Me and Toni in the Projects

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Growing up in the King Kennedy Estates public housing project on Cleveland’s East Side, I found refuge in reading. After the robbery of two ice cream truck vendors shot dead outside Momma’s bedroom window, after a kicked ball bounced a car with a man shot dead inside, after assaults in the hallway by young men at the end of each school day, I retreated to the safe pages of books. That is, until Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula invaded my girl-tryna-grow-up happy and safe space. 

Morrison’s earthy prose and taboo themes afflicted me like a rash—icky, creepy, menacing. At the same time empathy, grief, and deep sorrow surged through me for her hapless, enigmatic characters: Pecola, Cholly Breedlove, Soaphead Church in The Bluest Eye; Eva Peace, Plum, Shaddrack in Sula; and, later, Pilate, Hagar, Macon Dead in Song of Solomon. Their painful predicaments, loves, losses, traumas, and triumphs resonated with my very core. 

But one thing nagged at me. These and other novels told the painful stories of African Americans who had fled the violent and economic oppression of the Jim Crow South towards the North for brighter days. Upon arriving in Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, thousands landed in government-subsidized housing. They came to be known as the projects, as if residents were an experiment. In 1947, my mother made the trek from Aberdeen, Mississippi to Memphis to Cleveland. And in 1968, she moved me and four siblings into King Kennedy, a brand new housing project. Her upwardly mobile gaze saw a way station to the American dream. So for me, plots and themes from the projects felt like a missing piece in Morrison’s Great Migration stories.

By 1994, no such themes, characters, or plots had shown up in Morrison’s pages. On library shelves, I found only one nonfiction account, Brothers: Black and Poor—a True Story of Courage and Survival, by journalist Sylvester Monroe (1988). “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it,” Morrison told the Ohio Arts Council in 1981. 

So I wrote Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? From the Projects to Prep School* (1995, second edition in 2008), a creative non-fiction account of growing up in Cleveland from 1967 to 1977 that braids local happenings with my trajectory as a scholarship student and beneficiary of federal Great Society Era programs. And humbly but shamelessly, I attempted to copy, conjure and co-opt Morrison’s unique approaches to situating, seeing, and defying the segregated cosmos in which black people in America are forced to live; themes unveiling the beauty and ugliness, richness and valor of black life and culture; earthy prose powered by audacious imagination that sings off the page, singeing mind and soul.  

Here is what she taught me.

Defy the White Gaze 

“What I’m interested in is writing without the gaze, without the white gaze…It was always about African-American culture and people, good, bad, indifferent, whatever—but that was, for me, the universe.” (Interview with Rachel Kaadsi Ghansah in The New York Times Magazine, 2015)

Toni’s determination to write beyond the “white gaze” emboldened me to write about the projects without explaining, rationalizing, or diluting my black experience to accommodate, placate, or comfort white readers. The school bus ride up the Magic Mountain of Mayfield Hill to Hawken School on scholarship to a new world of white affluence was the next leg of the Great Migration journey. It dropped me off in two worlds—one white and affluent in prep school and the suburbs, the other black and impoverished in King-Kennedy. The ride was bumpy, another painful, confounding stop in the African American “ nomadic quest” for home as Morrison’s early novels depict. Along the way, I chose to lay bare black project culture, its idiosyncrasies, strengths, weaknesses, ways of being and seeing—and I explain none of it. Apologize for none of it. If white readers perceived it as dysfunctional, so be it. If they saw my writing as exploitative, fine. As a girl growing up Afro and American, the experience of living in two worlds was uniquely mine alone. I put it raw on the page. And let it be. I could see Toni looking down with a smirk as, during a school-wide assembly I spoke at, my white classmates and teachers sat aghast at my unvarnished attempt to defend Great Society-era programs, such as Affirmative Action: 

You’re a ‘nigger,’ you’re a nigger, and you’re a nigger.” I heard the unrehearsed conclusion roll off of my tongue as I pointed randomly to members of our audience. “We would all be ‘unqualified’ niggers without the privileges and legacy that have given so many access to opportunity, everyone except Afro-American’s, that is. Yes. We would all be unqualified.” I saw dismay wilt the brows of Hawken’s more conservative faculty members …. Others sniggled quietly. (Lyles, Charlise. Do I Dare Disturb the Universe. Gray & Co, 1994. p. 233)

