Quiet as it’s kept there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. This book, like all of Morrison’s works, is a master class in storytelling. In simple terms, it’s the story of a dark-skinned Black girl’s desire to have blue eyes, but on closer examination, it’s about the roots of racial self-loathing. I studied Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye, and re-read it many times while writing my own debut. She gave me permission to write boldly and unapologetically about blackness while centering no one’s gaze but my own.Īs writers, we learn craft best by reading works from authors we admire. Sadly, I admit I didn’t pick up Morrison’s work again until years later when I’d done enough living to understand how she’d held a mirror up to my own interior life. I struggled with language too dense and ideas too complex for my immature imagination to hold. We’d lost our literary light, Toni Morrison.ĭuring my sophomore year at Northwestern University, Professor Leon Forrest assigned Beloved and Song of Solomon as required reading for our literature class. As I read aloud the words I’d just composed for a writing prompt, one of my classmates gasped. Last week, I was sitting in a classroom at Howard University during a Hurston-Wright workshop for Black writers led by bestselling author Nicole Dennis-Benn. We all remember where we were when the collective community celebrated or mourned something momentous.
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