Alphabetizing Toni Morrison
by Mark Anthony Williams
If you asked me on August 4th, 2019 who were the five greatest novelists on the planet, I could tell you, unequivocally; that was a list that I carried around with me way others carry a license, a passport, a rolodex-my own Black Card that American Express had no hand in issuing. I carried that list with equanimity and a confidence, bordering on arrogance, wore that confidence as insouciance, because, and again, that list, my list, was unequivocal.
On August 5th, 2019 that list, my list, went to four. On that day, Toni Morrison took flight. And I could feel the earth mourn. And I mourned. The kind of mourning that feels like a gut punch, sounds like the woman telling the man, ‘I don’t love you anymore.’, and lands like prayer, way prayer bends you. One of the greatest of American writers died that day. One of the greatest writers on the planet died that day.
Mark Twain once remarked,
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
I go to books, more specifically, fiction to make sense of the politics of the day because politicians espouse a truth and, exactly as Twain says, make that truth a singular one, devoid of any other possibility, leverage that truth towards political agenda, meaning ultimately votes and staying power, then platform and campaign accordingly. Here, and for the purposes of this essay, connected to Toni Morrison’s passing on August 5th, 2019, I cite Mr. DeSantis and his peoples in Florida, more specifically a sound bite about the great strides in education made by the state he governs, taken from his 2021 state of the union address,
“Just last week, the College Board released data showing that Florida ranks number two in the nation in the percentage of graduating seniors who have passed Advanced Placement exams.”
In 2022, according to U.S. News & World Report’s Best High Schools ranking, Florida was ranked third in the nation, after Massachusetts and Connecticut. And along comes the College Board, with its AP African-American History course, developed in 2020, on the heels of social unrest and uprising, much of which came from and leveraged the death of an unarmed African-American man who was effectively choked to death. Mr. George Floyd. Who in that instance was more adjective, African, than American. It was and remains not ironic, nor metaphorical, that in that instance of putting (meaning murdering) an American man to sleep, a woke movement was borne, that again leveraged the adjective, African, then politicized the adjective to Black. Again, not American.
The College Board’s AP African-American History course seeks to be a careful analysis of core historical, literary, and artistic works of African-Americans. Incidentally, there is no AP African-American Literature or Art course, but there is AP History, AP English, and AP Art History. No adjectives for the latter three. Unless one reads AP as an adjective, for American, dare I say, American exceptionalism, and if one subscribes to this exceptionalism, then the construct of AP, within the College Board, is definitely the pre-cursor, the breeding ground in the way it corresponds to admission into higher ranked universities, Ivies, etc. And that is a truth, unlike the fiction of the egalitarianism of an education and the equal opportunities it affords.
Back to Mr. DeSantis and his visceral objections, and in turn, those of the state he governs, to this new addition to the College Board’s AP structure, an AP structure which he leveraged towards political gain, as well as economic and social gain for specific demographics, which are part and parcel of the successful rankings package. The Governor said the course lacked educational value, pandered to Woke rhetoric and agenda, and my favorite part, reflected the political agenda of the College Board, and perhaps even those of of different political parties.
A word about the rhetoric of Woke and its attendant renderings that confound me, particularly as it pertains to Mr. DeSantis’ understanding and the country writ large-as far as I can tell- the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Red Scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee, the anti-Vietnam movement, the United Farm Worker’s Movement, to name a few, as there as so many others in American History-were they not all instances of Woke? Was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, and Mr. Obama, to name a few, were they not Woke presidents? Well at least the last one was, the adjective American one.
Back to Toni Morrison.
I once was in an audience listening to Ms. Morrison read from her work and in the Q&A after, someone in the audience asked her if she thought that art was necessarily political. The look Ms. Morrison gave the audience member was akin to telling that person to go outside and get a switch. Really what she was saying though, after the cut of her silence was over, and the loving brilliance of her language filled the silence, was the question that not only all of her work explicitly takes on, but is the question that I think she continues to pose. Pose to all of us. Still.
“The why is unbearable. So we go to the how.”
