The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,54

of literature. William Gass is correct. There are “acres of Edens inside ourselves.” Time does have a future. Longer than its past and infinitely more hospitable—to the human race.

INTERLUDE

Black Matter(s)

Tribute to Martin Luther King Jr.

Pursuing the recollections of several people for projects he is engaged in, Martin Luther King III recently asked me for my thoughts on his father. And one of his questions was predictable, designed to elicit some subjective response. He said, “If you were having a conversation with my father, what would you like to ask him?” And for some wholly unaccountable reason, my heart skipped and I fairly keened into the telephone. “Oh, I hope he is not disappointed. Do you think he’s disappointed? There must be something here to please him.” Well, I calmed my voice to disguise what was becoming obvious to me, that what I really meant was, “I hope he is not disappointed in me.”

I went on to frame a question that I would like to put to him, and I set aside my thoughts about the current state of affairs for the dispossessed: some wins, but some big-time losses; some vaulting leaps, but much slow sinking into muddy despair.

But all the while, I was wondering, Would he be disappointed in me? And it was odd, because I never met Reverend King. My memory of him is print-bound, electronic, through the narratives of other people. Yet I felt this personal responsibility to him. He did that to people. I realized later that I was responding to something other, and more durable, than the complex personhood of King. Not to the preacher he was or the scholar he was or the vulnerable human being, not to the political strategist, the orator, the brilliant, risk-taking activist. But I was responding to his mission. His, as he coined it, audacious faith. His expectation of transforming, appending, cosmic elegy into a psalm of brotherhood.

His confidence that we were finer than we thought, that there were moral grounds we would not abandon, lines of civil behavior we simply would not cross. That there were things we would gladly give up for the public good, that a comfortable life, resting on the shoulders of other people’s misery, was an abomination this country, especially, among all nations, found offensive.

I know the world is better, finer, because he lived in it. My anxiety was personal. Was I any better? Finer? Because I have lived in a world that is imaginary. Would he be disappointed in me? The answer isn’t important. But the question really is, and that is the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. He made the act of assuming personal responsibility for alleviating social harm ordinary, habitual, and irresistible. My tribute to him is the profound gratitude I feel for the gift that his life truly was.

Race Matters

EARLY ON in my life as a writer, I looked for but never actually found a sovereignty, an authority like that available to me in fiction writing, but at no other site. In that activity alone did I feel completely coherent and totally unfettered. There, in the process of writing, was the illusion, the deception of control, of nestling up ever closer to meaning. There was (and still is) the delight of redemption, the seduction of origineity. But I have known for a good portion of the past twenty-nine years that those delights, those seductions are rather more than less deliberate inventions necessary both to do the work and to legislate its mystery. But it became increasingly clear how language was both liberating and imprisoning. Whatever the forays of my imagination, the keeper, whose keys tinkled always in earshot, was race.

I have never lived, nor have any of you, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, a world free of racial hierarchy, is frequently imagined or described as dreamscape, Edenesque, utopian so remote are the possibilities of its achievement. From Martin Luther King Jr.’s hopeful language, to Doris Lessing’s four-gated city, from Saint Augustine to Jean Toomer’s “American,” the race-free world has been posited as ideal, millennial, a condition possible only if accompanied by the Messiah or situated in a protected preserve, rather like a wilderness park.

But, for the purposes of this talk and because of certain projects I am engaged in, I prefer to think of a world in which race does not matter—not as a theme park, or a failed and always failing dream, nor as the father’s house of many rooms. I