Celebrate Black History Month with Toni Morrison

As we celebrate Black History Month today, I lift up the revolutionary American novelist, essayist, and academic, Toni Morrison (1931-2019). 

I’d like to hone in on one of the most powerful scenes she wrote in her novel, Beloved, which inspired my newest painting, “Goddesses Among the Ringing Trees.”

Morrison describes an enslaved woman named Baby Suggs, holy, who was a prophet and preacher for her people. Each week, Baby Suggs leads the enslaved into a clearing in the woods for worship and ritual.

This is historically known as a brush harbor or hush harbor because the trees and brush prevented slaveholders from hearing and seeing the worshippers as they sang, danced, laughed, and cried out in lament. In this “Invisible Institution,” as it’s known today, Baby Suggs invites her people to step out from the trees to laugh, dance, and cry.

She then delivers what is the most beautiful sermon I’ve ever read, inviting the enslaved to “love your flesh, love it hard,” reminding them that the “only grace they can have is the grace they can imagine.”

Then she “danced with her crooked hip the rest of what her heart had to say.” As she dances, the gathered sing among the ringing trees, “long notes held until the four part harmony was perfect enough for their deeply loved flesh.”

Take a deep breath, beloveds. Can you hear their voices? Pause to remember, honor, and lament this history and how it lingers among us still.

What strikes me is both the particular and the universal in Morrison’s powerful scene. The particular is the resilience and creativity of the enslaved to secretly gather for lament and celebration in community for dancing, singing, laughing, and crying. The universal is the power of the arts—dancing, singing, dreaming, creating—in community.