Rise Up

Toni Morrison died a few days ago at the ripe old age of 88.  That’s a good, long life, but I am greedy and I wanted her to keep telling stories, to keep telling us what it means to be human in all its messy and bloody atrocities.  Nobel Prize winner; Pulitzer Prize winner; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2016.  She will be missed; may her voice ever echo down the mountain from sea to shining sea.

Morrison was no stranger to tragedy and loss.  Her family home was burned to the ground by the landlord for late rent; she was two years old at the time.

It happened again when she was 62.  This time, the fire was ignited by a fireplace ember, but most of Morrison’s priceless papers and manuscripts were saved.

Her son, Slade Morrison, died of pancreatic cancer in 2010 at the age of 45, which stopped her work on her novel, Home (Vintage International, 2013), until she realized he would expect his mother to go forward with her writing.  And so she did.

Her voice became a clarion call against injustice, words of protest flowing from her pen, calling the world’s attention to the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott, unarmed black men killed by white police officers.

She addressed white privilege and fear in her essay published in the November 21, 2016 issue of The New Yorker after Donald Trump was elected president.  I can only imagine what she would have to say about the bloody days of murder and mayhem in California, Texas and Ohio, and the 255 incidents of mass murder that have occurred already this year.

Critic John Leonard in his office

In reading the numerous tributes and obituaries online for Morrison, one name leapt off the page at me.  He was the first white critic to trumpet Toni Morrison’s extraordinary voice and talent:  John Leonard, book and cultural critic for publications as diverse as CBS News, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Boston Globe, Esquire, and the Los Angeles Times.  John Leonard inspired me to read and write, one of many critical influences in my life.  His book, The Last Innocent White Man in America (The New Press, 1993), made me want to read and write about books and culture.  He turned criticism into poetry, and raised such writing to its own exalted place in the pantheon of belles-lettres. He, too, is gone now, eleven years ago.

Something clicked over in my head.  It was time.

I dusted off The Teacher’s View and On The Street Where I Live, my online essays about literature, culture and the life of the mind, and about living in Los Angeles.  We have a culture in crisis.  We have a country in crisis.  We face enormous, heart-breaking and dangerous challenges.  This is not the time to keep silent but to raise one’s voice, as Toni Morrison and John Leonard did.  This is the crucible where we determine what we’re made of and what we value most.  This is the time when we must, finally, institute a culture of equality, respect, and love.  There is no other way forward.

A long time ago, my first mentor-teacher told me that real teachers never fully walk away from the classroom; they will always find their way back.  Teachers, writers, philosophers, or students—human beings always find their way.  The path is not easy, and there will be tragedies and failures.  Trial and error, feeling demoralized and empty, lost and alone—this is what we are experiencing now, even as we stare at our phone screens and try to lose ourselves while carrying the overwhelming burden of anxiety and fear.  But as Socrates once said:  “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  Only through intense and relentless self-examination can we come to understand ourselves and others.  We rise to meet the challenges of brutality and racism.  We pick up the torch and carry on.  This is not the time to retreat but to reach out and find the truth and humanity in the immigrant, the neighbor, the human being living on the street.  As Toni Morrison and John Leonard taught us, in the face of aggression, oppression, and rage, we must rise up whatever way we can, and be very, very brave.