Beloved

via https://www.washingtonpost.com

Eight black female writers and thinkers on Toni Morrison’s life and legacy

ESSAYS BY

Michelle Obama, Esi Edugyan, Sherrilyn Ifill, Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Tayari Jones, Jacqueline Woodson, Michele L. Norris, Leah Wright Rigueur

Illustration by Diana Ejaita for The Washington Post

Michelle Obama

“We belong, she showed us, not just in paperback books but in textbooks, not just in a publishing house but in the White House.”

The summer after my senior year of high school was a slow one for me. I’d had a cyst removed from my wrist, and a heavy white cast cocooned my forearm up to my elbow. There wasn’t a lot I could do. Sidelined on my parents’ couch in the South Side heat, I picked up a paperback copy of “Song of Solomon.” I hadn’t heard of Toni Morrison yet, so I can’t say I did it because I was curious about her writing, or that I was being purposeful about supporting African American women authors. The truth was, I didn’t know anything about the book. It was simply there in the living room, just like me.

I like to think that this is the way that she would have liked it; that she’d have wanted the tidiness of her prose, the interiority of her characters, the complexity of the stories to stand on their own, away from her growing legend. Toni Morrison understood, you see, that people …

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