It’s more than halfway through National Poetry Month, which I personally observe in some way every April, and this post, to me, is a little late. What I wrestle with in these times is trying to figure out what to say that is helpful, even when I’m not sure what that is. Trying to make sure that I am not allowing events or bullies to suppress my natural inclination to share, while I am also not adding to the noise.
“…Poetry reminds me that feelings of despair and hopelessness that I sometimes feel are not unique to this time, that beautiful words and unique insights are a common reoccurence.
The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.
I hope these times find you implementing your freedom in all the ways you see fit. If you are a poetry lover, please share your faves with me in the comments. I made a brief list of some of mine over at Bookshop.
It’s difficult to write through fear and to feel like I have anything of value to contribute, really, in a time when so much damage is happening. But here are some things I’ve been thinking about the lie of merit/meritocracy over diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
We don’t need one or the other, we need both — and much more — and to say anything different is really a lie.
As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about words and looking them up, because I want to be precise. Language, as we know, especially now that our government wants to ban some of it, is not some neutral tool that you just fling about carelessly — at least it shouldn’t be.
A word I keep coming back to that surfaces from time to time is merit.
Merit, as a noun, means: “The quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward.” As a verb, “ deserve or be worthy of (something, especially reward, punishment or attention.)”
We live in times that seem to the be enemy of context, which is the reason this word has been stalking my thoughts, when I’m walking the dog, when I’m trying to watch a movie. I’m writing this to get it out of my brain, at least for now. And, there are too many examples that I wish my younger self had to reinforce that I was worthy and deserving before I believed the lies of meritocracy in America for me to keep these thoughts to myself.
It’s hard to believe it is has been almost two full years since the publication of Women of the Post. It feels like the characters in the book are with me all the time, even as I work on my next book.
A large part of that has been the warm reception, the kind words and notes others have shared about the book. It was nice to see, just the other day, that Women of the Post was included in this Book Riot roundup of books about the 6888th Central Postal Battalion. I also loved seeing every member of the battalion listed at the end of Six Triple Eight, Tyler Perry’s Netflix movie — that kind of recognition is long overdue. It’s exciting to see all the different ways creators, storytellers and historians are amplifying the story of the Women’s Army Corps, and the 855 Black women who served as part of the Six Triple Eight.
In the broader world, there is an aggressive push to proclaim the end of diversity, equity and inclusion. That war is separate but related to a false sense of competition between my version of the 6888th history and other versions. First, those of us who embody the histories central to Black History Month and Women’s History Month know that the work of pulling important, erased narratives from the margins to the center of discourse is not done. If it were, I would not get regular emails from readers sharing their dismay that they never learned about these Black women veterans. I would not hear from women veterans all over the country that each year during Veterans’ Day, their husbands are thanked for their service but they continue to be overlooked, even when they are the veterans and their spouses are not.
But second, history has been generous to non-Black and male veterans in this country, to put it mildly. There are many millions of stories, movies, books, plays and other archives brimming with descriptions of service to this country that do not include Black women at all. So there is much more to be written, told and shared about Black women veterans, and Black women, period. There is more than enough room for all of our stories.
It’s encouraging to me, always, to be in the virtual literary community that continues to lift up Women’s History all year long. This year, I’m also delighted to note that Women of the Post is included in great company as part of author Janis R. Daly’s 2025 list of 31 Titles about Women in History that educate and inspire. I’m looking forward to picking up some of these titles myself, and I hope you’ll spread the word about them, too.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Juneteenth and a common response that I have when anyone asks me how I deal with writer’s block. I know more people became familiar with Juneteenth during the pandemic, but I learned about the holiday in the state where it was born, Texas. (I highly recommend reading Annette Gordon-Reed’s slim, enlightening book, On Juneteenth, which I like to return to once in awhile.) I was in my 30s, working in Austin, when I first learned about it. Before that moment, I had never considered the quantum emotional leap that had to be required for enslaved people to transition to full, legal (on paper, at least) autonomy.
