America needed a storyteller like Toni Morrison. It needed her unique voice and those magisterial works of fiction that explored black identity in a country that so often turned its back against it. Perhaps not since James Baldwin has a black American writer had such impact on the literary landscape.
Morrison's novels – in particular Jazz, Beloved and Song of Solomon – were timely and necessary in an era when the United States was still coming to terms with civil rights and the toxic legacy of segregation.
She was not only a great writer but also a wise one. Knowing the limits of the written word, she once acknowledged that “language can never pin down slavery, genocide, war, nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so”.
Arrogance, however, was never a trait of either her thinking or her writing style, but she confronted its ugliness in telling the stories of those she called “the unfree at the heart of the democratic experiment”.
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Having won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved, wider recognition came with the Nobel Prize, which honoured work that “gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”. Imagination mingled with the everyday life of that “American reality” to produce work that often takes on a magical resonance; while her narratives were grounded in the rhythms of the daily vernacular of black America, her imaginative journey could shoot away from the ordinary and into the extraordinary.
Morrison was a recipient of that rare combination, popular and critical acclaim. The response to her death is another reminder of her achievement in bringing serious literary form to a wide readership.
In Beloved – and perhaps no other novel more shockingly deals with the injustice of slavery – Morrison has one of her characters say of another: "She is a friend of my mind". She and the characters she created became a friend to the minds of the many readers who, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, looked to her as their "conscience… seer… truth-teller".