The Book Club Meets
This is a book of secrets. The things you don’t say unless you’ve been pushed, encouraged, or required. That time your brother called black people niggers and you said nothing. How you came to this country on a travel visa and never left. Your relief at giving birth to a girl, not a boy, just as the headlines announce another unarmed black man killed by cops. That time you let a white boy pretend that he didn’t know you in front of his friends, even though he had put his hands all over your black body the night before.
It is also a book about how to coax secrets from your friends, getting them to reveal the tender part of who they are. Here are the basic facts of our book club. We are black and white. Three women, one man. All of us parents. All of us professors. All of us concerned about the future. But beneath these basic facts are other flavors to our group. Of the four of us, one is gay, another attends church regularly, a third speaks Jamaican patois, and the tallest of our group flirted briefly with a modeling career.
After two years of meeting in our homes, sometimes at restaurants, and around tables and chairs of every shape and size, we have learned when we can push, prod, and challenge each other. We’ve been loud with explosive laughter, choosing the back parts of restaurants or bringing our hilarity to the parking lot. And we’ve also shouted, wildly screaming at the stupidity of the world, sometimes coming back to humor and irony as some small compensation. And in order to center ourselves, we come back to Toni Morrison.
We turn to Morrison’s novels not so much as guide but as inspiration, allowing her words—like music—to make us feel, express, and discover. We have taken this principle as the starting point. How might Toni Morrison help us live whole in times of uncertainty? How do her novels—embedded as they are in history—speak to us now? How can her words illuminate the problems of everyday racism and guide us toward healthy responses and greater clarity?
But this is not a scholarly treatise on Morrison. There are already wonderful guides to her novels, brilliant studies of her work—too many to count. This book does not aspire to add to that list. We have dispensed with notes, left literary analysis behind, turned instead to personal inquiry in order to celebrate what the novels can offer rather than explain what they do.
It is not so much that Morrison is secondary but more that she is central as a catalyst. This, then, is a group memoir—with Toni Morrison as our soundtrack. The stories we tell may not illuminate Morrison’s work in revolutionary ways, but they shine a light on the act of reading when it just cannot help but become deeply personal, fiercely political, and surprisingly emotional.
When Juda was struggling to explain the kinds of personal stories that he wanted this book to include, he turned to Cassandra and said, “You know, like that story you told about your mother teaching you how to look out for KKK members by looking at their shoes?” The others had not heard this story, so Cassandra delivered a shortened version—no southern accent this time, just her mother’s sobering words: “If they have their faces covered, look at their shoes so you’ll know them when they’re handing you the mail or teaching your class at school.” This is the kind of story you expect a very old person to tell, not something one of your peers would experience, but we know it happened.
“You have to write that down,” Piper said. Winnie nodded, slow and serious.
“I already did,” Cassandra said. “It’s in my last book.” Then she raised one eyebrow and pressed her lips into a half smile. “Wait! So y’all didn’t read my last book?”
Piper smiled and cocked her head in a way that said, I have three kids. And then we were all laughing.
In writing our stories, we challenged each other to look beyond our first accounts, pushing each other to discover what is underneath our protective shields. We reached into our pasts, while also mining the events of our present to understand how everyday racism shapes us all. Morrison has said, “I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness.” Is that what we are after?
We share these stories as a guard against burying hurt. First, we let Morrison push us to uncover all the hurt and all the work to be done. Then we prodded, bugged, and emboldened each other into thinking and writing about it. Our stories remind us that even this moment, so saturated with lies that some have described it as posttruth, is not as new as it sometimes seems. We call on the past to say that there was never a time of innocence, even if there were times of deep denial. Remember that term “postracial,” bandied about during the Obama years with no recognition of the work that was yet to be done and certainly no anticipation of the person who would replace him in the Oval Office? We also know that there is a chance that we are yelling into the wilderness, but we take comfort in the fact that at least we can hear each other and together move past fear, repression, and surrender.
Even though the idea to write a book using Morrison’s novels to discuss current events was alluring, we had to ask ourselves, Why Morrison? Why us? And why now? Yes, we loved her, but wouldn’t it be easier to just write about current events without also introducing our readers to books they might never have read? And even if we thought we saw ourselves reflected at times in her work, so did Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé. And if we could get past that fact, wouldn’t it be easier to write a book alone and without the competing voices, albeit from friends, with different visions of how to respond to the social and political changes in the country?