Display Black Community 

“I long for a critic who will know what I mean when I say ‘church,’ or ‘community,’ or when I say ‘ancestor,’ or ‘chorus.’ Because my books come out of those things and represent how they function in the black cosmology.”  (Morrison, Toni, and Nellie McKay. “An Interview with Toni Morrison.” Contemporary Literature 24, no. 4 (1983): p. 425)

Like Morrison, I wanted to enlighten readers to the richness of black community. She portrays black community as both healing and destructive—often with sass and a wink “quiet as it’s kept.”* In The Bluest Eye, mean-spirited neighborhood women gossip about Pecola’s hapless ugliness and the perverse Breedlove family. Their words isolate, blame, and shame Pecola for her pregnant predicament. They function as a dark, insinuating Greek chorus standing in harsh collective judgement. Similarly in Beloved, community women condemn Sethe for killing her own child. But as they grow to embrace Sethe with compassion, they gather in her yard at 124 Bluestone Road to exorcise the ghost of her murdered child. In Home, this healing embrace is a group of cooking, quilting, singing women who nurture Cee’s womb back from the edge of death. Morrison shows community as a space for spiritual renewal and refortification to face the brutality of the white racist world.

My experience of community picks up where Morrison’s leaves off. The project’s concrete architecture offered few spaces for warm gatherings of comfort and spiritual refreshment. Instead, high-density housing multiplied the ills of poverty, producing a tense, powder-keg atmosphere. People steered clear of one another. Friendships were cooler than down home, less trusting. Or not at all. I show black community through a different lens. It consisted of Momma’s job at a social services hub, where she scoured bulletin boards for activities to keep her five children off the streets—Friendly Town, the Karamu House, rare free tickets to the Ice Capades.

The POC Recreation Center too far away and limited ballfields to play in, us kids created community in the parking lot and a weedy patch near the garbage incinerator. When rats got out of control, we bonded as a community to defend our communal space.

“…armed with boards, bats, one axe, two shovels, one ten-pound end of a barbell, and an old skate with metal wheels … A slick furry head poked out of a pile of trash. Frack! … Out they came, six or seven at once scurrying every which way. Like crazy we swung. Frack. Bam! Ughh!  … We chased. We cornered. … Innards every shade of pink spurted every which way, like balloons bursting into pieces. Rat blood spattered our play clothes. Before dying, the squishy creatures let go a high, final squeal like a bad blues singer wailing at the end of a recording … Neither the screeching nor the stench unnerved us…

Surely people would think we were natural-born savages capable of any subhuman act. 

In my heart, I knew that we were just kids trying to keep our community clean, trying to show that we didn’t have to ask CMHA [Housing Authority that managed King Kennedy] to do anything for us. That rat-killing had been our most dignified stand: us against them.” (DIDDU, p. 135)

The scene is written with no care for how unpalatable white readers might find this expression of black community. I neither sugar-coat nor conceal. Hand-to-hand combat with rats was hand-to-hand combat with society’s disregard for our community. With a Toni smirk, I attempt to juxtapose humor and horror. 

Don’t Tell the Story the Same Old Way—Experiment. Craft Unconventional Structures 

“…the third focus in my list: the examination of contemporary literature (both the sacred and the profane) for the impact Afro-American presence has had on the structure of the work, the linguistic practice, and fictional enterprise in which it is engaged.” (“Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature” in The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations, Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.
p. 181-182)

 Morrison specifically designs and engineers narrative structures to convey the complexity, beauty, brutality, and humanity of black life. In The Bluest Eye, first-person and third-person omniscient narrators tell a fragmented story from different time perspectives. Voices alternate between interiority and exteriority. The outrageously unique “SEEDICKANDJANE” framing juxtaposes idyllic mid-century* white middle-class life to impoverished black Pecola’s meagre existence. In Home, the protagonist speaks directly to the writer of the story, impudently questioning the author’s assertions. Beloved is written in an elliptical style as fleeting and reappearing as the ghost Beloved herself. The novel Jazz breaks out into improvisational prose as if John Coltrane blows the saxophone on stage before our very ears. 

