Euclid Ave. Mural

Cleveland, Ohio

By Monique Wingard

In the tapestry of life, sometimes the threads that pull us away are the same ones that guide us back home. In 2013, the job market in Cleveland had left me feeling shut out, unwanted, unworthy. I hit the road for a job in Chicago, in pursuit of a better life. After ten years away, I came back to be closer to home. When I returned, while walking through downtown Cleveland, a striking mural caught my eye. There, prominently displayed on the side of a building at 334 Euclid Ave., alongside LeBron James and Tracy Chapman, was the face of Toni Morrison — Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Ohio’s own literary giant.

As I stood before Morrison’s portrait on that Euclid Avenue wall, it was her smile that ignited my renewed sense of purpose and belonging. The mural, commissioned by Browns player Myles Garrett and created by Glen Infante, welcomes visitors near Destination Cleveland, and it now served as a powerful reminder of Morrison’s legacy and the potential within every Black woman from Ohio to persevere in the face of adversity.

After nearly a decade away, I felt a surge of emotions as I stood before Morrison’s mural. The vibrant colors and bold lines captured not just her likeness, but her spirit — unapologetic, fierce, and inspiring. As I gazed at the mural with my mother by my side, I was struck by a sense of homecoming and responsibility. Morrison’s watchful eyes seemed to ask, “What will you contribute to our shared legacy?”

This mural takes on even greater significance in light of recent statistics. In 2020, Bloomberg CityLab published a report analyzing the livability for Black women in 42 U.S. cities, based on health, education, and economic factors. Shockingly, Cleveland — with its nearly 50% Black population — ranked dead last. This statistic is sobering, but it’s crucial to understand its context. While the label of “worst city for Black women” holds some truth, it also leaves room for change and renaissance. It should prompt us to demand that Black women and organizations in Cleveland remember their power and responsibility to advocate relentlessly for each other and for a better life in the city.

Morrison once told an audience of college students, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” Her words resonate powerfully, encapsulating the responsibility we have as Black women in Ohio — to lift as we climb, to create opportunities for those who come after us, and to transform our communities. The mural reminds us of this responsibility. It challenges us to stand up, be counted, and hold ourselves and our community accountable. It urges us to be persistent in our pursuit to change Cleveland and uplift the entire state of Ohio.

As we look upon Morrison’s face on that Euclid Avenue wall, we must ask ourselves: How can we embody her spirit of unapologetic Blackness and unwavering determination? How can we weave our own threads into Morrison’s tapestry of Black womanhood?

We can start by:

1. Supporting and uplifting other Black women in our communities
2. Advocating for policies that address the disparities highlighted in the CityLab report
3. Creating and supporting spaces for Black women to thrive in business, arts, and education
4. Mentoring young Black girls, ensuring they see the potential within themselves

The Toni Morrison mural in downtown Cleveland is more than just a beautiful piece of art. It’s a beacon of hope and a call to action. The mural entitled, “Cleveland is the Reason,” was created by artist Glen Infante in April 2021 to remind the world that he and others are proud of the people who have shaped the city. The mural reminds us of the power of imagery, our words, our actions, and our unity. As Black women in Ohio, we have a responsibility to change the narrative, to rewrite Cleveland’s story, and to continue the work that Morrison began. Let us stand tall, speak boldly, and act with purpose, knowing that we carry within us the same strength and resilience that Morrison embodied. By doing so, we honor her legacy and create a better future for all Black women in Cleveland and beyond. As Morrison would have done if she were still with us, let us be relentless in our pursuit of justice, equality, and empowerment for Black women in our city and our state.

My exodus in 2013 was born of necessity and hope — a pursuit of better opportunities in a job market that seemed to have no place for me. At the time, I couldn’t have known about the harsh realities that would later be quantified when CityLab named Cleveland the worst city for Black women. Yet, as I stood before Toni Morrison’s vibrant visage on that Euclid Avenue wall, I felt a renewed sense of purpose and belonging, despite the sobering statistics that had emerged during my absence. Chicago had been great, and D.C. okay, but neither quite felt like home. There’s a unique rhythm in Ohio that resonates in the souls of those born here, whether in my birth city of Dayton or my adopted home of Cleveland. It’s a cadence of perseverance, a melody of pride, and a harmony of shared identity that calls us back, no matter how far we roam.

