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Toni Morrison

If all of Toni Morrison's work could be summed up with just one quotation from one of her individual features, it would have to be Pilate's fact, in recital of Solomon, "Life is life. Precious." really, Morrison's work overflows with the stuff of life — the analyzed and the unanalyzed life, the triumphant and the tragic life, the little, undervalued life and the flamboyant, commemorated life. In re- examining Morrison's work to arrange this capacity, it appeared to me that the very imperative which compels Toni Morrison to write is life itself. And what grander subject issue is there? Around the time I first began reading Morrison seriously, I ran across an interview in which she was defending herself against the allegation that the tales she tells are larger than life. "Life IS large," she retorted, and her work carries that assertion vociferously. The irony comes in the tales she selects to tell; after all, what is the worth in hearing the story of a young very dark incest casualty who desires for nothing but the blue eyes she believes will allocate her society's acceptance and the love she craves? Or the excursions of a materialistic juvenile man with the befitting surname "Dead," who stoops to steal even his own aunt? Or the harrowing journey of a runaway slave woman whose short taste of flexibility convinces her that murdering her children is more just than allowing them to be re- turned to slavery? Through her novels Morrison forces us to accept that the inhabits we often overlook and seldom commemorate are possibly the inhabits we can discover most from.

Edward P. Jones

The picture only in black and white as Edward P. Jones was the first year of her mother's in Washington, DC, Satana Jeanette major's door earrings and a ...