Sad news today that the world lost Toni Morrison. The first time I encountered Morrison was my freshman year. In a community college class called Intro to Literature. We mostly read stories from an an anthology--everything with a feminist bent--Tillie Olsen, Flannery O'Connor (I am so fortunate in my education that we always read more women, even in non-focused classes.) I was just beginning to write seriously, but badly, and was sort of placeholding and wracking up some credits & gen-eds (history, intro to psych, dramatic lit) before I started at Rockford College in the fall after returning from North Carolina and changing my plans and my major. By the end of the semester, we had time for one long form fiction, and the professor had chosen Beloved, heavy reading for a 19 year old, but one that struck me as amazing. It struck me as a horror novel, becuase of the ghost, the haunting of the main character after sacrificing her children to save them from slavery. And it is a sort of ghost story--and importantly, a midwest gothic, one wrapped up in our terrible, bloody history. It was a book that haunted me, as a reader, and I returned to it in the following years, particularly as I was trying to figure out the whole writing thing. We later read it in another class at RC devoted to Psychology and Literature. Though I read and loved The Bluest Eye as part of my MA Comp exam a couple years later, Beloved remained my favorite Morrison, because of its strong roots in the gothic.