Now, as I gaze up at Morrison’s unwavering eyes and electric smile, I feel a surge of determination. This has been more than a homecoming; it is a reclamation. A reclamation of my place in this city, of my identity as an Ohioan, and of my responsibility to weave new threads of hope and opportunity for others into the tapestry of Cleveland’s future and beyond.

The city has changed since 2013, and so have I, but one thing is certain — I am home, ready to stand firm and forge a new path in the state that shaped me and Toni Morrison. Armed with the knowledge and experiences gained during my time away, and inspired by Morrison’s unapologetic celebration of Black womanhood, I’m determined to be a beacon for young women — our future leaders. My mission is clear: to ignite a fierce pride in their Ohio roots, a pride so deep that it becomes an unshakeable foundation built by trailblazing Black women like Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, activist Mary B. Talbert, philanthropist Dr. Zelma Watson George, and educator Louise Troy.

Together, we’ll rewrite Cleveland’s story, just as Morrison rewrote the narrative of Black women in literature. We’ll transform this city into a place where Black women not only survive but thrive, where every young girl can see herself reflected in the success stories around her. This is our home, our legacy, and our future — and we will make it shine with the brilliance of every young woman who dares to dream here, carrying forward the torch that Morrison and countless other Ohio daughters lit for us all.

A proud Buckeye and doctoral student at Kent State University’s College of Communication and Information, Monique Wingard is a digital transformation consultant who amplifies the digital footprint of women-led organizations by shaping effective communication strategies. Her research focuses on news and media literacy among adolescent girls, with the goal of developing curriculum that enhances their critical thinking skills. She is a member of the Coalition for Independent Tech Research and the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). Visit moniquewingard.com for updates on her research, speaking engagements, conference presentations, and published works.

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Chesapeake Bay

Northeast Maryland

By Alice Sundman

We are driving southward on I-95, toward Washington, D.C. I am trying to take in the landscape around us, a landscape I have never seen before, but that I still, somehow, know in my mind. Here, in the midst of gray concrete and endless numbers of cars, I finally get a few glimpses of parts of Chesapeake Bay, of patches of verdant vegetation — and of a landscape in which Jacob Vaark, a character in Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy, makes his way toward the slaveholder D’Ortega’s plantation in Maryland in the late 1600s.

For someone who grew up on a small island in the Baltic Sea, the enormous highway and the great distances are quite a contrast to my childhood windblown pines, low cliffs of red granite, and thousands of tiny islands in the archipelago of the Åland Islands of Finland. I am used to short distances ideal for cycling, to walking in the forest, to picking berries, to going for a swim in calm, shallow bays — to experiencing the place concretely, through my body and thus to get a sense of actually being in the landscape.

In the car on the highway, I am at a distance from everything. I can see water, trees, parts of the ground.… But how does it feel to actually be there, in the place?

In A Mercy, Jacob is travelling by boat, on foot and on horseback. Having sailed down the river into Chesapeake Bay, he is now struggling with the water, the sand, and the mud as he tries to find his way through the fog toward land:

“The man moved through the surf, stepping carefully over pebbles and sand to shore. Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. He could see his boots sloshing but not his satchel nor his hands. When the surf was behind him and his soles sank in mud, he turned to wave to the sloopmen, but because the mast had disappeared in the fog he could not tell whether they remained anchored or risked sailing on.”

For Jacob, the place evokes a sense of chaos, but this is due to political skirmishes and shifting territorial claims rather than the landscape itself, whose Indigenous inhabitants give him a sense of stability and of life lived in accordance with nature and the land.

