggles and triumphs.

“Toni Morrison:The Pieces I Am” is visually stunning, from the opening neo-Cubist animated collage created by Mickalene Thomas showing the evolution of the writer’s face over time (a perfect metaphor for the idea behind the film), to the sparkling shots of a white sun-drenched pier against the serene blue of the Hudson River outside Morrison’s waterfront home, where she still writes in longhand on a yellow legal pad. And that writing continues to speak about what it means to be human in an imperfect world. Says Oprah Winfrey, “Toni Morrison’s work shows us through pain all the myriad ways we can come to love.”

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am” opens Friday, June 21st, at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. For more info, visit filmforum.com

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Posted on June 21, 2019, in Documentary and tagged Angela Davis , Beloved , Fran Lebowitz , Jacob Lawrence , Oprah Winfrey , Robert Gottlieb , Song of Solomon , Sonia Sanchez , Sula , Th Bluest Eye , Timothy Greenfield-Sanders , Toni Morrison , Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am , Walter Mosley . Bookmark the permalink . Leave a comment .

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Blog – Posted on Thursday, May 13

15 best toni morrison books: where to start.

The late great Toni Morrison was a giant of the literary world and an icon of Black literature. When she passed away in 2019, she had a long list of accolades to her name: winner of the Pulitzer prize, the first Black female editor at Random House, and the first (and only) Black female to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2012, she was even presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

More importantly, Morrison has earned a place in the hearts and bookshelves of readers the world over by crystallizing the Black experience throughout American history in prose that is fluid, hypnotic, and flat out gorgeous. 

Our point is, you should definitely be reading some Toni Morrison books! And you’ll find there’s a lot to catch up on. So where to start? Choosing the very best Toni Morrison books would be near impossible — and totally subjective. So instead we’ve curated the perfect route into a lifetime of remarkable writing. 

If you're feeling overwhelmed by the number of great classics out there, you can also take our 30-second quiz below to narrow it down quickly and get a personalized book recommendation 😉

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1. The Bluest Eye (1970)

If you’re at a loss for where to start with any author as eminent as Toni Morrison, we would always suggest picking up their debut novel. Written on scraps of paper while Morrison cooked her son’s dinner, The Bluest Eye was published during her time as an editor. 

The novel follows a young girl named Pecola Breedlove, who grows up in Lorain, Ohio — Morrison’s hometown — in the years following the Great Depression. Consistently bullied for her dark skin and made to feel ugly and unloved, Pecola prays for the miracle of blue eyes — a hallmark of white American beauty. As a result of this impossible desire, and the trauma she suffers at the hands of others, Pecola’s life begins to unravel. 

The Bluest Eye is a devastating book about the hostility and pain inflicted on vulnerable people by racialized standards of beauty. In what became her signature poetic prose, Morrison confronts this difficult theme, as well as those of incest and assault, with an innate humanity, setting the tone for her work to come.

2. Beloved (1987)

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is widely regarded as her greatest novel: partly because it won her the Pulitzer Prize, and partly because it is indeed great! Set in the wake of the American Civil War, the novel takes an unflinching look at the true horrors and psychological trauma of slavery. 

Sethe is a runaway slave who continues to be haunted by her memories of the plantation eighteen years after her escape. Living in Ohio with her daughter, she becomes convinced that their home is inhabited by a malevolent spirit, which she believes to be the ghost of her baby, laid to rest in the garden beneath a tombstone marked ‘Beloved’. 

This terrifying but important exploration of guilt and parenthood was inspired by the tragic, real-life story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped with her daughter to the free state of Ohio in 1856. In Beloved, Morrison gives a voice to the harrowing experiences of the “Sixty Million and more” African Americans who, like Garner, endured the atrocities of slavery.

3. Song of Solomon (1977)

Battling with Beloved in the popular vote for the title of “best book by Toni Morrison” is an early novel that paved the way for her vividly original later work. A stylistic tour de force, Song of Solomon is imbued with Morrison’s rich understanding of the novelistic tradition, and blends fable, fantasy , and magical realism, as her central character, Macon “Milkman” Dead III, comes of age . 

A Black man living in Michigan against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Milkman grows up and leaves his Rust Belt city, striking out South in search of his family’s roots — and their rumored hidden treasure. This book is a wise and hard-hitting portrait of a young Black man getting to grips with his violent heritage. It not only won the acclaim of former president Barack Obama, but was also the first Morrison book to be selected for Oprah’s Book Club (a legitimately enormous platform) — so it comes highly recommended.

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4. Tar Baby (1981)

After years of juggling her day job as an editor with life as a single mother — all the while moonlighting as an author — the release of Tar Baby finally allowed Morrison to commit to being a full-time writer. What Random House lost in editing skills , however, they gained in writing talent, as Morrison achieved immeasurable success and hard-won acclaim with the seven novels that followed. 

As for the book itself, Tar Baby reimagines the timeless story of the star-crossed lovers. Jadine Childs is a beautiful fashion model whose affluent white patron has sponsored her into education and elite society. A Black American now living in Europe, she has a sophisticated white boyfriend, a degree in art history, and a coat made out of ninety seal skins. Son is a Black fugitive who comes into the service of Jadine’s sponsors. An uneducated, rough, beautiful criminal, he embodies everything Jadine loathes and desires. Through their affair, Morrison acutely addresses the racism that’s ingrained in American society and charts the nuanced and superficial differences and assimilations that pit people against each other: master and servant, man and woman, Black and white. 

5. Jazz (1992)

The second book in Morrison’s trilogy on African American history (after Beloved ), Jazz sets itself apart from her other works in both style and setting, making it an important and exciting read for someone who, by this point, is probably a Toni Morrison fan. 

Amid the urban tumult of 1920s Harlem, Jazz tells the tragic story of a love triangle between a murderous door-to-door salesman, his green-eyed, unstable wife, and his teenage lover Dorcas. The crime that kick-starts the narrative rips through this novel with a howl of love, rage, and betrayal, syncopating Morrison’s prose with all the swelling and dipping passions of a jazz tune. Jazz music not only lends the novel its energy and heat, but also inspires its structure, with shifting perspectives and hazy vignettes evoking the improvisation and polyphony of the genre.

6. Sula (1973)

In the poor, Black Midwest, in a neighborhood known as Bottom, two young girls, Nel and Sula, are the closest of friends. But though they are privy to each other’s secrets and dreams, they’re destined to grow into two very different women. Nel, raised in a straightlaced, conservative family, settles down and marries straight out of high school; while Sula, whose childhood with her eccentric grandmother and unpredictable mother was fraught with instability, disappears from town soon after Nel’s wedding. When she returns to Bottom after a mysterious ten year absence, she is cast as the town pariah. No one, least of all Nel, is prepared to trust her. 

Sula is an all-too-familiar study of a world that resents strong women; one in which society tries to hold down wayward forces because it is trapped by fear and bound to social convention. Yet, despite being hard and bitter, Morrison’s novel is, as always, uplifting, rhapsodic, and achingly alive.

7. Paradise (1997)

“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” These are the opening lines of Toni Morrison’s Paradise , the final book in her historical trilogy . An unforgettable meditation on gender , race, and religion, the novel opens with a chilling act of violence, and chronicles its genesis in an all-Black Oklahoma town called Ruby. 

The town is built on fear, righteousness, and a strict moral code, and is completely dominated by its founding families — the descendants of freed slaves who can trace their ancestry back well over a hundred years. When this patriarchal community perceives itself to be under threat from an all-female town called the Convent, years of smoldering oppression will be stoked into flames of violent rage, and nine male citizens will lay their pain and anger on four young women. In soaring prose, Morrison weaves an unforgettable tapestry of folklore, history, and myth; past, present, and future.

8. God Help the Child (2015)

Morrison’s final novel combines the elements of magical realism that imbued Song of Solomon , with the shifting perspective of Jazz , and themes as audacious as those of The Bluest Eye , proving that she remained a powerful writer throughout her career. 

The first book by Toni Morrison to be set in the current moment, God Help the Child anticipated a conversation that has come to dominate Black fiction several years later — that of colorism. At the novel’s center is “Bride”, a confident young woman with beautiful blue-black skin, who turns heads wherever she goes. But Bride did not always know how to wear her beauty. As a child she was denied love by her light-skinned mother, who was poisoned by that strain of color anxiety still present in Black communities. 

Now, as Bride tries to love her man Booker, she finds herself betrayed by a desperate moment in her past, misshapen by the sins and sufferings of her childhood, and shrinking into the hairless body of a girl. Toni Morrison exposes the damage that adults can do to children in this brisk and ferocious novel.

9. A Mercy (2008)

Always a great chronicler of the American experience, in A Mercy, Morrison examines an era of the slave trade that is significantly less chartered than its final decades: namely, its very beginnings during the seventeenth century. 

The story takes place in Virginia, in the home of an Anglo-Dutch merchant called Jacob Vaark, who agrees to accept a slave girl from a plantation owner in lieu of payment for a debt. Into Jacob’s home enters little Florens, joining his wife Rebekka, Lina, their Native American servant, and the little foundling Sorrow. Here among these women, Florens looks for the love she lacks in a mother; and together they face the trials of their harsh environment as Vaark attempts to carve a place for himself in a hostile and lawless new nation. A Mercy is so beautiful and elemental, it’ll leave you trembling at the power of its storytelling and the dignity of its purpose.

10. The Source of Self-Regard (2019)

The last of her works to be published before she died, The Source of Self-Regard is Toni Morrison in her own words. A rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, this nonfiction collection is organized into three parts and spans the four decades of Morrison’s work. Each part is punctuated by a powerful introduction: the first, a searing prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second, a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr.; and the third, a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. Beyond these introductions, she offers moving reflections on a variety of subjects, including female empowerment, wealth, the artist in society, and the African-American presence in literature . She also reflects on her own creative process, revisiting her most celebrated novels with a keen critical eye. So once you’ve read all the best Toni Morrison novels, this is the perfect book to pick up next.

11. Love (2003)

While hotel-owner Bill Cosey was alive, the women in his life would do almost anything to gain his favor. They gave him love and misery in equal measure, until they drove him to his grave. Even in death, Cosey’s hold on these women has lost none of its strength. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress: each voice in Morrison’s novel stakes their furious claim on his memory and his estate, forced together but driven apart by a hatred so deep and bitter that only their own death will free them from it. 

This shrewd and funny tale is about so much more than a disputed will and divided affections, however. It is a bold and powerful work from a masterful storyteller on the nature of love itself — appetitive, possessive, all-consuming, and sublime. Love is rich in characters and drama, but it is also written with all the grace, sensitivity, and insight of earlier Toni Morrison novels.

12. Home (2013)

A young African-American veteran of the Korean war, Frank Money returns from the trauma of combat only to be thrust into a segregated United States that is riddled with lethal pitfalls for an unwary Black man. He is filled with growing self-loathing and contempt, but when he hears that his cherished little sister is gravely ill, he quickly regains a sense of purpose. Together, they return to their tiny Georgia hometown, revisiting the buried secrets of their childhood and discovering the roots of their shattered sense of self. 

With incantatory power Morrison tells the story of this modern day Odysseus: a profoundly lost and defeated man who learns what it takes to heal, and consequently finds both his courage and his home. She uses the trials of Frank and his sister Cee to expose historical trauma — the racism of the 1950s, the devastating effects of war, and the self-serving techniques of a patriarchal medical industry — in this emotional powerhouse of a novel, Home .

13. The Origin of Others (2017)

The Origin of Others is a resonant book about literature and the fetishization of skin color, based on Morrison’s 2016 Norton lectures at Harvard University. Though this book is slim, Morrison takes on a mammoth topic: What is race and why does it matter? In her search for answers, Morrison takes up vital questions bearing on identity, and asks what motivates the enduring human tendency to invent and reinforce dehumanising categories of otherness. 

Morrison turns to history and politics, as well as her own memories, but above all, she looks to literature — this is, after all, a book about the possibilities and responsibilities of the written word. Dissecting the works of authors from Ernest Hemingway to Camara Laye, she examines notions of racial purity and the ways in which literature employs skin color in characterization and narrative. Avid readers of Toni Morrison novels (and that very much includes you, if you make it this far!) will be pleased to hear that she also revisits her own work to discuss how things are said, what is left out, and why.

14. Playing in the Dark (1992)

A must-read for admirers of Tony Morrison’s novels (as well as students, scholars, and lovers of American literature), Playing in the Dark ponders the effect that a racialized society had on the American literary imagination of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her compelling argument is that the central themes of freedom, individualism, masculinity, and innocence, as well as an obsession with figurations of hell, were responses to an abiding Africanist presence, and to a Black population that was manifestly unfree. Through her brilliant discussions of the Black force that figures so significantly in the fiction of Early America — including novels by all-time greats such as Poe, Melville, and Hemingway — Morrison promises to change the way we read American literature.

