Reading the South

Toni Morrison. What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction.
Edited by Carolyn C. Denard. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
215 pages. $30.00 cloth.

Carolyn Denard gets her title for this splendid collection of 29 essays, reviews, and addresses from a luminous parable at the heart of Morrison’s Nobel Prize lecture of 1993. The children of a village approach a wise woman with a question that may be a riddle, a trap, or an urgent plea: tell us whether the bird we hold in our hands is living or dead. The woman, old and blind, is skeptical of the children’s motives and replies cautiously, testily. Whereupon the children, surprisingly, upbraid her for the poverty of her response, insisting on the wisdom that is their due: “‘tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. . . . Tell us
what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.’” For Denard, the wise woman is Morrison herself, and the occasional writings gathered here are what move at the margins of her celebrated fiction, what “informs, orders, and gives intellectual energy to her life commitments and to her role as a writer.”

These essays, however, are far from marginal. They are central, vital, and the publication of this book gives them a new visibility and coherence as major elements of the Morrison oeuvre. They are brimming with insights into African American history, literature, and culture, the work of fellow writers and artists, national politics, and the vocation and business of writing. “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” adds an important new motif, “the presence of an ancestor,” to the inventory of conceptual tools for mapping the “distinctive elements of African-American writing.” “[T]hese ancestors are not just parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective.” The absence of such figures is “frightening,” “threatening,” “caus[ing] huge destruction and disarray in the work itself.” With these words Morrison not only limns the significance of such characters from her own work as Pilate in Song of Solomon or Baby Suggs in Beloved; she also reminds a national culture quick to fetishize youth, freedom, and newness that “[w]hen you kill the ancestor you kill yourself,” that “nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection.” A beautiful autobiographical tribute to two such ancestors, Morrison’s maternal grandparents, can be found in the essay that opens What Moves at the Margin, “A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say),” first published in the bicentennial year of 1976. There Morrison channels her ancestors to comment on the “racial vertigo,” the justified skepticism and optimism, of the black community at the advent of the nation’s third century.

To the ancestor, I would suggest, we might add the stranger as another defining figure in Morrison’s writing, as discussed in “The Fisherwoman,” her weirdly affecting introduction to a collection of photographs by Robert Bergman. There she recounts the lasting impression left by a woman she met only once, a visitor who comes to fish from a neighbor’s seawall and never returns—a figure whose very existence Morrison comes to question. Reflecting on her response to this encounter—wistful, betrayed—Morrison comes “[t]o understand that I was longing for and missing some aspect of myself, and that there are no strangers. There are only versions of ourselves, many of which we have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from,” for “it is the randomness of the encounter with our already known—although unacknowledged—selves that summon a ripple of alarm.” In the stranger as well as the ancestor, then, Morrison finds “access to me,” an “entrance into my own interior life.”

“The Site of Memory” explores the role of the literary image as the principal means of access to “the unwritten interior life of the people” in Morrison’s creative process: “the image comes first and tells me what the ‘memory’ is about,” as beautifully illustrated by an episode in the composition of Beloved. Morrison’s brilliant reflections in Playing in the Dark on the “Africanist presence” that underlies and organizes “classic” (that is, white) American literature find a complement here in “On the Backs of Blacks,” which notes a similar phenomenon, a marginal-yet-inexorable “presence,” in the histories of American immigrant groups. The “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture” for such groups, she writes, is “negative appraisals of the native-born black population. . . . It doesn’t matter anymore what shade the newcomer’s skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open”—a claim supported by subsequent works of historical scholarship such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks. “Rediscovering Black History” recounts the making of The Black Book, perhaps the most significant accomplishment of Morrison’s editorial career at Random House—a work that supplied germinal images, episodes, and epiphanies for Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. An anthology, picture-book, scrapbook, and historical artifact in its own right—all in one—The Black Book was an attempt to document “life as lived—not as imagined—by the people: the anonymous men and women who speak in conventional histories only through their leaders,” an effort “to hold on to the useful past without blocking off the possibilities of the future. To create something that might last, that would bear witness to the quality and variety of black life before it became the topic of every Ph.D. dissertation.” Like the book itself, the essay succeeds memorably.

I could go on. There are the incisive and sometimes deeply moving appreciations of other writers: Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and especially the Guinean novelist Camara Laye, whose 1954 novel The Radiance of the King is the subject of a brilliant critical essay demonstrating Morrison’s bona fides as a commentator on postcolonial literature. There is the New Yorker essay that hails Bill Clinton as “our first black President” while proceeding to a lacerating deconstruction of the media circus and Capitol Hill feeding frenzy that was the Summer of Monica Lewinsky: “This is Slaughter-gate. A sustained, bloody, arrogant coup d’état. The Presidency is being stolen from us. And the people know it.” There is the witty and provocative 1971 report from the trenches of second-wave feminism, “What the Black Woman Thinks about Women’s Lib,” a wry but unfazed account of the ironies attending the peculiar position of black women at the intersection (or was it in the crosshairs?) of the civil rights and women’s movements: “In a way black women have known something of the freedom white women are now beginning to crave. But oddly, freedom is only sweet when it is won. When it is forced, it is called responsibility. The black woman’s needs shrank to the level of her responsibility; her man’s expanded in proportion to the obstacles that prevented him from assuming his. White women, on the other hand, have had too little responsibility, white men too much. It’s a wonder the sexes of either race even speak to each other.”

And of course, there is the Nobel Prize address, whose stubborn, hard-won faith in the efficacy of language is grounded in a communal context that may give it even greater resonance than Faulkner’s famous words on the “puny inexhaustible voice” of the mid-century liberal individual talking back against the “ding-dong of doom.”

Denard deserves credit for organizing these writings in a straightforward three-part scheme—with sections on “Family and History,” “Writers and Writing,” and “Politics and Society”—and for her lucid introduction to the volume. But the real star is Morrison, who seems incapable of an uninteresting thought or a pedestrian sentence. The hazard that a book like this confronts its reviewer with is the temptation simply to let those sentences speak for themselves. Like these words on writing and language: “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write) isn’t about the village or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfills only the obligation of my personal dreams—which is to say yes, the work must be political.”

“When you first start writing—and I think it’s true for a lot of beginning writers—you’re scared to death that if you don’t get that sentence right that minute it’s never going to show up again. And it isn’t. But it doesn’t matter—another one will, and it’ll probably be better. And I don’t mind writing badly for a couple of days because I know I can fix it—and fix it again and again and again, and it will be better. I don’t have the hysteria that used to accompany some of those dazzling passages that I thought the world was just dying for me to remember.”

“The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image, and experience, which may involve both, one, or neither of the first two. Language (saying, listening, reading) can encourage, even mandate, surrender, the breach of distances among us, whether they are continental or on the same pillow. . . . Provoking language or eclipsing it, an image can determine not only what we know and feel, but also what we believe is worth knowing and feeling.”

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

Magnificent.

Jay Watson