Seeing the vastness of the landscape and the long distances of seemingly interminable highways, I wonder how Morrison managed to create the sense of immediate bodily experience of the landscape that Jacob experiences. For even if she most likely knew this place far better than I do, her experience from the late 1900s and early 2000s differs considerably from Jacob’s 17th century ditto.

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in her archived manuscripts, the Toni Morrison Papers, at Princeton University Library. It is well known that Morrison did thorough research for her novels. She studied reports and books of facts, and she used places she had visited or lived in as inspiration for her fictional places. But how did she create this particular fictional landscape, through which Jacob is travelling? Her archived research material for the novel includes information about Native American place names and their relation to topographical features that have most likely informed her writing. Facts about and descriptions of actual places thus form part of her creation of the fictional landscape. But more important, I think, are two crucial skills: her crafting and her imagination.

Early drafts I studied in the archive suggest that the landscape in this passage was not a priority at the beginning of her writing process; in these drafts, she focuses on sketching the contours of Jacob as a greedy settler. In later and more elaborate versions, the landscape is gradually given a greater role as she develops it into a thematic feature that becomes part of a human-place relation, which also allows her to develop Jacob into a more complex character. In her final, published version of this passage, as in other textual moments involving other characters in the novel, human-landscape interactions are crafted into complex thematic features that enrich both setting and character.

In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison comments on the significance of imagination for her writing: “memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.” In addition to her drafting and crafting the landscape, she imagined Jacob walking in these regions in 1682. Her imagination enables her to create a story that invites the reader to feel a closeness to the place, despite the chronological, and sometimes geographical, distance. She invites us to experience the place along with a 17th century settler: “he took delight in the journey. Breathing the air of a world so new, almost alarming in rawness and temptation, never failed to invigorate him. Once beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking.”

In the car on the highway, I realize that despite the traffic, despite the concrete, despite the radically changed place, the landscape I see is also the one Jacob is sailing, walking, and riding through. This actual place, marked by the imprint of today’s humans, is interwoven with the fictional place Jacob traverses in another century. Along with these watery landscapes, I see my childhood Baltic archipelago with its narrow fairways on which thousands upon thousands of vessels have sailed through the centuries — some out fishing between the islets, others on their way toward the world’s oceans as part of a growing shipping industry — all on a sea that binds together the continents. In my mind and through my imagination, fed by my childhood island landscape, I can now experience this co-existence of times and places. For this, I thank Toni Morrison, whose drafting, crafting, and imagining made this amalgam of placescapes possible.

Alice Sundman was born on the Åland Islands of Finland and lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where she is working on a project exploring places of and between water and land in Anglophone literature. She is the author of Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022).

Image: “A New map of Virginia, Maryland, and the Improved Parts of Pennsylvania & New Jersey.” Originally published by Christopher Browne, 1685. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

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Childhood Home

Lorain, Ohio

By Tara L. Conley

“This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is a memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say ‘home’”? –Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

In astronomy, there’s an idea that describes how displacement and difference observed in a perceived object depends on the viewpoint, or the location from which the object is observed. Parallax, from the Greek word parallaxis, or change, is a multidimensional way of seeing. In literature, and by extension film, parallax is a device sometimes used to tell a story about a single event, place, or person through the perspective of multiple characters. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) employs parallax, as does Netflix’s Kaleidoscope (2023) and Knives Out (2020-2022), as well as David Fincher’s 2014 psychological thriller, Gone Girl. 

In my classroom, when I discuss the idea of social difference, I hold up a marker. I ask students to describe exactly what they see from their vantage point. Each description is slightly different: “it’s plastic and round,” one student says. “It’s hard to see from where I sit,” says another. The story of the marker, as told by my students, contains multitudes. The point of this exercise is to show how perceived differences depend on perception, and to demonstrate how the relationship between subject and object is mediated. Perception is never truly unidirectional, and affected by our memory, ways of knowing and being, and a sense of place and environment. We don’t so much observe objects out there as we become affected by the experience of seeing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parallax lately as I revisit previous writings on Toni Morrison, fellow Ohioan and Lorain County native. During the summer of 2019, I published a piece for CityLab/Bloomberg about visiting Toni Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain a few days after she passed. My article was among others published at the time that highlighted Morrison’s legacy as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and cherished luminary on the Black American experience. I took a different approach, writing instead about the shape of borders, real and imagined, that make up the regional landscape both Morrison and I call home.

