Opinion | Toni Morrison’s Song of America

In “Beloved,” the protagonist Sethe is haunted by the return of her own child, whom she killed in an attempt to protect her from enslavement. But beyond this insular haunting, the family is intruded upon at every turn by the larger specter of a nation whose claims of freedom, power and moral authority are confounded by systems of slavery, submission and the fallacy of racial inferiority.

In her essay collection “The Origin of Others,” Ms. Morrison writes, “The resources available to us for benign access to each other, for vaulting the mere blue air that separates us, are few but powerful: language, image and experience.” When we encounter the world through Ms. Morrison’s fiction, we are urged to submit to and invest in the feelings and plights of others separated from us by time and circumstance. There is very little else in the world that can so easily afford us such an opportunity. Friendship can do it, and so can love, yet there are limits to the people we befriend and those we allow ourselves to love; we must be willing to see them as worthy of our attention, and we must muster the courage to approach them. But in a novel, we vault “the mere blue air that separates us” instantly.

“That’s how much she loved us,” a friend said by text Tuesday morning when the news of Ms. Morrison’s death was announced. “She tried to teach us about love in everything she wrote, but what have we learned?”

It’s hard, waking up so often to news of the terror unspooling in America. Domestic terrorism. Racially motivated violence. Environmental devastation. Economic instability. It’s tempting to believe that a distinct chapter has only just now begun, one in which some new evil has been unleashed and our national work will be to devise new terms and new tools for understanding and eradicating it. It’s tempting to believe that the work that lies ahead must live on a policy level, in laws and punishment, checks and safeguards. But the living monument of Ms. Morrison’s body of work assures me that the language of peace, justice, safety and stability must enter our imagination as they always have — not through the language of policy, but via our willingness to regard one another as worthy of attention and love. Such ideas must be sat with, moved through, married to our vocabularies for love, desire, loss, resentment, remembering, healing and hope. And those vocabularies are the primary terrain of the artist.

I don’t believe there is a writer who understood America better and loved it with more ferocity than Toni Morrison. Her genius and her humanity invite us to imagine a different sense of who we are, even now, and where, together, we might decide we are going.

Tracy K. Smith served as United States poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her most recent book is “Wade in the Water,” a collection of poems.

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