And, as a native New Yorker, I had mixed feelings about the holiday, which on its surface felt to me like the celebration of delayed freedom. And understanding what little I do about the Reconstruction Era, thanks to Bryan Stevenson and Kidada Williams especially, the holiday seems to have been observed, always, in an environment of extreme animosity for former dehumanized engines of labor resting up, relaxing and otherwise trying to see what this nation and its attraction to a simple freedom narrative really meant for them. After all, the end of slavery really reached a chilling crescendo in the twelve-year period immediately following the Civil War, when there were so many promising laws meant to offer Black folks a path to full citizenship.
But as part of a system of racial hierarchy, the caste system built here to justify slavery in the first place, the first tool of dehumanization was to cut Black people off from educating themselves. Because without reading or writing, you are chained to ignorance. Reading as a practice is what lead me to writing. Writing is what became the catalyst for personal expression that built the architecture of this amazing life.
Anti-Black literacy laws in this country were meant to strip us of any chance at navigating the world around us. And, as a kind of shorthand whenever anyone asks me about writer’s block and how I deal with it, I say that given that my ancestors were forbidden by law to read or write, I do not have the luxury that the phrase writer’s block insinuates.
The Harvard library talks about the barriers to education for Black people this way:
Between 1740 and 1867, anti-literacy laws in the United States prohibited enslaved, and sometimes free, Black Americans from learning to read or write. White elites viewed Black literacy as a threat to the institution of slavery – it facilitated escape, uprisings, and the sharing of information and ideas among enslaved people. Indeed, literacy undermined the false foundation slavery was built on: the intellectual inferiority and inhumanity of African-descended people.
The small percentage of enslaved people who became literate did so at great risk – those who were caught were often violently punished, sold, or even killed. Because of the danger, enslaved people had to be strategic and resourceful in learning to read and write. They attended secret informal schools taught by free Blacks at night, covertly learned from white enslavers’ children, or found opportunities when enslavers were away.
So, what does this have to do with Juneteenth? For me, when I consider the struggle of being truly freed after being conditioned to believe you were unworthy, I also wonder about what it must have felt like to realize that the promise of freedom is not the same as being truly liberated. And the true liberation of Black people in this country has always been and will always be contested, and greeted with hostility.
Freedom to read and write does not equal liberation from work — in fact, the more you read and write, the more work is ahead of you. You have to understand the context: Once the slaves were free, they had nothing of their own; everything they touched with their hands belonged to white people — Land, clothing, books. There was hunger and drought especially in the South. The last thing anyone probably cared about was writing about it, but this is a reminder to me to read W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.
The hardest thing about writing is how often you fail, no matter how often you try. Much like the paradox my ancestors found themselves living at the end of the Civil War, writing is not a 1:1 scenario. What you put in is not what you get out. Everything about writing is complex, and it resists platitudes and reason.
But these complexities also make writing beautiful, just like the ongoing freedom struggle. They have made me pledge my undying devotion to sitting in quiet places trying to put my thoughts into the right order to share them with you.
Writers and those who profit from our weirdness make up so many romantic stories about writer’s block and fatigue and distraction. And those ideas are not entirely without merit. But what Black writers have that others do not is the haunting reality of a legacy truncated by racism and racist practices in this country.
Black people who looked like us, who had dreams for their lives and their families like us, also had to go to school in secret and risk their lives to learn what is so abundantly available to us. How many millions of stories have not been written and therefore remain unread that our ancestors did not have the luxury of writing down? Understanding this past, it feels impossible to believe in writer’s block. Whenever I run out of things that feel new to write, I imagine what got buried in the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage. I try to imagine all the other possible futures for those gone too soon.
I think of this when I have to make much smaller sacrifices to make room for what I am here to write, like getting up early before most of the world (on the East Coast, anyway) is up or writing on the rare quiet weekend morning. I think of this whenever anyone asks me a question about how it is I manage to write so much with all the things that I always have going on. And I especially think of these things when I remember that it was not long ago that my ancestors were enslaved, when this country dragged its feet to do what was morally sound, even though we were the ones everyone said were morally corrupt, dangerous and inferior.
My offering this Juneteenth/Freedom Day is just the reminder that while our freedoms as Black writers may be fraught, contested and resented, they are, nonetheless, freedoms that our ancestors endured much for us to have. May we continue to revel in this abundance, and write to our heart’s content, in their honor.
