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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We round out our hour on Toni Morrison by turning to her fiction. She wrote 11 novels over the course of her prolific career, exploring themes of African-American identity, family relationships, and generational legacies, earning the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature. The citation for the award described her as someone "Who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import gives life to an essential aspect of American reality". One of our friends from the New York Public Library put together a Toni Morrison reading list for us to share with you. Joining us now is Michael Santangelo, deputy director of the New York Public Library's Collection Management. Welcome to the studio.

Michael Santangelo: Thank you for having me. It's a real honor.

Alison Stewart: I've gotten to say your name on the radio a few times. It's nice to see you in person.

Michael Santangelo: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we want you to be part of this conversation. Which one of Toni Morrison's books resonates with you? When did you first discover it? Why has it remained a favorite all these years? Maybe you can't choose which one you like. You can tell us too. Do you have a work that you return to regularly or maybe some other connection to Morrison's work? Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can share with us on social media @AllOfItWNYC. That is both Twitter and Instagram. All right. This is a little bit of a broad question, but when you think about it, what makes a Toni Morrison novel a Toni Morrison novel?

Michael Santangelo: I start with language. I think that she really tried to focus her prose, and she really challenged herself. If you read The Guardian piece that she talked about, she was looking for prose that was race-specific, but race free. She's always challenged herself in her prose, and then her use of detail. I think of Song of Solomon Not Doctor Street or Beloved's first footprint in the cake when they first see her in Beloved. These details that are part of stories too that are just incredible.

Alison Stewart: Morrison is a favorite of academics. There was one professor who was quoted saying that only Shakespeare rivals her in the number of senior theses centered on her work. Why do you think her work is particularly suited for academia?

Michael Santangelo: I was thinking of the-- she talks about memory versus history, and that she wanted to center memory a lot, because history is written by a few people, but we all have memories. She wanted to honor those memories. Sometimes our memories go against history. I can see an academic really loving that because history dictates so much to us. She was giving you almost an out to say, "No, maybe this is what people were thinking, or this is what was going on."

Alison Stewart: Listeners, let's get you in on this conversation. Do you have a favorite Toni Morrison book? When did you first discover it? Why has it remained a favorite? Maybe you had a course in college where you read Toni Morrison. You can tell us about that, or high school, or maybe you picked up the book yourself just because you were interested. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or you can reach out to us on social media @AllOfItWNYC. We are crowdsourcing a reading list of Toni Morrison's work on this 30th anniversary of her receiving the Nobel Prize in literature.

Actually, I want to start with the book Home. From 2012, the professor we spoke to, Autumn Womack, the curator of the exhibition and all the associated events, I asked her, what book would you read a little bit differently now after 2020? She said Home, which I thought was interesting. I was like, "Oh wow, that's on Michael's list." First of all, why did you put Home on the list?

Michael Santangelo: To be honest, it was one I hadn't read of her. When I heard about this interview, I ran and got a copy. I almost missed my subway stop because I was so into reading it. There is some important war, Frank Money in some of the descriptions of war, and the moral dilemmas of war. She doesn't try to give you just a clear-cut answer. You're in his head as he's struggling throughout the novel to think about what's going on and how can he deal with that.

Alison Stewart: Yes, Frank is coming home from the Korean war. He's our protagonist. What is awaiting him when he gets home?

Michael Santangelo: Almost nothing. He almost has to reinvent his life, has to decide what he is now, what's going to happen. At first, he's with Lilly, his girlfriend, but that doesn't work out, and he then goes in search of his sister because his sister was home. [unintelligible 00:04:48] is home to him. He's really just looking for that and seeing if he can find his place as he's returned from this war.

Alison Stewart: That is Home from 2012. Let's take a call. Kevin from Manhattan. Hi Kevin. Thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Kevin: Hi, Alison. Thank you so much for always focusing on books. It's really such a treat, including today. My husband and I went to the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival, which is held in this tiny town in Wales.

Alison Stewart: I've been there.

Kevin: -and specific-- Yes, isn't it great?

Alison Stewart: Oh my gosh.

Kevin: We timed specifically to hear Toni Morrison. I didn't know if she would be as familiar there as she is here. Of course, she was. It was packed. She was just majestic and deeply human at the same time. The whole audience was wrapped with attention, and it was just so memorable and years ago, and I remember it vividly today. That's my memory.

