Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision

Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature

Nadra Nittle

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506471518
• eBook ISBN: 9781506471525
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies

When Toni Morrison died in August 2019, she was widely remembered for her contributions to literature as an African American woman, an identity she wore proudly. Morrison was clear that she wrote from a Black, female perspective and for others who shared her identity. But just as much as she was an African American writer, Toni Morrison was a woman of faith.

Morrison filled her novels with biblical allusions, magic, folktales, and liberated women, largely because Christianity, African American folk magic, and powerful women defined her own life. She grew up with family members who could interpret dreams, predict the future, see ghosts, and go about their business. Her relatives, particularly her mother, were good storytellers, and her family's oral tradition included ghost stories and African American folktales. But her family was also Christian. As a child, Morrison converted to Catholicism and chose a baptismal name that truly became her own--Anthony, from St. Anthony of Padua--going from Chloe to Toni. Morrison embraced both Catholicism and the occult as a child and, later, as a writer. She was deeply religious, and her spirituality included the Bible, the paranormal, and the folktales she heard as a child.

Toni Morrison's Spiritual Vision unpacks this oft-ignored, but essential, element of Toni Morrison's work--her religion--and in so doing, gives readers a deeper, richer understanding of her life and her writing. In its pages, Nadra Nittle remembers and understands Morrison for all of who she was: a writer, a Black woman, and a person of complex faith. As Nittle's wide-ranging, deep exploration of Morrison's oeuvre reveals, to fully understand the writing of Toni Morrison one must also understand the role of religion and spirituality in her life and literature.

1

Black, Christian, and Feminist

Toni Morrison’s Village Literature

“Invisible to whom? Not to me.”1

Toni Morrison once made this quip about Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man to distinguish herself from the Black male writers who came before her. She suspected that authors such as Ellison, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin—who described his inner critic as the “little white man deep inside of all of us”2—wrote books with white readers in mind. Morrison pointed out that while white people appear in her books, she crafted her novels without “having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.”3 Instead, Morrison wrote her books first and foremost for Black people, a choice for which she refused to apologize. Just as Tolstoy wrote for a Russian audience, she explained, she was writing for Black readers—many of whom have remained devoted fans beyond her death at age eighty-eight in 2019.

Her decision to approach literature through an African American lens meant writing books rooted in the Black oral tradition whereby storytelling is not an individual endeavor but a group effort that mirrors the communal nature of Black life throughout the African diaspora. Morrison wrote what she characterized as “village literature, fiction that is really for the village, for the tribe,”4 and, in this way, her fiction includes all the complexities of the village experience. Rather than stick to the point, her narrators sometimes veer off course, only to return to the topic at hand after an aside, much like village storytellers do—a tradition this book will follow. Also, her novels aren’t just told from one point of view but from the multiple perspectives found in any group or tribe.

The speech patterns of her characters originate from African American culture, specifically those of her family members. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in 1931 in the ethnically diverse steel town of Lorain, Ohio, Morrison grew up hearing the stories of Mexican, Italian, and Greek immigrants, often marveling at them. But nothing topped how fluidly her relatives used language,5 and she wanted her fiction to reflect their verbal dexterity.

“When something terribly important was to be said, it was highly sermonic, highly formalized, biblical in a sense, and easily so,” Morrison recalled of her family. “They could move easily into the language of the King James Bible and then back to standard English, and then segue into language that we would call ‘street.’”6

Morrison’s family took pride in the fact that her grandfather read the Bible five times from cover to cover.7 With reading materials limited—“there were no books, no libraries”—the Bible was the only book available to him, and his decision to read the Scriptures amounted to “taking power back,” since it had been illegal for enslaved African Americans to read. Following her grandfather’s example, Morrison’s parents had books throughout their household. “That was like resistance,” she said, but the Bible remained the family’s literary foundation.

At the core of Morrison’s literature is the Black community, and at the heart of that is African American religion, as it was in her family. Black America regarded Christianity as a belief system of liberation and wed it with West African oral, spiritual, and folk traditions. This religious sensibility shapes the stories Morrison chose to tell, how she told them, and the characters within them. In her effort to capture how the African Americans she knew conversed, worshipped, healed, loved, and told their own stories, Morrison created a literary universe in which the supernatural and the church coexist with the dual horrors of racial oppression and misogyny. Her engagement of the spiritual world allowed Morrison to center Black characters, particularly women, whose otherworldly gifts empower them in a society determined to strip them of their agency.