Thank you for your ongoing patience with me as I navigate a full and busy life. I’ve been gushing all over social media about the news that Women of the Postis a 2024 Gotham Book Prize finalist. The winner will be publicly announced next week, but in the meantime, here’s a little history about the prize, and why it’s such an honor to even be nominated.
And I would be remiss not to mention that I’m headed back to the Bay Area for the 10th Anniversary of the Bay Area Book Festival to speak on a panel with some brilliant Black women, which is basically my favorite thing to do in life. Come visit if you’re at the festival!
Finally, in case I haven’t mentioned it enough, I spend most of any imagined free time I have writing reviews and other things at my Substack, Black Book Stacks. Here’s what I thought about Great Expectations by Vinson Cunningham, and what I’m reading now.
I’ve been up to a lot since I last updated my blog, and I’ve resolved to write here more when I can, so here I am!
Wild to write a novel about Black women trailblazers marginalized in history and get to talk about the Six Triple Eight not only during Black History Month, but also as part of Women’s History Month and throughout the year. Thank you for your kind notes, for the virtual book club conversations, for all your love and support for Women of the Post. It’s been beautiful to experience.
I wanted to share some events and opportunities to write with me that are coming up:
On March 14th, I’ll be in conversation with fabulous fellow authors Victoria Christopher Murray and Ruth P. Watson at the Library of Congress for a conversation called “First Ladies: Historical Fiction about Pioneering Black Women”: https://www.loc.gov/item/event-412002
And last but not least, March 15th I’ll kick off a weekend of joy-centered creative nonfiction writing with my friends at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. I’ve taught versions of a class I call Subversive Joy on and off for six years now. It’s a powerful, revolutionary practice to use our writing powers to cultivate gratitude, bliss and to remember the delight available to us when we remember we don’t have to suffer to create beauty in our work; indeed, we get to celebrate together, in the words of the lovely Lucille Clifton, that everyday something has tried to kill us, and has failed. I hope I see you for the virtual writing in mid-March.
It is with great joy and pride that I share the exciting news that my debut novel, Women of the Post, will be published this summer, in July.
Women of the Post follows Judy Washington from the demeaning work of the Bronx Slave Market to the Women’s Army Corps’ 6888th Central Postal Battalion.
The novel is about Black women’s unvalued labor in the workforce that enabled us to overcome fascism and build morale in order to win one of the most significant wars in American history. It is about how Black women’s love for one another and for our country has been both sanctuary and salvation. It is my love letter to the courage it takes to be unique and also be in sisterhood as you evolve.
I will have much more to say about the book and the process of writing it in the weeks and months and years to come. in the meantime, I hope that you’ll pre-order the book — pre-orders are really important for the success of a book! — which is available everywhere books are sold, including Bookshop or directly from your favorite independent bookstore.
One of things I’ve been doing lately is thinking about my legacy as a writer, as a person. It feels a little abstract to think about what your influence will be when you’re gone. And then someone you love dies. And it doesn’t feel so abstract.
My heart is still heavy thinking about bell hooks’ transition. I was honored, as someone who was profoundly shaped by her passion, her courage, her clear-sighted articulation of the things that keep Black women from soaring — and how to overcome them — were balm for me. She was really an iconic trailblazer. I tried to do her work and life and impact some justice for Oprah Daily. An excerpt is below. You can read it here, or here. I hope she is resting well.
Mourning bell hooks—who died on December 15, 2021, at age 69 after giving us four decades of trailblazing feminist scholarship—means celebrating everything she taught us about what it means to be a Black woman in love with herself and the world, and with the life of the mind. With her passing, there will be one fewer pair of hands holding up Black women—all women—as inherently valuable. For decades she has helped me in my journey to become myself; her legacy will live in my bones, and in the minds and hearts of all she awakened and inspired.
Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, hooks honored her matrilineal line by taking her maternal great-grandmother’s name as her nom de plume in a lowercase version to emphasize “the substance of books, not who I am.” She influenced several well-known luminaries and writers to adopt the same practice. Let us defer to the work of our hands and pay tribute to our elders instead of bowing to tradition and capitalizing ourselves.
