Word: morrisonism
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THERE IS an understanding that even the lightest skin cannot hide any traces of African blood from the eyes of another Black person. For Toni Morrison, this blood reveals itself as a ghost. She sees ghosts haunting each pair of eyes, coloring every Black man or woman's skin, ghosts that become, for Black people, a cloak and an identity. Toni Morrison must stare very hard and deep into the brown faces she sees, watching these ghosts so intently that they have become alive themselves and are often more vibrant than the human beings whose lives they influence...
Howard Sand, in the number one slot, won the first set 7-5 after carefully testing opponent Craig Morrison, a player he has also confronted before. In a repeat of that previous match. Sands torpedoed the midshipman in the second and final...
...takes 200 pages to find out, though not before Morrison forcefully diverts attention from her love story to some serious conflicts in the Street house. Valerian and Margaret do not share a bedroom. He spends most of his time in a greenhouse tending feeble plants that might flourish if left outside in the trade breezes. Ghostly pale, Margaret lies in the shade and believes that her son Michael will finally visit her. In the kitchen, Ondine, Sydney's wife, cooks Main Line specialties and fumes about the unreasonable demands of her boss's wife. Ondine also harbors...
...emotions and passions. The author wisely does not explain too much. She depends on a ripe, sometimes overripe, prose style to create atmospheres in which strange things are possible. The Caribbean, with its buried history of slave trade and uprisings, its lingering essense of negritude, is a good stage. Morrison attempts to evoke island life with touches of the magic realism that made Song of Solomon so successful. It does not quite work in Tar Baby. In fact, the strongest sense of place is conveyed in a scene set in New York City, where the author is an editor...
...also suspect because the church, while an instrument of salvation, is also an instrument of social containment, a taming device. The idea of home is elusive and treacherous, with one's home being traced either to a ghetto or to a Southern plantation or, as in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), into the past, where there are more dreams than roots. Is the U.S. itself home? That is no easy problem for a people from whom much of the country's bounty has been withheld, yet who are far more native sons than most whites...