Photo of the Day: Toni Morrison ‘Bench by the Road’ Project, Nyack, NY

Besides Carson McCullers, the Nyack area’s other major literary luminary was Toni Morrison. While walking in the village’s Memorial Park a couple of weekends ago, I came across and took a photo of this commemoration of African-American history that the Nobel Literature laureate (who resided a few miles away, in Grandview-on-Hudson) highlighted.

Ten years ago this past May, as part of the Toni Morrison Society’s “Bench on the Road” project, the novelist attended a public ceremony commemorating an individual who was part of the vast diaspora resulting from the forced “Middle Passage” from African freedom to American slavery.

The project took its name from Morrison’s 1989 observation about the lack of public places “to think about…to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves.”

This roadside monument honors Cynthia Hesdra, a former slave who became a successful businesswoman and property owner in Nyack. As a conductor on the Underground Railroad, she aided others from the South in achieving the liberty and opportunity she had come to enjoy.

The Underground Railroad involved the transfer of an estimated 30,000 to 100,000 people to freedom—a mass movement in which countless ordinary citizens performed extraordinary deeds. They changed America forever by defying legally sanctioned, government-sponsored, shameful racism.

Visitors passing through Nyack would do well to ponder how Cynthia Hesdra did her part, and how each of us could do ours now.

Quote of the Day (Toni Morrison, on ‘A Disrupting Darkness’)

“All of us are bereft when criticism remains too polite or too fearful to notice a disrupting darkness before its eyes.” —American novelist, essayist, editor, and Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

(Photo of Toni Morrison taken at a lecture at West Point Military Academy in March, 2013. Author of photo: West Point - The U.S. Military Academy.)

Quote of the Day (Toni Morrison, on How ‘Unharassed Writers’ Trouble Bullies, Racists, and Predators)

“Writers, journalists, essays, bloggers, poets, playwrights can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population. Truth is trouble. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources.”—American novelist, essayist, editor, and Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019), “Peril,” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019)

(Photo of Toni Morrison taken at a lecture at West Point Military Academy in March, 2013. Author of photo: West Point - The U.S. Military Academy.)

Quote of the Day (Toni Morrison, on Beauty as ‘What We Were Born For’)

“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.”—American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019), interviewed by Claudia Brodsky Lacour, The Paris Review Podcast, Episode 13: “Before the Light,” Podcast Season 2, Oct. 23, 2019

The image accompanying this post of Toni Morrison was taken on Mar. 28, 2013 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. 

Quote of the Day (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, on a Slave Mother)

“She is a mother pale with fear,
   Her boy clings to her side,
And in her kirtle vainly tries
   His trembling form to hide.
  
“He is not hers, although she bore
   For him a mother's pains;
He is not hers, although her blood
   Is coursing through his veins!
  
“He is not hers, for cruel hands
   May rudely tear apart
The only wreath of household love
   That binds her breaking heart.”—African-American poet, abolitionist and temperance and women's suffrage activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), “The Slave Mother,” originally published in her Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), anthologized in American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume Two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals, edited by John Hollander (1993)
 
I am glad to see historians’ growing attention to Reconstruction and the far longer Jim Crow era of reaction to the political and economic gains of African-Americans. It’s important to realize how easily such advances can be reversed.
 
But with the federal holiday of Juneteenth occurring today, I think it’s also important to remember that emancipation—and the horrifying Civil War that made it possible—also ended practices that would never be repeated. One of these was the breakup of slave families by their owners, a dread evoked in the above verses.
 
I had never heard of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper before I began looking for a quote in observation of Juneteenth—she never came up in my college courses on American literature nor American history in the 19^th century—but I think her life and career are worth recalling.
 
Particularly in the antebellum era, this child of free blacks bore witness, through her writing and lectures, to the horrors of slavery—and implicitly refuted whites who perpetuated the myth of innate African-American intellectual inferiority.
 
For a deeper consideration of what Harper meant—for her time and ours—I recommend Eric Gardner’s 2015 post on OUPblog, Ohio University Press’s Website offering “Academic Insights for the Thinking World.”
 
The image accompanying this post, Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's The Modern Medea (1867), was inspired by Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who, after being recaptured in the North through the Fugitive Slave Act, killed her own daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery.
 
Garner’s case—an example of the plight faced by African-American women under slavery depicted by Harper—also gave rise, a century later, to Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987), as well as her libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005).

Quote of the Day (Toni Morrison, on Why ‘There Is No Time for Despair’)

“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge—even wisdom. Like art.” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Toni Morrison (1931-2019), “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear,” The Nation, Apr. 6, 2015

(Photo of Toni Morrison taken at a lecture at West Point Military Academy in March, 2013. Author of photo: West Point - The U.S. Military Academy.)