The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,30
the moral inhabitants of the galaxy. Why trash that magnificent obligation after working so hard in the womb to assume it? You will be in positions that matter. Positions in which you can decide the nature and quality of other people’s lives. Your errors may be irrevocable. So when you enter those places of trust, or power, dream a little before you think, so your thoughts, your solutions, your directions, your choices about who lives and who doesn’t, about who flourishes and who doesn’t will be worth the very sacred life you have chosen to live. You are not helpless. You are not heartless. And you have time.
The Slavebody and the Blackbody
IN 1988, the same year James Cameron opened America’s Black Holocaust Museum here in Milwaukee, I responded to an interviewer’s question. Having published a novel investigating the lives of a family born into bondage, I was being asked about the need for, the purpose in articulating that unspeakable part of American history. The need for remembering the men, the women, the children who survived or did not survive the three-hundred-odd years of international commerce in which their bodies, their minds, their talents, their children, their labor were exchanged for money—money they could lay no claim to. Since the argument for shunning bad memories or sublimating them was so strong and, in some quarters, understood not only to be progressive but healthy, why would I want to disturb the scars, the keloids, that civil war, civic battle, and time itself had covered? The slavebody was dead, wasn’t it? The blackbody was alive, wasn’t it? Not just walking, and talking, and working, and reproducing itself, but flourishing, enjoying the benefits of full citizenship and the fruits of its own labor. The question seemed to suggest that, whatever the level of accomplishment, little good could come from writing a book that peeled away the layers of scar tissue that the blackbody had grown in order to obscure, if not annihilate, the slavebody underneath.
My answer was personal. It came from a kind of exhaustion that followed the completion of my novel. An irritability. A sorrow.
“There is no place,” I said, “where you or I can go, to think about or not think about, to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves; nothing that reminds us of the ones who made the journey and of those who did not make it. There is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby. There is no three-hundred-foot tower. There’s no small bench by the road. There is not even a tree scored with an initial that I can visit or you can visit in Charleston or Savannah or New York or Providence or, better still, on the banks of the Mississippi.”
“Somebody told me,” I continued, “that there is a gentleman in Washington who makes his living by taking busloads of people around to see the monuments of the city. He has complained because there is never anything there about black people that he can show. I can’t explain to you why I think it’s important, but I really do. I think it would refresh. Not only that, not only for black people. It could suggest the moral clarity among white people when they were at their best, when they risked something, when they didn’t have to risk and could have chosen to be silent; there’s no monument for that either.” Except in the names of institutions that pay homage to a white person’s care, or generosity: Spingarn, General Howard, Spelman, etc. “I don’t have any model in mind,” I said, “or any person, or even any art form. I just have the hunger for a permanent place. It doesn’t have to be a huge, monumental face cut into a mountain. It can be small, some place where you can put your feet up. It can be a tree. It doesn’t have to be a statue of liberty.”
As you can tell I was feeling quite bereft when I made those comments.
When I use the term “slavebody” to distinguish it from “blackbody,” I mean to underscore the fact that slavery and racism are two separate phenomena. The origins of slavery are not necessarily (or even ordinarily) racist. Selling, owning people is an old commerce. There are probably no people in this auditorium among whose ancestors or within whose tribe there were no slaves. If you are Christian, among your people were slaves; if you are Jewish, among your