The author with Toni Morrison and American poet Yusef Komunyakaa

Photo of Morrison for the back cover of her debut novel, The Bluest Eye

“America became free, tested, tried, and triumphant, through that black pot experience.”

Of all the artists that I have come to understand as having a profound impact on arts, life, understanding our values, a sense of heritage and the powers particularly of literature, it’s Toni Morrison. She stands tall in the history of American literary arts as an author, writer, social critic, editor and spokesperson for humanities, education and culture.

With her elegant and powerful use of language and her gifted view into the world, she came to be a critical chronicler of our culture. Her role as a professor of literature at Princeton and her amazing career as a literary editor-turnedinternationally read and respected author, is legendary, unmatched in modern times. Few authors in our time enjoy iconic rock starlike public adoration. Her very presence, her words in response so thoughtful, informative, gracious and with critical bite.

Morrison’s collected work within the reflective realm creatively presents us with stories and characters whose actions and images point to social markers and symbols that reveal and recapture declarations that resonate with readers. These representations find some alignment with the values embodied in our literary heritages and the worthiness of her cultural expressions.

In her 2016 series of lectures at Harvard, collected in a book titled “The Origins of Others,” she uses the notion of “otherness” and takes the reader through numerous literature accounts, which illustrates the acuteness of social division due to a political prescription of “otherness” and provides a lens which is hugely disturbing to say the least. It is hardly a move toward a better society, as such suspicions and alienating our other sisters, brothers, neighbors and town dwellers we must avoid.

Morrison’s work gives us paths to recognize our failures and recover by telling stories in real terms through her characters.

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. She and her three brothers and sisters lived with their parents in the small Midwestern town along the Black River, integrated with many ethnicities.

It was called “the international city” because of its diverse population and being a major industrial center, with a shipyard and steel plants. Chloe’s father worked as a steel welder, her mom as a domestic. They were resourceful and respected members of a strong close-knit community. The area attracted many immigrants. These conditions were hugely impactful on Morison’s development as a person and thinker.

She learned to read at age three, and had heard their grandfather read the Bible five times. She came to understand that reading was “a revolutionary thing.” With the encouragement of her parents, she excelled in school. She studied Latin and read voraciously. As a child she worked in a library and spent more time reading the books than shelving them.

Chloe graduated with honors and attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. She graduated in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in English and went on to graduate studies at Cornell University, receiving her master’s degree. Then she returned and taught at Howard from 1957 to 1964.

In 1958 she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, and had two sons. In 1965, Morrison began working as a textbook editor for a subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, N.Y. Two years later she was recruited as an editor at Random House in New York City, where she worked for more than 15 years, being the first female African American editor in the company’s history. Later, in a “second professional wind,” she began writing more steadily as an author. She stated, “I look very hard for Black fiction because I want to participate in developing a canon of Black work … where Black people are talking to Black people.”

“The Bluest Eye,” her first novel, was a book where Black girls were the centerpiece. Morrison asks, “How does a child learn, self-loathing, and what are the consequences? I won’t, I won’t be Black. I don’t want the Black one (doll).” We remember those lines in the film “Imitation of Life.” This is interior pain, so deep, that if the girls only had some characteristic of the whiteness, she would be ok. That problematic master narrative is imposed on everybody else.

The central themes that define Morrison’s value sets as a writer are always the Black American experience, as her characters find themselves and their cultural identity. All this models a value system that’s end is to find place, humanity and to celebrate the victories in the struggle to assign meaning to a recognized humanity, in which love, struggle and redemption are interwoven.

She stated, “I knew words had power.” Toni Morrison, for our purposes here, was a powerful leading champion of the arts and education.

“The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overheard by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists’ questions challenging authority never being posed, upstaged plays, canceled films — that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”

In Black life and culture, arts, music, dance and very hugely books for Black people have been, following the Bible, always held up and had an incredible impact on our culture.

The super prolific artist of words, ideas and concepts underlining our human narratives, she wrote 11 novels, all of which are books she is hugely known and celebrated for.

Morrison’s work explores slavery, our history, gender influences, the lived experiences of men and women, and celebrates Black American culture, especially in music and geography, revealing the effects of generational trauma particularly in regard to racism and sexism in families and the larger community.

The idea we raised about the total impact of artists’ ideas on value construction and living is clear in the work of Toni Morrison. She brought Black culture and literature into the previously exclusive world of mainstream publishing. In Toni Morrison we have our griot.

Her awards alone speak of the professional appreciation she garnered — the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for “Beloved,” National Book Critics Circle Award for “Song of Solomon” and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first Black woman to be selected for the award. Toni Morrison received as well the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama.

I love documentary films.

Toni Morrison’s piece called, “The Pieces I Am,” softly fractured me, where I am. I have never been so moved because it ripped questions through me that I heard from her, and it showed up in my thinking about what we might be now in the moment of now. So, what are you going to do? And that question, for anyone, is riveting and compelling at once. Who am I as I need to be now? I am not shy in sharing that as a younger man I served as her 2001 Atelier visiting professor at Princeton, and she commissioned an opera from me, on Black sculptress Edmonia Lewis.

She helped me to not be fearful of failure, having anxieties, encouraging not to focus on worry, noting that, “in the end, it’s about the results of what you produce that really matters.” I’ve never forgotten that.

The Pieces I Am film, more than any other, gives an account of not just a person’s life, but how life can be understood through this person. That person, the subject of the film, is Toni Morrison and understanding what light she was.

Professor Morrison credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music and folklore as they helped her develop a strong sense of clarity and perspective.

In the film, Oprah Winfrey notes, “Depth of meaning, knowledge and education. ... There is not a sentence that does not teach us.”

The film captures so many illuminating aspects of how Morrison was read and respected by the general public, but in particular, her close colleagues.

Morrison in one segment states: “This is America, that is made from a melting pot. All the people, are melting in the pot. Black people are the pot. Everybody becomes melted together inside of us. Black people are the pot that all got baked in because America became (free, tested, tried, and triumphant) through that black pot experience.”

She told TV journalist Charlie Rose, “If you can be tall because everyone else is on their knees, what is tall? And who are you really?”

Near the end of the film, Morrison states: “The older women I knew in my family. …They were people of dignity and of value, and they knew they had to pass that along.”

The film closes as a loving postcard written by Morrison’s dear friend poet, Sonya Sanchez. “And she was loved. To be human, to be alive and to have done well on the planet and in the end someone saying, “you are Beloved.”