15. The Big Box (199)

Even some of the most ardent Toni Morrison fans aren’t aware of the picture books that she co-wrote with her son Slade — but they really are a gift to the world of children’s literature. In true Morrison fashion, her picture books challenge the traditional perspectives that are so often reinforced in books for children, by including diverse and unconventional characters. The Big Box , for example, is about three children who don’t quite fit the mold. As a result, their parents send them to live in big boxes, and bring them things that children are supposed to crave — but what they really want is freedom. Though the pictures portray a more literal version of events, this thoughtful and complex story resonates on a figurative level, too, thanks to Morrison’s dreamlike magical realism. 

Just as Morrison shared her love of writing with her son Slade, the final instalment on this list of Toni Morrison books provides the perfect end to your reading experience, by allowing you to pass on the baton by sharing her storytelling with  the little readers in your life.

On the lookout for another author who adds a touch of magic to complex and thought-provoking themes? Look no further than the enchanting work of Haruki Murakami .

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The Revelation of Reading Toni Morrison in Moscow

Kristina gorcheva-newberry on the world expanding experience of the bluest eye.

I first read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in graduate school. I was frightened by how it made me feel—in awe of the writer’s genius, of her ability to weave together horror and beauty, the mundane and the sublime. I called one of my friends in Moscow and said, “I just read the most gorgeous and terrifying book by Toni Morrison.” And my friend asked, “Who is that?”

The year was 2001, and nobody among my very educated, book-loving cronies in Moscow knew who Toni Morrison was. Russian-speakers remained in the dark, even after Morrison had received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The next time I traveled back home, I brought copies of her books to my friends, who found Morrison’s novels just as poignant and heartbreaking as I did, her characters looming off pages, alive and unforgettable.

Occasionally, we would gather in my flat, and I would read out loud and translate passages from Morrison’s books, pages and pages of magnificent scenes or descriptions and also those that I found most difficult or tragic or controversial. We would then discuss them, zealously, pointing at the differences or similarities between African American and Russian women, and how little control we still had over our own lives, at the mercy of our government or newly hatched oligarchs.

We compared Morrison’s heroines to Tolstoy’s or Chekhov’s and found them to be just as strong and passionate, imprisoned by their historical past or trapped in the reality of living in a man’s world, where a woman’s body was nothing but a commodity; her fate and worth designated by her father, her husband, her lover, her children, or her community, like a town of Eloe in Tar Baby . There was little empathy in that world, and little glory. But there was friendship, and there was motherly love, and there was the desire to break free from the oppressiveness of our homes and the country that supported patriarchy in all its evident or inconspicuous forms, at home and at work, in science or arts.

For me and many of my female friends, Morrison’s books became portals into a new, freer world of self-discovery and womanhood; they peeled away the scar tissue that our hearts, our souls had grown like a protective shell, a carapace, in order not to be crushed, annihilated by a male fist. Her books gave us, if not solace, then hope, hope that one day we would be able to speak our minds, to express what we truly felt, to chart our own destiny, and to denounce the current regime that continuously suppressed, suffocated women. After reading Morrison, my friends and I grew courageous, ready to defend one another, to fight for our right to birth not only children, but books, music, paintings; to fly planes, perform surgeries, make scientific discoveries; to be regarded not only as nurturers, Morrison’s “swamp women” deified by their “ancient properties,” but as artists and politicians, the architects of our own lives.

Even now, years later, when I reread the passage about soldier ants in Tar Baby , I can’t help but hold my breath and press the book closer to my heart because, once again, Morrison had written about me—a proud laboring insect, a determined female who has so much to do “bearing, hunting, eating, fighting, burying….”

Morrison’s unfathomable ability to make us empathize with her characters on a very personal, intimate level allows us to inhabit her fictional world, become an organic part of it. No matter how strange or harrowing that world is, as readers we have no choice but to surrender to the bewildering power and beauty of her language, her striking command of the narrative art. We embrace her rich, thriving landscapes so fully, so completely, the remarkable interiority of her worlds, we can’t separate ourselves from them or the characters—male or female, old or young. Just like them, we suffer and fight and plead, choking on anger or tears.

The more we read her novels, the deeper we descend into her worlds, where we turn into Sula, Nel, Pilate, Milkman, Jadine, Son, Sethe, Paul D, or little Pecola who prays to God to change the color of her eyes. Page after page, we find ourselves transfixed and transformed by the sound of Morrison’s voice, so proud and distinct in all of her work. And I think: How fortunate we are to have been graced with her presence, her literary genius, her humanity, which she continues to share with us, her soul hovering about the universe, immortal.

I met Toni Morrison twice, and both times, when she appeared, she reminded me of a great ship entering a town’s harbor. She made everything look small—the stage, the room, the building, the people inside, the trees outside. When I finally dared to speak to her, I found myself stumbling for words. Not only was I afraid that she wouldn’t understand my accent, I also kept asking myself: What could one possibly say to the sun, or the moon, or the universe that might seem important or even necessary? In October of 2012, Morrison was honored at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. I carried a bouquet of fifty red roses to a private reception preceding the official ceremony. A crowd gathered. Morrison had trouble walking and was slowly wheeled out to the middle of the room. For a moment, all I could hear was my heart thrashing about my chest, exploding from pride and joy and from the sight of her face, so close to mine. I kneeled beside her chair and laid the roses in her arms.

I said, “What I know about life I’ve learned from my mother. But what I know about fiction writing I’ve learned from you.” She studied my face, her gaze heavy but also warm, like a late-afternoon sun. When she asked whether I’d brought vodka, I shook my head, embarrassed, mumbling that had I known, I would’ve brought the best vodka, the best pickles, the best pumpernickel bread. “What kind of Russian are you? If you don’t have anything to drink?” she asked and then laughed—a hearty, full-throated laugh, which made me feel awkward but also known, understood. I have never forgotten that feeling.

My debut novel, The Orchard , couldn’t have been conceived or written had I not read Morrison’s books, especially The Bluest Eye . I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, a country that forbade any sexual discourse. Before perestroika, in novels and short stories, as well as in movies and plays, sex scenes were omitted, or they happened to be so chaste, depicted in sighs and whispers. No one talked about rape, incest, pedophilia, or women-trafficking, although we knew all of that existed. The Orchard —among many things—is a story about a young girl, Milka, neglected and abused by her parents. She carries a shameful secret, one she doesn’t share with anybody, not even with Anya, her best friend and the novel’s narrator. When Anya learns about Milka’s predicament, the tragic circumstances of her life, she refuses to believe her, and later feels helpless and aggrieved trying to help her friend.

Just like Claudia, the narrator of The Bluest Eye , Anya tells the story through a prism of memories, resurrecting the ghosts of her youth, the years she spent together with Milka, dreaming about boys and foreign lands, unaware that soon nothing would remain of their dreams but the dumb, “ unyielding earth .” Neither Claudia nor Anya can explain why things happened the way they did, but we, as readers and human beings, must “ take refuge in how .”

Writers like Toni Morrison are the universe’s response to everyday ugliness and the cruelty of existence, to wars, murder, genocide, torture, rape, gender and racial discrimination. They provoke and astound us, lure and haunt us; they “gather” us, “the pieces” we are, and “give them back” to us “in all the right order.” Such writers search for wounds to expose, for souls to heal; they bear witness, unveiling a higher truth, one that we might have never discovered or have discovered too late. They show us who we are as a species—weak, vulnerable, unfaithful, ignoble, but also those capable of surviving any tragedy, any loss, any pain; of building cathedrals and spaceships. Such writers remind us that at the beginning there was sound , and then there was word , and that if they dared to write those stories, we should dare to read them because in doing so we can recover, reclaim our humanity.

I was visiting my homeland when Toni Morrison died, in August of 2019. All day long my friends called or sent me messages with their condolences; they knew what she meant to me. In our Moscow flat, my mother lit a candle next to Morrison’s picture on the cover of Song of Solomon . My heart wept; my soul orphaned forever. As the evening drew closer and the darkness settled in the sky, I walked to the kitchen, poured two shots of vodka, and sliced two pieces of pumpernickel bread. I imagined her sitting in front of me, the glass raised in her strong, beautiful hands. I imagined her face—so intelligent, so sincere, so warm. I remembered Milkman whispering to Pilate, “ There must be another one like you … There’s got to be at least one more woman like you. ” I lifted the shot glass, saluting my invisible guest, my mentor, my muse. “No, there isn’t,” I said. “There isn’t anybody like you on this earth.”

__________________________________

The Orchard by Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry is available now from Ballantine Books. 

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The greatest toni morrison books, ranked and in order.

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Toni Morrison at Grande Hotel et Milan.

Toni Morrison is one of the greatest authors to ever live because she commanded respect and appreciation with everything she wrote and her work was renowned for its rich historical profundity and emotional panoramas. Her lucid accounts of the Black American experience made her an encyclopedia of truth for readers who wanted to see the world with new eyes and truly view the experiences of others with an allegiance to humanity and shared understanding. Morrison’s journey as a writer began while she was raising two sons and working as an editor at Random House. Her debut novel, The Bluest Eye , which she published at 39 years old, was inspired by her own desire to read stories that reflected the complex nature of Black life as captured in her famous quote: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”

Toni Morrison at Harbourfront's International Festival of Authors.

As a winner of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom, Morrison had ideas that shifted culture, and an approach to her craft that was unlike that of other writers in her generation, one which empowered her to shape stories that have stood out in the literary canon as paradigm shifting. With her words, she transformed the ordinary into the extraordinary, the deflated into the lush, and the mundane into the eccentric, all while transfusing ideas and transcribing the rawness of the human story.

Toni Morrison Books In Order

Morrison’s repertoire is more than a resume; it has become a rich literary reservoir and the legacy of her Midas touch, which has produced several acclaimed Bildungsroman masterpieces like Bluest Eye , magical realism stories like Beloved , and emotional works like Sula , among others. Below are all of Toni Morrison’s best books in order of release.

Toni Morrison photographed in her New York City apartment.

• The Bluest Eye (1970)
• Sula (1973)
• Song of Solomon (1977)
• Tar Baby (1981)
• Recitatif (1983)
• Beloved (1987)
• Jazz (1992)
• Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992)
• Conversations with Toni Morrison (1994)
• Arguing Immigration: The Controversy and Crisis Over the Future of Immigration in America (1994)
• The Nobel Lecture In Literature (1993 – 1994)
• The Dancing Mind (1996)
• Paradise (1997)
• Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (1997)
• The Big Box (1999)
• The Bluest Eye Teacher Guide (2001)
• The Book of Mean People (2002)
• Love (2003)
• Who’s Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003)
• The lion or the mouse? (2003)
• Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Casebook (2003)
• Poppy or the snake? (2004)
• Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004)
• A Mercy (2008)
• What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction ( 2008)
• Burn This Book (2009)
• Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word (2009)
• Peeny Butter Fudge (2009)
• Everyman’s Library (2010)
• Home (2012)
• Please, Louise (2014)
• God Help the Child (2015)
• Race: Vintage Minis (2017)
• The Origin of Others (2017)
• The Measure of Our Lives: A Gathering of Wisdom (2019)
• The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019)
• Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019)
• Goodness and the Literary Imagination: Harvard’s 95th Ingersoll Lecture with Essays on Morrison’s Moral and Religious Vision (2019)

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Toni Morrison wrote across multiple genres, pouring her intelligence and knowledge into important issues. Throughout her career, Morrison wrote 11 novels as well as books in other genres including non-fiction, short stories , essays, political commentary and children’s literature, which she co-authored with her son Slade Morrison across a decade. Below are Morrison’s top novels, ranked.

11. Love (2003)

Morrison’s non-linear eighth novel, Love , centers around the story of the affluent Bill Cosey, his family and the women influenced by his life and legacy. Love specifically examines the life of Heed and Christine, two women bound together by a shared past involving the wealthy Cosey family. Their complex relationship, marked by rivalry and reconciliation, unfolds against a backdrop of personal and communal history. Morrison’s rich prose split narrative, and creative use of complex character development captures the story’s nuances in its various and complex forms.

Who should read this book : This book is recommended for readers who enjoy stories that center around character-driven plots and complex human relationships.

Where to read this book : Penguin Random House .

Toni Morrison smiles in her office at Princeton University after hearing that she had won the Nobel ... [+] Prize for Literature in 1993.

10. Paradise (2003)

The nine-part novel Paradise is about Ruby, a small, all-Black patriarchal town in Oklahoma, that was built by descendants of freed slaves and refugees escaping a hostile world, and which is governed by a stringent sense of duty and morality. Just 17 miles away is another town called Convent, where women revolt against the agenda of Ruby’s male-dominated society. When the men of Ruby accuse the Convent women of corrupting their community, a violent confrontation breaks out and culminates in nine men unleashing their vitriolic violence and rage on four women. The novel handles themes of utopia, community and the clash that can often converge on the cusp of tradition and change.

Who should read this book : This book is ideal for readers who enjoy dystopian-themed novels .

Where to read this book : Barnes and Noble .

9. Recitatif (1983)

Toni Morrison speaks at a Newsday Book and Author luncheon at the Huntington Town House in ... [+] Huntington, New York on October 18, 1977.

