Miss Chloe Read online

  Dedication

  Ailey

  Epigraph

  We are each other’s harvest:

  We are each other’s business:

  We are each other’s magnitude and bond.

  Gwendolyn Brooks

  from the poem “Paul Robeson”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Do You Know Where Your Wisdom Lives?

  Call Me Grand.

  Standing at the Gate of Goodbye

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by A. J. Verdelle

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Do You Know Where Your Wisdom Lives?

  When you open the door to Toni Morrison, you look genius in the face. She was a legend while she lived. Now that she’s gone, she’s a literary monument. A beacon. An ancestor. An everlasting eidolon, thriving in a weightless world. A woman and a writer who left a voluminous legacy. A woman who lived through incarnations we can only conjure. Consider:

  Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born colored, in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931.

  Colored was the term of the time. “Colored” is what her birth certificate says. Mine says “negro.” Morrison was twenty-nine when I was born. So, in those three decades, we made our first naming transition. Officially. From colored to lowercase negro. More name changes have come, as we stopped accepting definition solely as a racialized opposite.

  Toni Morrison lived a dozen years short of a century, but she researched, thought about, and reimagined all four centuries of our experience here in this country we call America. This little girl from Lorain made books covering all our eras. She focused on our positions under the low sky of our lives: first as colored, which was originally an “emancipated” moniker; then as negro; then as Negro; then as black; then as Black; then as African American—which brings us, through self-definition, to now. Her books about us—about people living under unseemly, outrageous, and callous conditions—managed to capture our persistence and stamina and aliveness, regardless of how our country left our future for dead. Written from inside our culture, her characters and their struggles ring true to our experience, even when her invented scenes or situations were improbable or impossible.

  Morrison’s works are soaring, towering accomplishments. Some of her sentences vault high as church steeples; her word choices ring with musicality; her constructed scenes or chosen names can give you pause. In Beloved, Sethe’s dog is named Hereboy, which is canny and a linguistic reference at once. Through her characters and their situations, Morrison considered multiple positions; her works start and settle debates. People become seriously motivated after reading Toni Morrison; I have seen folk take definite action, in their own best interest, as a result of a Toni Morrison book. I read an article about a successful African American businesswoman who read a Toni Morrison book and then took the leap into entrepreneurship. People everywhere are changed after reading Toni Morrison. Though Morrison credited everyone with their own choices, that her works were transformative did not escape her and did not displease her.

  CHLOE WOFFORD MADE TONI MORRISON of herself. She pursued the highest heights, throughout the arc of her experience—staring, glaring, working, peering, writing, imagining. Pencil in hand, she watched her country writhe, be vile, throw up waves of consistent and insistently revived ignorance and hatred. She herself defied derision. She refused to be a victim. This refusal was part of what set her free. Toni Morrison’s intense attention to her talent, her genius, set her mind aloft—and set her work a-sail in the free air. Morrison famously pronounced racism “a distraction.” A system that forces people to argue about their value or viability, as opposed to focusing on their own lives, their own gifts, their own hopes. Racism sucks energy from human development. Rather than succumb to the distraction of responding to what others thought she, or we, could not be, Toni Morrison refused to race-splain. Why argue our humanity to obstinate people who are, at their most benign, terrifically unaware? Toni Morrison spent her time on earth being and becoming and developing who she was, which was genius.

  Not everyone who faces racism is unvictimized or, like Morrison, unvictimizable. Not everyone can make that decision. You have to have some chops, some cash, some wherewithal, to refuse, as she describes it. One of Toni Morrison’s key positions was that you work with what you have. She had the goods.

  Unchecked greed and ruthless oppression combined to deny our presence, our humanity, our capability, and our accomplishments, but Morrison understood these behaviors to be unjustifiable and patently ridiculous, if at the same time painful. She chose consistently to lean into her own legacy, to cultivate her own confidence, to live in the landscape defined by the truth of her strengths, including language, including the strength of her culture.

  AS A YOUNG BLACK GIRL in America, I was already in Morrison’s debt. This I was aware of. Morrison belongs to a rare club of writers who have changed literature, popular culture, and Black women’s views of themselves—like Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Paule Marshall, June Jordan. Women and readers of this time, of this era, will elect the changemakers of their time. During her era and mine, Morrison accomplished an enormous tour de force: by relentlessly stripping the hegemonic gaze, Morrison made us and our human complexities so visible, in language so eloquent and deep, that the whole of world literature could not deny her innovation and brilliance. When I met Toni Morrison in person, I had been her reader and her cheerleader for dozens of years.

  Morrison’s fame is far-reaching. You can find Toni Morrison quoted here, there, and everywhere. Translations abound. YouTube has scrolls of clips of her. There are articles galore. There are hundreds of published interviews. She talked about writing, she talked about race, she talked about racism, she talked about motherhood, she talked about history and social justice, about who had the problems and what were the salient questions. Her commentary tended to be targeted. Her narratives created characters we can call by their first names, and can remember, and can quote. In some circles, Toni Morrison quotes are flung about like Frisbees. If you have readers in your life, it might take you twelve minutes to find somebody who can quote Baby Suggs’s Sermon in the Field. Some folk can quote Joe Trace sitting around sorry after he murders his little girlfriend. Women can quote Sula and Nel, BFFs whose luck with each other runs out—sort of. Other women can tell you when they are a man’s third beer.

