Her mother Polly takes her self-loathing out on Pecola, believing her to be ugly and unworthy of love, because in 1940s America it seems like there's nothing and no one to contradict her.But what sparks the narrator's observation on love comes from what her father Cholly does, Cholly who has known only abandonment and violation. Editor’s note: This essay, originally published on August 8, 2019, was republished for the first anniversary of Toni Morrison’s death on August 5, 2020. What does love mean under such perilous conditions? His tweet read: "Her writing was a beautiful, meaningful challenge to our conscience and our moral imagination. "It was absolutely the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it," Morrison said The seeming contradiction in that statement lies at the heart of Because Morrison can so deeply unsettle us when she writes of love as a destructive force, she can also move us when it can soothe and heal. I figured serenading birds by her window would be the finest gift I could give an artist who offered the world, and me, deliverance. Toni’s house, meanwhile, with wraparound porches and a long white pier that extends a hundred feet into the river, was always sparkling and spotless—a wonder considering the number of ducks and gulls that lived on her property and traveled overheard.
A few weeks in, a deep loneliness engulfed me. I was in a different state of mourning.
She kept no lists. (Once I gave her Instead Toni marveled on what was happening outside her doorstep—the river, the trees, and the sublime gifts of the morning hour, which included scores of local and migrating birds. As a little girl in 1938, she looked up at the night sky of Lorain, Ohio, and saw the northern lights, an event that would inspire her writing life: “I remember that most shocking, most profound event,” she said of the dazzling show in the essay I teasingly called her the “bird whisperer.” So when I had a bird-poop problem a few years ago, I sought her advice.
To my joy, I got to be a bird nerd with the celebrated author.Yet as much as Toni revered birds, she was not a traditional birder. Though only a 30-foot tall brick chimney remains, I could still see in my child’s eye the sea of fields where he and my godfather worked, and where African and Native bodies labored to near death for hundreds of years. Hundreds of millions of birds mirgrate through the region, and many would stop and rest, eat and nest, on her waterfront property and on her magnificent willow.
One morning, I ran outside in the freezing New England snow in my Morrison wrote about characters as birds, some shattered and marooned, unable to fly but imbued with the capacity to heal their crushed wings and soar.
Several people mourned Toni Morrison's death online, including former US President Barack Obama, who even called her a "national treasure." She replied: “Take a shotgun, and when you see the birds come close, shoot a couple of rounds into the air. The onomatopoeia conjured a world of neighborhood gossip and intrigue that felt distinctly Black.Blackness, of course, was also her subject. Here was a woman who, like my indigenous mother, talked to and grieved trees and plants as deeply as she did humans.The willow, she explained, was a bird magnet.
I saw what racism and neglect does to a vulnerable girl of color, and also to the children who grow into broken adults.
By now, readers know all that befalls one of its protagonists, Pecola Breedlove, an 11-year old girl wilted by trauma.