TONI MORRISON FEBRUARY 18-1931
Toni Morrison born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18-1931 in Lorain, Ohio, who is one of my favourite writers, transitioned to the ancestral realm yesterday, Monday, August 5-2019. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for “Beloved.” The novel was adapted into a film of the same name (starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover) in 1998. In 1993, Morrison was the first African American woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. She was honored with the 1996 National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison wrote the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
Murphy Browne © Wednesday March 30-2016
“When I began, there was just one thing that I wanted to write about, which was the true devastation of racism on the most vulnerable, the most helpless unit in the society – a Black female and a child. I wanted to write about what it was like to be the subject of racism. It had a specificity that was damaging. And if there was no support system in the community and in the family, it could cause spiritual death, self-loathing, terrible things.”
Chloe Anthony “Toni” Wofford Morrison during an interview published in the New York Times on September 11, 1994.
Chloe Anthony “Toni” Wofford Morrison was awarded the “Pulitzer Prize for Fiction” for her 1987 novel, “Beloved” on March 31-1988. Morrison was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African woman, Margaret Garner.
On Sunday, January 27, 1856 the enslaved Margaret Garner escaped from a farm in Kentucky with her four children across the frozen Ohio River to Ohio, a free state. Garner was 22 years old and pregnant with her fifth child. Her four children were the products of years of rape by her owner. She herself was the product of the rape of her enslaved African mother and her mother’s owner. They spent the night in Cincinnati hiding in the home of African-American abolitionist Joseph Kite. On January 28, 1856 while Kite went to get help to move them to a safer location Garner and her family were surrounded by White men determined to return them to slavery in Kentucky.
This enslaved African woman who had been repeatedly raped by her “owner” and had given birth to four of her rapist’s children and was pregnant with a fifth child decided that she would rather see her children dead than alive as slaves. In Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground, the legendary White abolitionist Levi Coffin wrote: “Margaret, the mother of the four children, declared that she would kill herself and her children before she would return to bondage.”
A description of the scene from the 2012 book, The Underground Railroad: A Reference Guide, by White philosophy professor Kerry S. Walters reads: “At this moment, Margaret Garner, seeing that their hopes of freedom were vain, seized a butcher knife that lay on the table, and with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter, whom she probably loved the best. She then attempted to take the life of the other children and to kill herself, but she was overpowered and hampered before she could complete her desperate work. The whole party was then arrested and lodged in jail.”
U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had accompanied Garner’s “owner” to arrest her. A two-week trial followed Garner’s arrest after which the judge deliberated for another two weeks. It was “the longest and most complicated case of its kind” because usually a “fugitive slave” hearing would have lasted less than a day. The central issue was whether Garner would be tried as a “person” and charged with the murder of her daughter or tried as property under the “Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.”
Garner’s defense attorney moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the “Fugitive Slave Law”. One of the people who gave evidence on Garner’s behalf was White abolitionist Lucy Stone who reportedly said: “With my own teeth I would tear open my veins and let the earth drink my blood, rather than to wear the chains of slavery. How then could I blame her for wishing her child to find freedom with God and the angels, where no chains are?” Garner was returned to slavery in Kentucky and disappeared (supposedly sold away to someone in Arkansas) even though the court in Ohio issued an extradition warrant to try her for murder in Ohio. Garner is said to have died of typhoid fever during an epidemic in 1858.
Toni Morrison would probably have heard of stories like Garner’s almost all her life. African-American women and girls were routinely subjected to sexual abuse from White men during slavery and long after slavery was abolished, especially in the southern U.S. Some of the cases made their way to court and many, many more remained family and community secrets except for the complexion of the children that resulted from the rapes.
Morrison’s parents, Ramah (née Willis) and George Wofford, were southerners who moved to Ohio at the beginning of the 20th century. She grew up hearing stories of how her mother’s father, John Solomon Willis, a violinist, often had to leave his wife and family behind on a farm in Greenville, Alabama to go to Birmingham to make money.
Morrison recalled that her grandmother, Ardelia Willis, realized as the months passed that the White boys in the area were “circling” the family’s farm because her daughters were growing up. When Ardelia Willis saw the White boys frequenting the area she realized she had to get her daughters away. During an interview with Morrison published in the New York Times on April 8, 2015, African-American essayist Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah wrote: “This image and her grandmother’s way of speech have stayed with her: I like the way she said ‘circling’, Morrison told me. After sending a message to her husband that they could no longer stay put, Morrison’s grandmother took her children in the dead of the night and got on the first train they could find that would take them away.”