Morrison had the innate ability to write about race across various genres in a way that never became watered down. Recitatif , which Morrison originally titled Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, is her only short story, and it follows the bond between childhood friends Twyla and Roberta, who lose contact after they grow older and get on with life. Years later, the two friends reconnect but realize that time and experience have changed their perception. The transformative power of time and experience is a central theme in Recitatif , prompting readers to reflect on their own assumptions and biases.

Who should read this book : Readers who enjoy dialogues around race and social issues.

8. A Mercy (2008)

Set in the late 17th century, A Mercy is a significant and beautifully-written portrayal of the early days of slavery. It tells the story of Florens, a young slave girl abandoned by her mother and given up in exchange for bad debt to Jacob Vaark, an Anglo-Dutch trader. Florens, a literate young girl, was exchanged to replace a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland and to comfort Rebekkah, his lonely wife. On her new master’s farm in rural New York, Florens seeks comfort and acceptance in Lina, an older Native American servant woman, and a handsome African who has never been enslaved. In this novel, Morrison provides readers with insight into the historical dynamics between men and women in those early days.

Who should read this book : This book is perfect for historical fiction enthusiasts and those interested in the origins of American slavery.

7. Jazz (1992)

In Jazz , Morrison invites readers to 1920s Harlem, crafting a story that is both fluid and improvisational. The novel revolves around Joe Trace, a door-to-door salesman who kills his young lover, Violet, his wife, also known as “Violent,” who tries to attack her husband’s lover’s corpse with a knife at the funeral. Like Langston Hughes’ jazz poetry writing style, Morrison uses a writing technique similar to how jazz music is played and conveys her ideas in a complex, sensuous way while analyzing themes of betrayal, love, injustice and redemption.

Who should read this book : Readers who enjoy jazz music and Harlem Renaissance-themed stories.

Toni Morrison at home.

6. Sula (1973)

Morrison’s Sula is a spin on friendship, camaraderie and the beauty of human connection. Sula tells the story of two friends, Sula Peace and Nel Wright who grow up in the Midwest as childhood friends but later take divergent paths define their lives and their community. Set in Morrison’s prominent geographical canvas, Ohio, the novel examines friendship, betrayal and the complex nature of good colliding with evil through the perspective of the women’s contrasting choices and their impact. Sula is a story whose characters force readers to ask questions about the grey areas of friendship and gives insight into the impact of Black womanhood on community trajectories. Morrison follows the progression and ebbs and flows of Sula and Nel’s friendship, from childhood to death.

Who should read this book : This book is ideal for those interested in stories around themes of friendship, morality and community.

5. Tar Baby (1981)

Set on a Caribbean Island, Tar Baby is a modern-day romance novel focusing on the rocky relationship between Black fashion model Jadine Childs, a fashion model, and Son, a Black drifter. Jadine and Son live different lives and approach their Blackness from different tangents. More importantly, Morrison shows the sharp contrast between Jadine’s assimilation into white culture and the privilege that can come with it, and Son’s contrasting perspective, which has been informed by his life of poverty. Skillfully, Morrison uses different settings to show their affair and examine issues of race, culture, loyalty and betrayal.

Who should read this book : Readers who are curious about the intersection of race, loyalty and class.

Novelist Toni Morrison is presented with a Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama ... [+] during an East Room event May 29, 2012 at the White House.

4. The Source of Self-Regard (2019)

Among Morrison’s most notable works is The Source of Self-Regard, a compilation of powerful essays, speeches, meditations, a eulogy and decades of knowledge by Morrison all condensed into what would become the last of her works to be published before she died. The book is a wealth of knowledge and covers topics from race and history to art and culture, female empowerment, human rights, the Black American experience, and an intersection of several other matters. At its core, this compilation offers a pigmented understanding of Morrison’s thoughts and observations over several decades. More impressively, Morrison also gives a unique take on some of her most prominent works and offers some self-reflection on those works. More than anything, this book showcases the breadth of Morrison’s intelligence and elegance, not just as a novelist but as an ever-evolving thinker and social commentator.

Who should read this book : Fans of Morrison who appreciate her thought-provoking essays and speeches on social and cultural issues.

3. Song of Solomon (1977)

In Song of Solomon , Morrison shows that she is a master of storytelling and, indeed, a master of the novel craft by digging into the generational story of Michigan-based Macon “Milkman” Dead III and his journey to self-discovery. The epic plot spans several decades, giving readers a three-dimensional insight into Milkman’s adventure to find his roots and cultural heritage. The plot’s narrative, rich with symbolism, complex characters and evocative imagery, is a captivating journey for readers. The book was met with national acclaim after its release, and in 1978, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Although the book was well-received, some controversy came along with that acclaim. Between the ‘90s and early 2000s, several schools across the United States banned the book, citing that it contained degrading and sexually lewd content. However, most of those bans were later lifted.

Who should read this book : This is an ideal book for readers who are curious about complex family and cultural heritage.

Toni Morrison in France.

2. The Bluest Eye (1970)

Morrison’s classic debut novel , The Bluest Eye, is a welcoming introduction to readers who haven’t read any of her work before. In this non-polemic novel, Morrison incisively analyzes the destructive influence of racism and its translation and perceptions of beauty standards through the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a young Black girl from an abusive home who yearns for acceptance, but more importantly, blue eyes. Set in 1940s Lorain, Ohio — Morrison’s hometown — the novel notes how societal pressures devastate Pecola’s life, leading to a tragic conclusion. Morrison’s unflinching prose delves into themes of identity, community and the longing for what can seem to be unattainable acceptance. Some critics consider Morrison’s The Bluest Eye to be one of her best works because in many ways, the novel set the tone for her career, although its popularity grew years after its release.

Who should read this book : Readers who are interested in racial and social issues will appreciate this book.

1. Beloved (1987)

Morrison’s magnum opus, Beloved , is a poignant story about the trauma of slavery and its lasting scars. The novel follows the story of Sethe, a freed slave who is still traumatized by the ghost of her daughter, and the farm Sweet Home in Kentucky, where she endured horrifying experiences even years after she became free. Set in post-Civil War America, the novel takes a grim and brutally honest approach to the trauma of slavery survivors. It presents their experiences in a way that is deeply personal to each character, yet universally significant to all who read it. Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning Beloved is the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped from a Kentucky plantation in 1856 with her family but was later re-captured. Instead of allowing her daughter to return to slavery, Margaret kills her daughter, which leads her enslaver to believe that she is mentally deranged, and this leads her owner to refuse to keep her.

Who should read this book : Beloved is an essential read for those who enjoy historically rich and emotionally charged stories.

Bottom Line

Toni Morrison’s work, which includes novels, non-fiction and children's books, has significantly contributed to readers’ understanding and appreciation of Black culture. Her most acclaimed novels, including Beloved , The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, have combined the richness of the Black identity and its existence in society, securing her as an icon of literary repute.

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13 Groundbreaking Toni Morrison Works to Read Right Now

The brilliant mind behind Beloved will be honored with a U.S. stamp in 2023.

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Although she left us more than two years ago, Toni Morrison and her singular oeuvre live on in our hearts and mind, rippling like concentric circles over fathomless depths as she upends and transforms myths of race and redemption, personal and political. One of only 12 Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, Morrison was born on February 18, 1931, and raised in Lorain, Ohio, earning degrees from Howard and Cornell. Then, as a divorced mother of two, she became the first Black female editor at Random House, where she shepherded luminaries such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayl Jones into print. Her passion, though, was for writing and teaching; she traded the editor’s desk for the typewriter and a lectern at Princeton. She mentored writers such as David Treuer and Mohsin Hamid—by all accounts, her finger went straight to the pulse of a workshop piece, unerring in its aim, precise in its criticism.

But we know her today as she asked us to know her: through her novels and one published short story. On what would have been her 91st birthday, we raise a toast to 13 of her groundbreaking books—13 ways Toni Morrison gazed unflinchingly at the world, its beauty and cruelty and marvels—and once again plunge into her rich narratives and stirring language.

The Bluest Eye (1970)

This debut novel follows a young Black girl named Pecola growing up in Lorain, Ohio—Morrison’s hometown—in the years following the Great Depression. Pecola is consistently teased about her dark skin, hair, and eyes, causing her to long for the white features she perceives to be more beautiful, such as blonde hair, light eyes, and fair skin. But as the young girl prays for the miracle of blue eyes, her personal life takes a heartbreaking turn. From racial conflict to sexual abuse to her characters’ inner demons, Morrison boldly announces the themes that will propel her lengthy career, literary jet fuel.

Sula (1973)

Sula takes you through the lives and diverging paths of two best friends: Nel and Sula. One decides to stay in their hometown and raise a family, while the other leaves home for college, enjoying the city life. They soon reunite, coming to terms with their differences and the consequences of their own life choices. Morrison explores broader historical arcs and their imprint on us all.

Song of Solomon (1977)

Tar Baby (1981)

This romance depicts the unlikely love affair of a young Black couple from two different worlds: Jadine is a beautiful fashion model accustomed to the life of the rich due to her family’s wealthy, white employers; Son is a poor fugitive. Together, they seek a world where superficial differences don’t pit people against each other. Morrison’s lighter register is deceptive, though, as she sifts through the layers of class struggle.

Beloved (1987)

Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this novel is perhaps Morrison’s best-known. Based on the true account of Margaret Garner, Sethe, Beloved’s protagonist is a former slave who escapes to Ohio in the 1870s. Despite her freedom, she’s haunted by the trauma of her past. In 1998, Oprah starred in the film adaptation. “ Beloved is written in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point,” wrote The Handmaid's Tale’ s Margaret Atwood in a 1987 review for The New York Times.

Jazz (1992)

Set in 1920s Harlem, this historical story depicts the dramatic love triangle of door-to-door salesman Joe, his wife, Violet, and his teenage girlfriend, Dorcas. In a sudden twist of events, after Dorcas begins to resent and reject Joe, he kills the young girl. In the aftermath, a timeline is pieced together that reveals the motivations and inner turmoil of Morrison’s cast.

Paradise (1997)

Chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in 1998, Paradise concludes the Beloved trilogy, chronicling the events that lead to a shocking act of violence in Ruby—a patriarchal all-Black Oklahoma town. Morrison’s intricate narrative structures mirror her perspicacious gaze at Black history, a world-building tour de force both anchored in reality and brimming with speculative buoyancy.

Love (2003)

Centered around a deceased hotel owner named Bill Cosey—who died under suspicious circumstances— Love unfolds as a split narrative that follows the lives of the many women who shared relationships with him. From his granddaughter to his widow, these women filled Cosey’s life with love and misery. As with Beloved, Morrison illuminates the many ways the dead hold the living in a vise-like grip.

A Mercy (2008)

Here Morrison peers further into the past, portraying the slave trade of the 1680s. A Mercy follows an Anglo-Dutch adventurer who takes in a young girl named Florens after being traded in a debt payment. With the ability to read and write, she works on his farm, searching for connection and protection from her fellow workers in a kind of parable, a pilgrim’s faltering path toward reconciliation.

Home (2012)

Frank Money, a young Black veteran of the Korean War, returns home only to be thrust back into America’s race wars while also dealing with the specter of combat. He eventually finds himself in his once-hated Georgia hometown to save his abused younger sister—a journey that seems to be his saving grace.

God Help the Child (2015)

The first of Morrison’s novels to be set in the 21st century, God Help the Child deals with the subject of colorism. Its main character, Bride, is a gorgeous and confident dark-skinned woman, but her features cause her fairer-skinned mother to withhold love and instead subject her to abuse. Once again Morrison delves further into the tensions inherent in among mothers and daughters, the rifts that lurk in even the most intimate relationships.

The Source of Self-Regard (2019)

As the last book published before her death, this nonfiction collection is a stunning culmination of some of Morrison’s most powerful speeches and essays. From a James Baldwin eulogy to meditations on Gertrude Stein, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the painter Romare Bearden, she reflects brilliantly on wealth, female empowerment, and the Black imagination.

Recitatif (2022)

First published in 1983 and released as a hardcover last month, Morrison’s only short story is a formal experiment that both stokes and defies our expectations, a chess game she’s destined to win. As 8-year-olds, Twyla and Roberta are “dumped” for four months into a home for runaway and orphan girls; as Twyla notes, “my mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” Within St. Bonaventure, they’re hapless pawns near the bottom of the social pecking order, just above Maggie, the mute, disabled kitchen aide. But the literary queen has a gambit up her sleeve: One girl is white and the other Black, and Morrison jumbles their racial identities through a series of moves that undermine historical hierarchies and simple binaries. When the girls reunite as women, they seek out the truth about what, exactly, went down so many years earlier. Zadie Smith offers an incisive, surprising introduction, limning the burdens the author placed on herself and us all, stepping out of her comfort zone while tirelessly advocating for “the African American culture out of which and toward which Morrison writes.”

A former book editor and the author of a memoir, This Boy's Faith, Hamilton Cain is Contributing Books Editor at Oprah Daily. As a freelance journalist, he has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, Men’s Health, The Good Men Project, and The List (Edinburgh, U.K.) and was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. He is currently a member of the National Book Critics Circle and lives with his family in Brooklyn.  

McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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The Essential Works of Toni Morrison

Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison left behind a legacy of powerful books. These are her most essential listens.

In August 2019, we lost a giant of the literary world. Toni Morrison died at the age of 88, leaving behind a decades-long legacy of remarkable writing and achievements. She was one of a few American authors whose work has had an indelible impact on readers and writers everywhere. Toni Morrison’s books are essential listening for anyone who wants to study American literature or experience books filled with powerful storytelling and brilliant prose.

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio, on February 18, 1931. She received a BA in English from Howard University and earned a master's in American Literature from Cornell University. Morrison became the first Black female fiction editor at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. In 1970, her debut novel, The Bluest Eye , was published to great acclaim, leading to a long and illustrious career as a writer and teacher. 

In her lifetime, Morrison wrote 11 novels, nine works of nonfiction, five children’s books, two short stories, and two plays. Morrison’s writing is evocative and fluid: a combination of memories, details, and history. The result is a poetic prose that explores heavy-hitting subjects such as slavery, racism, and abuse in an almost ethereal manner. Her works are both hypnotic and grounding. Morrison is one of only a dozen American citizens to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is awarded for an author’s body of work. She is the only African American woman to have won the prize.

One of Morrison's novels, Song of Solomon , was among Oprah Winfrey’s first book club picks; another, Beloved , was made into a feature film starring Winfrey in 1998. Winfrey went on to select more of Morrison’s novels for her book club, sending a few of them back to the best seller list. 

Throughout her career, Morrison received a tremendous number of awards and honors, including a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Harvard University. President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, and her home state of Ohio recently passed legislation to recognize February 18 as Toni Morrison Day.

With an author as revered and adored as Toni Morrison, it’s hard to know where to start. And as with most authors, deciding which book is best is a subjective process. But combining accolades and reviews, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of her essential works. A fact worth noting: Morrison is the fact that she narrated almost every single one of her audiobooks herself. Listening to her low, rich voice provides the added significance of knowing exactly which tone the author intended her work to take.

The Bluest Eye

When you're just discovering an author whose career is as esteemed as Toni Morrison's, we always suggest starting with their first novel. Morrison's debut evolved from a short story she wrote in the 1960s during her time teaching at Howard University. The story is set in Morrison's own hometown of Lorain, and shows the inherent racism in standards of beauty. The novel follows a young African American girl named Pecola Breedlove, who grows up in the years following the Great Depression. Because of her dark skin and mannerisms, she is repeatedly labeled as ugly and unloved. As a result of the demeaning bullying she endures, she believes blue eyes are the highest form of beauty, so she prays that someday she, too, will have blue eyes. The novel is told from the perspectives of various people in Pecola's life, including Claudia MacTeer, the daughter of Pecola's foster parents, and an omniscient third-person narrator. It explores the trauma Pecola suffers as a result of her inferiority complex, and how the whole town uses her as a scapegoat for their own miseries. Because of the novel's serious subject matter, there have been numerous attempts to ban the novel from schools and libraries.

Morrison did not suffer from the sophomore slump with her second novel. Set in the fictional town of Medallion, Ohio, Sula is a powerful examination of friendship and societal conventions. It follows two young women, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who grow up together in the Black neighborhood of Bottom. The two girls are the closest of friends, despite having different backgrounds. Nel is being raised by conservative parents, while Sula's childhood with her unpredictable mother and grandmother is fraught with instability and tragedy. Nel marries right out of high school, and Sula disappears from town shortly after the wedding. When she returns to Bottom 10 years later, she becomes the town pariah because of her disregard for societal constraints.

Song of Solomon

If you have to absolutely choose Morrison's best book, it might just be a tie between this one and Beloved . In her stunning third novel, Morrison takes readers through the life of Macon "Milkman" Dead III, an African American man who resides in Michigan. Milkman grows up during turbulent times in the 1930s, with racial injustices all around. When he gets older, he leaves his Rust Belt city and strikes out for the South to learn about his family's roots. The Nobel Prize committee specifically cited this novel when they awarded Morrison the prize for literature.

This is widely considered to be Toni Morrison's greatest novel: partly because it won a Pulitzer, partly because of its film adaptation, and partly because it is indeed incredible. It is an unflinching look at the horrors of slavery. Sethe is an escaped slave living in Ohio with her daughter after her teenage sons have run away. She believes they fled because of a malevolent spirit that inhabits their home, which she knows to be the ghost of her dead baby, who is buried in a grave with a tombstone that only reads 'Beloved.' Beloved's narration takes readers through Sethe's life and looks at the repercussions of slavery in a terrifying and important story. Morrison was inspired to write the novel after hearing the story of Margaret Garner, an African American who escaped slavery by crossing the Ohio River to Ohio. When she was recaptured, she killed her child rather than have her taken back into slavery.

This is the second book (after Beloved ) in Morrison's Dantesque trilogy on African American history. It is set mostly in Harlem during the Jazz Age of the 1920s. It differs from her earlier works, in that it follows a structure based on jazz music, with many of the chapters comprising solo compositions. It also features unreliable narrators, letting readers see events from different perspectives. At its heart, Jazz is a tragedy about a door-to-door cosmetics salesman who kills his teenage lover, and his distraught wife, who attacks the girl in her casket at her funeral. It is a novel about love, obsession, and betrayal, whose passions swell and dip like the notes in a jazz tune.

Home is one of Morrison’s greatest later novels. It's a powerful look at racism in the mid-20th century, featuring an African American Korean War veteran named Frank Money. He's justifiably angry after returning from war wounded to be treated once again as a second-class citizen in a segregated United States. His self-loathing and contempt for his nation grows, but when his ailing sister needs him, he must set aside his own problems to help her. He returns her to the tiny Georgia town where they were raised to care for her, and learns a new lesson about the importance of home.

The Source of Self-Regard

This is the only book on this list that is not narrated by Morrison. It's also the last of her works to be published before she died. This collection of speeches and essays offers searing and moving reflections on important social issues such as female empowerment, racism and the Black Lives Matter movement, money, the press, and equal rights. The book is organized in three parts, and each has a powerful introduction. The first is a prayer for the dead of 9/11, the second is a meditation on Martin Luther King, Jr., and the last is a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. These three sections span four decades of Morrison's work, from 1976 to 2013, highlighting the best of her speeches and essays. She discusses a variety of subjects: the importance of protecting artists from an increasing number of threats, intersectionality, human rights, and even her take on the O.J. Simpson trial and the exploitation of tragedy as entertainment. She also shares a rare self-reflective moment and discusses her own creative process. Toni Morrison lived for nearly nine decades. Still, her death is a tremendous loss for literature and the world. She was eloquent, perceptive, outspoken, uplifting, and brilliant. Fortunately, Morrison leaves behind a large body of work, which will provide strength, inspiration, and wisdom for generations to come.

Liberty Hardy is a Book Riot senior contributing editor, co-host of All the Books, a Book of the Month judge, and above all else, a ravenous reader. She resides in Maine with her cats, Millay, Farrokh, and Zevon.

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• Toni Morrison
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The 9 Most Essential Toni Morrison Works

By Ej Dickson

On August 5th, it was reported that Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the classic works Beloved  and  The Bluest Eye and one of the greatest 20th century American novelists, had died at the age of 88. Although the novelist and essayist had struggled with health issues in recent years, the cause of death was unreported at press time.

The first African American woman to win a Nobel prize, Morrison was known for her unflinching and relentlessly lyrical evocation of the black American experience, in all its brutality and beauty. Born Chloe Ardella Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison was perhaps best known for her master work, Beloved, which is widely considered to be one of the best, if not the best, books about American slavery, and was later adapted into a film produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey. But although  Beloved was probably Morrison’s most widely read work, it is not always considered her most stylistically significant or groundbreaking work (that honor usually goes to Song of Solomon ) nor is it arguably her most personal (The Bluest Eye). Nor were novels the only books that Morrison wrote: she dabbled in many different genres, writing children’s books and essays well into her later years.

In honor of Morrison’s life and work, here are nine of the most essential works in the Morrison canon.

The Bluest Eye   (1970) Published when Morrison was 40 years old, The Bluest Eye  was her debut novel. Though it was not met with instant acclaim, it’s arguably her most intensely personal work, as it was set in Lorain County, where Morrison grew up. The novel tells the story of Pecola, a bullied young black girl who wishes more than anything else for the hallmarks of white American beauty — blue eyes, blond hair, fair skin — and whose childhood rape by her father leads to her unraveling. It’s not an easy read, but it’s an important one, especially since many have sought to have the book banned in classrooms and libraries.

Sula (1973) With her second book ,  Morrison continued her tradition of showcasing the lives of those who are most often dismissed or rejected in mainstream society: specifically, the two black women from the low-income Ohio neighborhood The Bottom, who form the central relationship at the heart of  Sula.  While Sula and Nel grow up close friends, a tragic accident causes their relationship to fall apart, and the novel follows the two as they go down wildly divergent life paths. A portrait of black female friendship, as well as a fiercely unconventional black female character,  Sula  firmly established Morrison as a master of characterization.

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Song of Solomon (1977) This novel was Morrison’s third book, and one of her most ambitious. A stylistic tour de force that stretches across literary genre, creating a dizzying tapestry of historical fiction and magical realism, the book tells the story of Macon “Milkman” Dead, who grows up in the industrial Midwest against the backdrop of the Great Depression and then travels through Pennsylvania and Virginia to forge his own identity. The book is also frequently banned in classrooms, and is one of former President Barack Obama’s favorite works.

Jazz (1992) While not as much of a straightforward narrative as her other works,  Jazz — Morrison’s follow-up to  Beloved  which is composed of vignettes from one troubled couple’s life against the backdrop of 1920s Harlem — is eminently readable, in large part due to Morrison’s masterful command of world-building; it’s hard not to be drawn into the brutal and dizzying world of the two young lovers at the center of Morrison’s tale.

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Paradise (1997) Paradise  sets forth with one of the most gripping opening lines in the history of American fiction: “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” Set in a patriarchal community in rural Oklahoma, which finds itself under what it perceives as a threat by a nearby all-female town called the Convent, Paradise  is a sprawling work that chillingly explores the process by which victims become victimizers, the demonization of unapologetic women, and how years of oppression smolder to form the embers of violent rage.

A Mercy (2009) Though one of the later works in Morrison’s oeuvre,  A Mercy  is in many ways a culmination of the themes Morrison had been exploring since Beloved . Set against the backdrop of colonial-era slavery, it drew many comparisons to Morrison’s earlier work upon publication, largely due to the repetition of one specific plot point. But A Mercy  is by no means a retreading: packed with Morrison’s trademark evocative language, the book delivers a rich and rewarding narrative within just 166 pages, proving Morrison a master of her chosen form.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)   Unlike the other books on this list, this is not a novel; rather, it’s a compilation of three lectures Morrison gave at Harvard in the early 1990s, in which she speaks on the myriad ways the African-American experience was relegated to the background by white writers in an effort to establish a collective American literary identity. But anyone interested in Morrison’s work and its significance in the context of the American literary canon would benefit from reading her lectures, in which Morrison lays bare the white supremacy at the heart of the classics we know and love.

“ Mourning for Whiteness “ Though Morrison was not as well known for her essays as she was for her novels, her 2016 New Yorker essay in the wake of Donald Trump’s election proves that she was just as virtuosic as a cultural critic as she was a novelist. “So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified,” she wrote at the time, her words proving chilling in light of recent events.

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Toni Morrison's powerful writing won her the Nobel Prize. These are 20 of her best books, according to Goodreads members.

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• Toni Morrison (1913-2019) was an influential author, professor, and Nobel Prize winner.
• We used Goodreads to rank her most popular novels, essays, and children's books.
• Toni Morrison's most popular books are " Beloved " and " The Bluest Eye ."

Toni Morrison was a distinguished novelist and essayist who highlighted the generational consequences of racism in the United States through her fictional works and literary criticisms. 

Celebrated for her profound work towards equality in literature, Toni Morrison wrote 11 novels, 10 children's books, and dozens of essays that earned her numerous awards and accolades (including the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature) as she explored the experiences of Black women in America.

To rank Toni Morrison's essay collections, novels, and other works by popularity, we turned to Goodreads members. On Goodreads, over 125 million users rate and review their favorite books and share how Toni Morrison's legacy continues to impact them. 

Whether you're looking to experience Toni Morrison's poetic fiction or explore a searing literary criticism, here are the most popular Toni Morrison books, as ranked by Goodreads members. 

The 20 best Toni Morrison books, ranked by Goodreads members:

20. "the nobel lecture in literature, 1993".

Available at Amazon, $2.95

This short read is the speech Toni Morrison gave in 1993 as she received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her ability to "give life to an essential aspect of American reality" "in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import." For an even more powerful experience, you can listen to Toni Morrison deliver her speech here . 

