Toni Morrison

The great American novelist and Nobel laureate used breathtaking prose and a clear moral vision in pursuit of a more humane and just world

- Tayari Jones

I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO LOrain, Ohio, but it has been on my bucket list for 20 years at least. I’m curious about this town, pop. 64,000, located roughly 130 miles north of Columbus, at the mouth of the Black River. One of my students drove across the country, passing through the town with which I was so infatuated. I asked her to bring me back a small sample of dirt. It isn’t rich and loamy, as I imagined it would be. Instead, it is the soft brown of cocoa powder, grainy and dry. Still, I keep it on my writing desk, sealed in a tiny jar that once held baby food. This earth, scooped from the hometown of Toni Morrison, is my totem.

Morrison, who died Aug. 5 at the age of 88, is not the first black woman writer I ever encountered. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, begins with what reads like an excerpt from the Dick and Jane books, indicting the compulsory whiteness of American education in the 1950s and its sickening effect on children. Born in 1970, I grew up with a steady diet of fiction and poetry by writers who “looked like me.” Dick and Jane were cast to the dustbin in favor of African folktales and the novels of Virginia Hamilton and Mildred Taylor. So, when I read The Bluest Eye as a teenager and was gobsmacked by the sheer genius of the work, it wasn’t because I had never seen myself in a book. It was because I had never read a book this good.