In The Source of Self-Regard (2019), when Morrison asks, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’?” I think about our shared home region of Lorain County, the shape of its borders, and the houses that hold memories of growing up during eras of radical social and political transformation. Born mid-February 1931 during The Great Depression, Morrison’s early life in Lorain was marked by an era of cataclysmic economic downfall. Born on the first day of February in 1981, amidst an economic recession, my early life in Elyria was marked by the rise of neoliberal economic reforms and New Right political movements. Despite the half-century gap between us underlined by different eras of social and political strife, Morrison and I belong to a shared ancestral line of Black American travelers who migrated to Ohio, seeking an escape from the south, what sociologist Karida L. Brown (2018) calls “the battered womb of the Civil War.”

The decades spanning roughly 1910-1970 transformed Ohio’s landscapes. During this historical period, known as The Great Migration, Black people left the South to seek opportunities in Midwestern cities like Elyria and Lorain. Once bustling, the region gradually decayed as industries left, businesses shut down, and economic progress stalled. For many, including my own family members, this fostered a visceral sense of being stuck in time. Amid the circumstances, Black people were especially vulnerable to the repercussions of these changes and subject to racial resentment as social institutions crumbled around them. 

Even the Black River, a natural tributary that flows into Lake Erie and connects Elyria and Lorain, was once a thriving center of commerce. As time passed, however, it became known for its polluted and treacherous waters that claimed the lives of those who ventured too close to its shores. The story of the Black River became a parable of the sower — once-vibrant, then weathered by time, reflecting the place and dispositions of the people surrounding it. 

Black travelers have always been keenly aware of landscapes that bend and close in on us. We also recognize when it’s time to leave. Morrison understood this too. She left Lorain in 1949 to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, and soon realized the price Black Americans pay when leaving home. During an interview with Colette Dowling in 1979 Morrison says, “if black people are going to succeed in this culture, they must always leave.” She continues: 

“Once you leave home, the things that feed you are not available to you anymore, the life is not available to you anymore … So you really have to cut yourself off.”

I left Ohio at a young age, but unlike Morrison, I returned to live, teach, and make stories about home. One of those stories is my documentary film called Dry Bones, about Ike Maxwell and the summer of 1975 when Elyria erupted in protest after Ike’s brother, nineteen-year-old Daryl Lee Maxwell, was shot and killed by a White police officer. Regardless of where I lived geographically, I always remained tied to northeast Ohio. The reason I returned isn’t merely rooted in being born and raised in Lorain County; rather, it’s the region’s story of social difference that draws me back.

In 2019, when I returned home to Lorain County, I noticed how neighborhood symbols and historical landmarks came to represent racial and social division. For example, while driving towards Toni Morrison’s former childhood home—a modest two-story pale blue colonial at the corner of Elyria Avenue and East 23rd Street—it was difficult to miss the house across the street adorned with a large Trump 2020 banner waving on the porch. It stood as a clear and intentional symbol of White racist attitudes and beliefs in one of Lorain County’s most heavily populated Black cities, along with Elyria. It also served as a reminder that within shared landscapes, disparate realities exist. Four miles away in Elyria, sits the YWCA building, an historical landmark located across the street from my childhood home. When I learned Daryl Lee Maxwell was arrested in the YWCA parking lot during the summer of 1975, bleak visions emerged of a young man I never knew heading towards the end of his life. Less than one month after Daryl Lee was arrested in the YWCA parking lot, a White police officer named Michael Killean shot and killed him outside a local bar, igniting a three-day protest and uprising. These moments, separated by time and space, and imbued with rememory, reveal the legacy of White power in America, persisting through its symbols of supremacy and authoritarian acts of violence.

Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain and mine in Elyria provide vantage points to reflect on the perpetual shadow of racial subjugation in our home region. Through a contemporary political symbol of White resentment and a nearby historical landmark of a haunting past, the answer to Morrison’s question about home crystalizes for me; home isn’t merely a broken place of shared memories or a place where Black travelers come and go. Home reveals a way of seeing with searing clarity Black people’s enduring resilience across cruel landscapes.

Tara L. Conley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at Kent State University. Her writing on Morrison and living as a Black woman in the Rust Belt have appeared in CityLab/Bloomberg. Conley is currently working on a book and a film about her hometown of Elyria, Ohio. For more information on Tara’s research and creative projects, visit www.taralconley.org. 

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Thayer Hall

West Point, New York

By Trivius Caldwell

Born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second of four children and a precocious reader. She attended Howard University in 1949 and, later, taught there for seven years. In 1965, following the birth of her second son, Morrison moved to Syracuse, New York, to work for Random House. There, she edited work by African American writers Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and many others. Morrison’s oeuvre is replete with aspects of African American vernacular and themes of race, gender, and sexuality. Her tenth novel Home (2012) is a departure from much of her ephemeral work and centers around a male protagonist, a war veteran. Portraying Frank Money as a protagonist grappling with profound troubles and trauma, who embarks on a journey back home after the Korean War, underscores the significance of delving into complex notions of home while reevaluating the concept of family. It seems odd Frank Money and cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point might have something in common, yet the tragedy of war is but one way of straying from home.

The academy is nestled in the Hudson River Valley, north of bustling New York City. The old fortress, West Point, is home to almost 4,300 cadets from across our nation and territories. They represent the best of us as they prepare to lead our Nation’s sons and daughters. The Cadet Corps calls the Academy home, and along the Hudson river, they prepare to defend liberty. In the spring, the sun peaks over the adjacent mountain range, toying with cadets as they scuttle to classes under the final chill of winter. On the clearest day, the cityscape of the Big Apple appears like a distant mirage.

Sometimes, cadets travel by train toward the city’s glow. Unbeknownst to them, the river flowing broadside of their locomotive was also home to perhaps the greatest literary genius of our time, Toni Morrison. She too called a portion of the Hudson’s bank home. Morrison lived in the village Grand View on the Hudson, a quiet place to write while staring into the river’s reflection of that passing train. Her novels — including classics like The Bluest Eye (1970)and Beloved (1987) — represent the reality of the American African interior by depicting an Africanist presence in America’s soul. Teaching at West Point, I often admired cadets as they reflected on their future military service while gazing into that same soothing water. The Hudson River is more than just a canal to the Big Apple; it is an artery of the imagination.

Follow that river north and the gothic architecture of Thayer Hall emerges from the rolling hills of the Hudson highlands. Thayer Hall stands as a testament to both history and transformation. Originally conceived as the Riding Hall for the horses, this architectural gem proudly showcases the Gothic Revival style, mirroring the grandeur seen in other structures at West Point from the same era. Its robust exterior, crafted from gneiss masonry in random ashlar coursing, is accentuated by limestone parapets, window and door surrounds, and elegant belt courses. Granite additions, particularly at the bridges leading to its west side, further enhance its stately presence.

On March 22, 2013, Toni Morrison shuttled a short distance north to lecture to the Plebe (freshman) class in the Roscoe Robinson Jr. auditorium in Thayer Hall. Her work on depicting the totality of our American experience is all too familiar to cadets — those charged with reading Home as they reflect on the inner turmoil and implications of their service — especially given the experiences of Morrison’s protagonist Frank Money.

