Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
Amid the many tributes and retrospectives that appeared following the death of novelist Toni Morrison, one observation stood out. In an interview Morrison spoke of how satisfying it was to write about the life of African Americans because the culture, history and life of her community was so much richer than that of white America. She was glad to have liberated herself from the need to write with the white man looking over her shoulder.
One gains an appreciation of what she was talking about upon reading her work. The lives of her characters are as full, contradictory, rich, sorrowful, tragic and joyful as the lives of any segment of humanity, perhaps richer because of the epic struggle that history assigned to them.
Of course, her world is not the exclusive preserve of black readers. The story of humanity shines through all great literature, from whatever culture, and all of humanity has access to it. Dostoyevski allowed us into 19th century Russia. Flaubert and Balzac brought us into 19th century France. Cervantes and Shakespeare created works of universal importance from Spain and England. Gabriel Garcia Marquez gave us Latin America; Philip Roth gave us Jewish America. In all of these examples, writers of imagination have erased borders of time and space. And while they grounded their work in the specifics of their own worlds, borders of ethnicity or race seemed to vanish.
For me, the writer who has come closest to Morrison in creating a rich and varied African American world was the playwright August Wilson. I am not of that world, but in reading both Morrison and Wilson, that world has been opened up to me, bringing me within a larger, richer idea of America.
It may be a peculiarity of mine, but as a reader, I have tended to resist works about my own world and the places with which I am familiar. Thus, it’s embarrassing to admit, but I have never given Howard Frank Mosher the chance he deserves as a writer from the Northeast Kingdom. Writers have the power to make familiar places seem strange and imagined places seem real. The Vermont of Castle Freeman, one of my favorite Vermont novelists, is strange enough that it is appealing to me.
This tendency of mine goes back to my family’s origins in Idaho. My brother always said I should read the novels of Ivan Doig, whose books are set in the mountains of Idaho and Montana, where my family is from. But that world is too familiar to me. I’d rather read about Dickens’ London or Roth’s Newark.
Or the worlds of Toni Morrison. There is so much discussion today about cultural identity, multiculturalism and diversity that we need to remember the point of diversity is for people like me to be able to lose myself in the literature of African Americans or other artists of the broad American community. I may be especially susceptible to the appeal of African-American literature because my cultural awareness was shaped from the age of 10 by the music of jazz. In the California suburb where I grew up, I was a bit of a music weirdo, more or less clueless about rock ’n’ roll (till the Beatles). For my 12th birthday I had my parents take me to hear Dizzy Gillespie and Carmen McRae. My response to jazz music was visceral from an early age, and exposure to the music inevitably acquainted me with the heroic struggle that went into the music’s creation by pioneers such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and the whole long catalog of brilliant musicians. And loving the music conditioned me to appreciate the struggle as it played out socially and politically. Loving Louis conditioned me to love Martin.
Ross Douthat, columnist for The New York Times, named Toni Morrison with Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner and Cather as essential pillars of the American canon. He might also have mentioned Twain. A number of canonical writers, including Morrison, Twain, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston have placed African Americans at the center of the American experience. That doesn’t mean John Cheever and John Updike didn’t write important works about white suburbanites; it just shows that the American palette includes an extraordinarily broad spectrum of experience.
The specific culture that was handed down to me through my forebears was particular and narrow. My great-grandfathers and grandfathers included farmers, miners, a teamster, a tailor, who helped to settle the Rocky Mountain West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were people trying to wrest a living out of a harsh and rugged region. One was described to us as a ne’er-do-well logger and Indian fighter; his wife, my great-grandmother, seems to have been a formidable figure and a survivor. Wallace Stegner is the novelist who has best captured their world.
Though every culture has its stories and its human depth, I can see why Morrison looked at her own history and culture and saw it as rich soil to till artistically. The tragic-heroic drama of captivity, enslavement, struggle and freedom that form the American story offers artistic potential surpassing the story of the tailor who came from Denmark with his sewing machine on his back, settled in Utah and became my great-grandfather — not to take anything away from the accomplishments of the enterprising young Christian Hansen. Willa Cather might have found a place for him in her work.
Toni Morrison gave us America, and a richly imagined rendering of the horror that has been central to American life — not just African-American life, but the life of a place where white people and black people, and a multiplicity of others, are bound together in a single community, where the struggle to reconcile crimes past and present with the hovering and enduring spirit of humanity is our continuing challenge.