Alison Stewart: Kevin, thank you for sharing your memory, and thank you for calling. Let's talk to JP calling from Scarsdale. Hi JP.

JP: Hi Allison. How are you? I came to Toni late actually, read Jazz and The Bluest Eye originally. Jazz really resonated with me and came to her through her friendship with Fran Leitz actually, and also my wife both championing Toni's work.

Alison Stewart: JP, thanks for calling. I saw you nodding Michael.

Michael Santangelo: Yes. Her friendship with Fran Leitz was very interesting. I remember Fran talking about Toni was an early morning person, supposedly because she had been a single mother. She didn't have time to write, but it was during the OJ Simpson trial. I remember Toni went on to edit a book about the OJ Simpson trial. Fran is not someone who gets up in the morning, and she talks about her. Toni, be up at 5:00 AM already ready for the trial.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Tiffany, calling in from Carmel, New York. Hi, Tiffany. Thank you so much for calling in.

Tiffany: Hello. I am a 58-year-old African American who was raised in predominantly white areas. The Bluest Eye really spoke to me because of course your family always tells you you're beautiful, but I wasn't seeing the society mirroring that. Just a lot of those lessons and it was like, "Oh, this is what my mother was talking about." It was one of those, all the stories your parents tell you about racism, and after you have to be careful. There it was again, and it was separate from them. It really formed a lot of my middle school and high school interactions with people because I am beautiful, but I didn't know it.

Alison Stewart: Tiffany, thank you so much. The Bluest Eye is on your list, Michael.

Michael Santangelo: Right. I completely agree with her. I just remember some of the parts of that story. I remember Pecola, she drinks all the milk at Claudia and Frieda's house because she wants to keep drinking of the Shirley Temple cup because that is what she saw as beauty. Exactly what the caller was talking about, and how Toni really brought that alive in the story. Yes, I completely agree. I think Toni really, yes, right on.

Alison Stewart: Yes, the book centers around themes of whiteness and Eurocentric beauty standards.

Michael Santangelo: Right.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Kathy. This is interesting calling in from Harlem on line five. Hi Kathy. You're on the air.

Kathy: Hello. I'm such a fan of your show. I'm calling to say that in the 1980s, Adina Porter and I, we were both students at SUNY Purchase at the time. She asked me to adapt The Bluest Eye into a one-woman show that she performed at Purchase. Then everyone was so excited about how we did it and the success of this one-time-only performance. We sought Toni Morrison out. We dogged her at any place that we could find her. We found her doing a reading at Albany.

Then we went up to her because we had tried to get through to her through her agent and things like that. We got nowhere. Then we went up to her. I'm African-American and so is Adina. We presented ourselves to her after a reading. She looked at the two of us and she said, "Oh, you're cute." She gave us her home address, and she said, "Come to my house and we'll take it from there." Shortly thereafter, we presented ourselves to her house up off the Hudson River.

She said, "Okay. Let's hear what you got." We moved for her furniture in her living room so Adina could perform the whole one-woman show in Toni Morrison's living room, and she loved it. She said, "Okay. Well, you need to have more of this." The structure of The Bluest Eye is quite complicated, but she really gave us her blessing and then, it was just so remarkable. Then she put us in touch with her agents and whomever because we had to then go through official channels, but we were like two 21-year-old girls. [laughs] No money or the wherewithal to buy the rights or anything like that but it lives that moment. First of all, working on her work so closely is a student-to-student purchase, but then to have that moment in her living room. Just wanted to share that with everyone and with you whom I'm a fan of.

Alison Stewart: Wonderful story. Kathy, thank you so much. You were smiling through the whole thing, Michael.

Michael Santangelo: I think generosity is one of her legacies and she was constantly part of arts groups and on boards. Ishmael Reed talks about the novels how she opened up her house so we can do a reading before she died of one of his recent plays. I think that's really a great story that illustrates her generosity to other artists and other people.

Alison Stewart: Also, something that she was she did not suffer fools. One of my favorite clips, which I've pulled, which is often cited is this exchange where Toni Morrison really schools, Charlie Rose. When he asks her and he gets into the conversation about her novels centering only on Black people and whether she'll ever write a novel with White characters. It's a little bit of a long answer, but it's worth it. Let's take a little clip of it.

