Juda Bennett - The Toni Morrison Book Club

The Book Club Meets

This is a book of secrets. The things you dont say unless youve been pushed, encouraged, or required. That time your brother called black people niggers and you said nothing. How you came to this country on a travel visa and never left. Your relief at giving birth to a girl, not a boy, just as the headlines announce another unarmed black man killed by cops. That time you let a white boy pretend that he didnt know you in front of his friends, even though he had put his hands all over your black body the night before.

It is also a book about how to coax secrets from your friends, getting them to reveal the tender part of who they are. Here are the basic facts of our book club. We are black and white. Three women, one man. All of us parents. All of us professors. All of us concerned about the future. But beneath these basic facts are other flavors to our group. Of the four of us, one is gay, another attends church regularly, a third speaks Jamaican patois, and the tallest of our group flirted briefly with a modeling career.

After two years of meeting in our homes, sometimes at restaurants, and around tables and chairs of every shape and size, we have learned when we can push, prod, and challenge eachother. Weve been loud with explosive laughter, choosing the back parts of restaurants or bringing our hilarity to the parking lot. And weve also shouted, wildly screaming at the stupidity of the world, sometimes coming back to humor and irony as some small compensation. And in order to center ourselves, we come back to Toni Morrison.

We turn to Morrisons novels not so much as guide but as inspiration, allowing her wordslike musicto make us feel, express, and discover. We have taken this principle as the starting point. How might Toni Morrison help us live whole in times of uncertainty? How do her novelsembedded as they are in historyspeak to us now? How can her words illuminate the problems of everyday racism and guide us toward healthy responses and greater clarity?

But this is not a scholarly treatise on Morrison. There are already wonderful guides to her novels, brilliant studies of her worktoo many to count. This book does not aspire to add to that list. We have dispensed with notes, left literary analysis behind, turned instead to personal inquiry in order to celebrate what the novels can offer rather than explain what they do.

It is not so much that Morrison is secondary but more that she is central as a catalyst. This, then, is a group memoirwith Toni Morrison as our soundtrack. The stories we tell may not illuminate Morrisons work in revolutionary ways, but they shine a light on the act of reading when it just cannot help but become deeply personal, fiercely political, and surprisingly emotional.

When Juda was struggling to explain the kinds of personal stories that he wanted this book to include, he turned to Cassandra and said, You know, like that story you told about your mother teaching you how to look out for KKK members by looking at their shoes? The others had not heard this story, so Cassandra delivered a shortened versionno southern accent this time, just her mothers sobering words: If they have theirfaces covered, look at their shoes so youll know them when theyre handing you the mail or teaching your class at school. This is the kind of story you expect a very old person to tell, not something one of your peers would experience, but we know it happened.

You have to write that down, Piper said. Winnie nodded, slow and serious.

I already did, Cassandra said. Its in my last book. Then she raised one eyebrow and pressed her lips into a half smile. Wait! So yall didnt read my last book?

Piper smiled and cocked her head in a way that said, I have three kids. And then we were all laughing.

In writing our stories, we challenged each other to look beyond our first accounts, pushing each other to discover what is underneath our protective shields. We reached into our pasts, while also mining the events of our present to understand how everyday racism shapes us all. Morrison has said, I want to feel what I feel. Whats mine. Even if its not happiness. Is that what we are after?

We share these stories as a guard against burying hurt. First, we let Morrison push us to uncover all the hurt and all the work to be done. Then we prodded, bugged, and emboldened each other into thinking and writing about it. Our stories remind us that even this moment, so saturated with lies that some have described it as posttruth, is not as new as it sometimes seems. We call on the past to say that there was never a time of innocence, even if there were times of deep denial. Remember that term postracial, bandied about during the Obama years with no recognition of the work that was yet to be done and certainly no anticipation of the person who would replace him in the Oval Office? We also know that there is a chance that we are yelling into the wilderness, but we take comfort in the fact that at least we can hear each other and together move past fear, repression, and surrender.

Even though the idea to write a book using Morrisons novels to discuss current events was alluring, we had to ask ourselves, Why Morrison? Why us? And why now? Yes, we loved her, but wouldnt it be easier to just write about current events without also introducing our readers to books they might never have read? And even if we thought we saw ourselves reflected at times in her work, so did Oprah Winfrey and Beyonc. And if we could get past that fact, wouldnt it be easier to write a book alone and without the competing voices, albeit from friends, with different visions of how to respond to the social and political changes in the country?