Over the years, and on the first day of any African-American literature course I taught-and there have been many- I would begin every class, after students, white, black, or indifferent, sat down, by saying, Whether you elected to take this class, whether an elective for credit, or not, or just mere curiosity, by virtue of you sitting here and taking this class, you are being sent a racist message by a school, by a district, by an accreditation committee, a governing board, and by your own history. Why? Because the work and contributions of these American writers you are about to read has been adjectified, by establishing center and periphery, by making James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, to start, furniture in the house, and not the house itself. Which is precisely what the greatest American writers, Twain, and Hemingway, and Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, and Rand, and Chopin, and Bronte, and Miller, to name a few-all of whom you would find in AP English- what these writers provided was a house in which to live. To then, section off Baldwin, and Morrison, and Hughes, and Toomer, and Hurston, and Ellison, and Brooks, and Hansberry, to name a few; section them off as chairs in a corner-Center and Periphery-Citizen and part of speech-Whole and three fifths. Racism 101. The black writers have to go to different bathrooms, and eat somewhere other than the kitchen.
In an interview with Jeffrey Brown on PBS, just after she had won the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, Morrison commented on the fact that her books were used more in law classes, feminist studies, and black studies classes than English departments. While she understood the need for identity politics and the necessity of groups, her larger, personal, and as an American writer’s point was,
“I want to be alphabeticized.”
In curriculum, on syllabi, in English departments, Morrison’s want was for her work to not be sectioned off, it would not be part of a the periphery-a fringe element. In bookstores when one went to the Fiction section, one would simply need to move through the aisles using last names ordered by the alphabet, rather than go to some specialty section, bound by the politics of identity. And in those aisles, the identity politics ones, not only are center (the American canon) and periphery (for the purposes of the current language, Woke literature) reinforced, they are also reinforced by Mr. DeSantis and the Florida that supports him in suggesting this literature is of and has a lesser educational value, and the College Board by soldering center and periphery, canon and three fifths, house and furniture. In this statement,
“I want to be alphabeticized.”
Toni Morrison is asking the why of the thing-Why am I not an American? How long does it take to be an American? I have been here for four hundred years. And my work, every single thing I write, illuminates the possibilities of this country. Not a truth of it.
That is after all what scares both Mr. DeSantis and the College Board. Equally. And though leveraged for different political outcomes, whose political agendas are not altogether so different-both undergirded by American exceptionalism. The possibilities of these American writers, of these American artists, of this American history, constituting center and not periphery, whole and not 3/5s, American and not Adjectified American, for them to recognized as such, per the promises of its founding documents and against its racist legislations, would require something more substantive than Woke. And Anti-Woke. Namely, reading. And reading the work of any of these writers, black or not, is much harder than politics. As politics does not require imagination. Fiction does. Precisely because of the work necessary to consider the possibilities, the scale, and scope, limitations, and limitlessness of human, and in our case, American.
Toni Morrison has achieved the alphabetizing, has become part of the American canon, will show up in both the AP English and AP African-American History course I would image. She is taught at the secondary, post-secondary, and tertiary levels, perhaps more than any other African-American writer in terms of her body of work. James Baldwin, her teacher, until recently was read and revered more so internationally, but now, and I would argue because of the Woke movement, has picked up steam here on U.S. soil. Irony is, I don’t believe there is any other American writer, none, not even close, who shows us the possibilities of black and white bodies, American bodies, together, in love, life, fight, destruction, and redemption, way Baldwin does, and yet it is my contention that he gets leveraged towards all things Woke, black, LBGTQ, militant, activist, far too easily, and claimed within those confines. Baldwin’s teacher, at least one of them, was Henry James. No monolith there. No center and periphery. But that is for another day.
There are seminal texts by Toni Morrison that one can find alphabetized in any bookstore in the U.S.; The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, the Song of Solomon, Home, and A Mercy seem to be the easiest and most consistent finds. Each novel shatters truth. A singular, monolithic truth. An agenda laden, clumsy, unilateral truth. An oppressive truth. A text that also shatters and isn’t as widely read is one that I, in closing, would recommend that any and everyone read to consider the why, of this-one of the greatest of American writers- is her Nobel lecture. It is at once stunning and elegant. It is brimming with dignity, is a clarion call, and is simply a good story. And like Toni Morrison. It is radical.
Excerpt from it,
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek — it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