The acoustics in the auditorium transformed her writing into a symphony, harmonizing the rustle of a thousand pages turning simultaneously with the mellifluous cadence of Morrison’s jazzing voice. At once, the soundscape transformed the room into both canvas and cave, capturing the collective breath of anticipation and the energy of a captivated audience as cadets immersed themselves in Morrison’s literary imagination. The ethereal fusion of turning pages, coupled with Morrison’s voice resonating in the air, created a transcendent experience wherein the written and spoken word converged with an almost orchestral precision, inviting listeners to navigate her narrative. The auditorium, alive with the resonance of storytelling, became a sanctuary where the magic of literature unfolded in a captivating and immersive symphony. After all, Morrison makes fiction an oral art form. She is a master of manipulating sound by employing jazz characteristics in her writing.

Interestingly, that auditorium is named after a St. Louis native who ascended the military hierarchy to become the first African American four-star general in the United States Army. The formerly known “South Aud” served as a lecture facility for the Corps of Cadets long before the 1958 commemoration of the auditorium for General Robinson, who is emblematic of the pride that motivates Cadets to serve in times of war. However, the purpose for renaming it demonstrates the same exigence motivating Morrison’s fiction — belonging.

The Cultural Affairs Seminar (CAS), a cohort of cadets of color at West Point, petitioned for the auditorium’s name change because they were not satisfied with their lack of reflection in the gothic stone. Like others seeking to join the Long Gray Line to defend freedom, they wanted to be represented at the historic military mainstay. As with Morrison’s depiction of the Korean War veteran Frank Money — not to mention Shadrack, Paul D, and the Harlem Hellfighters in other novels — the cadets were willing to scratch the calcified scab of national history by using voice and action to assert their place.

Long landscapes like the Hudson River, the stone Riding Hall, and the auditorium and its acoustic flair served as the setting for the writer’s tutelage. Everyone awaited her voice, loud like the silence itself, signaling a legacy and ghosts of the past. On the hallowed grounds of West Point, she whispered Frank Money’s thoughts: “I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men.”

Trivius Caldwell is an active-duty Army Infantry officer. He served as an Assistant Professor of English at West Point from 2011-2013. Trivius is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Duke University where he studies African American literature, sound studies, and hip-hop literature.

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Lakeview Park

Lorain, Ohio

By Ashley Burge

As a teenager, I entered what Toni Morrison calls her narrative “village” through her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), and I was pleased to see three young Black girls traverse the familiar experiences of home life while prodding the unfamiliar territory of adolescence. I found much comfort in these girls’ fantasies and fears, and I wept, as I still do, over their tragedies. I was also entranced by the way Morrison framed her beautifully tragic characters in picturesque settings of nature and growth and beauty. Any serious Morrison reader is well attuned to her complex and intriguing characters, sparse but rich prose, and “unspeakable” thematic materials. I remember sprawling on my bed admiring these Black girls amidst golden-brown autumn leaves or tight red rosebuds. To me, these snapshots of nature were a buffer to the hopelessly tragic story that would soon unfold.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the backdrop of Lorain, Ohio, her midwestern hometown, to illuminate the traumas inflicted on young Black girls and women in the 1940s. Specifically, she represents the Edenic Lakeview Park, with its beautiful rose gardens, situated among the pristine beachfronts on West Erie Avenue, as a pathway to cathartic revelation and renewal. For Morrison, nature and the natural world are a catalyst for survival, so the book’s version of Lakeview, called Lake Shore Park, is an ideal space to anchor her vision.

Lakeview Park has become a landmark in Lorain County with its approximately 2,500 roses planted in a rotary wheel. The park sits on Lake Erie, its circular design symbolizing wholeness and rebirth. In a more just world, it would be the ideal space for Morrison’s tragic protagonists to transcend the confines of intersectional oppression. But in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, spaces such as these were inaccessible to the three Black girls who epitomize themes of victimhood and survival in Middle America. In The Bluest Eye, these girls, Claudia, Fredia, and Pecola, are accosted by the traumas of racism, sexism, and classism well before they have escaped the naïve joy and confusion of adolescence. The tragic character Pecola does not understand or question her obsessive desire for blue eyes, but she is awestruck when the green-eyed “high-yellow dream child” Maureen Peal enchants teachers, parents, and students. Portrayed as a type of Persephone embodied in Morrison’s season themed narrative, Maureen disrupts the equilibrium of the girls’ identities and symbolizes the overwhelming otherness of Black girlhood in America. In these young girls’ experiences with racism and sexism, Morrison interrogates the worst possible scenarios for those who are othered, marginalized, and dismissed, and she indicts the communities that are complicit in their annihilation.