Maybe honoring her elders and ancestors played a role in enabling her to speak and write her fame into existence, to hear her family tell it. Like most Southern towns, Hopkinsville, Kentucky, was stratified by race and class; hooks’s father was a janitor, and her mother a maid. “Gloria learned to read and write at an early age and even proclaimed she would be famous one day,” her family said in a statement. “Growing up, the girls shared an upstairs bedroom, and she would always keep the light on well into the night. Every night we would try to sleep, but the sounds of her writing or page turning caused us to yell down to Mom to make her turn the light off.”
Her family went on to say that Gloria always had at least 10 serious books she was reading simultaneously, whether Shakespeare, Little Women, or other classics, which quenched her “great thirst for knowledge, which she incorporated into her life’s work.” Against the backdrop of the great civil rights struggles, she graduated from a newly integrated high school. Her intellectual acumen and writer’s gifts were apparent early, and she majored in English literature at Stanford University, then earned her MA from the University of Wisconsin and her PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation on Toni Morrison.
Karjean Levine, Getty Images
She thrived in the classroom, and her criticism and charisma quickly acquired a following both in and beyond academic circles. I first encountered her during one of my many trips to my local New York library at age 13 and was instantly in awe. Hooks wrote with confident wisdom and ease about topics I had never read from a Black woman’s perspective; she seemed so like me, even if she was from a different part of the country and a different generation. We were kindred spirits.
My dog-eared copy ofSisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery was the gateway to reprogramming myself. The microaggressions, the confusing pauses and rudeness that came my way because of my dark skin and natural hair—bell hooks helped me understand that these were the manifestations of social constructs she interrogated, not figments of my imagination. Her writing about writing, the way she mined the role of self-love and self-care: All these things and more marked her as a visionary. Radical, yes, for her positions on racism and patriarchy and capitalism. Radical, too, for attending to the hearts of Black women. For saying that we were not just our work, but we deserved, as much as anyone, our own affection and tenderness. The world would not give it to us, not without a fight.
I’m wondering these days if everything about writing and publishing is about failure. If you’re any good, anyway. This is why it has both surprised me, and not, to pick up a non-book related hobby — sewing — in recent weeks. I wanted to build something with my hands that required a different use of my brain. And it helped me view my writing life a little differently in the process, which is always cool.
A common misconception non-writers and aspiring writers have about writing is that when you write a first draft, you are done. I don’t know where this concept comes from. It might be that we live in a society that metabolizes everything very fast, from news cycles to video clips, so it makes sense that we share a common expectation that even things that should be slow can happen more quickly (says the lady who has all but abandoned my Crockpot in favor of my Instant Pot).
But actually, the longer and more complex your writing, the more revision it probably requires of you. And that’s as it should be. A solid draft isn’t really excellent or even good until it’s gone through a few rounds of revision, probably many rounds.
One way that writing weeds people out of the profession or vocation (can you get discouraged out of a calling?) comes down to whether you have the capacity for the rigor of revision. Some of it is ego. Some of it is pure determination. You have to outlast the many versions of the thing.
A marathon, not a sprint. Only a cliche because it’s true.
When I was starting out, I wish someone would have told me to listen a little less to the people who fed my ego and maybe had decent points about my talent as a writer and my attentiveness to the craft and a little more to the physically and spiritually demanding aspects of writing. That I would sit alone with myself and my memories and thoughts for long periods of time, waiting for what I imagined would be on the page to be fully realized as the story, essay or poem that is actually on the page.
Another cliche is appropriate here: You can’t really push the river. There is something that the work is teaching you when it is janky and uneven and not working. All that you learn on your way to the draft that is as good as you can make it (not perfect, maybe not ever) is part of the writing, too.
So it is with learning a new craft. The story about me and sewing begins with my grandmother, Edna, who showed up in an 1940 Census report as someone who cooked and sewed as a profession for something called the National Youth Administration down in Orangeburg, South Carolina. This is the most information I have about my mother’s mother and it made me feel closer to her to know that cooking is one of my great joys, but I have also always been fascinated by fashion design — specifically fashion illustration. An old dream of mine was to be a fashion designer one day, mainly because I grew up without the luxury of clothes that were made to fit me. They were always from someone else’s closet, their old things, re-sold at discount in thrift stores. One day, I would make my own things, just for me.
