Happy Birthday Toni Morrison: An Invocation for the Salt Tasters
Last week, I was invited by my stellar comrade + colleague Dr. Jakeya Caruthers to lead an embodied spiritual-political education workshop/Deep Study Salon honoring the work of Toni Morrison as apart of Berea College’s African & African American Studies department’s Black History Month programming.
Since we know each other from the Bay, Dr. Caruthers is familiar with several dimensions of my work and invited me to dream up an offering that could engage my sensibilities as an artist, scholar and facilitator. Thinking about my work with The Church of Black Feminist Thought, I immediately knew I wanted to do an interactive workshop. As we dreamed up the session I asked Dr. Caruthers, “What is the Morrisonian lesson that Berea’s campus needs?” and during our first visioning conversation she replied: a lesson about imagination and wild ethics.
The next time we spoke we had gathered Morrison quotes that we felt delivered the lesson. The one I got stuck on came from an interview in Claudia Tates’ Black Women Writers at Work (1983):
Tate: Cholly [The Bluest Eye], Ajax [Sula], and Guitar [The Song of Solomon] are the golden-eyed heroes. Even Sula has gold flecks in her eyes. They are the free people, the dangerously free people.
Morrison: The salt tasters. . . . They express even an effort of the will or a freedom of the will. It’s all about choosing. Though granted there’s an enormous amount of stuff one cannot choose. But if you own yourself, you can make some type of choices, take certain kinds of risks. They are the misunderstood people in the world. There’s a wildness that they have, a nice wildness. It has bad effects in society such as the one in which we live. It’s pre-Christ in the best sense. It’s Eve. When I see this wildness gone in a person, it’s sad. This special lack of restraint, which is a part of human life and is best typified in certain black males, is of particular interest to me. It’s in black men despite the reasons society says they’re not supposed to have it. Everybody knows who “that man” is and they may give him bad names and call him a “street nigger”; but when you take away the vocabulary of denigration, what you have is somebody who is fearless and who is comfortable with that fearlessness. It’s not about meanness. It’s a kind of self-flagellant resistance to certain kinds of control, which is fascinating. Opposed to accepted notions of progress, the lock-step of life, they live in the world unreconstructed, and that’s it.
With Morrison’s provocative utterance about the “nice wildness,” the “self-flagellant resistance to certain kinds of control” and her call to live in the world “unreconstructed” and “opposed to accepted notions of progress” as our guide we shaped a one-hour ( too short!) introduction to the practice of Black feminist study.
What follows is the invocation I wrote to call in Morrison’s work. Thinking about her as a lead architect in the construction and maintenance of Black imaginative possibility. Understanding her creative practice as bigger than the books she wrote. Holding the decisions she made about how to be in the world as a Black woman and a Black woman writer.
In May of 1985 Toni Morrison published a love letter to black women in the 15th anniversary edition of Essence Magazine titled “A Knowing So Deep.” This undercited treasure offers a glimpse at the breadth of all that Morrison knew.
“I think about us, black women, a lot;” she wrote, “How many of us are battered and how many are champions. I note the strides that have replaced the tiptoe; I watch the new configurations we have given to personal relationships, wonder what shapes are forged and what merely bent. I think about the sisters no longer with us, who, in rage or contentment, left us to finish what should never have begun: a gender/racial war in which everyone would lose, if we lost, and in which everyone would win, if we won.I think about the black women who never landed who are still swimming open-eyed in the sea. I think about those of us who did land and how their strategies for survival became our maneuvers for power.”
I would like to invite us all to join her in thinking about those still swimming open-eyed in the sea. Who swim with us and into our pores, eyes and mouths when we enter the sea for ritual, relief and recreation. Further i’d like for us to consider new, or untraditional configurations of personal relationships. Shapes forged and bent. That constitute the wildness of a legacy that seasons us all.
Christina Sharpe’s offering of “residence time” from In The Wake helps to ease the posturing of theoretical distance some so-called “progressive” scholars of black studies like to take when discussing the middle passage. Technically defined as “the average length of time during which a substance, a portion of material, or an object is in a given location or condition” for Sharpe, residence time signifies the ways bodies thrown, or jumped overboard and never recovered during the middle passage have likely “broken down into various components, like sodium from their blood” that are still with us today. Hortense Spillers writes and Saidiya Hartman reminds, that it is while “suspended in the oceanic” that the captive africans are culturally unmade and ungendered into vulnerability and possibility.
The Carribbean sugar plantation has a different relationship to water than the US Southern cotton field, the middle Georgia cotton field has a different relationship to water than the Coastal Georgia rice plantation. Nevertheless at psychic, ontological and material levels the past is present. Those Africans will rise again as the water cycles, they will rain down, they will be consumed, but above all they will be here alongside and inside of us.
So now, how do we move forward? And perhaps that question is precisely the problem. Morrison, and her people, pose a new question; how might we tread this water? What does it taste like?
One portion of bodily salt I think about often is sweat. And I think of sweat in tandem with heavy breathing. Exasperation. The pulse of what Fred Moten might term “exhaustive celebration in and through our suffering.”
On March 5, 1974 Toni Morrison was photographed dancing at a New York Disco. In one of the black and white photos of her that evening owned by getty images, her right arm lifts towards the roof, fingers curled into a snap, her waist twists in dance and underneath the heavy/ of her unbridled breast we see the damp markings of a good time. I want to think with the moment that may have come sometime after. The moment her body stilled itself in a corner, folded over, hand to knees as she caught her breath. As her sweat, her salt, continued to bleed through the fabric of the evenings costume to be met with a breeze that she cherished.
(I know this moment exist in some capacity, however different from my fabulation, because of the things I wish to share with Toni Morrison, there are the contours of a body black and feminine , there are folds of flesh that hold moisture, there is a heart and there are lungs)
How might this sweat, This moment of the body following pleasure to its outpour, connect us to what Gwendolyn Brooks terms, those maternal armies lining the oceans floor? How are our waters linked? How is our breath shared? What might it mean to conspire, in this way, with those who can’t breathe, who don’t need to?
How does one channel this ethos into an ethic let alone a literary career? Morrison knows. Her wildness is a contagion spread throughout a rhizomatic network of sisters. Black women protecting each other (and their shared genius) fiercely. Mutual aid in a cooked meal and an informal ‘fellowship check.’ Posthumous collaboration. Sister-circles. Rigorous care in the margins of draft after draft of Manuscript.
Morrison wrote things that she believed, so every biting moment of the text, ever tear she provokes, is intentional. The lingering presence of her voice in your head is by design. She baits you out towards the wild thing of your own imaginative doing. And even when you don’t know its her hand reaching out towards you through the bush (Jazz), she’s left her mark.
Huey P Newton. Muhammad Ali. Angela Davis. Henry Dumas. Gayl Jones. Nettie Jones. Toni Cade Bambara. And so many others. Toni Morrison midwife’d a bevy of wild imagination.
In her honor, we fix our mouths to cherish the taste of our own fearlessness.
Let The Church say Axe!
Embodied Practice: Place a few granules of salt on a spoon (coarse salt works best but any is fine!). Sit down in a position that feels grounded. Close your eyes and place the salt on your tongue. Take a full minute to be present with all the sensation the salt brings as it melts. Beyond taste, what does it feel like? Where do you feel it? Is it pleasant? What does it remind you of? Free write for about 3 mins if it helps you process. Then re-read the Morrison quote and decide for yourself what it means.
