I saw Toni Morrison once. I was a guest at the National Book Awards the year they were honoring her work. My table was in the back of the grand hall, and I squinted at her long white locks, understanding why people called her regal. There was a kind of confidence and command in her bearing. She and Maya Angelou, who introduced her, were a luminous, divine pair: two literary goddesses, dazzling on the celestial stage. I peered at them from afar: a silent supplicant.
Though we never met, the memory of witnessing Morrison in real life remains with me, looms over me in tandem with her literary influence, so much so that when I committed to writing a book about an enslaved woman, I was afraid. How does one write about an enslaved woman and grief and love in the shadow of Beloved? I knew that my main character, Annis, would enter in conversation with Sethe, Toni’s main character, and all the other books by Black Americans trying to write our way into the past to find our way to the present. I cut my creative writing teeth on Morrison’s work. Her work was so important in my quest to learn to read like a writer, with a critical eye to what I love, and a faint hope that I could use some of that in my work.
One of the many things that works so brilliantly in Beloved is the portrayal of the terrible, fearsome, outsize love that Sethe feels for her deceased daughter. How Sethe’s longing for the child haunts her, how it feels present in every scene, every flashback. It is an immersive love. The reader aches with Sethe, feeling her adoration twinned with that most familiar human emotion: unruly grief. Sethe is vividly realized, compelling, and emotionally complex. In killing her daughter, Sethe has the most terrible agency. In her making of a new life in Ohio, in her mothering, in her romantic relationship, Sethe lives beyond the constraints of the American imagination of the enslaved.
While writing an early draft of Let Us Descend, I realized that I had to reimagine what agency means for an enslaved character. As Morrison did for Sethe, I had to give my character a love so strong, it could bring the dead back to life. To do so, I had to enlarge my own imagination past the stereotypes so common in the American consciousness about enslaved people, which rendered each one flat: helpless, weak, and reactionary. Which rendered them victims. But I didn’t want to pivot to the opposite representation, the survivor. Sethe survives, yes, but she is more than that. She is real because she is rendered fully: physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
I took these lessons from Beloved and modeled them when writing Let Us Descend. Throughout the novel, Annis has a keen awareness of her body, this vessel that is fundamentally hers even as enslavement tries to tell her it is not, and like Sethe, she sits with the discomfort and, sometimes, glory of what it is to be embodied: She walks, she breathes, she swims, she climbs, she makes love, she crawls, and she fights. With the limiting effect that enslavement has on physical agency, I realized I had to render other types of agency for Annis, the same way that Morrison explored with Seth. Annis has emotional agency. She grieves and feels anger, and when she can, she curries love. Annis makes family, finding kinship with so many different enslaved people on her journey; some of them serve as parental figures, some are like siblings, still others are romantic partners. Annis also has mental agency: She’s intellectually curious, collecting knowledge from the world around her and feeding her intellect by remembering her mother’s stories, by eavesdropping on a tutor and memorizing language, by keeping a mental catalog of mushrooms and their uses. Lastly, Annis has spiritual agency, or the ability to interact with the divine. I’ve heard that part of the reason that magical realism is so popular in Central and South American literature is because the horror of history is so stark and nearly unbearable that one must incorporate a reality beyond the five senses to write toward it. This is true in Beloved, when the child Sethe both spared and killed came back, and it is true for Annis, too, who encounters spirits and ghosts in a world sopping with the divine.
I think often of that night when I hovered at the edge of Morrison’s presence, my face upturned toward her like a flower to moonglow. I hope that Morrison is somewhere beyond us, and I hope she hears my stories. I hope she perceives them rippling from my low-country, humid, green marsh, and I hope they please her. I hope she understands that I, and many others, have been learning from her. I hope my stories rise like smoke and perfume to her, wherever she is, that they say: Oh how I admire you and your work—hello hello hello.