We discussed all these issues in emails, offices, hallways, and parking lots, mulling it over and for some of us building arguments for why the project wouldn’t work. Often Juda assigned himself the role of go-between, transmitting questions and information, until finally we bit the bullet and decided to meet. But one major thing would change between the time that we started this conversation and that meeting: Donald Trump would be elected president of the United States. We met less than two weeks later, our hearts heavy with fear and anticipation of what would follow. At this first meeting we had yet to name ourselves “The Toni Morrison Book Club,” but as we worried aloud about what the future held for each of us, our spouses, our children, and our students, a book club is exactly what we became. We were readers and friends, talking about novels and our lives at once as we searched for clarity, intimacy, and safety.
It was through this process that we realized that Toni Morrison was quite simply the most logical way we found to say what we wanted to say about the current state of America—not just about our literature but our society. She pushed us to understand ourselves better, to understand the workings of racial hierarchies and power systems that affect us. And we believe everyone will be enriched by knowing a little about her and her work.
In her eleven novels—from the first written in the turbulent sixties to her latest, penned nearly fifty years later—Toni Morrison is our greatest living historian of love, race, nation, and just about everything else of consequence. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she describes romantic love and the concept of physical beauty as “probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” Even in this first work, she refuses easy explanations or platitudes, making us see our everyday existence with fresh eyes, widening our perspective from the story of two lovers to the weight of human history.
In the same novel, arguably her most accessible story, she offers an epigram of love that is so compelling in its logic that it appears in the Oxford Treasury of Sayings and Quotations: “Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly.” It is a quote that solidifies Morrison’s reputation as the premier novelist of love—romantic, familial, spiritual. Signs that Morrison impacts the world far beyond the world of literature can be found in her appearance on The Colbert Report, her receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the great regularity with which her words appear everywhere from self-help books to political action groups. She is liberally quoted by everyone from Ivanka Trump to Janet Mock, by journalists and self-help websites.
It is, in fact, nearly impossible to find a website on faith, marriage, and friendship that does not include her words. Valentine’s Day would not be the same without her. A Google search suggests that as a nation we are looking to Morrison more and more for wisdom and guidance. You can easily find “12 Toni Morrison Quotes to Inspire You,” “16 Morrison Quotes to Live By,” and “50 Toni Morrison Quotes to Lift You Up When Life Gets You Down.” Black History Month fills banners and internet postings from her characters’ observations—common people with uncommonly insightful things to say. Even Mother’s Day has finally put trust in her novels, lifting her words and inscribing them onto cards, websites, and memes.
She is clearly someone who is eminently quotable. Someone to learn from. And so we have turned to her.
As our most important living novelist, Toni Morrison becomes the subject of our fantasies and the unwilling tool for our desires. And yet many are reluctant to follow her to places where she explores our deepest fears about race in America. For example, when Ivanka Trump lifts a line about enslavement from Morrison’s most famous novel, Beloved, she does so without fully venturing into the horror of that moment. Instead, she quotes from this novel about the legacy of slavery in order to introduce, of all things, the importance of time management.
When someone’s words can be so misused and employed for such different and bizarre purposes, clearly it is everyone’s job to return to the work itself. We have tried to do this in these pages, allowing her words to speak for themselves and then asking them to speak to us, allowing the spirit of her words to address race and racism and what it means to be American. We believe that if you want to fully understand the evolving nature of America, Morrison’s novels are the perfect guide and inspiration. “I’m interested in the way,” Morrison tells us, “in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.”
Each chapter considers a key aspect of Morrison’s work as a springboard to a weighty contemporary issue, such as the killing of unarmed black men by police, or a more uplifting story, such as the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016. One chapter asks, with a bit of humor, whether it is possible for black people to go crazy because they don’t have time for such nonsense, while another chapter considers, with no shortage of irony, if white people are (or even can be) funny.
To be honest, we did juggle with competing ideas about direction, style, and substance, but this became one of the book’s strengths. As we watched the country become increasingly polarized, we asked each other tougher questions about our goals. And we asked each other to uncover more, to peel back more, to find the personal in the political. If we could not challenge ourselves, how could we challenge our readers?
