Response to Morrison’s

Race Matters

October 8, 2023

I haven’t written an essay in a year. The time that I put toward it began getting dished out to other priorities like work for capital and my relationship with my fiancee, minute-by-minute until I only had time left for writing fiction. But, I recently re-read (although the revelation felt novel) Race Matters by Toni Morrison and in an attempt to summarize the unique offering her words bring to the subject of race, I wrestled with her analysis of the house/home antagonism and race-specific, race-free language that I’ve come to agree is necessary for our collective liberation from the seemingly impenetrable prison of racism.

Since I was 13 living in Exeter, NH I have been thinking critically and seeking out literature, and speeches, and opinions, and stories, and movies, and all forms of knowledge that had been produced on the subject of race. At that age with a heart for God and a belief in justice (and death-dealing implications of injustice) I would not accept that this is how the world has to be. Why would I accept a world that wanted me, as a man characterized as ‘black,’ dead? 

This intellectual (though treated as survivalistic) pursuit continued over the last decade through my living abroad, going to college, and commencing full-time work by way of electoral politics and nonprofits. Of all the knowledge I’ve consumed, which is still but a sliver, the only writer and artist I felt I had shared vision with was Toni Morrison. There is something visceral yet peaceable about her language that promised the realization of bearing truth that has been lived without diminishing its felicity nor compromising on its narration. But, for the past year I haven’t read a single thing from her. I re-member listening to her Nobel lecture on YouTube, a speech that helps to spur my own creativity, but nothing from her did I hold in my hands and flip page-to-page.

Over the years in my early 20s consuming her work, I was convinced I needed to search outside of her to other writers, to Black male writers like Bladwin, Hughes, Bambara, Wright, Whitehead, Coates, Wilson, and Baraka. But, this week, I read Race Matters from her larger collection Mouth Full of Blood, and it agitated three questions within me that I must write in order to do the work of arriving at solutions, which include the better questions that accompany deep thinking: (1) If being ‘black’ doesn’t define a person’s identity, then what does being ‘black’ really mean? (2) Can we accept the historicity of ‘blackness’ without succumbing to domicile in the white power structure such racial language like ‘black’ was created within? (3) Using Morrison’s language, how do we live in a racial house and yet have freedom?

These questions have particularly percolated in my mind due to the fiction project I’ve been writing for three years now. How do I write from the space-time of Virginia in the 1860s where matters of race are so critical to the setting, without subjecting myself to the master narrative and language which removes what might be beautiful about a raced people into an image of racial hierarchy and human subjugation? How do I center the lives of enslaved and indigenous people whose experiences are subjected to the egregious violence enacted by racial hierarchists at the all-encompassing level of government in law and society, without falling into the traps of positionality determined by those racial hierarchists thereby still playing the rules of their chess game that uses (to make it more personal) the history of my people as pawns?

I took on this fiction project because of the images occupying my mind, places I couldn’t get rid of, scenes that haunted me in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. People who kept speaking until I heard them clearly, animals who kept gesturing until I could read their body language, landscape that kept arising before my very eyes asking me to write it, to write it, to write it. I am not doing this work because it is fun, or because it is ideal, I am doing this work because I believe in the real, tangible possibilities of a race-specific, race-free society which starts with art, with literature, with writing that works on hearts and minds by being rooted in human experience. And I want to see it realized.

I want to believe that I chose fiction, but I must say it claimed me. I thank God for imagination oriented to justice, and I pray that this piece arrives soon. In the meantime I will continue to think about that race-specific, race-free society, one that might begin,” Two dead men lay prone in her doorway, hands clutching their bellies in vain, their pink lips flat on the heart pine floor. Hannah waited to lower her revolver, switching her gaze from the back of one to the back of the other, making sure neither chest rose up any more. Sophia and Joseph were safe, safe from being taken alongside the slave the two came searching for and failed to find.

“She wasn’t planning to harbor him in her cupboard. Truth be told, she didn’t expect to see him walk in with his dingy shirt and mud-stained pants, still wet from his travel downriver in the Pamunkey. Maybe Abram was a gift she thought, one the river thought she needed to re-member. Or maybe it was just her luck attracting men who invited fear into her heart…”