‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison

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

‘Sweetness’ by Toni Morrison

There are some stories you read as a reader and there are other stories you read as a writer with one eye fixed on the how each word makes the sentence, how each sentence stacks up into paragraphs of meaning and emotion. This is a story I read and reread to learn how to write character, to learn how to turn character into plot, to learn how to tell a story before the reader even notices they are in the middle of one. Morrison teaches you how to tell a story that pulls no punches, that doesn’t care if the reader likes the narrator or not, that leaves much for the reader to figure out for themselves while pertaining to state plainly what they mean. There is no better school than this.

Published in The New Yorker, 2015. Read online here. Later formed part of Morrison’s novel God Help the Child, Knopf/Chatto & Windus, 2015

‘Recitatif’ by Toni Morrison

“We sat on the ground and breathed. Lady Esther. Apple blossoms. I still go soft when I smell one or the other”

First published in Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women (Morrow, 1983). Read online