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Nonfiction

Toni Morrison: First Lady of Letters

Toni Morrison, 2008.Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

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THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD
Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
By Toni Morrison

In 1982, when I was a 24-year-old reporter at The Boston Globe, I was sent to cover Harvard University’s Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year ceremony. The award that year went to the jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald. The ceremony took place in a theater packed with students. When Fitzgerald stood at the podium to offer her thanks, a young voice suddenly piped out, “Sing, Ella!” A second student shouted, “Please sing, Ella!” A chorus quickly enveloped the room. “Sing, Ella!” they shouted, “Sing, Ella, sing!”

I watched, fuming. Fitzgerald had already sung. She sang for 40 years. In clubs and juke joints, at weddings and dances, in sweatboxes, filthy bars and rancid watering holes, even at a Harvard class reunion two decades before. As a child, she was a musical genius, born with perfect pitch. When she was 15, her mother died, and she essentially wandered around New York City in the mid-1930s as a homeless teenager, until the bandleader Chick Webb gave her a gig — and Webb had to be talked into it, because female singers were adornments in those days. She sang her way to the top of the music world. Now at 64, she was feeble, nearly blind, the diabetes that would plague her until the end of her life some agonizing years later already crippling her ability to walk. And these privileged kids, some of whom had marched in a giddy parade earlier dressed in tutus and clown costumes in a time-honored Harvard tradition that was somehow venerable because, well, they’d been doing it at Harvard for decades, wanted her to sing. Sing your own damn selves, was my thought.

But the First Lady of Song was gracious. She stood at the microphone, and sang a soft a cappella verse from the 1930 song “I’ve Got a Crush on You.” She forgot the lyrics in the middle, then remembered them, and ended by pointing at the kids and singing “I love you … and you … and you. …” They loved it. It was gorgeous madness.

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Toni Morrison receiving the Nobel Prize in literature, Stockholm, 1993.Credit...Associated Press

I still remember that event 37 years later. I remember Fitzgerald’s grace, her style, her silent understanding of the moment. I had no reason to be angry. It was her moment, not mine. She was the First Lady of Song. She endured more pain and suffering than I knew or would ever know. Her pain and joys were hers to guard, to share, to translate into her art as she saw fit. She had the benefit of wisdom, which I, a young hothead, did not.

Which brings to mind another first lady in her field.

Toni Morrison, the author and Nobel Prize winner, turned 88 on Feb. 18. I have never met Morrison. And while you’ll likely see a donkey fly before you see her stand before a bunch of Harvard undergraduates and sing on demand, the fact is Toni Morrison is very much like Ella Fitzgerald. Like Fitzgerald, she rose from humble beginnings to world prominence. Like Fitzgerald, she is intensely private. And like Fitzgerald, she has given every iota of her extraordinary American-born talent and intellect to the great American dream. Not the one with the guns and bombs bursting in air. The other one, the one with world peace, justice, racial harmony, art, literature, music and language that shows us how to be free wrapped in it. Morrison has, as they say in church, lived a life of service. Whatever awards and acclaim she has won, she has earned. She has paid in full. She owes us nothing.

Yet even as she moves into the October of life, Morrison, quietly and without ceremony, lays another gem at our feet. “The Source of Self-Regard” is a book of essays, lectures and meditations, a reminder that the old music is still the best, that in this time of tumult and sadness and continuous war, where tawdry words are blasted about like junk food, and the nation staggers from one crisis to the next, led by a president with all the grace of a Cyclops and a brain the size of a full-grown pea, the mightiness, the stillness, the pure power and beauty of words delivered in thought, reason and discourse, still carry the unstoppable force of a thousand hammer blows, spreading the salve of righteousness that can heal our nation and restore the future our children deserve. This book demonstrates once again that Morrison is more than the standard-bearer of American literature.

She is our greatest singer. And this book is perhaps her most important song.

