Cassandra’s Secret

Cassandra’s secret is that she did not want to write this book. She got tricked, bamboozled, hoodwinked into it.

It wasn’t that she felt any less inspired by Morrison than the rest of us. Sula was the first book about black people that she had ever read. She was eighteen years old, trying hard to figure out why she could see herself in a book that she only half understood. But she recognized herself on the page, “an artist with no art form . . . dangerous.” She had no idea who Toni Morrison was, wasn’t even sure if she was a man or a woman, but Cassandra knew she better take the hint, get an art form. She started writing, at first weak imitations of Morrison, and eventually something of her own emerged.

Maybe this was why she had avoided writing about Morrison like the plague. How do you write about someone whose shadow no living writer can ever escape? And on top of that, how do you write about someone whom so many have already written about? Cassandra was worried that her voice, in a conversation about Morrison, really didn’t matter.

So when Juda proposed a group project inspired by Morrison’s work over lunch, Cassandra bit into her tomato and mozzarella sandwich and said to herself, Oh hell no. To Juda, she made a list of problems with the project: collaboration means more work and not less, more writing and not less—more struggle, splintering, and conflict and certainly not less. Whoever heard of a book written start to finish by four people? And what about all of Morrison’s possessive fans—you know the ones who write her odes and letters and search for virgins to sacrifice to her? What if they come for us?

Juda, forever the optimist, just kept chirping about how easily it could be done.

“No book is easy,” Cassandra said. “Even Morrison says it takes her three years to write one.”

Cassandra should have just said no, or at least told the truth that she was scared of this project. But she is not good at naked vulnerability. So instead, she said the kindest (or perhaps the most devious) thing she could think of to get out of it: “I’ll do it if Winnie says yes.” Juda knew exactly what she was up to. They both knew that Piper would say yes because she says yes to whiny students and lazy colleagues and anyone, short of a hitchhiker with a butcher knife. Winnie, on the other hand, is always discerning and a little suspicious. She would be a much harder sell. Cassandra was confident that Winnie would act as a hitman, killing the project before it even got started, leaving Cassandra without blame. Ripping through the next bite of her sandwich, a piece of tomato halfway in and halfway out, she was already anticipating her miscalculation. Holding a finger to stop time, she swallowed and then added, “But only if I get to write about Beloved. You can assign the others whatever they want, but nobody takes Beloved from me.”

With Cassandra’s provisional acceptance, Juda went to Winnie and Piper, telling them he had a solid commitment from Cassandra. That was all they needed to hear—they were in and they were excited.

At one group meeting, Cassandra suggested calling this book “Who’s Afraid of Toni Morrison?” We thought it was a clever way of thinking about Morrison’s place in the culture, a famous writer who writes about a topic many white people don’t want to read about—black people. But in Cassandra’s mind it wasn’t just a clever title—it was a real question and she was the answer.

She funneled her anxiety into seemingly practical questions for us: “Now how is this supposed to work?” and “What is the form of this thing?” and “Am I supposed to say ‘I did this and that,’ using first-person or is there some other voice?” Finally Juda, fearful that Cassandra might scare the bejeezus out of Winnie and Piper, announced that we had talked enough. It was time to go write chapters based on our conversation. Once we had drafts, we could figure out what we wanted the voice of the book to sound like—how personal, how literary, how we could function as one voice and many at the same time.

Even though she had fought to write about Beloved, a book she had taught too many times to count, she couldn’t do it with her children asleep in the next room. Cassandra had fought hard to have these children. She conceived the first one on her fifth attempt at in vitro fertilization and the second had been a frozen embryo from that same procedure. Without knowing it, these children, who couldn’t even read yet, had changed everything about Beloved for her. Sethe’s act of killing her child to save her from slavery had transformed from frightening in its brutal logic to just true, and this was far more terrifying.

So she turned to The Bluest Eye, thinking about the very first time that she read it, also at the age of eighteen. Cassandra had found it familiar and chilling. But in thinking about her eighteen-year-old self, she took comfort in the place where she discovered Morrison: Spelman College, a historically black institution where she felt free and new.

When we met over the first draft, Piper, who also went to Spelman during the same years and seems to have no memory of Cassandra being there (though Cassandra remembers her well), wanted to know one thing, “Did you really have a boyfriend that gave you a copy of The Bluest Eye?”

“Don’t you remember him?” Cassandra said.

“No,” Piper said. “I don’t even remember you. Remember?”

We are already laughing.

“Yeah, he had just read it in his composition course. He kept saying that I needed to read it. Should I be concerned by what he meant by that?”

Winnie, who is married to an intellectual, had no idea why a boyfriend gifting a used book was so remarkable. But she laughed along anyway, thinking that we must all be married to illiterate jackasses.

“Wait,” Juda said with a raised eyebrow. “Was he—”

“Yeah, he was gay,” Cassandra said.

“Ohhhh—I get it now,” Piper said.

“But you said he was your boyfriend,” Winnie said.

“He was,” Cassandra said.

Juda cackled and banged on the table.

Winnie cocked her head with a look that said, Who the hell are these people?

“I didn’t know he was gay—well, I kind of knew—but I was young and stupid enough to think that it was not significant,” Cassandra said.

“So you have asked a thousand questions about this project, and you didn’t think to ask that boy if he was gay?” Juda said, still laughing.

“Well at least he gave you a copy of The Bluest Eye,” said Piper, our other eternal optimist.

When the laughter died down, Cassandra was determined to get down to business. She admitted that she had loved writing the essay, but she now worried if the chapter was too personal. Did anyone really want to hear about her mentally ill uncle who chased her mother with an axe? Did anyone really want to see the thinness of the seams that held her and so many other black people together?

We reassured her that yes, indeed, we did. Her chapter on The Bluest Eye was the first galvanizing moment in finding our shared approach, clarifying how to move between our stories and Morrison’s novels. We decided to follow Cassandra’s lead and write about the things that we fear most: menacing cops, the prison industrial complex, leering white men, guns, and even the buried secrets of family. When we gave her permission to write about the most vulnerable parts of herself, we gave ourselves permission to do the same.

Did Cassandra ever get over her fear of Toni Morrison? Well she still blames Juda for getting her into this scary mess, even though she enjoyed writing her way out of it. But we like to think that this book allowed her to wrap that fear up with all her other fears, a cocoon of possibility waiting, but not for long, for something beautiful to emerge.