Lessons on Black Art Writing From Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison photographed by Jill Krementz in her office at Random House in New York City on February 13, 1974 (© Jill Krementz; image courtesy the photographer) She had just died, and I couldn’t stop looking at a photograph of her. She held me there: in her Random House office in 1974, outstretched arms, open palms, eyes cast upwards, mouth widening into a shape of jubilation. I do not know what she is reacting to in the picture, but I still can’t get over the way that ecstasy gathers on her face. My gaze cannot let go, for I am committed to looking at her with the kind of uncompromising affection with which she looked at Black life. Five years ago, I was arrested by that image of Toni Morrison, captured by photographer Jill Krementz. She had passed the night before on August 5. We were all learning of her death the morning after, and a hollowness was growing in my stomach as the reality set in that there would be no more pages unfurling from the wideness of her imagination, no more of her pen loving and lingering on Black life in the way she did. I return to Morrison’s writings — novels and non-fiction alike — several times a year. With each encounter, she gives me a new set of eyes and imbues my sight with deeper shades of Blackness. Morrison is salient always, but particularly so when I am looking. And looking is among the principal investments in my life as a writer responding to and thinking alongside artworks — for the most part, artworks by artists of the Black diaspora. Almost a year after Morrison’s death, in that 2020 summer convulsing with Black protests and elegies, after the unrelenting tides of anti-Blackness had once again swelled with death and then with the futile promises of White guilt, a video of the writer — clipped from a 1998 interview with Charlie Rose — began circulating widely on the internet. She is majestic in leopard print as she speaks about how White people see — or cannot […]

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