The Toni Morrison Book Club

by Juda Bennett, Winnifred Brown-Glaude, Casssandra Jackson, Piper Kendrix Williams

Overview

In this startling group memoir, four friends—black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born—use Toni Morrison’s novels as a springboard for intimate and revealing conversations about the problems of everyday racism and living whole in times of uncertainty. Tackling everything from first love and Soul Train to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, the authors take up what it means to read challenging literature collaboratively and to learn in public as an act of individual reckoning and social resistance.
 
Framing their book club around collective secrets, the group bears witness to how Morrison’s works and words can propel us forward while we sit with uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and identity. How do we make space for black vulnerability in the face of white supremacy and internalized self-loathing? How do historical novels speak to us now about the delicate seams that hold black minds and bodies together?
 
This slim and brilliant confessional offers a radical vision for book clubs as sites of self-discovery and communal healing. The Toni Morrison Book Club insists that we find ourselves in fiction and think of Morrison as a spiritual guide to our most difficult thoughts and ideas about American literature and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299324988
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	02/04/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Juda Bennett is a professor of English at The College of New Jersey and the author of Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts and The Passing Figure. Winnifred Brown-Glaude is an associate professor of African American studies and sociology at The College of New Jersey and the author of Higglers in Kingston: Women’s Informal Work in Jamaica. Cassandra Jackson is a professor of English at The College of New Jersey and the author of Violence, Visual Studies, and the Black Male Body and Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. Piper Kendrix Williams is an associate professor of English and African American studies at The College of New Jersey and the coeditor of Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, and Other Forms of Racial Division.

Table of Contents

Contents
Introduction: The Book Club Meets 3
Cassandra’s Secret 13
Not Today, Motherf#@$ 19
Why Black Folks Go Crazy 38
Juda’s Secret 63
Dangerous Music 68
Funny White People 84
Winnie’s Secret 105
Black Life and the Dead Deer 111
On Guns and Apples 129
Piper’s Secret 144
Too Many White Guys 149
Harriet Tubman’s Shawl 166
Epilogue: A Letter to Toni Morrison 181
Afterword 186
Acknowledgments 189
Sources 192

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/14/2019

In this insightful group memoir, a reading group of four English professors from the College of New Jersey tackles four Toni Morrison novels: Beloved, The Bluest Eye, A Mercy, and Song of Solomon. Each contributing a pair of essays, they consider African-American history, personal experiences, and Morrison’s lessons for the present moment. Jackson interprets The Bluest Eye as a critique of the “strong black woman” cultural trope, while Brown-Glaude finds in Song of Solomon “models of resistance from which we can learn... today.” Bennett muses on his outsider position as the volume’s one white contributor through Beloved’s “brief representation of a comic white girl,” and Williams reflects on A Mercy’s exploration of the costs of “being seen” through her own memory of “being the only black kid in a sea of” white high school students. She then fittingly concludes the collection with a piece that merges the personal, literary, historical, and contemporary, as she visits the National Museum of African American History and Culture and feels, while viewing Harriet Tubman’s shawl, the “epiphanal blackness” also present in Morrison’s work. For book lovers and history buffs, as well as the politically engaged, this collection, though small in size, will yield vast intellectual riches. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

What can the work of Toni Morrison teach us about the world we live in? Morrison’s work provides a scaffolding here; the narrative frame of the distinct voices is unique and makes for an intriguing multivocal experience.”—Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine

“Poignant. Fear and dread run through this book in a really impactful way, and every revelation felt substantive and singular. Reading Morrison becomes vital to the group’s efforts to mourn and to march forward in their own lives.”—Michelle S. Hite, Spelman College

“For book lovers and history buffs, as well as the politically engaged, this collection, though small in size, will yield vast intellectual riches.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

From the Publisher

★ 01/01/2020

In 2015, college professor friends Bennett (Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts), Winnifred Brown-Glande (Higglers in Kingston: Women's Informal Work in Jamaica), Cassandra Jackson (Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body), and Piper Kendrix Williams (Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow), who form a diverse group of black and white, gay and straight, immigrant and American-born, gathered together and created the Toni Morrison Book Club. After two years of meetings, they crafted this personal work celebrating Morrison's most memorable novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Song of Solomon, and A Mercy. Here, an aspect of Morrison's writings becomes a catalyst for discussions on police brutality, immigration, xenophobia, mothering, and exoticizing black female bodies, with intimate, moving, and often funny essays evoking a thoughtfulness and honesty on the part of the authors that in turn is demanded from readers. VERDICT All who pick up this book, from Morrison devotees to newcomers, will discover lessons in the literature to apply to their own lives. They will also feel inspired and wish to be part of a Toni Morrison Book Club of their own.—Stefanie Hollmichel, Univ. of St. Thomas Law Lib., Minneapolis

Library Journal

Toni Morrison’s novels serve as a catalyst for four friends to reveal their upbringings and personal truths in this group memoir. Each narrator represents one author and delivers three essays in succession, all beginning with a secret. For example, after Daniel Henning formally narrates the introduction, Adenrele Ojo delivers “Cassandra’s Secret” and the two essays that follow. The authors intertwine their own experiences with those described in four of Morrison’s novels. The material helps listeners to better understand these educators. The narrators’ voices shape the authors’ diverse backgrounds, adding a bit of sassiness, sternness, raw frustration, and communal adoration of Morrison. These personal touches create both wonder and connection to Morrison’s powerful literary works. T.E.C. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

JANUARY 2021 - AudioFile

2019-10-23
Toni Morrison's novels elicit powerful feelings of fear, grief, and anger.

Friends and colleagues at the College of New Jersey, Bennett (Toni Morrison and the Queer Pleasure of Ghosts, 2014, etc.), Brown-Glaude (Higglers in Kingston: Women's Informal Work in Jamaica, 2011, etc.), Jackson (Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body, 2010, etc.), and Williams (co-editor: Representing Segregation: Toward an Aesthetics of Living Jim Crow, 2012) gathered informally for several years to discuss the novels of the iconic Nobel laureate: "Morrison is our griot, a singer and social commentator, the keeper of traditions and the exemplary engaged citizen of our world." Black and white, three women and one man, all parents anxious about their children's futures, they discovered that Morrison's works spoke to each of them directly, helping them to understand what it means to be black in America and to "live whole in times of uncertainty." To structure the conversations conveyed in this insightful group memoir, they agreed to focus on four novels—The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and A Mercy—assigning each to two writers to show how the same novel affects different readers. Besides offering close, fresh readings of Morrison's narratives, the authors share personal stories about the experiences that have shaped them as readers. Bennett, for example, grew up knowing he was an anomaly in his racist military and law enforcement family. Reading Song of Solomon, he writes, gave him a "feeling of floating outside myself" that allowed him "to feel comfortable as an outsider." Jackson, writing about Beloved, and Brown-Glaude, about Song of Solomon, reveal their fears as mothers, consumed by worry about how to keep a child safe in a world where so many unarmed young black people have been killed by police. "My fear is borne out of the unpredictability of those deaths," Brown-Glaude writes. "And my fear, at times, turns to anger toward those mothers of white sons who do not have to live this way."

Intimate responses to fiction cohere into a moving meditation on race.

Kirkus Reviews