This individual tells us the listeners that she learned about the power of the word when she learned to read at 3 years old and never stopped reading. Reading had been something forbidden to her Grandfather and since the Bible was the only book in his house, she quips that must have been why he had read it 5 times.
As a preteen her mother had sent her father a message as he was earning money elsewhere playing his violin that she would be with their two daughters leaving on a specific train heading North to Ohio and he should meet be her on that train. A mother's intuition knew her daughters would be in grave danger if she stayed as White boys had been circling and their eye on her. The father did get on the train yet hid for fear of being thrown off. You see the news of emancipation hadn't reached everybody. They landed up in Lorain, Ohio, a steel town on Lake Erie. Folks worked in the steel mill. Poverty, she adds, was not shameful.
That photo collage was of Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison; an editor, essayist, college professor, award winning novelist who we have come to know through her books as Toni Morrison, a 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. A strong, articulate, outspoken woman who was the first Black to write about Blacks for Blacks and she was unapologetic.
Other black authors's writing was for Whites filled with explanations. Morrison's speaks of her first novel Bluest Eye as based on White Gaze, a true story between her and a close childhood friend about the existence of G-d. Her friend had proof G-d did not exist. For two weeks straight she had prayed to G-d for blue eyes and she still did not have blue eyes. This self loathing of one's skin color is imposed by a racist system controlled by Whites. The receivers of the White Gaze are so damaged they do not even deem themselves lovable...
Morrison says of America's melting pot, "Blacks are the pot and everyone else is inside." Think about it and the mess we are in today due to our racism. Yes, dialogues are beginning but admitting our racism is the first step in opening up to listening, learning and changing. We all, are lovable.
Toni Morrison left us a wealth of rich language reading in her novels, children's lit, non fiction, short fiction, plays, etc... Her novels include:
The Bluest Eye. 1970.
Sula. 1973.
Song of Solomon.1977
Tar Baby. 1981.
Beloved. 1987.
Jazz. 1992.
Paradise. 1997.
Love. 2003.
A Mercy. 2008.
Home. 2012.
God Help the Child.
Here is a youtube link to the trailer:THE PIECES I AM
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