Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM looks at the life of the distinguished author of 11 novels who won a Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1987 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Morrison showed America, white and Black, about the Black experience unfiltered through a "white gaze." White critics viewed her early books with condescension, calling them "narrow," by which they meant that she depicted a Black world that omitted the white world, which was exactly the point Morrison says she was trying to make. When someone compared her work unfavorably to novelist Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man, about a Black man whose life is shattered by experiences in the white world, Morrison pointedly asks, "Invisible to who?" That protagonist wasn't invisible to other Black people, only to the demeaning white world he faced. Her death in 2019 leaves behind a legacy that touched many students, writers, and readers. She was a professor at her alma mater Howard University and at Princeton University. As a Random House editor, she coaxed books out of Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali, her personal mission to "bring other people of color to the party." She laments what she observes as a "master narrative" that guides society, something like an ideological script imposed by people in authority on everybody else. That's why some young Black girls prize white dolls and why some older Black women self segregate by skin tone, an experience Morrison had at the historically Black college Howard University, where she was invited to join a sorority that she later learned only accepted light-skinned Black women. The movie opened in June 2019; Morrison died of pneumonia two months later at the age of 88.