“I also want my work to capture the vast imagination of black people. That is, I want my books to reflect the very practical, shrewd, day to day functioning that black people must do, while at the same time they encompass some great supernatural element. We know that it does not bother them one bit to do something practical and have visions at the same time. So all the parts of living are on an equal footing. Birds talk and butterflies cry, and it is not surprising or upsetting to them. These things make the world larger for them. Some young people don’t want to acknowledge this as a way of life. They don’t want to hark back to those embarrassing days when we were associated with ‘haints’ and superstitions.” - Toni Morrison Early, on a morning just like this one: when the overcast is so marbled, but the sun is so bright that the sky shines pale amber, glowing grey-gold all around you, I leaned against the bodega counter up the street from my house, waiting for my breakfast. I was also watching carefully between cigarette ads glued to the picture window frame for a glimpse of the bus that promised to carry me across the city and up the mountain to interview for a job that would never contact me again. The sandwich arrived before the bus— sausage, egg, and cheese melted into a bagel—and I brought it outside to wait under the corner store’s red awning. No one else walked the earth here: not at the gas station across the street, or at the corner to my left, where the dope boys usually bask. This was a few months back, when all that extra hurricane water kept pouring over north Jersey, not knowing that we wouldn’t be drowned; that south Jersey had tried and it just never took. The rain started and stopped at inconvenient times, like that morning, halting when no one was awake. Even without the showers, the chewed-up streets of Newark, with potholes like craters, still carried lakes of various sizes. My headphones were shot, so I stood there, listening to birds, and planes, and the quiet roar of a distant garbage truck drawing nearer. Before long, it rolled into view over the hill of Chancellor Avenue, the night-green of the collector lugged by the white cab. Apart from the driver, the other men, usually hanging from the sides of the truck, were nowhere in sight. It paused at the light, across the street, beside the gas station, and then made a left down Maple. As it swung through the intersection, the rear of the truck veered gracefully into view, revealing the other two collectors. They were squatted in the horse stance, arms lifted, clinging to the very back of the truck with their heavy boots planted firmly on the pavement. And, as the garbage truck rounded the corner, it pulled them through pools of water mixed with runoff gasoline, the fanning spray from their feet showering bright colors out over the street behind them. In their neon orange vests, reflecting all the light that found them, these men shone, teeth gleaming inside their dark beards. They drove off, singing laughter louder than the growl of the truck. I watched them go, struck so dumb by their magic that I didn’t even realize that I was laughing, too. I’m so glad this is a true story. I’m so terrified to imagine how, if not for Toni Morrison’s guiding light on Black, everyday magic, I never would have noticed the moment-to-moment miracles of the hood. White supremacy is a kaleidoscope lens, placed over a peephole that views Blackness. If we let it, it can decide how we see ourselves, feeding remarkable lies about standards of life and love and beauty. This same lens reforms cornrows as boxer braids, beauty supply dollar bamboo hoops as hundred dollar high fashion, historically Black neighborhoods as worthless unless they have been colonized. In 1986, Christina Davis interviewed Toni Morrison one year before Beloved was published. Morrison was known for harboring a deep dislike for having her writing nimbly shuffled into the genre of magical realism, which was primarily introduced by the Uruguayan writer Felisberto Hernández. The supernatural elements used by he and his contemporaries were largely meant to downplay the often radically political themes of their stories. When asked about her aversion towards the descriptor “magical realism,” Morrison answered: “My own use of enchantment simply comes because that’s the way the world was for me and for the black people I knew.…There was this other knowledge or perception, always discredited but nevertheless there, which informed their sensibilities and clarified their activities. It formed a kind of cosmology that was perceptive as well as enchanting, and so it seemed impossible for me to write about black people and eliminate that simply because it was ‘unbelievable’.” Now, I don’t make the rules. Our Black experiences can be, have been, and are, both wholly magical and wholly real. It is etched unending into the fibers of your being, just how chosen you truly are. Each mundane moment, whether you are afraid to notice it or not, holds a dazzling spirituality. The nine hours spent under the trusted hands of the alchemist, weaving marvels into your scalp in as many colors and styles as there are stars. The buzzing propinquity summoned by a circle of you and your friends doing nothing, chilling, shooting the shit, sharing sunflower seeds and people watching on the porch. The instant at the cookout where a sudden chime over the speakers paves the way for blaring, noble trumpets, announcing the swag surf, convoking strangers to kin, arms linked in a nameless, joyous, triumphant kind of Black freedom. These blessings are so easy to overlook, invisible to the eyes of those who disdain it for not suddenly belonging to them when they try to Grinch it from our fingers like Christmas. It may be popular to view Blackness through the peephole that deems it uncouth, ghetto, ratchet, or any other title white supremacy has greedily latched onto to use for its lens. But, even through that peephole, our Blackness views us right back. It tells you that you are beautiful, powerful, and chosen, even when you feel forgotten. Especially when you feel forgotten. It sends signs that society tells you to ignore; goes out of its way to grin at you in the street while white supremacy does that weird shift-eyed, lip-press, nodding shit. Y'all know what I'm talmbout. It is every ancestor, who only ever existed for you to walk the earth. It is the bad ass kids hopping fences through everyone’s backyards. It is your mama. It is God. It is the perfectly natural supernatural that Toni Morrison was brave enough to face, beyond the lens, and braver still to show the world, recording in her golden tomes that Blackness, in all its oppressed, dehumanized, and brutalized reality, continues to be pretty damn magical. Works Cited
Christina Davis, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations, 242–43. Interview originally published in 1987. Lipinski, Jed. “Meet Felisberto Hernández, the Father of Magic Realism.” Village Voice, 5 Aug. 2008, www.villagevoice.com/2008/08/05/meet-felisberto-hernndez-the-father-of-magic-realism/. Nellie Y. McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danielle Taylor Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 153. Interview originally published in 1983 .
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