19. "Burn This Book: PEN Writers Speak Out on the Power of the Word"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $10.35

" Burn This Book " is an anthology edited by Toni Morrison that also includes a short but brilliant essay about the power of writing and the threat of censorship. Each writer in this collection is a " PEN " writer or a poet, essayist, or novelist who defends the freedom of expression through literature as a human right.

18. "Desdemona"

Available at Amazon, $39.75

This play by Toni Morrison recreates the story of Desdemona, the heroine from Shakespeare's " Othello ." Morrison brings the female characters from "Othello" to life in a stunning literary and dramatic form, including the previously silenced voice of Desdemona's African nurse, Barbary.

17. "The Big Box"

Available at Amazon, $45

" The Big Box " was Toni Morrison's first picture book written with her son, Slade Morrison. It is about three children who don't fit adults' expectations and are sent to live in big boxes with locks on the door when the adults decide they can't handle their own freedom.

16. "Remember: The Journey to School Integration"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop , $19.99

Combined with historical photographs that captured school desegregation in America, Toni Morrison tells a fictional story about the emotions and dialogue of the children in the pictures. Published on the 50th anniversary of the "Brown vs. Board of Education" trial, this historical read paired with Morrison's emotional touch is a powerful revival of history.

15. "Recitatif"

Preorder available at Amazon and Bookshop from $14.72

" Recitatif " was Toni Morrison's first published short story which premiered in the now out-of-circulation " Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women " in 1983. This emotional story is about Twyla and Roberta, two young girls who meet at an orphanage and bond over their unique situation. 

14. "The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $15.29

This collection comprises some of Toni Morrison's essays, speeches, and prayers over 40 eventful and transformative years. From the emotional eulogy she delivered at James Baldwin's funeral to a meditative commentary about her early publications, " The Source of Self-Regard " is a necessary read for any Toni Morrison reader looking to understand the author in a deeper and more profound way. 

13. "The Origin of Others"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $17.30

" The Origin of Others " is a collection of Toni Morrison's reflections upon the themes of race, belonging, and identity through her work. Seeking answers to complex questions about racial "othering" in society, Morrison turns to great works of literature as well as her own in these extremely personal and meditative essays. 

12. "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $11.99

These essays serve as a focused literary criticism of "Africanist" presence within American literature. By analyzing some of the most revered writers in American literature, Toni Morrison demonstrates how whiteness and major themes of freedom depend upon the Black population while simultaneously silencing the Black narrative.

11. "Love"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $13.49

" Love " is the non-linear story of several Black women over three generations and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey. As the women — from Bill's daughter to his mistress — tell their stories, a larger image emerges to explain the hatred between them. 

10. "Tar Baby"

" Tar Baby " is about the tempestuous love affair between Jadine and Son, two Black Americans from very different worlds who meet in the Caribbean and return to the US, struggling to find a safe home together. Full of complicated relationships, beautifully descriptive settings, and an abundance of striking lyricism, Toni Morrison continues to captivate readers with her memorable writing in this novel.

9. "Home"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $9.17

Frank Money is a Black man returning home from the Korean War, searching for a new sense of identity after a series of traumatic experiences in the Army. Thrust back into a racist and segregated community, Frank must relive early memories and overcome mental challenges n order to find himself and his home. 

8. "Paradise"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $12.76

The final book of the " Beloved " trilogy opens with a scene of horrific violence in a small, all-Black town in Oklahoma called Ruby. Grand and tragic, this novel chronicles the creation of Ruby and the strife with another town that lies 17 miles away.

7. "God Help the Child"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $9.97

" God Help the Child " was Toni Morrison's final published novel before her passing in 2019 and her only novel to be set in the present. The story follows a Black woman who calls herself Bride and examines the brutal ways in which childhood trauma can shape the life of an adult.

6. "Jazz"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $12.99

" Jazz " is a historical fiction novel that takes place mostly in 1920s Harlem where Joe Trace is a middle-aged beauty product salesman. When Joe shoots his teenage lover to death and his wife attacks the girl's corpse, a story of love and obsession develops in this lyrical novel enriched with the perspectives of multiple narrators.  

5. "A Mercy"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $14.54

Set during the slave trade in the 1680s, this historical fiction novel is about a young girl named Florens who is given to a man in Maryland to pay off a debt. Rejected by her own mother, Florens seeks motherly and romantic love in this story that reveals the roots of racism through a glimpse at early slavery.

4. "Sula"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $12.59

In this 1975 National Book Award finalist, Nel and Sula are two women whose complex relationship both brings them together and pushes them apart over the course of 20 years. Nel chose to stay in her hometown to raise a family, while Sula escaped to the city for college. " Sula " is an intense read as the women experience racism, explore their sexuality, and grow up in very different ways. 

3. "Song of Solomon"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $13.99

" Song of Solomon " is a historical fiction novel that follows Macon "Milkman" Dead III through his life, beginning with a traumatic event that spurred his birth. In this profound and complex work, readers are introduced to Macon's life through a full cast of unique characters and Macon's tumultuous coming-of-age experiences.

2. "The Bluest Eye"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $9.43

" The Bluest Eye " was Toni Morrison's first novel, a historical fiction story first published in 1970. It is about a young African-American girl named Pecola growing up during the Great Depression who prays for her eyes to turn blue so she will be loved like the blond, blue-eyed children in America.

1. "Beloved"

Available at Amazon and Bookshop from $9.29

With over 355,000 ratings, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the most popular Toni Morrison book, according to Goodreads reviewers. The story follows Sethe, who escaped slavery 18 years ago yet cannot escape the horrible memories of her early life as she's haunted by the past and the ghost of her baby. 

• Main content

The Genius of Toni Morrison’s Only Short Story

In the extraordinary “Recitatif,” Morrison withholds crucial details of racial identity, making the reader the subject of her experiment.

Illustration by Diana Ejaita

I n 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her œuvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions. It’s hard to overstate how unusual this is. Most writers work, at least partially, in the dark: subconsciously, stumblingly, progressing chaotically, sometimes taking shortcuts, often reaching dead ends. Morrison was never like that. Perhaps the weight of responsibility she felt herself to be under did not allow for it. To read the startlingly detailed auto-critiques of her own novels in that last book, “ The Source of Self-Regard ,” was to observe a literary lab technician reverse engineering an experiment. And it is this mixture of poetic form and scientific method in Morrison that is, to my mind, unique. Certainly it makes any exercise in close reading of her work intensely rewarding, for you can feel fairly certain—page by page, line by line—that nothing has been left to chance, least of all the originating intention. With “Recitatif” she was explicit. This extraordinary story was specifically intended as “an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial.” 1

T he characters in question are Twyla and Roberta, two poor girls, eight years old and wards of the state, who spend four months together in St. Bonaventure shelter. The very first thing we learn about them, from Twyla, is this: “My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick.” A little later, they were placed together, in Room 406, “stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race.” What we never learn definitively—no matter how closely we read—is which of these girls is black and which white. We will assume, we can insist, but we can’t be sure. And this despite the fact that we get to see them grow up, becoming adults who occasionally run into each other. We eavesdrop when they speak, examine their clothes, hear of their husbands, their jobs, their children, their lives. . . . The crucial detail is withheld. A puzzle of a story, then—a game. Only, Toni Morrison does not play. When she called “Recitatif” an “experiment,” she meant it. The subject of the experiment is the reader.

B ut before we go any further into the ingenious design of this philosophical 2 brainteaser, the title itself is worth a good, long look:

Recitatif, recitative | ˌrɛsɪtəˈtiːv | noun [mass noun] 1. Musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note: singing in recitative . 2. The tone or rhythm peculiar to any language. Obs.

The music of Morrison begins in “ordinary speech.” Her ear was acute, and rescuing African American speech patterns from the debasements of the American mainstream is a defining feature of her early work. In this story, though, the challenge of capturing “ordinary speech” has been deliberately complicated. For many words are here to be “sung . . . on the same note.” That is, we will hear the words of Twyla and the words of Roberta, and, although they are perfectly differentiated the one from the other, we will not be able to differentiate them in the one way we really want to . An experiment easy to imagine but difficult to execute. In order to make it work, you’d need to write in such a way that every phrase precisely straddled the line between characteristically “black” and “white” American speech, and that’s a high-wire act in an eagle-eyed country, ever alert to racial codes, adept at categorization, in which most people feel they can spot a black or white speaker with their eyes closed, precisely because of the tone and rhythm “peculiar to” their language. . . .

And, beyond language, in a racialized system, all manner of things will read as “peculiar to” one kind of person or another. The food a character eats, the music they like, where they live, how they work. Black things, white things. Things that are peculiar to our people and peculiar to theirs. But one of the questions of “Recitatif” is precisely what that phrase “peculiar to” really signifies. For we tend to use it variously, not realizing that we do. It can mean:

That which characterizes That which belongs exclusively to That which is an essential quality of

These three are not the same. The first suggests a tendency; the second implies some form of ownership; the third speaks of essences and therefore of immutable natural laws. In “Recitatif” these differences prove crucial, as we will see.

M uch of the mesmerizing power of “Recitatif” lies in that first definition of “peculiar to”: that which characterizes . As readers, we urgently want to characterize the various characteristics on display. But how? My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick . Well, now, what kind of mother tends to dance all night? A black one or a white one? And whose mother is more likely to be sick? Is Roberta a blacker name than Twyla? Or vice versa? And what about voice? Twyla narrates the story in the first person, and so we may have the commonsense feeling that she must be the black girl, for her author is black. But it doesn’t take much interrogating of this “must” to realize that it rests on rather shallow, autobiographical ideas of authorship that would seem wholly unworthy of the complex experiment that has been set before us. Besides, Morrison was never a poor child in a state institution—she grew up solidly working class in integrated Lorain, Ohio—and autobiography was never a very strong element of her work. Her imagination was capacious. No, autobiography will not get us very far here. So, we listen a little more closely to Twyla:

And Mary, that’s my mother, she was right. Every now and then she would stop dancing long enough to tell me something important and one of the things she said was that they never washed their hair and they smelled funny. Roberta sure did. Smell funny, I mean. So when the Big Bozo (nobody ever called her Mrs. Itkin, just like nobody ever said St. Bonaventure)—when she said, “Twyla, this is Roberta. Roberta, this is Twyla. Make each other welcome,” I said, “My mother won’t like you putting me in here.”

The game is afoot. Morrison bypasses any detail that might imply an essential quality of , slyly evades whatever would belong exclusively to one girl or the other, and makes us sit instead in this uncomfortable, double-dealing world of that which characterizes , in which Twyla seems to move in a moment from black to white to black again, depending on the nature of your perception. Like that dress on the Internet no one could ever agree on the color of . . .

W hen reading “Recitatif” with students, there is a moment when the class grows uncomfortable at their own eagerness to settle the question, maybe because most attempts to answer it tend to reveal more about the reader than the character. 3

For example: Twyla loves the food at St. Bonaventure, and Roberta hates it. (The food is Spam, Salisbury steak, Jell-O with fruit cocktail in it.) Is Twyla black? Twyla’s mother’s idea of supper is “popcorn and a can of Yoo-hoo.” Is Twyla white?

Twyla’s mother looks like this:

She had on those green slacks I hated. . . . And that fur jacket with the pocket linings so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them. . . . [But] she looked so beautiful even in those ugly green slacks that made her behind stick out.

Roberta’s mother looks like this:

She was big. Bigger than any man and on her chest was the biggest cross I’d ever seen. I swear it was six inches long each way. And in the crook of her arm was the biggest Bible ever made.

Does that help? We might think the puzzle is solved when both mothers come to visit their daughters one Sunday and Roberta’s mother refuses to shake Twyla’s mother’s hand. But a moment later, upon reflection, it will strike us that a pious, upstanding, sickly black mother might be just as unlikely to shake the hand of an immoral, fast-living, trashy, dancing white mother as vice versa. . . . Complicating matters further, Twyla and Roberta—despite their crucial differences—seem to share the same low status within the confines of St. Bonaventure. Or at least that’s how Twyla sees it:

We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped. Even the New York City Puerto Ricans and the upstate Indians ignored us.

At this point, many readers will start getting a little desperate to put back in precisely what Morrison has deliberately removed. You start combing the fine print:

We were eight years old and got F’s all the time. Me because I couldn’t remember what I read or what the teacher said. And Roberta because she couldn’t read at all and didn’t even listen to the teacher.

Which version of educational failure is more black? Which kind of poor people eat so poorly—or are so grateful to eat bad food? Poor black folk or poor white folk? Both?

As a reader you know there’s something unseemly in these kinds of inquiries, but old habits die hard. You need to know. So you try another angle. You get granular.

• Twyla’s mother brings no food for her daughter on that Sunday outing
• Cries out “Twyla, baby!” when she spots her in the chapel
• Smells of Lady Esther dusting powder
• Doesn’t wear a hat in a house of God
• Calls Roberta’s mum “that bitch!” and “twitched and crossed and uncrossed her legs all through service.”