She wrote novels, she said, that reflect the shrewd decisions Black people make to survive, all while experiencing “some great supernatural element.”8 In her books, as in life, faith in the invisible—be it in God or magic—“make[s] the world larger”9 for African Americans.

The Black Church’s Effect on Black Storytellers

The fact that the Bible influenced the speech of Morrison’s relatives (and, later, her literature) wasn’t at all unusual. Across time, this was the norm for African Americans, as evidenced by the Black church’s effect on the storytelling styles of the late James Baldwin, Morrison’s contemporary, and President Barack Obama, three decades her junior. Born seven years before Morrison and raised in neighboring New York, Baldwin said that serving as a teen pastor in his father’s Fireside Pentecostal Assembly Church in Harlem shaped both his personal character and the cadence of his language—from his melodious use of words to his talent for scene setting.

Recalling his adolescence, Baldwin said, “Those three years in the pulpit—I didn’t realize it then—that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty.”10

More recently, the speeches of Barack Obama have drawn comparisons to sermons. The forty-fourth president has routinely invoked both Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount in his talks and broke into a rendition of “Amazing Grace” while eulogizing the victims of a 2015 hate crime at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The son of a white Kansan mother and a Black Kenyan father, Obama grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia removed from the African American church, but after moving to the continental United States and converting to Christianity as an adult, he attended Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s predominantly Black South Side. There, he absorbed the Black sermonic style, complete with the call-and-response tradition in which a pastor shouts out a line, and the congregation—or as Morrison might put it, the “village”—replies. With African origins, call-and-response continues to mold Black speech and literature centuries after the first Africans landed in the Americas in chains. The tradition is found throughout Morrison’s oeuvre, notably in a pivotal church scene in Song of Solomon (1977).

Along with religious allusions, Obama has peppered his speech with street language and colloquialisms akin to how Morrison’s family members did and her fictional characters do. Addressing a heavily Black crowd in South Carolina while campaigning for president, he used African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and slang to object to how his rivals were deceiving the public about his policy stances and religious beliefs.

“They’re trying to bamboozle you,” he said in January 2008. “It’s the same old okey-doke. Y’all know about the okey-doke, right?”11 He went on to say “hoodwink,” which along with “bamboozle” was a word Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X famously used. To quash the smear that he was a Muslim, Obama pointed out how he’d been a member of the same church for twenty years, “prayin’ to Jesus wit’ my Bible.”12

He never explicitly referred to racism during his speech, but the use of AAVE and colloquialisms largely associated with Malcolm X made his intentions clear to the African Americans in the crowd. This is known as signifying, which sociologist Michael Eric Dyson defines as the Black tradition of “hinting at ideas or meanings veiled to outsiders.”13 According to Dyson, “Obama’s risky move played to inside-group understanding even as he campaigned in the white mainstream: denying he was Muslim, he fastened onto the rhetoric of the most revered Black Muslim, beat for beat.”14 Morrison’s literature is filled with signifying—her books include cultural references, turns of phrase, and traditions that may not register to readers who aren’t African American.

In a different 2008 campaign speech, Obama motioned as if he was brushing off his “haters,” a nod to rapper Jay-Z’s 2003 hit “Dirt off Your Shoulder.” After this gesture, he drew cheers from the crowd in the same way theatrical Black preachers elicit praise from church members, which Morrison captures in novels such as Sula (1973). The idea of brushing dirt off one’s shoulder may very well be rooted in Jesus Christ’s advice to his disciples to “shake the dust off [their] feet”15 should anyone not welcome them into their homes or listen to their message. In Black culture, even hip-hop expressions sometimes derive from Scripture.

Given the outsized influence of the Black church on Black language, Morrison’s desire to write literature that “was irrevocably, indisputably Black,”16 as she phrased it, went hand in hand with writing fiction that was inherently Christian. She said the religion appealed to African Americans on a psychic level because it offered a message of transcendent love, and Black people, of course, have survived unimaginable hatred. Today, as Americans grow increasingly less religious, 79 percent of Black people still identify as Christian,17 a higher percentage than whites (70 percent) and Latinos (77 percent).

