Your Annoying Friend, Toni Morrison

Angela Davis

She and Angela Davis were locked in a room in Cuba writing her autobiography.  

This was painful for Angela Davis.

She had just fled the US, and Toni Morrison was all like “Angela Davis, what was the color of the table in the room where you had your first Black Panther meeting?”

There’s an interview from 2011 with the two of them where they recount this.  They spend most of it cracking up, talking about Angela’s Davis’ impatience and Toni Morrison’s complete apathy towards her impatience.

Finally, Angela Davis says “It turns out it did matter what color the table was in the meeting room.” Then they both start cracking up again.

Oprah

Remember when Oprah built that school?

So right afterwards she was like, this school is my legacy, while talking to Toni Morrison.

And Toni Morrison was like “no absolutely not.”

(Don’t you feel like talking to Toni Morrison on a regular basis involved her saying “no, absolutely not,” a lot?)

She continued:

“Your legacy is that every woman in America trusts themselves more and hates themselves less because you told them that they needed to wear their bras differently.”

And Oprah was like… OK fine. that’s my legacy. But I am still really excited about the school. **

Herself

There’s this essay this English professor wrote that’s like, it’s wild to me people say they understand Toni Morrison because I have taught four graduate level classes on her work and I still have no idea what the fuck happens in Beloved.

I share this because this next part feels a little risky — to try to guess how a writer felt about her work, one who was so often operating five miles above the heads of the greatest minds I can think of (both the ones she was friends with and the ones she wasn’t).

At any rate, in my mind, Toni Morrison funded that play making fun of Hamilton solely out of personal joy, rather than any sort of sense of justice or obligation.

In my mind she was like, you know what? This play is for me, I deserve it, i’m very old. 

And maybe that was the final part of her legacy, after she created her own and everyone else’s:

Fuck it, this part is just for fun. 

** This story is from Making Oprah. I would love to believe that when Toni Morrison made fun of Oprah’s school, she was also saying your school is a symptom of American Imperialism. But I don’t know if that is the case.