[In perpetual, joyful transcendent honor of Toni Morrison, upon the issuing of the U. S. Postal Stamp, March 7, 2023. First presented as panel presentation, Conference on the Catholic Imagination, Loyola University Chicago, August 2019] --After [Toni Morrison] Author's comments/responses in red--
“And God
said.....”
Of course,
God said...”darkness, you shall not prevail. There will be light.” Creation begins with a word, spoken, with the
power to make things. And to make things happen. Yes,
“àshe: Make it so.” The
power within all that has been created. Before anything was created, there was
the power. There was and is and will always be, the word.
“And there
was evening and there was morning, the first day.”̀
What they were
drowning in, in the bottom of the wooden vessel, rocking on water that could
also drown them – water that was now to be a forever-locked gate to the only
strength they had ever known, where the ancestors, the living-dead, wept for
their being ripped away from the earth where they had learned to dance. And it
was dark.
The evil
ones proved their clever genius in how they broke even the bonds of words -- “We
were landed up a river a good way from the sea, about Virginia county, where we
saw few or none of our native Africans, and not one soul who could talk to me.
I was a few weeks weeding grass, and gathering stones in a plantation; and at
last all my companions were distributed different ways, and only myself was
left. I was now exceedingly miserable, and thought myself worse off than any of
the rest of my companions; for they could talk to each other, but I had no
person to speak to that I could understand. In this state I was constantly
grieving and pining, and wishing for death rather than any thing else.” (Equiano, Chapter 3, p. 90)
No words,
but crying and moaning and the groans of wide-awake night (always, never broken
night):
“Then late
at night, after the songs were over, from the darkness of the lower decks of
the Young Hero and thousand other
ships, the sailors could hear ‘an howling melancholy noise, expressive of
extreme anguish.’ On one such occasion,
the ship’s doctor said that he asked his black female interpreter to go inquire
the cause of the wailing noise. According to the doctor, ‘she discovered it to
be owing to their having dreamt that they were in their own country, and
finding themselves when awake, in the hold of a slave ship.’” (Harding, There
is a River, p. 16)
“And God
said” And in the conviction bestowed in
them at birth, they sang. Each utterance
shaped the universe, resisted the darkness. Word. Sound. Sounding truth.
Speaking “No,” to the destructive trauma of darkness. Erasing the circle of all that was truth and
evident: we are born, we grow, we bless
and are blessed; we teach; we descend into a darkness where we are named,
blessed, called forth through the gateway of the night, to protect those who sleep.
We are bringers of peace.
No.
The circle
was forever destroyed. This we knew. But we could only sound the anguish, being
separated from the words that allowed us to live.
And so we
live. They named us, “dead.” And yet....
we howled and sang and year by burning year, we found a word, then more; then
many. And now, we now shape the circle -- being completed once more.
They brought
storms into our sky and into our minds and the howling we have done is nothing
but the howling we have been burned by.
Flinging the darkness up and away from us, we are the ancestors of the
children yet unborn.
Every song
draws someone, one by one, by “We”, into the circle where they and we can learn
who they and we have always been.
[Toni
Morrison]
“For a long
time, the art form that was healing for Black people was music. That music is
no longer exclusively ours; we don’t have exclusive rights to it.
(Ain’t that the truth! Somebody stole all my stuff,
Father-brother-uncle-cousin Langston said)
Other people
sing it and play it; it is the mode of contemporary music everywhere. So another form has to take that place, and
it seems to me that the novel is needed by African Americans now in a way that
it was not needed before – and it is following along the lines of the function
of novels everywhere.
(So we gotta do the soul-food magic,
again, take the left-overs and cook them up so good and delicious that we can
feed a neighborhood...of strangers)
We don’t
live in places where we can hear those stories anymore; parents don’t sit
around and tell their children those classical, mythological archetypal stories
that we heard years ago. But new
information has to get out, and there are several ways to do it. One is the
novel. I regard it as a way to accomplish certain very strong functions....
It should be
beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work. It should have
something in it that enlightens; something in it that opens the door and points
the way. Something in it that suggests what the conflicts are, what the
problems are. But it need not solve those problems because it is not a case
study, it is not a recipe.
”[there are
things to be incorporated] that should be directly and deliberately related to
what I regard as the major characteristics of Black art, wherever it is. One of which is the ability to be both print and oral literature: to
combine those two aspects so that the stories can be read in silence, of
course, but one should be able to hear them as well.
It should
try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in
the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join
him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to
cry and to accede or to change and to modify – to expand on the sermon that is
being delivered.....And having at my disposal only the letters of the alphabet
and some punctuation, I have to provide the places and spaces so that the
reader can participate. Because it is
the affective and participatory relationship
between the artist or the speaker and the audience that is of primary
importance, as it is in these other art forms that I have described.” (What
Moves at the Margin, pp. 58-59)
Oh, so what you mean is that Black
literature is sacrament and sacramental?
It achieves the effect that is intended?
It has the power to make the stranger a neighbor, neighbors a community;
and communities a culture? Is that what
you mean, Ms. Morrison? Is there
anything else we need to know, for this time and space and place and
purpose? Anything about how the original
artists, through their ability to be mystics, in the truest sense of the word –
becoming the angels that traverse Jacob’s ladder and not the trashy individual
caught up in their dream – learning to demand that God come down from heaven
and liberate those who groan and cry and mourn and weep – making their voices
the primal and primary therapeutic response to the enduring trauma inflicted on
them all – being thoroughly assured that “their wings were going to fit them
well, since they tried them on, at the Gates of Hell,” of becoming Moses, Joshua, Daniel, Elijah,
Mary, Martha, John the Baptist, Peter and even the silent abused Savior – in
other words, the carriers of the
Voice of God (like all good prophets are).
I’m sorry, Ms. Morrison, is there anything else you want to tell us
about how the art you conjure up is so closely aligned with the principles of
sacramental theology that we can grin and wallow in your generous teaching? Is there?
Oh, Ok....
“The only
thing I would add . . is the presence of
the ancestor; it seems to me interesting to evaluate Black literature on what
the writer does with the presence of the ancestor. Which is to say a grandfather as in Ralph
Ellison, or a grandmother as in Toni Cade Bambara, or a healer as in Bambara or
Henry Dumas. There is always an elder
there. And these ancestors are not just
parents, they are sort of timeless people whose relationships to the characters
are benevolent, instructive, and protective, and they provide a certain kind of
wisdom.
Yes, ma’am. Saints. The living-dead
of the Kongo cultures. The visitors of our dreams and daydreams. The
intercessors, guides, angels and guides.
The saints. When the survivors of the ocean voyage stepped on the earth
that would be their prison, they decided that as soon as they learned the
language of those who enslaved them, they would use that language to free
themselves. They stole the book, the
book that starts with darkness and sound – with the word of power. And they
named themselves the liberating heroes of the stories held dear by those who
sought to control them.
And they said, “Never been to
heaven, but I’ve been told, the streets of heaven are paved with gold.” “When I get to heaven, gonna sing and shout,
and there will be nobody there to turn me out.”
And, “Everybody talking about heaven ain’t going there.”
Yes, ma’am. And all the ma’ams and
sirs. You have taught us to see and hear
prophetic literature.
And we are grateful. And that is why
we love you all. By giving us your art and becoming our ancestors, you have
taught us to love the gifts you show us to be.
“Without
ever leaving the ground, [you] could fly.” (Morrison, Song of Solomon)
To fly. Without. Ever leaving. The ground… in the world of the Spirit. Amen.
