Hey, Celestial!

Love. Tar Baby. A Mercy. Home. Beloved. In this order, I revisited and in some cases read for the first time these works by Toni Morrison. My mum had all the books she had published up until the 80s, and I felt this urgent impulse to fill in the remaining gaps. I spent the entire month of July doing this, leaving Beloved for the end of the month near my birthday. I can’t say I would recommend doing what I did, reading several of her works in quick succession, unless you can spare significant amounts of time to catch your breath. I finished a few weeks ago, and I’m still breathless from the language, hypnotized by her brilliance, and unsettled by the aspects of human nature that she revealed and compelled her readers to reckon with. Even as I went from book to book knowing I should take a break, I kept going because I felt so strongly that I couldn’t stop. I left work a little early one afternoon to catch the documentary The Pieces I Am as part of the Roxbury Film Festival, and enjoyed it thoroughly while also feeling as though I had seen it before after spending hours watching any interviews and archival footage of her that I could find. Probably because I was spending so much time thinking about her and reading her work, I also dreamt one night that she was my teacher, literally, standing at a white board and writing out a lesson for me to take notes. My best friend said something in my spirit must have known.

Hey, Celestial! Hey. Celestial. Hey Celestial (Photos by Warring Abbott, 1974)

Toni Morrison, Toni the gawd, Toni Morrison as in one of the greatest to ever do it, became an ancestor on Monday night. This news was the first thing to greet me when I sat at my desk at work on Tuesday morning, on time for once and feeling unusually optimistic about the day. Toni Morrison is now an ancestor. Hey, Celestial! I don’t know what else to say except that I have never felt so deeply about the death of someone I didn’t know personally. I don’t know what else to say that people far more eloquent than me are already saying about what it has been like to live on this earth at the same time as someone so legendary. I don’t know what else to say except that I wrote nearly 2000 words last night which is far more than I’ve written in one sitting in weeks. I don’t know what else to say except that we are now living in a world where Toni Morrison is no longer sitting by a window somewhere laughing that distinct laugh and being wise and hilarious and sarcastic all at once. Except we are. She is still with us. Hey Celestial.

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Here’s what I posted on my social media accounts last night:

I talk about her all the time. As it is with so many other people, her name usually comes first for me as one of the writers who made it possible for me to imagine widely and to attempt to put that imagination into words. The yet to be finished book project I turned in as my masters thesis would literally be nowhere without Song of Solomon.

I’ve lost count of the number of application essays, reflection papers for class, and casual conversations in which I reference reading my mum’s copies of Morrison’s books when I was too young to fully understand, and yet somehow I did, and kept reading and re-reading her for years after that, trying to understand what kind of mind produces the sort of sentences she puts together.

She gave a series of lectures in Boston in 2016, at a time when I was feeling burnt out and discouraged at school and at work, and violated and angry in my personal life. I went to four of those lectures to hear her speak, and the way her presence filled the room was nothing short of divine. I’m still feeling discouraged these days, and especially today, but I guess because of Toni Morrison and what she has made possible, it is my responsibility to keep trying to do this thing called life.