Risky Business: Toni Morrison, Cinderella, and Free Black Women
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Dear Chloe,
Thank you for modeling the riskiest business, free Black womanhood. You have left an indelible mark on what it means to utilize our individual freedom in the name of collective freedom, you gave us wisdom instructions for taking risks as Black women, and you left us with so many worlds crafted through your gift of storytelling.
Xoxo,
monique
For as long as I can remember, Toni Morrison (born Chloe Wofford) was the pinnacle of Black womanhood. She was the aspiration, the goal, the model, and the blueprint. Was it because the movie Beloved came out when I was 12, and I can remember there being so much conversation between my grandmother and aunts about it? Or if it was when she was on the cover of TIME magazine and representations of Black women on magazine covers were still relatively novel? Or did it come earlier, as my mother and aunts had all been students at Howard University just like Toni had been? I do know that my mother made it her responsibility to ensure that I knew Toni Morrison was the first Black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. However, the knowledge came to me, I knew that the book covers bearing her name belonged on our shelves, beside our beds, and on our coffee tables. I knew between those pages were stories of Black women taking risks, risks at freedom, risks at independence, risks at sexual fulfillment, risks at existing on their own terms, risks that would define them as going against that status quo. It was that vibration of Toni Morrison that echoed throughout my upbringing. Black women risk it all to tell their stories.
Toni Morrison and I are not the same, my career won’t even touch the dust of her writing pencil, but there is a lot about her world-building that I can connect with. We share zero astrological placements, and while I can barely call myself a writer on my best day, Toni Morrison’s words are immortal. Despite the professional distance, I can identify with other core aspects of Toni Morrison’s life. We both entered the world as byproducts of the US South via the Midwest, with her parents (my grandparents) seeking a less racist and more industrialized place to live. We both left our midwestern homes to attend college at Howard University. While she graduated with a B.A. in English, I obtained a B.A. in Sociology. I hope one day, with some luck and lots of hard work, I can add to our similarities by teaching at The Mecca. From my experiences, Black women from the Midwest will risk every last dollar to get educated at Howard University, the epicenter of Black intellectual thought.
I recite Toni Morrison often. If I am asked to prepare a keynote or presentation, no matter the topic, I will sort through my myriad of Toni Morrison quotes and video clips. We usually reserve G.O.A.T. status for athletes and rappers, but Chloe is the GOAT when it comes to providing loving critique about our anti-Black world. Her books and essays are enough to fulfill that testament, but if you are honored to listen to her in an interview or a speech – you know that she embodies the West African proverb, “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Morrison’s big stick was ferocious, downright venomous, intellect paired with a matriarchal rhetoric and subtle yet artful sense of humor. Toni Morrison was never afraid to take the risk of speaking her truth.
One example of her intellect at work that comes to mind is from her 1979 commencement speech at Barnard College[1]. She uses the story of Cinderella to illustrate the importance of women nurturing one another instead of tearing each other down. She states that her curiosity is not about Cinderella’s upbringing but that of her stepsisters. She explains, “How crippling it must have been for those young girls to grow up with a mother, to watch and imitate that mother in the enslaving of another girl. How brutalized the sensibilities must be when you are encouraged, instructed, expected to live off the selfless labor of another woman. How poisonous to be forever in the company of a non-nurturing mother — a mother without milk.” She encourages us to consider the tale from the original Grimm collection. Disney illustrated the stepsisters as visually unappealing, but the original fairy tale describes them as beautiful, elegant women of status and power. Morrison states that it's easy for women to rally behind women abused by the power structure, but much less outrage comes when women oppress other women, such as in the case of Cinderella. (Have you ever watched the 1978 version of Cinderella entitled Cindy starring Carlayne Woodard? Must watch. It’s on YouTube!) Here we see what women do when they choose safety instead of taking risks.
However, the quote often taken from this speech is rarely given in the context of a feminist treatise on sisterhood. She goes on in the commencement address to advocate for a 20th-century education that produces humane human beings and that the women of Barnard College have a firsthand responsibility towards making that a reality. She states, “What I am suggesting is that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of freedom and the function of freedom is to free somebody else. You are moving toward self-fulfillment and the consequences of that fulfillment should be to discover that there is something just as important as you are and that just as important thing may be your stepsister.” The bolded text, “The function of freedom is to free somebody else,” is one of Toni Morrison’s most utilized quotes. I have used this quote myself in conversations, interviews, and reflections with peers -- but I now understand that our beloved Toni Morrison wasn’t just generally speaking; she was speaking to women, specifically women with post-secondary education, women like me. She basically said, if you gonna take the risk you better make it possible for other folks to take that risk too!
In group settings, I often introduce myself as a free Black woman. I decided, shortly after the harmful process of obtaining a Ph.D. that I was not going to allow any other institution to define how I present myself to the world. As a Black woman in the US, where so-called “freedom rings” while Black people are killed, abused, and dehumanized by systems and institutions that have branded themselves as bringing freedom and democracy to the globe, I declare without prompt or hesitation that I define my existence by the terms free AND Black AND Woman AND no one can tell me otherwise. But what good is that declaration if my everyday actions do not contribute to others feeling secure in that same declaration and living within it? And do I understand that to operate in my sense of freedom is not a futile exercise in rhetoric but a sizable risk to my safety? If I believe myself to be free, then I too dare to believe that I deserve human rights, and not only do I deserve them, I deserve to have them protected. And that if I, a free Black woman, am worth protecting in an anti-Black world, I put myself at risk of being consumed and destroyed by this world, for I am the antithesis of its core machinery - a masculine and unrelenting whiteness. My declaration of freedom is a risk, Mama Toni, that I am willing to take.
She goes on in the speech to acknowledge the risk and the consequence of choosing safety over risk, “And I want to discourage you from choosing anything or making any decision simply because it is safe. Things of value seldom are. It is not safe to have a child. That is an extremely risky enterprise. It is not safe to want to be the best at what you do. It is not safe to challenge the status quo. It is not safe to choose work that has not been done before. Or to do old work in a new way. There will always be someone there to stop you. None of the things of real value are simply safe. That is the mistake the stepsisters made; they wanted to wield their power, fulfill their needs in order to be safe.” I had no idea that this context shaped one of my most used Toni Morrison quotes, but having the context is healing and validating. We must take the risk because “safety” has dire consequences, if not for us because of the veil of protection we are in, than for our stepsisters. We must put ourselves in a position to risk the comforts we gain from successfully navigating this antiBlack world and take big risks towards our own freedom.
[1] (2019, August 7). Toni Morrison: ‘I Am Alarmed By the Willingness of Women to Enslave Other Women.’. ZORA. Retrieved July 17, 2023, from https://zora.medium.com/toni-morrison-in-her-own-words-562b14e0effa