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10 great articles and essays by toni morrison, articles/essays, the site of memory, nobel lecture, rediscovering black history, unspeakable things unspoken, no place for self-pity, no room for feary, can we find paradise on earth, cooking out, what the black woman thinks about women’s lib, on to disneyland and the real unreality, unemcumbered imagination, 15 great essays about writing.

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The Work You Do, the Person You Are

By Toni Morrison

A minimalist illustration of a young woman reading a book on a flight of steps. There is a maroon background and a...

All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.

I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.

Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike.

In those days, the forties, children were not just loved or liked; they were needed. They could earn money; they could care for children younger than themselves; they could work the farm, take care of the herd, run errands, and much more. I suspect that children aren’t needed in that way now. They are loved, doted on, protected, and helped. Fine, and yet . . .

Little by little, I got better at cleaning Her house—good enough to be given more to do, much more. I was ordered to carry bookcases upstairs and, once, to move a piano from one side of a room to the other. I fell carrying the bookcases. And after pushing the piano my arms and legs hurt so badly. I wanted to refuse, or at least to complain, but I was afraid She would fire me, and I would lose the freedom the dollar gave me, as well as the standing I had at home—although both were slowly being eroded. She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply gorgeous to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few. Until my mother asked me if I really wanted to work for castoffs. So I learned to say “No, thank you” to a faded sweater offered for a quarter of a week’s pay.

Still, I had trouble summoning the courage to discuss or object to the increasing demands She made. And I knew that if I told my mother how unhappy I was she would tell me to quit. Then one day, alone in the kitchen with my father, I let drop a few whines about the job. I gave him details, examples of what troubled me, yet although he listened intently, I saw no sympathy in his eyes. No “Oh, you poor little thing.” Perhaps he understood that what I wanted was a solution to the job, not an escape from it. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, “Listen. You don’t live there. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.”

That was what he said. This was what I heard:

1. Whatever the work is, do it well—not for the boss but for yourself.

2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.

3. Your real life is with us, your family.

4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and morons, quick-witted and dull, bighearted and narrow. I’ve had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home. ♦

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Beyond the Books: Toni Morrison’s Essays and Criticism

The Nobel laureate and author of such novels as “Beloved” and “Song of Solomon” wrote extensively for The New York Times.

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By Tina Jordan

Toni Morrison , who died Monday at 88 , is best known for her literary fiction , starting with her 1970 debut, “The Bluest Eye,” and continuing through her 2015 novel, “God Help the Child.” But she was an incisive cultural critic and essayist as well, putting her mind to everything from black feminism to Disneyland. Below are some of her reviews and writing for The New York Times.

‘The kindest words, the sweetest euphemisms’

In her 1971 review of “To Be a Black Woman: Portraits in Fact and Fiction,” edited by Mel Watkins and Jay David, Morrison wrote:

“Somewhere there is, or will be, an in‐depth portrait of the black woman. At the moment, it resides outside the pages of this book. She is somewhere, though, some place, just as she always has been, up to her pelvis in myth, asking those sad, sad questions: When I was brave, was it only because I was masculine? When I was human, was it only because I was passive? When I survived, was it only because my man was dead? And when ship loads of slaves became a race of 30 million was that really only because I was fecund?”

[How did Toni Morrison’s words touch your life ? Tell us.]

‘The winds are changing, and when they blow, new things move’

In her 1971 essay “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib,” Morrison wrote:

“They look at white women and see them as the enemy — for they know that racism is not confined to white men, and that there are more white women than men in this country, and that 53 percent of the population sustained an eloquent silence during times of greatest stress. The faces of those white women hovering behind that black girl at the Little Rock school in 1957 do not soon leave the retina of the mind.”

‘Delicate in its bitterness and tough in its joy’

In 1972, Morrison reviewed Albert Murray’s memoir of growing up in Alabama, “South to a Very Old Place,” writing:

“Murray’s going home, like the return of any black born in the South, takes on a special dimension. Along with an intimacy with its people and ties to its land, there is a separateness from both the people and the land — since some of the people are white and the land is not really his. This feeling of tender familiarity and brutish alienation provides tension and makes the trip down home delicate in its bitterness and tough in its joy.”

‘A wholly useless biography, somehow offensive in its one‐eyed stare’

Morrison could be a scathing book critic. Reviewing Regina Nadelson’s biography of Angela Davis in 1972, Morrison described it as “a Cyclopean view of Angela Davis that leaves the reader with a wholly useless biography, somehow offensive in its one‐eyed stare. Maybe because the other thing about Cyclops was that he too had a taste for human flesh.”

[ Toni Morrison: a writer who “enlarged the American imagination in ways we are only beginning to understand.” Read our critic’s appreciation . ]

‘All of us, bound by something we could not name’

For the 1973 summer reading issue, Morrison wrote an essay about the pleasures of cooking out , describing the scene so vividly you can almost smell the potatoes frying and taste the syrupy-sweet peach cobbler.

“Mama stood and put her jealousy into the paper bag with the egg shells and began to whip the eggs with a slow, wide and generous beat. Aunt Millie turned the fried potatoes over, saying a little splash of beer over the frying ham would be good. Green always liked it that way.

He brought us together. He meddled in the cooking and baiting of hooks. Told the older girls how to bile the coffee proper and to get them roastin’ ears out of the sun. He directed the boys to the coolest part of the lake to sink the beer in.

The day moved then into its splendid parts: a ham, fried-potatoes, scrambled-egg, breakfast in the morning air; fried fish and pan-cooked biscuits on the hind side of noon, and by the time Mama — who had never heard of Gerber’s — was grinding a piece of supper ham with her own teeth to slip into the baby’s mouth, and the Blue Gums had unveiled their incredible peach cobbler, the first stars were glittering through the blue light of Turkeyfoot Lake.