When discussing the historic importance of Christianity to the Black community, scholars tend to cite the Old Testament, noting that enslaved African Americans identified with the enslaved Israelites that Moses freed from Egypt in the book of Exodus. For liberating dozens of Black people from bondage, the abolitionist Harriet Tubman was famously nicknamed Moses, connecting the Israelite experience to the African American one.

Black women specifically have identified with Hagar in the book of Genesis. Forced into surrogate motherhood by Abraham and Sarah, the couple who enslaves her, Hagar and her son, Ishmael, are ultimately cast aside and take flight in the wilderness. Held captive during slavery and employed as maids during Jim Crow, African American women could relate to Hagar, for they, too, suffered sexual exploitation and served as substitute mothers to the white children they waited on, watched over, and wet-nursed. Morrison understood why Black people saw themselves in the Old Testament and named one of the characters in her 1977 novel Song of Solomon after Hagar. Yet she also noted that the New Testament resonated with African Americans and with her personally.

“The Bible wasn’t part of my reading: It was part of my life,” she said during a 1981 interview with author Charles Ruas. “The New Testament is so pertinent to Black literature—the lamb, the victim, the vulnerable one who does die but nevertheless lives.”18

In many of her books, including Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved (1987), characters live on in some form despite dying. In Beloved, the infant slain by her mother to avoid a life of enslavement rises from the dead to exact her vengeance. In Song of Solomon, characters fly despite jumping to their deaths, and in Sula, the woman blamed for the evil in her village dies painlessly but lives on to relish that fact. In the novels of Toni Morrison, death isn’t the end of one’s journey because African Americans, grounded in their Christian faith, have not believed that death equals an absolute end. The 1934 film Imitation of Life, based on Fannie Hurst’s novel of the same name, is a case in point and directly influenced Morrison. It follows Delilah Johnson, a Black mother with a striving daughter named Peola who is pale enough to pass for white and abandons her mother to cross the color line.

Marginalized in a racially stratified society that leads her own child to reject her, Delilah fixates on life after death, saving nearly all of her meager earnings for an elaborate funeral. The white characters in the film find her seeming preoccupation with death morbid; Delilah, however, isn’t focusing on death but on the afterlife. Unlike the enslaved Africans who, lore says, didn’t jump to their deaths but flew away to liberate themselves from bondage, Delilah doesn’t actively cause her own demise. Still, she remains steadfast that she’ll receive the dignity that eludes her in life in the hereafter.

Morrison alludes to Imitation of Life in her debut novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), in which a Black father rapes and impregnates his young daughter. With a slight tweak, she names the book’s tragic little girl character, Pecola, after the film’s “tragic mulatto” character, Peola. While the dark-skinned Pecola longs for blue eyes, the light-skinned Peola is willing to turn away a loving mother for would-be acceptance in a white supremacist society that loathes Blackness.

“Black women have . . . been given . . . the cross,” Morrison said of her first book. “They don’t walk near it. They’re often on it. And they’ve borne that, I think, extremely well.”19

Hence the Christianity in Morrison’s literature isn’t just uniquely Black but includes the divine feminine. It is entangled with African folklore and mythology; unorthodox preaching based on biblical principles and community mores; and women’s healing, power, and intuition. Her books engage religious syncretism, or the blending of discrete faith and folk traditions, because enslavement forced Black people throughout the diaspora to meld the religious beliefs of their captors with African customs and spiritual practices, giving rise to new strains of Christianity.

Black Liberation Theology

With a mother who belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a denomination where race and religion intersected from the outset, Morrison grew up understanding Black Christianity as a philosophy of refuge, if not liberation, for African Americans.

The first Protestant denomination established by African Americans, the AME Church was formally recognized in 1816, but its origins date back to the late 1700s, when white officials at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church ousted a group of Black worshippers from the san...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1. Black, Christian, and Feminist: Toni Morrison’s Village Literature
• 2. A Magical Black Heritage
• 3. Black and Catholic: A Long Tradition
• 4. Sula’s Deconstruction of the Madonna, the Whore, and the Witch
• 5. The Folklore and Holy Women of Song of Solomon and Beloved
• 6. Paradise’s Black Madonna and Afro-Catholicism
• 7. A Literary Legacy of Resilience
• Notes
• Index