I first studied Toni Morrison when I was a high school senior, in a private school, in the suburbs of Philadelphia. My grade had less than 100 students. My Literature class had about 15, and, out of those, one student was black — me. I was the only black student in the majority of my classes, since the school had so few. In a classroom purposed to learn how the human psyche manifests through the written word and to explore worlds that could exist in print, even if they didn’t exist in reality, my place wasn’t just as a student who happened to be black. I was the only black writer, righter, and rioter. 

Since learning to read at 2 years old, I knew that I wasn’t meant to only consume translations, but to also contribute to them. In literature, I’ve always felt at home. So, I came to Lit class ready for my interpretations to be as real as possible for the students who didn’t share my view of the world because they didn’t share my experience of it.

“Books are the first plane on which certain battles are fought.” - Toni Morrison, The Pieces I Am, 2019.

We studied Beloved. This wasn’t the first time we studied work that called attention to the history of the African American experience, but this time was different. Reading Beloved wasn’t like reading Huckleberry Finn and watching the anticipation on my classmates’ faces when the passage to be read aloud included the word “nigger.” It wasn’t like watching Glory, in Social Studies, sobbing when Denzel Washington’s character dies and waiting for someone to literally turn their body around in the seat, for no other reason than to check the black student’s reaction. Beloved is equally and undeniably both raw and tender. It isn’t a history book chapter about slavery. Beloved is a story of a mother and her children, filled with life, sacrifices, and characters that you know. Most of all, it is a lesson in black power.

Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, was inspired by a true newspaper clipping about a woman, Margaret Garner, who, with her children, attempted an escape from slavery. She was found and taken back to the plantation, but not before she made two decisions: to slit her oldest child’s throat and to drown her youngest. Her actions sparked a debate, not about whether or not she should be charged with a crime, but about whether or not that crime should be murder or destruction of property. To charge Garner with murdering her children would be to acknowledge black people as human. Toni wrote Beloved to trump that debate. She told the story of an undeniably human runaway slave, Sethe, and her undeniably human children. That story was very easy for me to understand. 

The day that our class discussed Sethe’s decision to murder her own children rather than to let them be taken back into the control of a slave owner, I witnessed, for the first time, a group of white people deciding what is and isn’t ok to think, feel, or do, as a black body, in a strictly black circumstance. This is something that I can now see in the media, on any given day. As a 17 year old, it was new. 

My classmate, who I otherwise considered as a friend, commented that Sethe couldn’t have loved her children and that she acted out of insanity rather than out of an urge to protect. She considered no context and argued that any mother who voluntarily kills her children is a murderer. I remember thinking hard about her use of that word. A “murderer...” The cold blooded kind? The kind that slave masters are when they catch a runaway or a black man that they’ve labeled as “disrespectful” and shoot him dead or hang him from a tree? In that moment, I had a seat, a voice, and a piece of writing, carefully coded by Toni Morrison to speak directly to me. I raised my hand. 

I said that Sethe exercised parental discretion when she took her baby girl’s life. It was equal parts power and tragedy — tragedy in the fact that such a choice had to be made, not in which choice she decided to make. In likely the only autonomous instance she’d have to decide what’s best for the children that she brought into the world, she took back the control. This wasn’t a woman that went insane because of the inhumanity of slavery (although, so be it, if she did). This was a woman who made a conscious, split second decision to save the life that she ended. Instead of leaving her children subject to the life of objectification that waited on the other side of the ride “home,” she acted out the words “Mommy’s got you.” She gave her baby back to God and kept her from the devils that waited to claim her. She acted out of the deepest love and if you don’t understand such love, then Toni Morrison excluded you from it.

Years later, I wish that I had just said something more along the lines of: It’s very curious the way you argue that a black life matters, when the sole extent of that life would be to serve as the property of a self empowered, dangerous , destructive, dehumanizing whiteness.

“I spent my entire writing life trying to ensure that the white gaze is not the dominant one.” Toni Morrison, The Pieces I Am, 2019.

There was a way that I discussed Beloved in class and a way that I discussed it with my black friends from other classes. Although I wasn’t fearful or dishonest in the classroom, I needed to explain and contextualize what felt like home to me. But, with those friends, I didn’t.

Toni Morrison wrote F.U.B.U literature that felt like saying “F.U.B.U” without detailing the words of the acronym and explaining that it’s more than a brand from the 1990s. She didn’t code switch in language, in character development, or in storyline. She never stopped to buffer the black experience for anyone who might be disoriented by its beauty, pain, magic, sexuality, power, purpose, intelligence, complexity. And, in doing so, she presented a new brand of literature that made it absolutely OK to live in a black world and share that life on a main stage. Of her work, she says, “The white world isn’t wrong. It’s peripheral, if it exists at all.” 

She wrote unfiltered blackness and achieved widespread acclamation and a Nobel Peace Prize. To me, this is more radical than demanding approval from white America. Toni demonstrated the resistance that is persevering in excellence despite. She carried on in competence, no matter. That is a blueprint that I channel in my career, in my writing, and in my day to day. I also crave that approach in my entertainment. 

In 1970, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she gave us the world that would later birth Donald Glover’s Atlanta. Art that unbothered-ly centers around the everyday life of a group of ordinary black people. The setting? The hood. Art that gives you an authentic black barbershop scene and either leaves you scrambling to develop conclusions in flat critical essays or leaves you feeling, finally, seen. Art that gives a slave mother the option to decide whether or not she will let her children be enslaved, no matter what you think of the how.

Toni Morrision wrote for the culture and to the culture — accolades from anywhere else are sheer acknowledgement of the magnitude that exists within that culture. She loved herself enough to be true to the experience that she knew, without adding water. Through that angle, she whispers to the only black student in Lit class. Through her lexicon, she loved us. “And, she was loved!”