From the Podcast, PASSAGES: On Morrison
Toni Morrison didn’t want a monument or statue erected in her honor; she wanted a dedicated reading room in her hometown public library, a space that could allow for change and continuous engagement with her work. In this episode, Namwali Serpell visits the Toni Morrison Reading Room in the Lorain Public Library, before heading to a tour event at the CityClub Cleveland to open up a passage from Morrison’s novel Paradise alongside poet and writer Kortney Morrow.
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From the podcast:
Kortney Morrow: When I read the opening sentences from Paradise, “None of it was as good as what they learned at home sitting on the floor in a firelit room listening to war stories, to stories of great migrations,”– I really thought that these were stories of their own ancestors because this novel really does span the course of Black history in the United States, and also a little Native American history, and I almost felt silly when the line after says, “all there in the one book they owned then,” because what I read was so much more expansive than a book.
