I was pulling down a box of books from a shelf in our closet the other day, searching for something for my wife, when I noticed Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I had swiped the book from my mother-in-law’s house over a year ago and somehow never got around to reading it. I’ve been chipping away at it on the bus to and from work, and this morning I finally finished it while enjoying my Saturday morning cup of coffee. What an awesome book! I read Morrison’s Beloved many, many years ago, at the time noting her amazing gifts and certain I’d be diving into more of her work soon. Better late than never. Here’s my favorite passage from The Bluest Eye:
“The pieces of Cholly’s life could become coherent only in the head of a musician. Only those who talk their talk through the gold of curved metal, or in the touch of black-and-white rectangles and taut skins and strings echoing from wooden corridors, could give true form to his life. Only they would know how to connect the heart of a red watermelon to the asafetida bag to the muscadine to the flashlight on his behind to the fists of money to the lemonade in a Mason jar to a man called Blue and come up with what all of that meant in joy, in pain, in anger, in love, and give it its final and pervading ache of freedom.”
Only a musician and a brilliant writer like Toni Morrison.