I had a nice surprise earlier in the week. My husband David's brother-in-law called to tell me how much he enjoyed my new book, Florida, A Love Story. This was especially exciting to me because he's a retired professor and somewhat of a historian. Long retired, he still enjoys leading classes on Shakespeare and other lofty subjects in his retirement community.
At some point, when we were discussing story telling, he brought up Toni Morrison. This surprised me. We then had a discussion about her work. He told me he'd read everything she'd ever done and asked if I'd read the novel she'd written in 2012 titled Home. I had not. I'd never even heard of it. But I ordered it from Amazon while we were still on the phone.
Home is about a black man returning home from the Korean war in the 1950s, Morrison describes Frank as a modern Odysseus returning to a 1950s America minded with lethal pitfalls for an unwary black man.
In this painful, scathing novel Morrison, as usual, doesn't preach. She just tells Frank's story. Early on, when Frank is on a train he sees a woman and her husband who has obviously been beaten. Frank asks a waiter what happened. The waiter explained that the man got off the train to buy a cup of coffee and the proprietor and others had physically thrown him out of the restaurant.
The abused couple whispers to each other, she softly, pleadingly, he with urgency. He will beat her when they get home, thought Frank...What was intolerable was the witness of a woman, a wife, who not only saw it, but had dared to try to rescue - rescue! - him.
I've been thinking about this passage for two days.
I told David's brother-in-law about how some Florida schools want to ban Toni Morrison's books Beloved and The Bluest Eye. We agreed that neither of us was surprised. Morrison told a truth many of us don't want to hear.
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