The result is a book that is not an edited collection but something conceived, cowritten, and collaboratively created from top to bottom. Although it is logical to affix individual contributors’ names to their corresponding chapters, it is just as logical—though probably too disconcerting for most readers—to affix all four of us to the entire collection, so much is every page a product of our group function and shared voice. Toni Morrison’s novels are famous for avoiding a central narrative voice, and somewhere and somehow along the way, it is as if we became a Toni Morrison novel, an admittedly intimidating prospect.
Quite simply, our book club does what most book clubs do: it permits the book to get us talking about our lives—about what is pressing right now and how we hope to move forward in dangerous times. We would never have known what mattered without each other. But this group is also different from most neighborhood book clubs in one respect. While most book clubs reserve a day for a book, we kept coming back to the books and the personal stories they inspired us to tell. Indeed, some of these responses to the novels were the product of more than a year of email and text exchanges, lunches and informal gatherings, hallway and FaceTime conversations, and some fabulous meals. We used this project, without ever knowing it, to propel our friendships to a new level, and we kept pushing ourselves to understand one another in new ways. We made ourselves vulnerable in the face of a growing willingness of the group to challenge and provoke even more as we found our way to new levels of intimacy.
Yes, this group is both like and unlike most book clubs. What else might we call it? It is also a writers group, but one where everyone has a shared project. And maybe we are also peer therapists, sloppy and certainly without credentials but with lots of heart. When we started calling ourselves the Toni Morrison Book Club, it sounded about as close as we could get to a name for this thing that is like nothing else we have experienced.
Undoubtedly, many people will want to know how we chose just four novels to work on and why two people were assigned to each of those four novels. For many of us, The Bluest Eye was our first Morrison novel, and so it is like first love: you can’t ignore it. Song of Solomon helped us talk about the current crisis of shootings of unarmed black men and the Black Lives Matter movement. If we had not covered Beloved, there would have been a riot from scholars, laypeople, and your mother. We also wanted to confront the resisting reader who stopped there. In probably what will appear to some as our most surprising choice, we selected A Mercy because in the wake of Trump we needed to talk about immigration, xenophobia, and the Dreamers. This wonderful novel, however, also shows the group wrestling with a less famous novel, providing us with an opportunity to effusively argue that “here is a novel you have got to read!”
We decided to assign each of the four novels to two writers in order to demonstrate to our readers how different the responses might be; how the themes of a single novel might yield altogether unique opportunities. The most popular novels—Beloved and Song of Solomon—were fought over. But the fighting was always in good fun and also productive. When Cassandra claimed Beloved because she was the one who most recently had given birth, we backed off. Who better among us to talk about “too thick love” and mothering? When Winnie claimed Song of Solomon because her son had just left home, we saw how it was written for her and how she would embrace the novel for its powerful exploration of the special burden of black men. Our two Spelman College graduates both needed to work on The Bluest Eye, and in truth this is when we might have conceived of the beauty of two perspectives. Sometimes we argued not for ourselves but for others, such as when Juda begged Winnie and Piper to work on A Mercy or Winnie felt like Juda would provide a different perspective on Song of Solomon. It was an exciting start to our project, a trust-building initial step to our collaborative journey.
There were novels that we regretted leaving behind, and it says nothing about their worth or our love of them. Jazz and Paradise or Love and Home (where do we stop?) could have also served to shine a light on the present moment, but like any book club we had to make tough choices. Really, any of the remaining seven novels would have equally served us well. And other writers might have also been used to illuminate the current moment, but Morrison is our griot, a singer and social commentator, the keeper of traditions and the exemplary engaged citizen of our world. Like all great writers of the past, Morrison speaks to her time and continues to speak to us.
Preceding each author’s group of essays, we have placed an interlude that provides glimpses of the conversations that shaped the essays presented here. Though we found it impossible to re-create all the winding paths of ideas, conflicts, compromises, and revelations that made up this journey, we offer as consolation and hopefully inspiration a key secret we uncovered about one another in the course of our book club. We hope that each of those secrets will give readers a peek into how Morrison inspired us to make ourselves vulnerable to each other and encourage them to take up the conversation where we left off.
The biggest secret of this book, however, is how the project moved us past fear, rescuing us from being disheartened and passive about the changes we were seeing in the country. In an essay titled “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” Morrison writes, “In times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.” With thanks for helping us to move past fear, we offer this book as a commitment to staving off dismay and inaction.