I gifted myself a sewing machine and some virtual classes at a local sewing center. The center sent a toolkit with all the things — a tomato-shaped pin cushion, a tape measure, fabric, shears (just very sharp, large scissors) and more. The machine was/is deeply intimidating, with little compartments for bobbins and other knickknacks. I watched a YouTube video on how to thread the thing maybe three or four times, and still, when it was time for the first three-hour class, I did it wrong, and my beautiful, intimidating machine made this constipated noise. The instructor tried to see through my less than sharp computer camera where things had gone wrong (I figured out later that I had done something strange with the thread and the presser foot, and it would not be the first time) and ultimately said, “Hmm, this seems like a mechanical thing.”
I wonder what I was thinking about when I was stitching — but not really stitching — the top…
Not that helpful, but we are not meant to learn everything on Zoom. Probably especially not something tactile like sewing. I had a very acute understanding of what my students had experienced throughout my Zoom teaching experiences over the past year and some months. Noted.
And when it came to sewing, I was frustrated and blissfully happy to be failing at it. Failing meant that I was trying something totally new. I fudged the measurements, and ruined the stitches. The thread kept coming out of the machine.
I couldn’t really figure myself out except to say that I must enjoy being humbled. This is what is at the core of the writing life. You cannot know the perfect way for you until you have written a lot of bad shit. Corny, underdeveloped, obsessed dreck. Maybe there are some salvageable lines in there. But maybe not.
One way to look at rejections of your work — for contests, for fellowships, for whatever — is to say, “They’re wrong.” But another way to look at them, especially as they begin to get sweeter and more concrete about what doesn’t work is to say, “Hmm, I wonder if they have a point.”
The relief of making a lopsided tote bag, to which I affixed straps that hang oddly, like banana peels over the top of the unfinished lips of this bag that I can never take outside, is that I tried. And for my first try, it wasn’t bad, even though it didn’t yield the beautiful bragging rights that I had hoped for. Who likes somebody who is always winning at everything all the time anyway? Not me. Probably not you.
I won’t lie: It was a relief to go back to my works in progress after botching not just the bag, but also a skirt, which I imagined would look one way but turned out to be the wrong size pattern for my body, or really, the body of anyone I know. So. That sucked. It’s a lot of fabric. I suppose I will use it now for something else, something different. Or maybe I’ll start again with another piece of fabric. There’s some kind of metaphor in there about writing, I think.
I had the somewhat frightening (intimidating?) experience of receiving Toni Morrison’s collection of essays and lectures, The Source of Self-Regard before its publication in 2019. [Here is the review I wrote for the smart folks at Bitch Media].
Unlike Ms. Morrison’s fiction, which I sometimes just did not understand (A Mercy, Paradise) or which I loved without really being able to explain why (Song of Solomon, Beloved) or which humored me the way a good friend does (Sula !), her nonfiction was a true education. It educated me by her example, in terms of her biography, and it educated me the way all reading does — through its structure, the way it had been nurtured and considered and through what was not there.
February 18th would have been Toni Morrison’s 90th birthday, and I’ve been thinking about her a lot, celebrating and commemorating her gifts to me and to all of us through her rigorous writing and creativity. For many Black writers, it is not only her discipline and vision that we admire, it is how she earned the nickname Mother Toni, which is a nod to her guidance to each of us as we have sought to make our way on the perilous journey that is writing and editing and revising and publishing.
Her wisdom is so much a part of my practice that I don’t even remember when I started telling others. Whenever I speak to young writers, I use her example. I remind them that Mother Toni had a day job into her 40s, that she woke up at 4 a.m. before said day job to write while her babies were asleep. I have admired this level of discipline all my life, and while I have different reasons for engaging it, it has been essential to my writing practice all the same. And at the same time, she let us know that we are the people that we are, we are not the work we do, which is essential.
She is also known for giving entire generations of Black writers permission to write the stories that do not yet exist, saying if there is a book you want to read that does not yet exist, you must be the one to write it (this is a paraphrase). I can’t imagine how many books we would not have were it not for this advice, for her presence, for her work and her inspiration.
