I was 28 years old and at a summer pool party. It had been a year since I moved out to the beach and had been driving my BMW. I was coming to the end of my patience with yuppie indulgences, but I was still trying to find a consistent highbrow aesthetic in black culture. I had joined a couple memberships in theatre companies, I toured all the black bookstores in the city. I went to all the coolest clubs and bars. People knew me and I knew people. It's funny I was just talking about some of that period in my life when my friend Charles and I ran GDZ and were part of the Babeless Crew. Nothing like being affluent, single and somewhat attractive in Southern California during the Cosby Era. It struck me that I was about as connected as I could get when I had been invited to hang out with Robert Townsend's Partners in Crime. I watched Bobby Brown practice at the Wadsworth Theatre for his comeback. 'My Prerogative' was the song. I knew it would be a hit.
At the pool party I was reading Toni Morrison's new book "Beloved". It was rather the last straw. I had pretty much had my fill of what was explained to me as the best of black fiction. I found it shocking that 'The Women of Brewster Place' was considered the best. It left me rather flat and unimpressed. I knew that as a student of Computer Science that my background in the Liberal Arts needed work and I tried to ignore the conceit that we in what would eventually be called 'STEM' worked a bit harder and were a bit smarter. Yet I kept singing myself to sleep with that song from the film After Hours "Is this all there is?" Jeopardy and Thelonius Monk didn't quite cut it. What was an intelligent young man to do, just make money? And then about 20 pages into the novel, I realized that here was the writing skill and imagery I had been craving. Suddenly the world around me began to pale and the sounds got tinny and muted and I was in Toni's world. She owned me.
That summer marked a major change in my life. Eventually all of the dance clubs, in fact all of Los Angeles fell into the background. I had found, at long last, the powerful black literature that I wanted to experience. For all of the extraordinary complexities of Beloved, I found an even better lesson in Jazz and started to understand through her narrative grace and insight something that boiled down to a Michael Jackson lyric "You're just another part of me." It's often hard to communicate what differences I expected and experienced between race and culture as flattened as they have become in the popular imagination. But the very last lessons of race I learned from Jazz and the works of John Langston Gwaltney and Adrian Piper. From Jazz came the subtle yet profound consequences of the emotional rejection of family and what comes of the rejection of genuine love between individuals who owe loyalties to their racial identities. It doesn't have to be hate that brings one to ruin. Exclusion from family is sufficient because it is the ultimate betrayal.
Beloved's Sixo was for me, Morrison's best character. Of all the characters in all of the black literature I ever read there were ever four that marked me as something close to the self. They were Jean Toomer's Kabnis, Paul Beatty's protagonist in the 'White Boy Shuffle', as well as Darryl Pinckney's in 'High Cotton', and Sixo. That was for then. I don't often think of Sixo now - I found my Thirty Mile Woman and she bore my progeny. My time out of time is best described in the time and place I wrote that some 20 years ago if I did. Morrison, more than any other black literary figure I can recall stood in a unique place. There was something ineffably affecting in her writing, not only in its evocation but in its syntax. Morrison's sentences went on and on folding and unfolding like tesseracts of consciousness capable of delivering you into parallel universes. You live in the world, but your mind is captivated elsewhere. That's what I recall floating through the NYC undergrounds. It was an alien diet that made your aura transmit in the ultraviolet spectrum where Earthlings still see only black and white.
Like all great writers, Morrison had a psychological wisdom that allowed her to occupy the consciences of her characters. I can't tell if she was going inside herself or not as the book following Jazz took me into a gory corner I could not stomach. Was that Paradise? I don't recall - I only remember choking on blood. The last bit of Morrision I took was from Playing in the Dark, as she metastasized into America's black woman author. In that, she talked theory, perhaps it was critical theory of a sort. I think she overplayed the 'masters tools' hand while making an excellent point of the matter of the rescued.
'The problem of internalizing the master's tongue is the problem of the rescued. Unlike the problems of survivors who may be lucky, fated, etc. the rescued have the problem of debt. If the rescuer gives you back your life, he shares in that life. But if as in Friday's case, if the rescuer saves your life by taking you away from the dangers, the complications, the confusion of home, he may very well expect the debt to be paid in full.' -- Toni Morrision, 1992Morrison brings up an interesting tangent. If America paid the Negro his Reparations, what do you think it would ask for in return? It doesn't matter the actual price, it's a psychic bargain, a deal with the Devil if you will, another form of shackles. Perhaps we ought to note and confess that the Negro is always with us.
This thinking remains with me, as does the echo of Sixo's self-liberation. I wonder if literature today, American literature, ever bothers to reach as deeply into the human psyche as Morrison's once did for me. I marveled at the empty profundity of so many somebody's daughter books, as if only the trials of women's souls were worth examining in literature. Unlike academics, I am not part of the industrial process of constant dealings with the intellectual and social maturity of our youth - these examinations of the dimensions of the soul are for me processed at the level of history and philosophy. Dostoevsky most recently. It is difficult to bear witness and learn at once. I am not growing tired or bitter, but I do sometimes wonder why so much is politics and so little is life. We are shocked at murder and want to blame somebody. We don't recognize the dimensions of our own souls, that is, I reckon an eternal human problem. We should wonder why we want to think we can program an AI to figure it out, or somebody else to tell the tales that Morrison has already told. Humanity lies in plain view in front of us, and maybe it is her death that can remind us of the transformative power of actual art. Can we bear our own imagination? Here lies Toni Morrison.
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