  For some of us, Morrison evoked mighty changes in our vision, by her work and her writing and her piercing, unrelenting insight. Her writing covered innumerable facets of our lives—so many that were her books brilliant gemstones, the carats would be uncountable.

  Toni Morrison’s oeuvre is still shimmering. Her books are time-centered and timeless simultaneously. Though some of her books are more than forty years old, they read as contemporary. Her narratives contain generations that invoke whole swathes of our culture, if not its generalized totality. Her willingness to reach across time and age met no limits in chronology. Most of what we think about, worry over, consider, ponder, wrestle with today, decades into the twenty-first century, Morrison has covered, in one book or another—set at whichever time in our long chronology of yesterday she happened to be staring down. Her subjects reference theories of life, and philosophy, and violence, and Black people, and our interiors. Her narrative crises magnify our social and familial challenges—which have not let up for centuries. Morrison reimagined a history that only our ancestors have lived. Morrison’s novels are specific and sweeping and rattling; her works are read and read again.

  We reference her narratives by those moments that shook us. And there are plenteous moments to be shaken by, to choose from. Her ideas are
debated and argued over, written about and reified—in colleges and universities all across this nation and the world. I know this. I teach college students. I teach graduate students. I meet and speak to students and writers from all corners. Morrison’s work is studied and parsed in multiple languages and in an array of disciplines. Literature first. But also history, sociology, women’s studies, magic/occult, religion, Black women’s studies, Black/African American studies, American studies, rhetoric, architecture, civics, the history of cities.

  TONI MORRISON PUBLISHED ELEVEN NOVELS, including Beloved. After the publication of Beloved, her fifth novel, her body of work won her the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1993. Morrison was the first African American woman to receive this highest international literary honor.

  Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, when Morrison was thirty-nine. To know she started publishing nearing what we now call midlife stood as encouragement to women and writers like me, who came to writing late. Morrison’s fiction is everything. Massive. Voluminous. Voluptuous. Substantial. Omniscient. Prescient. Provocative. Correct. Erudite.

  Eleven novels. Qualifies as a library.

  Morrison’s nonfiction is equally keen, though not a whole library like her fiction. Jimmy Baldwin holds the gold standard for our nonfiction: between his collected short essays, The Price of the Ticket, The Fire Next Time, and Nobody Knows My Name, Baldwin stays out in front for real-time, anti-racist, enduring commentary. You see film of him speak, once, and you realize you are looking at a rare genius. His work also creates a mighty chronology in its own frame.

  Reading Morrison’s ideas stripped of fictive aim, we meet strong, elegant examinations of the enduring and understudied facts of our lives. Her nonfiction (essays, speeches, and reflections) foreground her social justice insights and concerns. When her first nonfiction book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, was published in 1992, her ideas blew the lid off many a jar. It’s a little book, but it’s lean, revelatory, and explosive. Her arguments reference how much American literature and art rely on us Black folk, poking further holes in the gauzy imaginary of Black marginality. The truths of the American conflict are seeable and not subtle. Morrison’s work argues that our centrality is inarguable. Morrison contends, and our culture demonstrates, that Black genius exists and can be met walking down the street. You can see what she sees if you will read history honestly, if you will look at culture with unbiased eyes.

  Street is a loaded word, not just in our culture, but also in America. In our culture, the word street is no joke. But I do mean to use the word street, here, and I use street very sparingly. The way America works, the street is the whole landscape of life for some people. For others, their feet barely touch a street. The word street has many connotations, and multiple definitions, but none of its definitions or references is ambiguous.

  In 2019, Morrison published collected essays, The Source of Self-Regard, which holds a special place as the last publication during her lifetime. It collects speeches, essays, and more important, Morrison’s reflections on the writing and construction of her works of fiction. This pink-jacketed book creates one volume of decades of sharing, philosophizing, pontificating, urging, considering, critiquing, calling out. My favorite of her nonfiction is a sleeper, and is ekphrastic: Remember, a book of photography and text published in 2004, covers segregated and then integrated schools. Remember is little known and not much discussed, yet it’s one of the books I carry around to introduce Toni Morrison to people who might not yet be her readers.

  WITH HER YOUNGER SON, SLADE Morrison, who predeceased her, Morrison published reimagined children’s fables—short, illustrated children’s books. Since the stories reference fables, in a way they add a tone of nonfiction, commenting as they do on stories many of us know. The stories have long, language-heavy titles, which suggests that adult engagement might be required. Morrison always spoke of Slade wistfully. I never met her youngest son.