I rarely have occasion to do such deep research when I plan to write about a writer anymore, but I sensed that Ms. Morrison would not be with us much longer. So, in the before times, I took the liberty of luxuriating in the reference room at the Schomburg. I’ve aggregated below my notes on Ms. Morrison’s life, because these were the thoughts I had that didn’t make it into publication anywhere, and didn’t really fit in any kind of linear place; they also sum up why, aside from her talent, discipline and brilliance, I never felt anything I wrote about Ms. Morrison could really do her justice. I think it was important for me to put this here in celebration of her birthday in part because of how valuable looking at the contours of her life has been for my confidence as a writer. In a collection of her quotes, The Measure of Our Lives, she is quoted as having said: “If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.” One of her many talents was showing us all that writing could do and be if we were brave and persistent enough to meet it.
Writing African American Women: An Encyclopedia of Literature by and About Women of Color, Toni Morrison entry, pages 636 – 640
Born 1931 in Lorain, Ohio
Chloe Anthony Wofford
Shortened her name to an abbreviation of her middle name purportedly (and with regret) because no one could pronounce Chloe. The theme of claiming one’s name emerged –noted in entry – in her fiction – from third novel, Song of Solomon (1977) to Tar Baby, her fourth ( 1981)
Graduated from Howard in 1953, English Major, classics minor
Master’s from Cornell in 1955 – her thesis was on suicide in the work of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf.
She taught for two years at Texas Southern University in Houston, then returned to Howard as a faculty member.
She married Jamaican architect Harold Morrison in 1958
They had two sons together, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin. They divorced in 1964.
She moved w/sons to Syracuse where she worked as Random House textbook editor. Began writing at night as therapy for her loneliness when her sons were in bed.
Transferred to NYC in 1967 to headquarters for Random House editing acclaimed black women writers like Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara.
She kept teaching – at SUNY Purchase 1971-72, Yale, 1976-77. She left Random House in 1983; Appointed Albert Schweitzer chair at SUNY Albany in 1984. Stayed until 1989, when Princeton appointed her Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. (Note from me: That means 2019 marked the 30th anniversary of Toni Morrison becoming the first Black woman to hold a chair at an ivy league university.)
She’s taught at a number of prestigious colleges and universities including Bard, Rutgers & Princeton, she delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Massey Lectures at Harvard University. She’s also received a number of honorary degrees including from Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale. “Although Morrison is perhaps best known for her fiction, she has written successfully in several other genres as well, including drama, children’s and YA, short stories and criticism.”
Won the Pulitzer in 1988, the Nobel in 1993 – the first African American and only the 8th woman to ever receive the prize. Her body of work began with the short story that grew into the novel that became The Bluest Eye, work that “established her recurrent concern with the meaning and place of black female identity.”
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination (1992)
Two collections of critical essays (this would now be three, with the Origins of others, I think)
Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (1992)
Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (1997)
Icons of African American Literature
266-298
“The search for love and identity runs through almost everything I write,” (Taylor-Guthrie 96) Page 269
Page 273
“For Morrison, narrative is necessary. It is a psychic process that enables humanity to conceive and satisfy its fundamental need for coherence and understanding. The model of psychoanalysis throws light on the progress of characters looking for themselves as well as on the peculiar link the narrative creates between them. Such a relationship, reflected in the reciprocal link between narrator and reader, finds its model in the relationship shared by the analyst and its patient. The narrative of the one is stimulated by the patient listening of the other. Wisdom, if it emerges from such relation, is the work of the past, thanks to the traces left by memory or dream. In both cases, the aim is to discover the power of the desire that fuels the story, its origins, in order to master the process that, by elucidating the past, will lead to maturity. For the American black community, whose past is more easily read on the mutilated bodies or in the unfathomable eyes than in libraries, whose present is most often synonymous with alienation, telling stories is above all the way to refigure and to understand, to accept and to master a dismembered history made of holes and omissions.”
Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography, David L. Middleton, 1987
From “Good, Bad, Neutral Black,” NYT Mag, 2 May, 1971, Vol. 7, p. 3 ff
“TM assesses books designed for black children…That which is truly good becomes universal: “Like so much that is meant for black folks, like so much that black people do for themselves, it ends up in the marrow of the culture at large.”
Page 26
“In time, writing became a way to ‘order my experience.’
“It’s always seemed to me that black people’s grace has been with what they do with language.”
Joshunda Sanders 