Your grandmother taught me to read when I was only four. She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (which was quite often) she would make me write about it. The writing had to answer a series of questions: Why did I feel the need to talk at the same time as my teacher? Why did I not believe that my teacher was entitled to respect? How would I want someone to behave while I was talking? What would I do the next time I felt the urge to talk to my friends during a lesson? I have given you these same assignments. I gave them to you not because I thought they would curb your behavior - they certainly did not curb mine - but because these were the earliest acts of interrogation, of drawing myself into consciousness. Your grandmother was not teaching me how to behave in class. She was teaching me how to ruthlessly interrogate the subject that elicited the most sympathy and rationalizing - myself. Here was the lesson: I was not an innocent. My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. And feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent. Could this mix of motivation also affect the stories they tell? The cities they built? The country they claimed as given to them by God?

You see - I have copied your sonnet, because I found that it is lovely and simple and born in the form in which it moves with such quit decorum. It is the best of those of your poems that you have let me read. And now I give you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to come upon a work of one’s own again written in a strange hand. Read the lines as though they were someone else’s, and you will feel deep within you how much they are your own.

“I traveled the next morning to my see my maternal grandmother. This is the grandmother I am named after. It is our custom that when we are to embark on a long journey, we must seek the blessing of our living elders as well as our ancestors. My grandmother and I prayed together. I could feel the joy, anticipation, anxiety, and hopes of my family. I was carrying the dreams of our people.

Recall how Toni Morrison began writing her first books not with a huge external audience in mind but so that she herself could read them. That her work eventually had a huge impact, both artistically and socially, flowed principally from keeping herself in frame, focused (alongside raising her children) on One Big Thing: books. When an interviewer asked her how she saw her public/social responsibility, how she knew she was “doing the write thing” with herself, Morrison responded, “You make it sound complicated, but it is really just about books. I edit books, I teach books, I write books.” Morrison believed that a great book can both be true to its historical/political context and be an imaginative creation, connected to what’s happening in the world while also being timeless, universal, and stunningly beautiful. In another interview, when asked whether she might take on a more political or public role if she didn’t write books, Morrison responded, “All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books. . . . There are people who can organize other people and I cannot. I’d just get bored.” Morrison felt a strong sense of responsibility to give back, but she did not let that knock her out of frame. Toni Morrison did give back, absolutely and in the most profoundly powerful way: She gave of her encodings.

Chapter 2: ‘His Poems Are Seditious in Nature’: The Man Who Connected Them All

“Over the years, I have heard my uncles and aunts talk about the poetry my dad used to write. It had assumed a kind of legendary status in our family, but reading these documents was the first time I had actually seen it. I was surprised at how much it read, to me, like what it is — the writing of someone barely out of their teens. An intelligent person, with a great command of English, for sure. But words that could bring down a state? I still can’t get my head around it. I suppose that is the thing with repressive regimes. Any dissent must be totally stamped out. Even the words of someone as young as my dad. They say that you manifest what you fear, and the government did just that with my dad. He wasn't actively planning a revolution before his banning but he would do so afterwards.