Meanwhile, Roberta’s mother brings plenty of food—which Roberta refuses—but says not a word to anyone, although she does read aloud to Roberta from the Bible. There’s a lot of readable difference there, and Twyla certainly notices it all:

Things are not right. The wrong food is always with the wrong people. Maybe that’s why I got into waitress work later—to match up the right people with the right food.

She seems jealous. But can vectors of longing, resentment, or desire tell us who’s who? Is Twyla a black girl jealous of a white mother who brought more food? Or a white girl resentful of a black mother who thinks she’s too godly to shake hands?

C hildren are curious about justice. Sometimes they are shocked by their encounters with its opposite. They say to themselves: Things are not right . But children also experiment with injustice, with cruelty. To stress-test the structure of the adult world. To find out exactly what its rules are. (The fact that questions of justice seem an inconvenient line of speculation for so many adults cannot go unnoticed by children.) And it is when reflecting upon a moment of childish cruelty that Twyla begins to describe a different binary altogether. Not the familiar one that divides black and white, but the one between those who live within the system—whatever their position may be within it—and those who are cast far outside of it. The unspeakable. The outcast. The forgotten. The nobody. Because there is a person in St. Bonaventure whose position is lower than either Twyla’s or Roberta’s—far lower. Her name is Maggie:

The kitchen woman with legs like parentheses. . . . Maggie couldn’t talk. The kids said she had her tongue cut out, but I think she was just born that way: mute. She was old and sandy-colored and she worked in the kitchen. I don’t know if she was nice or not. I just remember her legs like parentheses and how she rocked when she walked.

Maggie has no characteristic language. She has no language at all. Once she fell over in the school orchard and the older girls laughed and Twyla and Roberta did nothing. She is not a person you can do things for: she is only an object of ridicule. “She wore this really stupid little hat—a kid’s hat with earflaps—and she wasn’t much taller than we were.” In the social system of St. Bonaventure, Maggie stands outside all hierarchies. She’s one to whom anything can be said. One to whom anything might be done. Like a slave. Which is what it means to be nobody. Twyla and Roberta, noticing this, take a childish interest in what it means to be nobody:

“But what about if somebody tries to kill her?” I used to wonder about that. “Or what if she wants to cry. Can she cry?” “Sure,” Roberta said. “But just tears. No sounds come out.” “She can’t scream?” “Nope. Nothing.” “Can she hear?” “I guess.” “Let’s call her,” I said. And we did. “Dummy! Dummy!” She never turned her head. “Bow legs! Bow legs!” Nothing. She just rocked on, the chin straps of her baby-boy hat swaying from side to side. I think we were wrong. I think she could hear and didn’t let on. And it shames me even now to think there was somebody in there after all who heard us call her those names and couldn’t tell on us.

T ime leaps forward. Roberta leaves St. Bonny’s first, and a few months after so does Twyla. The girls grow into women. Years later, Twyla is waitressing at an upstate Howard Johnson’s, when who should walk in but Roberta, just in time to give us some more racial cues to debate. 4

These days Roberta’s hair is “so big and wild” that Twyla can barely see her face. She’s wearing a halter and hot pants and sitting between two hirsute guys with big hair and beards. She seems to be on drugs. Now, Roberta and friends are going to see Hendrix, and would any other artist have worked quite so well for Morrison’s purpose? Hendrix’s hair is big and wild. Is his music black or white? Your call. Either way, Twyla—her own hair “shapeless in a net”—has never heard of him, and, when she says she lives in Newburgh, Roberta laughs.

G eography, in America, is fundamental to racial codes, and Newburgh—sixty miles north of Manhattan—is an archetypal racialized American city. Founded in 1709, it is where Washington announced the cessation of hostilities with Britain and therefore the beginning of America as a nation, and in the nineteenth century was a grand and booming town, with a growing black middle class. The Second World War manufacturing boom brought waves of African American migrants to Newburgh, eager to escape the racial terrorism of the South, looking for low-wage work, but with the end of the war the work dried up; factory jobs were relocated south or abroad, and, by the time Morrison wrote “Recitatif,” Newburgh was a depressed town, hit by “white flight,” riven with poverty and the violence that attends poverty, and with large sections of its once beautiful waterfront bulldozed in the name of “urban renewal.” Twyla is married to a Newburgh man from an old Newburgh family, whose race the reader is invited to decipher (“James and his father talk about fishing and baseball and I can see them all together on the Hudson in a raggedy skiff”) but who is certainly one of the millions of twentieth-century Americans who watched once thriving towns mismanaged and abandoned by the federal government: “Half the population of Newburgh is on welfare now, but to my husband’s family it was still some upstate paradise of a time long past.” And then, when the town is on its knees, and the great houses empty and abandoned, and downtown a wasteland of empty shop fronts and aimless kids on the corner—the new money moves in. The old houses get done up. A Food Emporium opens. And it’s in this Emporium—twelve years after their last run-in—that the women meet again, but this time all is transformation. Roberta’s cleaned up her act and married a rich man:

Shoes, dress, everything lovely and summery and rich. I was dying to know what happened to her, how she got from Jimi Hendrix to Annandale, a neighborhood full of doctors and IBM executives. Easy, I thought. Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world.

For the reader determined to solve the puzzle—the reader who believes the puzzle can be solved, or must be solved—this is surely Exhibit No. 1. Everything hangs on that word “they.” To whom is it pointing? Uppity black people? Entitled white people? Rich people, whatever their color? Gentrifiers? You choose.

N ot too long ago, I happened to be in Annandale myself, standing in the post-office line, staring absently at the list of national holidays fixed to the wall, and reflecting that the only uncontested date on the American calendar is New Year’s Day. With Twyla and Roberta, it’s the same—every element of their shared past is contested:

“Oh, Twyla, you know how it was in those days: black-white. You know how everything was.” But I didn’t know. I thought it was just the opposite. . . . You got to see everything at Howard Johnson’s and blacks were very friendly with whites in those days.

Their most contested site is Maggie. Maggie is their Columbus Day, their Thanksgiving. What the hell happened to Maggie? At the beginning of “Recitatif,” we are informed that sandy-colored Maggie “fell” down. Later, Roberta insists she was knocked down, by the older girls—an event Twyla does not remember. Later still, Roberta claims that Maggie was black and that Twyla pushed her down, which sparks an epistemological crisis in Twyla, who does not remember Maggie being black, never mind pushing her. (“I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”) Then Roberta claims they both pushed and kicked “a black lady who couldn’t even scream.” It’s interesting to note that this escalation of claims happens at a moment of national “racial strife,” in the form of school busing. Both Roberta’s and Twyla’s children are being sent far across town. And as black—or white—mothers, the two find themselves in rigid positions, on either side of a literal boundary: a protest line. Their shared past starts to fray and then morph under the weight of a mutual anger; even the tiniest things are reinterpreted. They used to like doing each other’s hair, as kids. Now Twyla rejects this commonality ( I hated your hands in my hair ) and Roberta rejects any possibility of alliance with Twyla, in favor of the group identity of the other mothers who feel about busing as she does. 5

The personal connection they once made can hardly be expected to withstand a situation in which once again race proves socially determinant, and in one of the most vulnerable sites any of us have: the education of our children. Mutual suspicion blooms. Why should I trust this person? What are they trying to take from me? My culture? My community? My schools? My neighborhood? My life? Positions get entrenched. Nothing can be shared. Twyla and Roberta start carrying increasingly extreme signs at competing protests. (Twyla: “My signs got crazier each day.”) A hundred and forty characters or fewer: that’s about as much as you can fit on a homemade sign. Both women find that ad hominem attacks work best. You could say the two are never as far apart as at this moment of “racial strife.” You could also say they are in lockstep, for without the self-definition offered by the binary they appear meaningless, even to themselves. (“Actually my sign didn’t make sense without Roberta’s.”)

A s Twyla and Roberta discover, it’s hard to admit a shared humanity with your neighbor if they will not come with you to reëxamine a shared history. Such reëxaminations I sometimes hear described as “resentment politics,” as if telling a history in full could only be the product of a personal resentment, rather than a necessary act performed in the service of curiosity, interest, understanding (of both self and community), and justice itself. But some people sure do take it personal. I couldn’t help but smile to read of an ex-newspaper editor from my country, who, when speaking of his discomfort at recent efforts to reveal the slave history behind many of our great country houses, complained, “I think comfort does matter. I know people say, ‘Oh, we must be uncomfortable.’ . . . Why should I pay a hundred quid a year, or whatever, to be told what a shit I am?” Imagine thinking of history this way! As a thing personally directed at you . As a series of events structured to make you feel one way or another, rather than the precondition of all our lives?

The long, bloody, tangled encounter between the European peoples and the African continent is our history. Our shared history. It’s what happened. It’s not the moral equivalent of a football game where your “side” wins or loses. To give an account of an old English country house that includes not only the provenance of the beautiful paintings but also the provenance of the money that bought them—who suffered and died making that money, how, and why—is history told in full and should surely be of interest to everybody, black or white or neither. And I admit I do begin to feel resentment—actually, something closer to fury—when I realize that merely speaking such facts aloud is so discomfiting to some that they’d rather deny the facts themselves. For the sake of peaceful relations. To better forget about it. To better move on. Many people have this instinct. Twyla and Roberta also want to forget and move on. They want to blame it on the “gar girls” (a pun on gargoyles, “gar girls” is Twyla and Roberta’s nickname for the older residents of St. Bonaventure), or on each other, or on faulty memory itself. Maggie was black. Maggie was white. They hurt Maggie. You did . But, by the end of “Recitatif,” they are both ready to at least try to discuss “what the hell happened to Maggie.” Not for the shallow motive of transhistorical blame, much less to induce personal comfort or discomfort, but rather in the service of truth. We know that their exploration of the question will be painful, messy, and very likely never perfectly settled. But we also know that a good-faith attempt is better than its opposite. Which would be to go on pretending, as Twyla puts it, that “everything was hunky-dory.”

D ifficult to “move on” from any site of suffering if that suffering goes unacknowledged and undescribed. Citizens from Belfast and Belgrade know this, and Berlin and Banjul. (And that’s just the “B”s.) In the privacy of our domestic arguments we know this. We must be heard. It’s human to want to be heard. We are nobody if not heard. I suffered. They suffered. My people suffered! My people continue to suffer! Some take the narrowest possible view of this category of “my people”: they mean only their immediate family. For others, the cry widens out to encompass a city, a nation, a faith group, a perceived racial category, a diaspora. But, whatever your personal allegiances, when you deliberately turn from any human suffering you make what should be a porous border between “your people” and the rest of humanity into something rigid and deadly. You ask not to be bothered by the history of nobodies, the suffering of nobodies. (Or the suffering of somebodies, if hierarchical reversal is your jam.) But surely the very least we can do is listen to what was done to a person—or is still being done. It is the very least we owe the dead, and the suffering. People suffered to build this house, to found that bank, or your country. Maggie suffered at St. Bonaventure. And all we have to do is hear about that? How can we resent it? 6

It takes Twyla some time to see past her resentment at being offered a new version of a past she thought she knew. (“Roberta had messed up my past somehow with that business about Maggie. I wouldn’t forget a thing like that. Would I?”) But, in her forced reconsideration of a shared history, she comes to a deeper realization about her own motives:

I didn’t kick her; I didn’t join in with the gar girls and kick that lady, but I sure did want to. We watched and never tried to help her and never called for help. Maggie was my dancing mother. Deaf, I thought, and dumb. Nobody inside. Nobody who would hear you if you cried in the night. . . . And when the gar girls pushed her down, and started roughhousing, I knew she wouldn’t scream, couldn’t—just like me and I was glad about that.

A few pages later, Roberta spontaneously comes to a similar conclusion (although she is now unsure as to whether or not Maggie was, indeed, black). I find the above one of the most stunning paragraphs in all of Morrison’s work. The psychological subtlety of it. The mix of projection, vicarious action, self-justification, sadistic pleasure, and personal trauma that she identifies as a motivating force within Twyla, and that, by extrapolation, she prompts us to recognize in ourselves.

L ike Twyla, Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless. And one of the ethical complexities of “Recitatif” is the uncomfortable fact that even as Twyla and Roberta fight to assert their own identities—the fact that they are both “somebody”—they simultaneously cast others into the role of nobodies. The “fags who wanted company” in the chapel are nobodies to them, and they are so repelled by and fixated upon Maggie’s disability that they see nothing else about her. But there is somebody in all these people, after all. There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human. Which acknowledgment is often misused or only half used, employed as a form of sentimental or aesthetic contemplation, i.e., Oh, though we seem so unalike, how alike we all are under our skins . . . . But, historically, this acknowledgment of the human—our inescapable shared category—has also played a role in the work of freedom riders, abolitionists, anticolonialists, trade unionists, queer activists, suffragettes, and in the thoughts of the likes of Frantz Fanon , Malcolm X, Stuart Hall , Paul Gilroy, Morrison herself. If it is a humanism, it is a radical one, which struggles toward solidarity in alterity, the possibility and promise of unity across difference. When applied to racial matters, it recognizes that, although the category of race is both experientially and structurally “real,” it yet has no ultimate or essential reality in and of itself. 7

B ut, of course, ultimate reality is not where any of us live. For hundreds of years, we have lived in deliberately racialized human structures—that is to say, socially pervasive and sometimes legally binding fictions—that prove incapable of stating difference and equality simultaneously. And it is extremely galling to hear that you have suffered for a fiction, or indeed profited from one. It has been fascinating to watch the recent panicked response to the interrogation of whiteness, the terror at the dismantling of a false racial category that for centuries united the rich man born and raised in Belarus, say, with the poor woman born and raised in Wales, under the shared banner of racial superiority. But panic is not entirely absent on the other side of the binary. If race is a construct, what will happen to blackness? Can the categories of black music and black literature survive? What would the phrase “black joy” signify? How can we throw out this dirty bathwater of racism when for centuries we have pressed the baby of race so close to our hearts, and made—even accounting for all the horror—so many beautiful things with it?