Morrison challenged me and all writers to experiment, to defy conventional Western and American literary structures. Be strategic. Arrange the storytelling to fit the story. Have no fear of making the reader work. Of course, as an English major, I had wrestled with unconventional story structures: a day in the life of Leopold Bloom in James Joyces’s Ulysses; the mash-up of Ishmael’s voice, philosophical essays, whale science, and history that is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. But Morrison takes story structures to a whole ‘nother imaginative level that required me to read as if assembling a puzzle, or walking a labyrinth.  

She helped me break free of conventional chronology that can often stilt and stunt meaning and reflection in memoir to write a nonlinear narrative. The second edition paperback opens: “Part One: The Middle”; Part Two: The Beginning; and Part III: Another Beginning. Both the original and paperback structures break the overarching narrative into parts that the reader has to reassemble. Instead of starting with my life in the projects, the narrative begins on the eve of entering prep school. Searching Kinsman Avenue for my father is part psychological, emotional, and pedagogical preparation for the new world at Hawken. The reader benefits from first feeling my anxiety mingled with pride at receiving a scholarship before witnessing details of life in King Kennedy. 

As the core of the story, Part II: The Beginning, braids my personal history with the momentous events of the late 1960s: local—the election of Carl B. Stokes as the first black mayor of a major American city, the Hough Riots, the Cuyahoga River burning; and national—the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Nationalist Movement, Head Start and federal assistance programs, Neil Armstrong on the moon, a total solar eclipse, the resignation of President Nixon. 

Find and Work Your Metaphors and Symbols

“Writing is, after all, an act of language, its practice. But first of all it is an effort of the will to discover.” (“Unspeakable Things Unspoken”, p. 182)

Morrison always shows out designing literary devices to convey violence and enigma in the built environment and the natural world. A plague of dead robins foretells Sula’s return to Medallion, Ohio. In Eva Peace’s house, built piece by piece, fire is a metaphor for possessive maternal love as she sets ablaze her drug-addicted son, Plum, to end his suffering. In Home, each time Frank Money survives trauma, a small man in a blue Zoot Suit appears in the distance. The bedecked apparition is a symbol of racial violence based on the Zoot Suit Riots during World War II.  A hook in the chest symbolizes how the violent past attaches and drags Frank and his sister Cee. In the final chapter, a tree gouged at the core yet still alive is a symbol of Frank’s resilient life: deeply damaged by the violence of racism and war, yet he lives. 

Morrison taught me to seek the eccentric and the enigmatic in human nature or the natural world, then transform it into symbol or metaphor, sound and sense. In King-Kennedy, garbage incinerators become an omnipresent symbol of how little control we had over our environment. When the Housing Authority turned the flames off, mounds of fetid garbage piled outside our living room windows symbolize burial under the effects of systemic racism. Maggots spawned, flies feasted, as if we were living corpses. We kids mounted a communal slaughter, a symbol of self-empowering, albeit impotent rebellion.

In 1977, spring of senior year, the cavernous red barn at Hawken School burned to ashes. Livestock fled, smoke billowed, students hauled water buckets in vain. The conflagration became a metaphor for growth and transformation: 

In the flames, I saw Cleveland—Kennard Junior High, East Tech, the Cuyahoga River burning, a black mayor and his brother glittering like good and gold, riots…, the black steel men yearning to be hired in steaming foundries, the green bottles of Thunderbird wine—that would steal Charles Lyles’s life-swelling, thinning, and finally bursting into sibilant crystals of heat. I saw the buildings in the King-Kennedy Estates housing project…melting into ribbons of red. I saw the Afro Sets, dark and defiant, marching left-right-left through the molten streets. I saw the ice-cream vendors bloodied truck and the slick, bloated rats scurrying from a skinny girl in pointy glasses wielding a baseball bat. 

“And from the flames, a new young woman emerged, Afro-American, outstanding, and authentic. [She] was a daring, new self.” (DIDDU, p. 251)

This is what Toni Morrison continues to do for writers and readers everywhere, especially me, a woman who grew up Afro and American in a Cleveland public housing project. She upsets, upends, disrupts, disturbs the literary universe.