Encountering a Ghost: On Toni Morrison & "The Bluest Eye"

Image by Angelo Maneage

It has come to my attention that a ghost haunts me. This revelation comes with a faint knowledge that the ghost has haunted me for quite some time. But, as is the case with ghosts, I simply never saw it. I never felt the ghost's presence. I was blind to it. I did not see the ghost of Toni Morrison hovering around me.

One morning, I was reading a book I purchased at Target (a mere $8.99) and as I read it the hairs on my arm stood up. I felt that I was not alone. I felt a presence being conjured as though through the reading of a magical text: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. As I read on I realized that the ghost of Toni Morrison had haunted me and that the text of the book had just uncovered this awareness. She had been there all along, but I had not seen her. I had been blind to her presence my entire life.

Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was originally published in 1970–the year I was born. In addition to this temporal overlap, the events of the novel take place in Lorain, Ohio–I was born in Akron, just an hour away. The Bluest Eye, in time and space, neighbors my own birth into time and space. One might argue (and one would be correct in doing so) that this simple proximity does not equate to any real connection. The Bluest Eye tells the story of Black Americans, primarily three young girls facing dire economic and social circumstances, while I am a white man born into America's suburban upper middle class. There is considerable distance between myself and the characters of the novel.

When I was 18 years old and feeling complete intellectual and emotional alienation from my upbringing in America's suburban upper middle class, I sought companionship and validation on the campus of a university some 500 miles from the spacetime of my origin. I was told that I could understand myself by being exposed to the roots of the unassailable elements of Western culture that had led to my moment in history. In college I would be directed to read Homer and Plato and Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Dante and Descartes and Kant and Dickens and Joyce and many others. I was never told to read Toni Morrison. And yet, of all the great literary names in the preceding list, the only one to appear in flesh and blood on my university campus would be Toni Morrison. She was teaching in the writing department at the time I was enrolled. But because I had been told that I had more in common with dead men than the living Morrison, I read Homer and Dante. I never even considered putting myself under the direct and corporeal influence of Toni Morrison.

The experiences of Toni Morrison and the majority of the characters in The Bluest Eye bear very little relation to my own. But, as I sit here typing this, I ask myself: with which set of circumstances do I have a greater affinity? Those of a human being living through the 1970s in Ohio or a Greek soldier embedded in a spacetime of near-infinite discontinuity with my own? What about a Florentine poet some 4000 miles and 800 years away? While I never did not come into contact with Toni Morrison, the simple fact that we drove the same streets, ate the same candy, had to some extent similar cultural references–did this not make it somehow possible, or, at least, imaginable, that I could have had some understanding of her and the characters borne through her writing?

I did not see her in 1970s Ohio. Nor did I see her on the Princeton campus. She was invisible to me, a ghost, because my eyes were focused in other directions. A cultural narrative built on the notion of a continuous and superior cultural phenomenon–white, Western culture–focused my gaze on people and cultural products that, in actuality, had almost nothing in common with me at all. 

Toni Morrison and I share the same name. She adopted hers from the patron she chose upon her baptism into the Catholic faith, St. Anthony of Padua. I was given the name Anthony after my grandfather, and also after St. Anthony of Padua. I shared the Catholic faith with Toni Morrison, practicing rigorously while enrolled at Princeton, but had no idea that Toni Morrison was Catholic at all. While at Princeton, Catholic identified my psychology more than anything else. My Catholic path never crossed her Catholic path during those four years. My immersion in the suffering of the Crucified Christ never crossed with hers either, nor with her transference of that understanding to the suffering of the innocent Black body throughout American history. My experience of the ravages of original sin in my own misdeeds and failures never crossed her understanding of the original sin in the misdeeds and failures of the American experiment. My consumption and digestion of a certain subset of Western culture–called Catholic or Christian–embodied by such literary figures as Flannery O'Connor, never crossed paths with her appreciation of and advocacy for Flannery O'Connor. The person with whom I shared both the cultural identifier of a Christian name and faith remained invisible to me despite sharing the same affinities which defined the majority of my closest relations at the time.

Toni Morrison has been present in my life. My entire life. And yet, she has been a ghostly presence to me. Not because she was a ghost. No. She was flesh and blood and genius. She was present. She was there to be seen. She was a ghost because I did not apprehend her presence. I characterize her presence as a haunting because despite her many attempts to make herself known I did not have eyes to see her. Then I started to read The Bluest Eye, and I realized that she had been a real and unacknowledged force throughout the duration of my 51 years on this earth. She had been trying to make contact with me for the entirety of my life. She had been trying to speak to me. And I did not see her. I did not hear her. Until I did.

Encountering a ghost is a radical experience. To see a ghost is to change as a person. I now wonder how the entire structure of my identity has been built, if the bounds of affinity as they have been raised for me are an actual reality. I wonder if I really do have more in common with Toni Morrison or Aristotle. I wonder which presence is more spectral: that of Toni Morrison or that of the Western culture that has been a keystone in the edifice of my identity.

I do know one thing: I could have walked up to Toni Morrison and encountered her any time. Like Doubting Thomas, I could have put my finger into the wounds that bled over the pages of her books. I have no real proof that there ever was a person named Aristotle.