T oni Morrison loved the culture and community of the African diaspora in America, even—especially—those elements that were forged as response and defense against the dehumanizing violence of slavery, the political humiliations of Reconstruction, the brutal segregation and state terrorism of Jim Crow, and the many civil-rights successes and neoliberal disappointments that have followed. Out of this history she made a literature, a shelf of books that—for as long as they are read—will serve to remind America that its story about itself was always partial and self-deceiving. And here, for many people, we reach an impasse: a dead end. If race is a construct, whither blackness? If whiteness is an illusion, on what else can a poor man without prospects pride himself? I think a lot of people’s brains actually break at this point. But Morrison had a bigger brain. She could parse the difference between the deadness of a determining category and the richness of a lived experience. And there are some clues in this story, I think. Some hints at alternative ways of conceptualizing difference without either erasing or codifying it. Surprising civic values, fresh philosophical principles. Not only categorization and visibility but also privacy and kindness:

Now we were behaving like sisters separated for much too long. Those four short months were nothing in time. Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew—how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed. There was politeness in that reluctance and generosity as well. Is your mother sick too? No, she dances all night. Oh—and an understanding nod.

That people live and die within a specific history—within deeply embedded cultural, racial, and class codes—is a reality that cannot be denied, and often a beautiful one. It’s what creates difference. But there are ways to deal with that difference that are expansive and comprehending, rather than narrow and diagnostic. Instead of only ticking boxes on doctors’ forms—pathologizing difference—we might also take a compassionate and discreet interest in it. We don’t always have to judge difference or categorize it or criminalize it. We don’t have to take it personally. We can also just let it be. Or we can, like Morrison, be profoundly interested in it:

The struggle was for writing that was indisputably black. I don’t yet know quite what that is, but neither that nor the attempts to disqualify an effort to find out keeps me from trying to pursue it. My choices of language (speakerly, aural, colloquial), my reliance for full comprehension on codes embedded in black culture, my effort to effect immediate coconspiracy and intimacy (without any distancing, explanatory fabric), as well as my attempt to shape a silence while breaking it are attempts to transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black American culture into a language worthy of the culture. 8

Visibility and privacy, communication and silence, intimacy and encounter are all expressed here. Readers who see only their own exclusion in this paragraph may need to mentally perform, in their own minds, the experiment that “Recitatif” performs in fiction: the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial . To perform this experiment in a literary space, I will choose, for my other character, another Nobel Prize winner, Seamus Heaney. I am looking at his poems. I am looking in. To fully comprehend Heaney’s œuvre, I would have to be wholly embedded in the codes of Northern Irish culture; I am not. No more than I am wholly embedded in the African American culture out of which and toward which Morrison writes. I am not a perfect co-conspirator of either writer. I had to Google to find out what “Lady Esther dusting powder” is, in “Recitatif,” and, when Heaney mentions hoarding “fresh berries in the byre,” no image comes to my mind. 9

As a reader of these two embedded writers, both profoundly interested in their own communities, I can only be a thrilled observer, always partially included, by that great shared category, the human, but also simultaneously on the outside looking in, enriched by that which is new or alien to me, especially when it has not been diluted or falsely presented to flatter my ignorance—that dreaded “explanatory fabric.” Instead, they both keep me rigorous company on the page, not begging for my comprehension but always open to the possibility of it, for no writer would break a silence if they did not want someone—some always unknowable someone—to overhear. I am describing a model reader-writer relationship. But, as “Recitatif” suggests, the same values expressed here might also prove useful to us in our roles as citizens, allies, friends.

R ace, for many, is a determining brand, simply one side of a rigid binary. Blackness, as Morrison conceived of it, was a shared history, an experience, a culture, a language. A complexity, a wealth. To believe in blackness solely as a negative binary in a prejudicial racialized structure, and to further believe that this binary is and will forever be the essential, eternal, and primary organizing category of human life, is a pessimist’s right but an activist’s indulgence. Meanwhile, there is work to be done. And what is the purpose of all this work if our positions within prejudicial, racialized structures are permanent, essential, unchangeable—as rigid as the rules of gravity?

The forces of capital, meanwhile, are pragmatic: capital does not bother itself with essentialisms. It transforms nobodies into somebodies—and vice versa—depending on where labor is needed and profit can be made. The Irish became somebodies when indentured labor had to be formally differentiated from slavery, to justify the latter category. In Britain, we only decided that there was something inside women—or enough of a something to be able to vote with—in the early twentieth century. British women went from being essentially angels of the house—whose essential nature was considered to be domestic—to nodes in a system whose essential nature was to work, just like men, although we were welcome to pump milk in the office basement if we really had to. . . . Yes, capital is adaptive, pragmatic. It is always looking for new markets, new sites of economic vulnerability, of potential exploitation—new Maggies. New human beings whose essential nature is to be nobody. We claim to know this even as we simultaneously misremember or elide the many Maggies in our own lives. These days, Roberta—or Twyla—might march for women’s rights, all the while wearing a four-dollar T-shirt, a product of the enforced labor of Uyghur women on the other side of the world. Twyla—or Roberta—could go door to door, registering voters, while sporting long nails freshly painted by a trafficked young girl. Roberta—or Twyla—may practice “self-care” by going to the hairdresser to get extensions shorn from another, poorer woman’s head. Far beneath the “black-white” racial strife of America, there persists a global underclass of Maggies, unseen and unconsidered within the parochial American conversation, the wretched of the earth. . . .

O ur racial codes are “peculiar to” us, but what do we really mean by that? In “Recitatif,” that which would characterize Twyla and Roberta as black or white is the consequence of history, of shared experience, and what shared histories inevitably produce: culture, community, identity. What belongs exclusively to them is their subjective experience of these same categories in which they have lived. Some of these experiences will have been nourishing, joyful, and beautiful, many others prejudicial, exploitative, and punitive. No one can take a person’s subjective experiences from them. No one should try. Whether Twyla or Roberta is the somebody who has lived within the category of “white” we cannot be sure, but Morrison constructs the story in such a way that we are forced to admit the fact that other categories, aside from the racial, also produce shared experiences. Categories like being poor, being female, like being at the mercy of the state or the police, like living in a certain Zip Code, having children, hating your mother, wanting the best for your family. We are like and not like a lot of people a lot of the time. White may be the most powerful category in the racial hierarchy, but, if you’re an eight-year-old girl in a state institution with a delinquent mother and no money, it sure doesn’t feel that way. Black may be the lower caste, but, if you marry an I.B.M. guy and have two servants and a driver, you are—at the very least—in a new position in relation to the least powerful people in your society. And vice versa. Life is complex, conceptually dominated by binaries but never wholly contained by them. Morrison is the great master of American complexity, and “Recitatif,” in my view, sits alongside “ Bartleby, the Scrivener ” and “ The Lottery ” as a perfect—and perfectly American—tale, one every American child should read.

Finally, what is essentially black or white about Twyla and Roberta I believe we bring to “Recitatif” ourselves, within a system of signs over which too many humans have collectively labored for hundreds of years now. It began in the racialized system of capitalism we call slavery; it was preserved in law long after slavery ended, and continues to assert itself, to sometimes lethal effect, in social, economic, educational, and judicial systems all over the world. But as a category the fact remains that it has no objective reality: it is not, like gravity, a principle of the earth. By removing it from the story, Morrison reveals both the speciousness of “black-white” as our primary human categorization and its dehumanizing effect on human life. But she also lovingly demonstrates how much meaning we were able to find—and continue to find—in our beloved categories. The peculiar way our people make this or that dish, the peculiar music we play at a cookout or a funeral, the peculiar way we use nouns or adjectives, the peculiar way we walk or dance or paint or write—these things are dear to us. Especially if they are denigrated by others, we will tend to hold them close. We feel they define us. And this form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the human—the insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as “nobody.” A direct descendant of slaves, Morrison writes in a way that recognizes first—and primarily—the somebody within black people, the black human having been, historically, the ultimate example of the dehumanized subject: the one transformed, by capital, from subject to object. But in this lifelong project, as the critic Jesse McCarthy has pointed out, we are invited to see a foundation for all social-justice movements: “The battle over the meaning of black humanity has always been central to both [Toni Morrison’s] fiction and essays—and not just for the sake of black people but to further what we hope all of humanity can become.” 10

We hope all of humanity will reject the project of dehumanization. We hope for a literature—and a society!—that recognizes the somebody in everybody. This despite the fact that, in America’s zero-sum game of racialized capitalism, this form of humanism has been abandoned as an apolitical quantity, toothless, an inanity to repeat, perhaps, on “Sesame Street” (“Everybody’s somebody!”) but considered too naïve and insufficient a basis for radical change. 11

I have written a lot in this essay about prejudicial structures. But I’ve spoken vaguely of them, metaphorically, as a lot of people do these days. In an address to Howard University, in 1995, Morrison got specific. She broke it down, in her scientific way. It is a very useful summary, to be cut out and kept for future reference, for if we hope to dismantle oppressive structures it will surely help to examine how they are built:

Let us be reminded that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another. Something, perhaps, like this:

• Construct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.
• Isolate and demonize that enemy by unleashing and protecting the utterance of overt and coded name-calling and verbal abuse. Employ ad hominem attacks as legitimate charges against that enemy.
• Enlist and create sources and distributors of information who are willing to reinforce the demonizing process because it is profitable, because it grants power, and because it works.
• Palisade all art forms; monitor, discredit, or expel those that challenge or destabilize processes of demonization and deification.
• Subvert and malign all representatives of and sympathizers with this constructed enemy.
• Solicit, from among the enemy, collaborators who agree with and can sanitize the dispossession process.
• Pathologize the enemy in scholarly and popular mediums; recycle, for example, scientific racism and the myths of racial superiority in order to naturalize the pathology.
• Criminalize the enemy. Then prepare, budget for, and rationalize the building of holding arenas for the enemy—especially its males and absolutely its children.
• Reward mindlessness and apathy with monumentalized entertainments and with little pleasures, tiny seductions: a few minutes on television, a few lines in the press, a little pseudo-success, the illusion of power and influence; a little fun, a little style, a little consequence.
• Maintain, at all costs, silence. 12

Elements of this fascist playbook can be seen in the European encounter with Africa, between the West and the East, between the rich and the poor, between the Germans and the Jews, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the British and the Irish, the Serbs and the Croats. It is one of our continual human possibilities. Racism is a kind of fascism, perhaps the most pernicious and long-lasting. But it is still a man-made structure. The capacity for fascisms of one kind or another is something else we all share—you might call it our most depressing collective identity. (And, if we are currently engaged in trying to effect change, it could be worthwhile—as an act of ethical spring-cleaning—to check through Toni’s list and insure that we are not employing any of the playbook of fascism in our own work.) Fascism labors to create the category of the “nobody,” the scapegoat, the sufferer. Morrison repudiated that category as it has applied to black people over centuries, and in doing so strengthened the category of the “somebody” for all of us, whether black or white or neither. Othering whoever has othered us, in reverse, is no liberation—as cathartic as it may feel. 13

Liberation is liberation: the recognition of somebody in everybody. 14

S till, like most readers of “Recitatif,” I found it impossible not to hunger to know who the other was, Twyla or Roberta. Oh, I urgently wanted to have it straightened out. Wanted to sympathize warmly in one sure place, turn cold in the other. To feel for the somebody and dismiss the nobody. But this is precisely what Morrison deliberately and methodically will not allow me to do . It’s worth asking ourselves why. “Recitatif” reminds me that it is not essentially black or white to be poor, oppressed, lesser than, exploited, ignored. The answer to “What the hell happened to Maggie?” is not written in the stars, or in the blood, or in the genes, or forever predetermined by history. Whatever was done to Maggie was done by people. People like Twyla and Roberta. People like you and me.

This essay is drawn from the introduction to “ Recitatif: A Story ,” by Toni Morrison, out this February from Knopf.