We were all there. All of us, bound by something we could not name. Cooking, honey, cooking under the stars.”

‘I want to go to Disneyland where the deceptions are genuine’

“Too tired? I’ve never been more exhausted in my life,” Morrison wrote in her 1973 essay “On to Disneyland and the Real Unreality.” “Not just the numbness of watching hundreds of Mexicans — naturalized and otherwise — being kicked back across the U.S. border. Not just the bone‐marrow fatigue of reading about the latest outrage in outrageous South Africa. Not just the weight of old anger, but an inability to contain the new. Mine is a tiredness of perception, of strafed ganglia. Anchors float. Bread won’t mold. Children’s brains splatter on the walls of ‘very good’ homes.”

[ Toni Morrison left behind a powerful literary legacy. These are her most essential books. ]

‘With the whole world as its couch and white America as its pillow, it dreams of colored people’

In her 1974 essay “Rediscovering Black History,” Morrison describes what it was like to work on “The Black Book,” an acclaimed folk history that she edited at Random House. “‘The Black Book’ is unconventional history told from the point of view of everyday people. With the whole world as its couch and white America as its pillow, it dreams of colored people. It is indeed an excellent dream.”

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Critical essays on Toni Morrison

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'I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and race-free': an essay by Toni Morrison

In this piece from her personal archive, Morrison reflects on how ‘the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting’ powered her novels, and in particular, Beloved

I suspect my dependency on memory as trustworthy ignition is more anxious than it is for most fiction writers – not because I write (or want to) autobiographically, but because I am keenly aware of the fact that I write in a wholly racialised society that can and does hobble the imagination. Labels about centrality, marginality, minority, gestures of appropriated and appropriating cultures and literary heritages, pressures to take a position – all these surface when I am read or critiqued and when I compose. It is both an intolerable and inevitable condition. I am asked bizarre questions inconceivable if put to other writers: Do you think you will ever write about white people? Isn’t it awful to be called a black writer?

I wanted my imagination as unencumbered as possible and as responsible as possible. I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and “race-free”. All of which presented itself to me as a project full of paradox and contradiction. Western or European writers believe or can choose to believe their work is naturally “race-free” or “race transcendent”. Whether it is or not is another question – the fact is the problem has not worried them. They can take it for granted that it is because Others are “raced” – whites are not. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. The truth, of course, is that we are all “raced”. Wanting that same sovereignty, I had to originate my own fictional projects in a manner I hoped would liberate me, the work and my ability to do it. I had three choices: to ignore race or try to altogether and write about the second world war or domestic strife without referencing race. But that would erase one, although not the only, most impinging fact of my existence and my intelligence. Two, I could become a cool “objective” observer writing about race conflict and/or harmony. There, however, I would be forced to surrender the centre of the stage to received ideas of centrality and the subject would always and forever be race. Or, three, I could strike out for new territory: to find a way to free my imagination of the impositions and limitations of race and explore the consequences of its centrality in the world and in the lives of the people I was hungry to write about.

First was my effort to substitute and rely on memory rather than history because I knew I could not, should not, trust recorded history to give me the insight into the cultural specificity I wanted. Second, I determined to diminish, exclude, even freeze any (overt) debt to western literary history. Neither effort has been entirely successful, nor should I be congratulated if it had been. Yet it seemed to me extremely important to try. You will understand how reckless it would have been for me to rely on Joseph Conrad or Mark Twain or Herman Melville or Harriet Beecher Stowe or Walt Whitman or Henry James or James Fenimore Cooper , or Saul Bellow for that matter, or Flannery O’Connor or Ernest Hemingway for insights into my own culture. It would have been equally dim-witted, as well as devastating, for me to rely on Kenneth Stampp or Lewis Mumford, or Herbert Gutman, or Eugene Genovese or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or Ralph Waldo Emerson, or Thomas Jefferson or any of those sages in the history of the United States for research that would enlighten me on these matters. There was and is another source that I have at my disposal, however: my own literary heritage of slave narratives.

For imaginative entrance into that territory I urged memory to metamorphose itself into metaphorical and imagistic associations. But writing is not simply recollecting or reminiscing or even epiphany. It is doing; creating a narrative infused (in my case) with legitimate and authentic characteristics of the culture. Mindful of and rebellious towards the cultural and racial expectations and impositions my fiction would encourage, it was important for me not to reveal, that is, reinforce, already established reality (literary or historical) that the reader and I agree upon beforehand. I could not, without engaging in another kind of cultural totalising process, assume or exercise that kind of authority. It was in Beloved that all of these matters coalesced for me in new and major ways. History versus memory, and memory versus memorylessness. Rememory as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative. The effort to both remember and not know became the structure of the text. Nobody in the book can bear too long to dwell on the past; nobody can avoid it. There is no reliable literary or journalistic or scholarly history available to them, to help them, because they are living in a society and a system in which the conquerors write the narrative of their lives. They are spoken of and written about – objects of history, not subjects within it. Therefore not only is the major preoccupation of the central characters that of reconstituting and recollecting a usable past (Sethe to know what happened to her and to not know in order to justify her violent action; Paul D to stand still and remember what has helped to construct his self; Denver to demystify her own birth and enter the contemporary world that she is reluctant to engage) but also the narrative strategy the plot formation turns on the stress of remembering, its inevitability, the chances for liberation that lie within the process. In the final pages memory is insistent yet becomes the mutation of fact into fiction then folklore and then into nothing.

Toni Morrison