Fearlessly Writing What I Want to Read: In Honor of Toni Morrison

Three celebrity deaths rooted me in my own mortality. I will never forget where I was when these passings were announced. I mourned my childhood and young adulthood and thanked The Universe that these artists ever existed and left behind bodies of works that we could continue to enjoy.

However, this most recent journey into immortality hit me hard. I felt this one in my spirit. A piece of my very being has dissolved.

Photo by Michael Lionstar/AP via publisher Alfred A. Knopf

I heard about Toni Morrison’s death through a dear writer friend and colleague’s text message. He was at work and struggling with the weight of grief. I had just woken up and wasn’t yet out of bed. I re-read his text. I closed my eyes. Tears streamed. I felt the familiar lump in my chest that accompanied sadness within me. I texted two of my daughters to get my disabled daughter up from bed.

I needed a few moments.

It was fitting that I heard the devastating news from this particular writer friend, who has been a professional and personal mentor for me for a few years. I’d had to pass on going to watch the new Morrison movie with him last month because I was preparing to leave for an academic presentation at an international conference on vampires — a presentation on the powerlessness of female vampires in film, with two of my subjects being Black women. My creative and academic work focusing on Black women and the horror genre could not have found any traction without Morrison’s body of work.

The last academic chapter I submitted for a collection of essays about the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House was a comparison between the maternal experiences of Olivia Crain in the series and Sethe Suggs from Beloved. The entire time I watched the series, I was assailed by the similarities of both women having been pushed to matricide by societal issues and supernatural influences that left them defenseless in depictions based on the “haunted house as defiled femininity” trope of horror. I joked to my students that I was glad this interpretation actually fit the essay because I am always trying to sneak Beloved into everything I write, anyway.

Every work of horror I write is pulled from my experiences as a Black woman who is a writer and a mother. Morrison is one of the major influences for the reasons why I write about these horrors. She did not craft mere stories: she bled the essence of these experiences onto the consciousness of humankind. Black experiences in this country have been, and continue to be, frightening. Racial brutality, racism, the lingering ignored vestiges of slavery, and senseless violence imparted onto Black bodies are forms of horror whose inclusion under the umbrella of the horror genre was only vaguely considered well after Beloved was published, and not more widely claimed until Jordan Peele’s Get Out in 2017. This hesitance is driven by fear that once the experiences are acknowledged to be horror, we must then acknowledge that the perpetrators are monsters.

This is why I must continue my work within the horror genre. Despite these fears and obstacles, and a perpetual musing that perhaps the genre is not ready for these stories, Morrison admonished writers to use language so that it doesn’t die and to tell our stories because that is our charge. She insisted we be fearless in our expressions. Even my most writing-averse students start to understand how courage in writing and using language to tell rich and individualized stories are important after we analyze her Nobel speech in class. We writers have a job to do, and that job requires us to also help others as we work along our journeys. Part of my journey is helping to train other writers to tell their own stories.

I see myself and the people I know in Morrison’s work. Much of my understanding of Black women’s relationships came through her characters and stories. Seeing Sethe’s experiences with motherhood helped shape my own. Understanding Bride had to love the toxic Sweetness from a distance so she and her unborn child child might be able to heal from generational trauma helped me let go of my own familial shortcomings. Watching Paul D walk out on Sethe and Denver when they needed him most eased some of my own heartbreak. And watching the village come together to help save Sethe’s life after they had banished her from the community showed me how time and time again “we got us.”

Toni Morrison speaking at “A Tribute to Chinua Achebe – 50 Years Anniversary of ‘Things Fall Apart.'” The Town Hall, New York City, February 26th, 2008. Photo by Angela Radulescu, CC BY-SA 2.0

The resilience of Black people and the language and freedom to express these strengths are priceless gifts Morrison imparted upon us. I will mourn her passing with my friends to whom she meant so much. I will continue to use my own writing to tell my own stories. I will make sure my children are exposed to the eloquence of her worlds. And as I continue to face my own mortality, I will also remember that Toni Morrison earned this eternal slumber, through the body of work she did not owe us but gifted us with nonetheless.