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Toni Morrison: Life, Liberty, and Literature (Routledge Historical Americans) (Paperback)

• Description
• About the Author
• Reviews & Media

Toni Morrison is one of the most celebrated living authors. Her work, for which she received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, vibrantly portrays American life from the Antebellum period to the present. Her best-selling novels and short stories have been adapted for theater and film, influenced countless artists, and have been widely read on college campuses for decades. Hendrick provides a short, contextualizing biography about Morrison's life and then moves through Morrison's work, introducing students to slavery, segregation, law, and civil rights.

In five brief chapters, bolstered by interviews, excerpts, and historical documents, Toni Morrison provides a perfect analytical bridge between literature and history.

Routledge Historical Americans is a series of short, vibrant biographies that illuminate the lives of Americans who have had an impact on the world. Each book includes a short overview of the person's life and puts that person into historical context through essential primary documents, written both by the subjects and about them. A series website supports the books, containing extra images and documents, links to further research, and where possible, multi-media sources on the subjects. Perfect for including in any course on American History, the books in the Routledge Historical Americans series show the impact everyday people can have on the course of history.

• American - African American & Black
• Women Authors
• Hardcover (March 9th, 2026): $180.00

In a Special Room in an Ohio Library, Toni Morrison’s Legacy Lives On

The nobel prize–winning novelist never lost touch with her hometown..

In fall 1993, the city of Lorain, Ohio, was in a frenzy. Toni Morrison had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and her hometown couldn’t decide how to celebrate. Officials and citizens held countless meetings and discussions, speaking over each other in excitement. One proposed to rename Broadway Avenue after her. Others wanted to put her name on a school or the local library. “When Toni heard about this, she contacted us,” says Cheri Campbell, the adult services librarian at the main branch of Lorain Public Library. “She said ‘I want a reading room where people can sit and read and just think.’ And that’s what we gave her.”

Morrison, who was born in Lorain in 1931 and died on August 6, 2019, at 88, got her first job at the public library. She worked as a part-time shelver, returning books to their rightful places, until the librarians noticed that Morrison spent more time reading than shelving, Campbell says. Morrison was let go from that position, but soon rehired in the library’s administrative office. Though Morrison spent many years of her life on the East Coast—either at her offices at Princeton University or in her converted boathouse on the Hudson River—she maintained ties with Lorain and its library.

The library officially opened the Toni Morrison Reading Room on January 22, 1995. The writer of Beloved and The Bluest Eye came to the ribbon-cutting ceremony, along with members of her family and poet Sonia Sanchez. Morrison had not prepared remarks, but Sanchez read an original poem for the occasion that moved the author to words. “I remember working at the library, making a little change,” Morrison said, according to the Lorain Public Library’s site . “I spent long, long hours reading there, so I wanted one place available in the neighborhood with a quiet room and comfortable chairs.”

In the years after the dedication, books and memorabilia trickled into the library from Morrison’s office in Princeton, eventually taking the form of a small but formidable altar. Morrison sent copies of her books that had been translated into many different languages, including Japanese, Polish, and Slovakian, as well as pieces of art she thought could hang on the walls. The Lorain librarians assiduously saved nearly every clipping of stories about Morrison in local and national papers and stowed them in a dedicated file. While Morrison donated the bulk of her personal papers , including notes, corrected proofs, and early manuscripts, to Princeton, the Lorain Public Library had, over the years, built up its own record of how dearly the author was cherished in Ohio and the world.

The walls of the Toni Morrison Reading Room are covered in this gratitude. Morrison’s face smiles out from covers on Time and Newsweek . Letters she wrote are kept safe in picture frames, around an enormous painted quilt square depicting Morrison at work. Her friends and family appear in a picture album of the writer’s 70th birthday at the New York Public Library. And at the heart of the room is an original portrait of Morrison by Ohio artist John Sokol. From a distance, the portrait looks jagged, almost like a dot matrix. But up close, one can see that Morrison’s face is rendered not in lines but in letters, specifically the opening lines of Song of Solomon .

The glass wall that frames Morrison’s room is engraved with a portion of her Nobel acceptance speech: “I will leave this hall with a new and much more delightful haunting than the one I felt upon entering: that is the company of the laureates yet to come. Those who, even as I speak, are mining, sifting and polishing languages for illuminations none of us has dreamed of.”

While the Lorain Public Library’s first duty is to serve the residents of the small city less than an hour west of Cleveland, it has also become a meaningful destination for Morrison devotees. “We get people from out of town, people who are scholars. Hilton Als came by,” Campbell says. “Some people even make a pilgrimage from out of state, just to visit us.” When out-of-towners come, quite frequently, Campbell is asked where Morrison used to live. Only one of Morrison’s old residences in the area is still standing—2245 Elyria Avenue—the house she was born in. So Campbell directs people to the Lorain Historical Society instead, which used to hold the branch of the library where Morrison worked. “Lots of times we just stand there and have a conversation about Toni,” she says. “It’s always very reverent.”

Elsewhere in Lorain, the city has begun to mourn their hometown hero. The city council will soon declare February 18 “Toni Morrison Day” in Lorain County. In Cleveland Heights, the Cedar Lee Theater is screening Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am , a documentary released earlier in 2019. And the library will host an evening remembering Morrison on August 14, in the reading room, of course. Attendees are invited to read Morrison’s work or share memories of her long, rich life.

Since the author’s death was announced, Campbell says the library has been doing its best to stay on top of the mountain of requests from media, fans, and locals—just another testament to Morrison’s towering impact and legacy. “We knew how much the world loves her, but it’s been kind of overwhelming,” she says. “I guess we just kind of thought she would go on forever.”

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Toni Morrison Quotes

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If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge - even wisdom. Like art.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

From my point of view, your life is already a miracle of chance waiting for you to shape its destiny.

I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are

Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

You are your own stories and therefore free to imagine and experience what it means to be human... And although you don't have complete control over the narrative - no author does, I can tell you - you could nevertheless create it.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

All important things are hard.

It's important, therefore, to know who the real enemy is, and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

A friend gathers all the pieces and gives them back in the right order.

Racism will disappear when it's no longer profitable, and no longer psychologically useful. And when that happens, it'll be gone. But at the moment, people make a lot of money off of it, pro and con.

You are your best thing

Don’t beg anybody for anything, especially love.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one.

If you take racism away from certain people - I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible, misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough. Of course you deserve it, but if that's all you have in mind - happiness - I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice - that's more than a barren life. It's a trivial one.

Let your face speak what's in your heart.

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Toni Morrison

• Born: February 18, 1931
• Occupation: Novelist
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Biography of Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was an American novelist, essayist, editor, and professor. Her contributions to literature were recognized worldwide when she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison attended Howard University and Cornell University in the 1950s before becoming the first Black woman fiction editor at the publishing giant Random House. In 1970 she published her first novel, The Bluest Eye , and proceeded to publish a string of novels that garnered critical acclaim, along with the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Morrison's writing was greatly influenced by her family. Her grandparents had relocated to Ohio during the national movement of Black Americans out of the South known as the Great Migration. After leaving their farm in Alabama, Morrison’s mother’s parents moved to Kentucky, and then to Ohio. They placed a high value on the education of their children and themselves. Morrison was a gifted student, learning to read at an early age and doing well at her studies at an integrated school. Morrison attended Hawthorne Elementary School, where she was the only African American in her first-grade classroom.

One of the most critically acclaimed American writers, Morrison is considered a major architect of a literary language for African Americans. Her work often features Black vernacular, Black settings, and is focused on Blackness—unusual for her time. Her writing is considered to have formed a distinctly Black literary sensibility, while drawing a reading audience that cut across racial boundaries.

Morrison's peers and critics have commended her not only for her creation of a literary language for African Americans, but also for the way her writing privileged and displayed the interiority of Black America. Angela Davis credits Morrison with teaching the world “to imagine enslaved women and men with full lives, with complex subjectivities, with interiority,” and essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah says that Morrison gave Black America “a record of gesture and custom and being and belonging.” Morrison is also recognized for the work she did as an editor for Random House, where she worked closely with Black authors and published books by Muhammad Ali, Henry Dumas, Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gail Jones. By highlighting the voices of other Black writers, Morrison paved the way for African-American studies and Black female literary criticism in the academy.

On August 5, 2019, Toni Morrison died at the age of 88 in the Bronx, New York City.

Study Guides on Works by Toni Morrison

Beloved toni morrison.

Beloved is Toni Morrison's fifth novel. Published in 1987 as Morrison was enjoying increasing popularity and success, Beloved became a best seller and received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Its reception by critics was overwhelming, and the...

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Bluest Eye Toni Morrison

Published in 1970, The Bluest Eye came about at a critical moment in the history of American civil rights. Morrison began Pecola's story as a short piece in 1962; it became a novel-in-progress by 1965. It was written, as one can see from the...

Desdemona Toni Morrison , Rokia Traoré

Desdemona is a play that first debuted at Theater Akzent in Vienna, Austria in 2011 and published in 2012 by Oberon Books . The work was a team effort consisting of Toni Morrison, Rokia Traoré, and Peter Sellars. The titular role belongs to...

God Help the Child Toni Morrison

God Help The Child is American author Toni Morrison's eleventh novel. It was published in 2015, Before this book's publication, in April, the literary world was given a small taster of the literary feast that was to come, when The New Yorker...

Home (Morrison Novel) Toni Morrison

Home is American novelist Toni Morrison's 10th novel, published by Alfred Knopf in 2012. Morrison has been forthcoming about the various influences on the germination and the writing of the novel. She wanted to critique the faddish affection for...

Jazz Toni Morrison

Jazz was first published in 1992, a year before Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Chronologically, Jazz is Morrison's sixth novel of seven, followed by Paradise and preceded by The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby...

A Mercy Toni Morrison

A Mercy is Nobel Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison’s ninth novel, published in 2008. It is set in the late 17th century in colonial Virginia and explores the intersections of race, gender, and class in a lawless, raw new world.

The Nobel Lecture in Literature Toni Morrison

In 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. She was also the first black woman of any nationality to win a Nobel Prize in any category. The honor was a culmination of her trajectory...

Paradise Toni Morrison

Paradise was published in 1997, the seventh of Morrison’s novels and her first after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. It completes a trilogy that begins with Beloved and follows with Jazz , each probing themes of memory, violence,...

Recitatif Toni Morrison

"Recitatif" is Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison’s only short story. It was published in 1983 in Amiri and Amina Baraka’s Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women . Though race is a central component of the story about two...

Song of Solomon Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon, a rich and empowering novel published in 1977 that focuses on black life across America, follows the path of Milkman Dead, a young black male in search for his identity. Toni Morrison's gift of storytelling clearly shines through...

Sula Toni Morrison

Published in 1973, Sula is Toni Morrison’s second novel. Like her first novel, The Bluest Eye , this one also deals with the life experiences of two black girls. Yet it does not merely address the childhood experiences but follows the girls as they...

Sweetness Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's short story "Sweetness," published in 2015, is about a light-skinned black mother who gives birth to a dark-skinned daughter who the mother fears and struggles to love. The mother justifies her prejudice by reflecting on how...

Tar Baby Toni Morrison

Tar Baby is a novel written by Toni Morrison and published in 1981. Morrison was a professor at various universities all over the United States, but she moved to NYC to become a part time writer in the mornings before she went to work as an editor...

Toni Morrison: Essays Toni Morrison

Born in raised in small town Ohio, author Toni Morrison accomplished a lot in her 88 year long life. After receiving her undergraduate degree in English from Harvard and her master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University, she went...

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Sound of a Fall

Benjamin Panico makes his New York Times Crossword debut.

By Sam Corbin

Jump to: Today’s Theme | Tricky Clues

TUESDAY PUZZLE — I know that I’ve got a pretty good thing going here, and that I don’t really have a right to complain. But if you’ll allow me just a whit of whining, a crumb of carping, a particle of protest, then I can tell you how I came to love today’s crossword puzzle, constructed by Benjamin Panico.

My colleagues and I occasionally suffer bouts of crossword tunnel vision. These episodes are harmless, as long as we’re not operating heavy machinery, and are set off by overused entries. Mx. Panico, who uses he/they pronouns, began his crossword, his first for The New York Times, with two such entries. [Pathetic], at 1A, is always SAD. [Hoarse], at 4A, is predictably RASP. And then I felt it: I was beginning to tunnel. But I was yanked back into focus by JAZZ (8A), the first of many themed entries about a well-known figure whose writing will no doubt be familiar to many solvers.

From that point on, the puzzle never lost momentum, and I hardly blinked until I devoured the entire thing. It’s especially heartening to see so many unexpected choices and sub-theme symmetry achieved in a constructor debut, so I’m really looking forward to seeing where Mx. Panico takes us next.

Today’s Theme

TONI MORRISON (55A) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In her banquet speech at the Stockholm City Hall, she said that she was “pleasantly haunted” by the laureates who had stood in that spot before her. That might be the best way to describe how this theme, in its impossible grandeur, hovers over the grid.

Ms. Morrison had written six novels by 1993, all of which are featured in this puzzle: JAZZ (8A), THE BLUEST EYE (19A), TAR BABY (30A), SONG OF SOLOMON (35A), BELOVED (42A) and SULA (65A).

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