Toni Morrison: I remember review of Sula in which the reviewer said, this is all well and good but one day, she meaning me, will have to face up to the real responsibilities and get mature and write about the real confrontation for Black people, which is White people. Our lives have no meaning, no depth, without the white gaze. I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the White gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.

The people who helped me most arrive at that kind of language were African writers, Chinua Achebe, Bessie Head, those writers who could assume the centrality of their race because they were Africans, and they didn't explain anything to white people. Those questions were incomprehensible to them. Those questions that I would have as a minority living in an all-white country like the United States.

Alison Stewart: Just love to hear Toni Morrison's voice. My guest is Michael Santangelo deputy director of collection management at the New York Public Library. Your our guest as well as we celebrate Toni Morrison in this hour. Let's talk to Joe calling in from Jackson Heights. Hi, Joe.

Joe: Hey, I wanted to say that I chose Sula. I recently published an academic paper on Sula which I presented at a conference in Chicago last week. I chose Sula, both for its literary meaning like the way Morrison interrogates and traumatizes issues of race, gender, identity, social inequality in the United States, but also for her prose style. What it can teach my students about how Morrison achieves her literary meaning specifically on the level of her language choices.

There's an interview I start the paper with from the '70s, actually, where she was asked what makes your work distinctive? What makes it so good? Morrison said the language. Only the language it's the thing that Black people love so much, the thing of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling Joe. Let's talk to Bill in Crown Heights. Hi, Bill.

Bill: Hi, thank you so much for taking my call. I was a student at Nikki Giovanni's when I was in college at Virginia Tech. This would have been about 1990. Well, there's a huge number of things about that experience. It was wonderful but one of the many ones is she knew everybody. She brought in Toni Morrison to read from Beloved and I have to admit, I was a college student who had not slept for days. Listening to her read was listening to someone sing a lullaby. I dose in and out but it was in the most beautiful way like somebody was singing me to sleep, and then waking up and they were still there. That experience was just so beautiful. It's a wonderful memory.

Alison Stewart: Bill, thank you much for sharing that memory. Beloved was on your list, Michael. It's one of these books that appears on the American Library Association's List of 100 most banned books of the decade. Why would you think that that book and The Bluest Eye? They're hard because I deal with hard subjects.

Michael Santangelo: Yes. She was saying to Charlie Rose, centering her own experience that I think people don't always allow people to do that. There's sexual trauma and sexual assault, and things like that and not allowing someone who's experienced that to center that in their own books when other people can't process it. I think it's really on those people that the problem is not on the books or on any of the people who enjoy them. It's unfortunate, but I guess it's some of the reasoning behind it.

Alison Stewart: The final book you had on your list, well, that could go on and on. We're actually at five. We were at Song of Solomon.

Michael Santangelo: I'd said Not Doctor Street. The language is just tremendous too and sing. He was talking about a sound like she was singing and I think if the character sang in Song of Solomon. This kind of way of some of her language was lyrical and almost influenced by music. I think you could see that a lot in Song of Solomon.

Alison Stewart: Lila agrees. Lila, you're our last call. Go for it.

Lila: Hi, thank you. I was going to say Song of Solomon is my favorite. I just love how long the story is and how [unintelligible 00:15:58] out it is and how she delves into each character, and their backstory and how they're all connected, even if they don't want to be because the family is so complicated. You have pilot and her brother and they just resent each other, but they still find out their way back into each other. I just love that about the book. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Thank you much for calling in Lila. Any final thoughts we have in our last minute?

Michael Santangelo: Oh, yes, please. I was just to get some things about Toni and one other thing that I was thinking was her legacy was accessibility, but not writing her language to be simplistic, but still making where people can engage in what she was telling them. The way she just constantly challenged herself. If you read one of the afterwards the 93 version of bliss, she was always challenged herself to be better and to achieve some of those goals she set out. I really think in her language, she really achieved a lot of it.

Alison Stewart: Michael Santangelo is deputy director of collection management at the New York Public Library. Thank you so much for putting this list together and taking our listeners' fantastic call.

Michael Santangelo: Thank you so much.

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