Morrison’s father also left the southern U.S. because of the oppressive White supremacist culture and the risk to his life. When George Wofford was 14 or 15, two African-American businessmen who lived on his street were lynched in succession. He left the south and headed north, eventually settling in Ohio. Morrison said: “He never told us that he’d seen bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.” That experience of seeing the bodies of the lynched African-American men traumatized the teenage George Wofford and affected his adult life. In an article published in the New York Times on July 4, 1976 entitled “A Slow Walk of Trees (As Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (As Grandfather Would Say)” Morrison wrote: “Thus my father, distrusting every word and every gesture of every White man on earth, assumed that the White man who crept up the stairs one afternoon had come to molest his daughters and threw him down the stairs and then our tricycle after him.” Morrison wrote that at the time she thought her father was wrong.
That 1976 essay which was also published in the 2008 book What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction gives a glimpse into the mind and thoughts of the woman who has written and published 11 novels beginning in 1970 with The Bluest Eye. Morrison has written novels with African-Americans at the centre. She has written unapologetically about the lives of African-Americans even though she has been challenged by White critics and even asked when she would write about White people, during an interview. Morrison has said that she has spent her entire writing life trying to make sure that the White gaze was not the dominant one in any of her books. (www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4vIGvKpT1c)
Morrison further explained: “I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for Black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only Black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.”
On March 31, 1988, Toni Morrison, an African-American woman who was born to working class parents in Lorain, Ohio was awarded the “Pulitzer Prize for Fiction”. In 1993, she was awarded the “Nobel Prize in Literature”. Both prizes were awarded for a story inspired by the life of an enslaved African woman. Morrison as a 13-year-old had worked as a domestic in the home of a White family to supplement her family’s income. She attended Howard University (1949-53 B.A.) and Cornell (1953-55 M.A.). After her marriage to African Jamaican architect Harold Morrison ended in divorce (1958-1964) she brought up their two sons as a single mother while working full time (as an editor at Random House in New York) and writing.
For more than 40 years Toni Morrison’s writing has lived up to her words published on September 11, 1994: “When I began, there was just one thing that I wanted to write about, which was the true devastation of racism on the most vulnerable, the most helpless unit in the society – a Black female and a child.”
BLACK LIVES MATTER!
Murphy Browne © Wednesday March 30-2016
Murphy Browne © May 2008
Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that suppose to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing. From Beloved, by Toni Morrison, published 1987
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is based on an historical event from 1856 when an enslaved African woman decided to commit infanticide rather than allow her children to live as enslaved people. Little more than 152 years ago, on January 27th 1856, Margaret Garner and her husband, enslaved Africans, both in their early 20s thought they had a chance of escaping their enslavers. Their hopes were dashed the very next day as the place where they had sought refuge was surrounded by their enslavers. Archibald K. Gaines and Thomas Marshall had pursued the couple from Kentucky and arriving in Cincinnati had obtained a warrant from federal Commissioner John Pendery and with the assistance of federal marshals were determined to recapture the Garners. Margaret Garner decided that she preferred that her children die rather than live the life she had lived as an enslaved African. She killed her baby girl first, since she knew from lived experience, the extra brutality of sexual exploitation that enslaved women experienced because of their gender. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 nullified the fact that Ohio was a free state. A trial followed the capture of the Garners and on 26 February 1856 a judge ruled in favour of the enslavers. The Garners were returned to slavery in Kentucky. During the trial, evidence was presented that Archibald K. Gaines was the father of Margaret Garner’s children. She had been the victim of rape resulting in four pregnancies. Margaret had also been physically abused by Gaines’ wife when the appearance of the children proved that he was the father. Newspaper reports of the trial described the children as "mulatto," "bright mulatto," and "almost white." The abuse that Garner suffered from her enslaver and his wife was not an aberration. White men who held Africans in captivity as slaves were physically and sexually violent. White women, whose husbands, sons, brothers, uncles, fathers, grandfathers and other male relatives were raping enslaved African women, blamed the women and were physically violent to the enslaved women. The white women also physically abused the children who resulted from these rapes, since their presence was a constant reminder that even though they thought of the women as less than human, their male relatives thought differently on some level. Enslaved African women tried to protect their children from abuse by various means, sometimes resorting to fleeing with their children. The presence of these children, the result of the rape of enslaved women so enraged white women that they frequently demanded that their men folk sell the children while they were still very young.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ0mMjII22I