  THE LAST TIME I SAW filmmaker Arthur Jafa, before he left New York, we were talking about how we wished we could keep up with the musicians. Musicians are always generating. Practicing. Talking to each other across the bars. Of course, novelists work with the full chorus of human behavior, and so on a canvas constructed to represent the world, Morrison worked like a musician. She studied, she practiced, she performed. Her performances were her books.

  Study. Practice. Perform. Repeat.

  Research inspired Morrison. Few endeavors jazzed her more than reconsidering, reimagining, resurfacing, reexamining the openly overlooked, intentionally buried, or understudied facts of the past. The author from Lorain brought Black communities to the page. Morrison replayed us back to ourselves. She held up the mirror. Showed us struggling and surviving, thriving and testifying. Self-governing. Doing the work that she was doing: making change, making home, making trouble, making money, making history, making art.

  Jazz musicians have the expression “going deep in the shed.” This expression references study time, practice time, focus time, time musicians take to study the music, to work on improvisation, to work on transcriptions, to work in preparation for performance, emergence, or laying down tracks. When a musician is “deep in the shed,” that means you’re not likely to hear from them, they’re not likely to be playing around. They’re getting ready, usually with a new body of material. Morrison took a shed approach to her writing agendas. She’d think, and study, and read, and research, and practice, and perform, and repeat. For Toni Morrison, performance was setting to the page the story she was imagining. Even though her shed was palatial, the work was still hard.

  IF YOU HAVE NOT READ Toni Morrison, you cannot know who she is. This seems important to acknowledge at the outset. The work introduces the author, and then the author arrives to support her work.

  Reading Toni Morrison—not necessarily all, but some—presents her register, her language, the grand and impressive sweep of her imagination. The unshakable, grounded wisdom of her critique. You cannot situate Morrison in her rightful place in the canon and in the arc of social thought without experiencing her consistent and often devastating breadth of insight, which she brought equally to narrative and to her sometimes blistering nonfiction.

  Morrison’s works are dense and driving and drenching. Individually and cumulatively. Watch out you don’t drown. Each person who ever interviewed Morrison about any of her works came with a whole array of different questions about the same work. In her books—rife with culture and allusion, family and physicality, magic and flowers—readers find infinite ways of responding, thousands of emotional entry points triggered by velvet, or by a leap, or by a flame, or by a beer. Or by a river spitting up a breathing child.

  GETTING OVERWHELMED READING MORRISON IS EASY. Whole historical eras rise up in baby towns and living rooms; premeditated murders happen in the backyard; women go without men their whole lives and then, when the drought ends, sometimes they bite. Twins are lost to each other all the way into the afterlife after getting their feet shot at by marauding whites.

  Any narrative about Toni Morrison that did not foreground her work would not meet with her approval and would be roundly denounced. I promise. I was her friend, and this, too, applied to me. Cryptically and possibly “churlishly,” she might say, My work is the only reason anybody knows anything about me. Without my books, nobody knows my name.

  JUST AS TONI MORRISON WAS known for her work, Toni Morrison knew me because of my work. The galleys for my first novel, The Good Negress, were sent out by my publisher, Algonquin, as a holiday gift in the season before the book was to be released. A friend of Morrison’s on the board of the National Humanities Center read the book and asked for another copy, to send to Morrison. Morrison read the novel and sent back a note commending the novel. The spring after the novel was published, I was invited to teach at Princeton. The summer before I started at Princeton, Morrison asked me to come visit her in New York. That first meeting, in the summer of 1997, lau
nched a long friendship that, in her new absence, played out before me like silent films.

  My relationship with Morrison lasted a third of my life and was not wholly intimate and not fully professional. Our relationship had its flares and embers, its low heat and occasional blaze. This happens in the arc of relationships of all kinds, especially those that endure. In the twenty-two years we knew each other we had two and a half spats. A low, respectful number. And thankfully, or mercifully, we got to the other side. Friction is temporary, we acknowledged like grown-ups.

  Always, we were part mystery to each other. Being surprised by each other infused the time we spent together. Sometimes the surprise was how well we understood each other. We could rely on each other in certain foundational ways. Black ways. Folk ways. Linguistic ways. We viewed history similarly: as understudied and so one-sided as to be often untrue as promoted. Morrison’s work did not present “negro” characters as intellectually deficient, which buoyed and encouraged me as a young person and then again as an aspiring writer (in my skin). Her stories were populated by protagonists and antagonists, powerful forces of all persuasions—good, bad, smart, sophisticated, confused, befuddled, nosy, mean. In her fiction, white people receded into the background; Black people ran their own families, their own shows. By foregrounding our power, by depicting our promise, Morrison’s works skewered the culture that rendered us repeatedly opposite her vision. Her novels showed how our lives really worked. In many respects, Morrison’s books created a whole new landscape for what Black people see, in literature, as home. We see ourselves as much in the mind as in the streets. By the late 1970s, when I was heading toward college, Morrison was in her late forties; she had published three novels and had been editing for decades by then. Morrison was bringing Black publishing into the real world. Morrison was bringing Black life into the light. Complete with all its “myriad subtleties,” as Paul Laurence Dunbar so sweetly and gracefully referenced.