Opinion | I Was Wandering. Toni Morrison Found Me.

Unlike the men in the paintings I studied, I began to despair I would ever hear that word. And then, in my senior year of high school, I read this: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it, and so did the children.” I was blinded. Struck dumb. Dust in my lungs. Toni Morrison called me out of my wandering, her words, whole sentences, whole paragraphs, speaking to me as none had ever done so before. Here were women doing the best they could with what they’d been given. Here were children given agency and soul and room on the page to grapple with both. Here was language as jarring as baby venom, crafted to disrupt, to immerse, to reveal. Here was poetry and tension and vivid, evocative imagery. Here were men named Paul D, women named Baby Suggs, twins to folks I knew in my little rural Southern community, which was awash with pseudonyms: Fat Shark, Boochie, Weenie, and Dot. In short, here was home.

Ms. Morrison’s stories revolved around people perpetually ignored. Here, a formerly enslaved woman. Here, a formerly enslaved man. Here, a child who survived. Here, a child who did not. Later, as I read more of her work, I was to learn that all of her characters, each and every one who inhabited “Paradise” or “The Bluest Eye” or “Song of Solomon” or “Jazz” were so meticulously rendered they seemed real and rose from the page, wreathed in flesh, bolstered by bone, and walked. They lived, but they were never perfect: They were messy and hopeful and hardworking and sly and oblivious and insightful. For the time I spent in the book, and even after I turned the last page, they were with me. They were real.

But Ms. Morrison did not judge in the way the Old Testament God who taught me the power of narrative did. There was a kindness, a generosity in how she sat with her characters as they argued and made love and killed and cared for children and fed strangers. There was a patience in her presence, in her attention. There was something about that absolute narrative presence that communicated this: You are worthy to be seen. You are worthy to be heard. You are worthy to be sat with, to be walked beside. Even in your quietest moments, you are worthy of witness. And when she communicated this to and through her characters, we, her readers, understood it. We wandering children looked blindly in the dry distance, enveloped by her voice, and we knew. We knew it was possible to write with such careful love. And we also knew it was possible to be loved. That we, every one of us, were worthy of witness, too.

She always insisted on our fullness, our humanity, and in doing so, she reached those beyond us. In the last few days since her passing, some of my friends who are writers have acknowledged the idea that Ms. Morrison did not write for their communities, but yet her work resonated with them. And to that, I want to say: Of course. Her stories, essentially, were about human beings, about people who loved and fought and failed and feared and laughed. We all share this.

She could have written otherwise. She could have turned from Black America, much like Jean Toomer, and written about other people and other places if she believed in the misguided idea that her stories weren’t universal. She could have ranged far, moved like light over the face of the water, could have created other worlds. But she did not. She returned to us again and again, wrote book after book for us, about us.