In many ways, The Bluest Eye is an autobiographical rendering of Morrison’s own othered identity in the small Midwestern industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison adamantly affirmed her Midwestern roots throughout her career. In conversation with Collette Dowling, she said, “Everything I write starts there…. Whether I end up there is another question, but that’s the place where I start…. It’s my beginning, my ‘thing,’ and I have distorted it, piled things on, I have done whatever it is that writers do to places, and made it my own. So it is mine now.”  Even while claiming the Midwest as her own, she confessed to Robert Stepto, “I know that I never felt like an American or an Ohian or even a Lorainite.”

Morrison’s allegiance to the Midwest shows in her ability to carve out the validity of Black identity in a region that often silences diverse voices. Morrison’s family faced such disenfranchisement. Before relocating to the Midwest for better opportunities, they had deep roots in the South, with her mother being from Alabama and her father from Georgia. She often recounts the story of 88 acres of land that were legally taken from her Native American maternal great-grandmother to show how white supremacy and systematic oppression renders land inaccessible to Black and brown people.

Morrison emphasizes this extension of day-to-day oppression in The Bluest Eye as she traces the growth and then disintegration of Pecola’s character. Before a pivotal scene in which Pecola is rejected by her mother and humiliated in front of the little white girl who her mother cares for, Morrison details the natural beauty of the white neighborhood that these young girls cannot access:

“We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.”

Here, Morrison embosses the fictionalized Lake Shore Park onto Lorain’s own Lakeview Park, with its lush rose gardens, manicured lawns, and picturesque lakeside. The tragedy of its beauty is that these young Black girls in 1940s Lorain are denied access to the dream of smelling those rosebuds, playing on those lawns, or frolicking on that lakeside. They are shut out from its beauty in nature and, therefore, alienated from their community, which adds to the despair that leads to Pecola’s demise.

When I reflect on my first immersion into The Bluest Eye as a teenager, I realize that my delight in Morrison’s poetic rendering of nature points to the reclamation of spaces that have been historically inaccessible to the Black community. Within that legalized denial enacted prior to the 1960s there was not only the unspoken denial of the ecstasy of nature but also the disenfranchisement of property, wealth, and mobility that still plagues Black Americans today. I was not personally denied access to Lorain’s natural enclaves, but the tragic narrative of denial was a tangible specter that haunted my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama even in my adolescence.  

These are, perhaps, the sentiments that impressed upon me as I empathized with Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. And these are, perhaps, the sentiments that many Black Americans must navigate as they encounter the traumas connected to public parks and natural resources in America. It would not be difficult to surmise that Morrison incorporates the tragic denial of Lake Shore Park in her narrative because her desire to access its beauty and nature also dominated her own dreams as a child. However, Morrison’s novels never persist in the tragic nor linger too long into despair. At their core, they are about healing that can lead to survival and subjectivity. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison took the pang of rejection and adorned the park with flourish and meaning and gravitas and three little Black girls whose voices would have otherwise been silenced. Now, Lakeview Park is forever hers, and through her reclamation, it becomes ours.

Dr. Ashley Burge is an Assistant Professor of African American literature at Augustana College–Illinois specializing in 19th and 20th century African American literature. Her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She also explores Black feminism and ecocriticism in her writings. Her essays have appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, the Pennsylvania Communication Annual, the African American Encyclopedia of Culture, and the critical anthology Through Mama’s Eyes. Her current book project establishes a theoretical paradigm that transmutes trauma and fragmentation to wholeness and subjectivity in African American literature. 

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