Toni Morrison’s only short story is fascinating: pupils are truly engaged in the voices of Twyla and Roberta: which is white, which black? What is particularly impressive about Morrison’s writing is that the conceit is never tricksy – it justifies itself again and again as the story deepens, and like all the best short stories it has the amplitude of a novel. In the end the narrative turns out to be about us as much as the characters.
First published in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, ed. Amiri Baraka and Amina Baraka, Morrow, 1983. Published in book form with an introductory essay by Zadie Smith, Chatto and Windus, 2022
A Personal Anthology 