Joycelyn Moody: Remembering Toni Morrison’s rare and precious gifts.
I’ve had an unprecedented confidence in my work in African-American literature ever since I heard over NPR, while getting dressed for work, that Toni Morrison had won the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature. All that Thursday morning, I kept catching my reflection sidelong—in my bedroom mirror, my rearview mirror, the glass door to my office building. I’d turn full face, grin widely, hug myself. I kept thinking, oh lord, can it be?! Somebody who looks like me has walked off with the world’s most distinguished literary prize! It was dazzling, Morrison was dazzling, and somehow it made me dazzling, too. I couldn’t wait to tell my students, couldn’t help greeting everyone with, “Have you heard the Good News?” Morrison’s honor signified my personal salvation.
The day after I was just as elated. I even introduced myself at a gathering for new graduate students, saying “I’m Jocelyn Moody, and I’m excited beyond words that Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize.” I was mortified by these autonomous words, stunned that they had escaped me—then the room broke into applause. That kind of response, the absolute joy of almost everyone I know at the Good News, so sustains my own gratification, I’m sure it’ll be years before the thrill subsides.
Morrison’s winning inspires recollections of my reading, studying, teaching her novels. Once, embarking on my sixth round of teaching The Bluest Eye, I caved in to the homesickness that novel always awakens in me. I called my parents long distance to ask them about some of Morrison’s meticulous detail, not because I needed my parents to explain Nu Nile Hair Oil or Black Draught mineral tonic, or to corroborate Morrison’s finely nuanced distinction between ”being put out and being put outdoors.” I’m glad he did, but I hadn’t needed Daddy to tell me that Alaga Syrup is named for the two states of origin, Alabama and Georgia. Instead, I had needed my parents to share the nostalgia for mythic, simpler days that Morrison’s words evoke in the most caustic of readers, to wade with me a moment in cultural waters. Over the phone, I read to them about the MacTeers’ struggle in Depression winters, about Cholly Breedlove’s certainty of his own ugliness, about Maureen Peale’s family who believed in lawsuits. In three rooms of two houses, half a continent apart, we breathed into each other’s ears the marvel and the miracle that Morrison’s extraordinary storytelling assures us black lives are.
On the other hand, just this fall I lent my copy of The Bluest Eye to a friend who couldn’t quite comprehend the complex portrait I drew of my mother after a trip home. Only after she read Morrison’s incredibly exact characterization of “sugar-brown girls” who, like Mama and me—“come from Mobile. Aiken. From Newport News. From Marietta. From Meridian”—could she piece together the paradox that frustrated me. I wonder that Morrison never met my mother, Mobile-born and reared, when she writes, “When you ask them where they are from, they tilt their heads and say ‘Mobile’ and you think you’ve been kissed.” I read and remember the fruit man’s wagon, Cashmere Bouquet, talc, brown bags twisted into hair curlers, whispers in the night about “nookey,” and all my agonized youth comes back to me. Southern women’s fastidiousness, our self-loathing and sexual repression are supposed to be grievous, I know, but I’m lost in a wash of lonesomeness in the beauty of Morrison’s prose. Even descended from colored Mobile women who hate funk and poor folk, hate poor coloreds for their funkiness, I read Morrison’s reconstruction of my repugnant past, and want to be a girl of nine in Mobile again, and sent to the corner store for a square blue box marked Kotex and powdered aspirin called “Goody” folded in translucent paper.
Hearing the NPR announcement, I remembered the woman named Joy (whose black mother in Mississippi in the 1950s had some optimism!) who first urged me to read Morrison’s novels. I was a grad student in English at Wisconsin then, and I wasn’t reading a single text that wasn’t on my MA reading list. In 1980, the only black woman writer ever spoken of in grad courses was Gwendolyn Brooks. We didn’t read her poems, of course; she was simply mentioned—amid poems by Stevens and Lowell, Stafford and Larkin.
It was years before I discovered Morrison’s novels on my own. Once I did, though, I made a spring ritual of reading Sula. Every Mother’s Day, I’d march into a Mormon temple in western Missouri for my college’s graduation, Morrison’s slender second novel tucked into the hollow sleeve of my borrowed commencement gown. When the faculty were settled for the four-hour ceremony, my friend Judy and I would go to “the Bottom,” to witness there Eva’s murder by fire of her boy Plum Peace, Eva’s efforts to save from fire the beautiful, fuck-loving Hannah Peace while her granddaughter, Sula, watched, curious. We’d bury Sula as the last graduate crossed the stage, silently pledge to each other undying friendship in the wake of Nell’s anguished loss. The ironies of day and place and text were lost on me, until the spring after I had left Judy at that college. I had thought Morrison’s second novel, on the second Sunday in May, only signified my students’ graduation, until I felt that my summer outside Missouri could not commence without the sweet and raw ritual that Sula had become.
I no longer read Sula to mark the coming of summer, probably because, as often as I can, I make Morrison’s work as writer, editor, mother, the stuff of my life. Her novel Beloved became the subject of my first published scholarly article. At the center of my poetry classes are the magnificent poems of Lucille Clifton, poems Morrison edited in her Random House days. The excruciating blues novels of another extraordinary African-American woman writer, whose work Morrison edited in those days, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Eva’s Man, are classic texts I find myself teaching again and again. In an audio interview with Kay Bonetti, Morrison spoke about her single parenting of two very young boys. “They don’t need an author in the house,” Morrison explained patiently; “what they need and what they deserve is a mother.” When my own son treads on my last nerve, Morrison’s statement fortifies me.
The strength to endure is one effect of Morrison’s rare and precious gift. Joy in celebration is another. Just as one of her most admired characters, Pilate Dead, leads a recalcitrant, prodigal boy into a respectable manhood, Toni Morrison’s gifts of power pilot us naked and ashamed to a state of grace where we are at once humbled and redeemed.
Toni Morrison, drawing by Gary Curtis
Joycelyn Moody’s essay “When We Won The Nobel Prize,” was published in Raven Chronicles, Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 1993-94, and in Stealing Light, A Raven Chronicles Anthology, Selected Work, 1991-1996, Raven Chronicles Press, 2018.
Joycelyn Moody is the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature and Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she teaches Black autobiography, Black feminist theories, and nineteenth-century African American literature. She is Founding Director of the UTSA African American Literatures and Cultures Institute. Her scholarship includes book chapters, books, and scholarly articles. In 2015, she co-edited special issues of the journals, MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States and American Periodicals, both on the topic of black print cultures. Moody: “My essay about the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Toni Morrison grew out of my enthusiasm about the then-unprecedented level of praise for African American women as cultural producers. I had been transfixed—and grief-struck—by the disparagement of Black women during my first few weeks at the University of Washington in Seattle, which overlapped with media coverage of Anita Hill’s brave outing of Clarence Thomas as a sexual predator. I felt hurt and stunned by all the Black people who resented Hill’s testimony and by extension resented all Black women. Hill seemed to me the kind of southern Black woman filling Morrison’s novels for better and for worse. Morrison’s brilliance at portraying complex and credible Black women characters never ceases to move me. In 1993, Morrison’s Nobel Prize healed me.”