Close your eyes and make a wish. Wish that one of the most informed, smartest, most successful people in your profession walks into your living room, pulls up a chair and says, “This is what I’ve been thinking. …” That’s “The Source of Self-Regard.” The book is structured in three parts: “The Foreigner’s Home,” “Black Matter(s)” and “God’s Language.” There are 43 ruminations in all. It opens with a stirring tribute to the 9/11 victims, then fans out into matters of art, language and history. It includes a gorgeous eulogy for James Baldwin, a powerful address she delivered to Amnesty International (“The War on Error,” about the need for a “heightened battle against cultivated ignorance, enforced silence and metastasizing lies”) and meditations on the thinking behind several of her early important novels. The bursts of rumination examine world history, skirt religion, scour philosophy, racism, anti-Semitism, femininity, war and folk tales, and are dotted with references to writers like Isak Dinesen and the deeply gifted African novelist Camara Laye. There’s even a tidbit or two about her closely guarded personal life. But the real magic is witnessing her mind and imagination at work. They are as fertile and supple as jazz.

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It is through jazz, actually, that one can best understand the imaginative power and technical mastery that Morrison has achieved over the course of her literary journey. No American writer I can think of, past or present, incorporates jazz into his or her writing with greater effect. Her work doesn’t bristle with jazz. It is jazz. Her novel of the same name is an homage to the genre. Jazz eats everything in its path — rock, classical, Latin. Like the great jazz musicians who evolved out of bebop and moved to free jazz, and whose later work demands listening, Morrison’s later novels are almost as enjoyable listened to as read. That is why, I suspect, she spends exhausting hours in the studio recording her books, instead of letting actors do the job. She’s the bandleader. She wrote the music. She knows where the song is going.

One way to appreciate Morrison’s supreme blend of technical and literary creativity — without reading a word of her books — is to listen to the unedited version of Nina Simone’s recording of the swing-era song “Good Bait,” made famous by Count Basie. Simone, a singer and musical genius, doesn’t vocalize on the recording. She plays piano. She begins with a gorgeous, improvised fugue, is joined by a bassist and a drummer and leads the trio in light supper-club swing, and intensifies into muscular Count Basie-like, big-band punches. She then breaks loose from the trio altogether and blasts into a solo, two-part contrapuntal Bach-like invention, which develops momentarily into three parts. She blows through the fugue-like passages with such power you can almost hear the bassist and drummer getting to their feet as they rejoin. But she’s left them. She’s gone! She closes the piece with a flourishing Beethoven-like concerto ending, having traveled through three key changes and four time signature changes. That’s not jazz. That’s composition. It’s also Toni Morrison.

It bears mentioning that young Nina Simone auditioned for entry into Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, America’s premier music institution, and was turned down, a snub she never forgot. Similarly, Morrison was not a favored child in the publishing industry or any other kind of industry in her young years. She was born in Lorain, Ohio, to lower-middle-class parents. After graduating from the historically black Howard University and getting an M.A. from Cornell, she taught in two different states and raised two boys as a single mother before settling into an editing job in New York, where she unearthed several important black writers, including Toni Cade Bambara and the gifted poet Henry Dumas. Her generosity toward young writers is not well known outside the industry, hidden by a shy, cautious personality and a straightforward, matter-of-fact persona. A few years ago she recounted to an interviewer that as a young girl, she had a cleaning job in a rich white person’s home. Her employer yelled at her one day for being a useless cleaner. She ran home in distress. Her mother told her to quit, but her father, a steelworker, gave her a stern lecture that Morrison never forgot: “Go to work, make your money and come home. You don’t live there.”

I am so glad she took his advice. I used to believe that God created Toni Morrison for the voiceless among us, that He knelt down and encouraged a little black girl in Lorain, Ohio, to whisper “I want blue eyes” to her friend Chloe Wofford, who, 30 years, two children, one divorce, one name change and more than four cities later, would sit down at age 39 and stick a pin in the balloon of white supremacy, and in the hissing noise that followed create “The Bluest Eye,” one of the greatest sonnets in the canon of American literature. But I don’t believe that anymore.

Toni Morrison does not belong to black America. She doesn’t belong to white America. She is not “one of us.” She is all of us. She is not one nation. She is every nation. Her life is an instruction manual on how to be humble enough, small enough, tiny enough, gracious enough, heartful enough, big enough, to do what Ella Fitzgerald did at Harvard 37 years ago. To take an unknowing audience in the cradle of her hand and say, “I love you … and you … and you. …” To love someone. It’s the greatest democratic act imaginable. It’s the greatest novel ever written. Isn’t that why we read books in the first place?

James McBride is an author, musician and distinguished writer in residence at the N.Y.U. Carter Journalism Institute.

THE SOURCE OF SELF-REGARD
Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations
By Toni Morrison
350 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $28.95.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Jazzed. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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