Wanting to buy a gun for protection, especially in a world where black bodies are all too often the target of guns, is a really difficult thing. Gay: Each of you shared a secret, which requires a lot of vulnerability. If I could give an example, Winnie said, “Well, you know Eddie and I were debating whether we should buy a gun for protection.” And we’re like what? “You gotta write it.”
That stuck with me into my adult years.īennett: We’d get together around my kitchen table to talk about process or how to shape chapters, and it would evolve into just chatting as friends. Part of it has to do with our undocumented status when I first came to this country with my family. It took a little while for me to go there. You want to talk about that, Winnie?īrown-Glaude: I had to give myself permission to open that box and share that anger and fear and feel okay about it. When Winnie cracked, I was like, “Oh, we got this,” because she was the emotional Fort Knox of the group at the time. But the one thing I would say akin to that was getting information out of Winnie, which is not easy. Jackson: There were never any big blow-ups. Gay: Were there any tensions you were not able to resolve when you were talking about anything, not necessarily race? It was safe for us to be honest and vulnerable. But just his willingness to even go there with us brought us closer. There’s definitely white people you cannot talk to about race.īrown-Glaude: There are chapters that Juda wrote that didn’t make the book where he’s really trying to wrap his mind around and interrogate whiteness. I never thought Juda was someone I can’t have a conversation with about race. Williams: It helped that we were already friends. Of being able to have those difficult conversations without, for example, making the white guy feel comfortable in his whiteness? Gay: I noticed you are not afraid to talk about race and the ways in which race complicates how we interact in the world.
Cassandra must have thought I would shy away from it but when Juda asked me to be a part of this project, I thought it was so exciting.īennett: I thought you would stretch the group because you are coming from such a different place. So I told him, “You get Winnie to agree to do it and I’ll do it.”īrown-Glaude: I’m the sociologist. Jackson: And I said, “Oh, hell no.” I just thought all these people have written about Morrison, there were so many who felt a certain kind of ownership of her legacy. I had an idea and I threw that out to Cassandra saying, “Hey, what if we were to write somethingīetween memoir, cultural criticism, but also literary criticism, using Morrison as our muse?” Gay: How did you decide to become a book club?īennett: I don’t think we knew it was a book club at first. Their discussion follows, interspersed with excerpts from the memoir. Booklist gave it a starred review, calling it “a beautiful homage to Morrison’s legacy, and a light on all the work there is left to do.”Ĭultural critic Roxane Gay spoke with them in November via Skype.
Then they created The Toni Morrison Book Club. “How can her words illuminate the problems of everyday racism and guide us toward healthy responses and greater clarity?” Acknowledging Morrison’s fervor for truth-telling, they disclosed often difficult secrets about their own experiences around issues of race, prejudice, and identity. “How do her novels - embedded as they are in history - speak to us now?” they asked. Second, they chose to center their discussion on Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, best known for capturing the complexities of the black experience inĪmerica.
Except it was far from a typical club.įirst, everyone had a PhD: Juda Bennett, Cassandra Jackson, Piper Kendrix Williams from the Department of English, and Winnifred “Winnie” Brown-Glaude from sociology and African-American studies. More than two years ago, four professors started meeting off-campus as “readers and friends, talking about novels and our lives.” Like a book club, in other words. Secrets make compelling reading when authors are willing to take risks.