Happy Birthday Toni Morrison: An Invocation for the Salt Tasters
By: Ra Malika Imhotep
Tags: Salt Tasters, Imagination, Black Feminism, Wildness, Toni Morrison

In May of 1985 Toni Morrison published a love letter to black women in the 15th anniversary edition of Essence Magazine titled “A Knowing So Deep.” This undercited treasure offers a glimpse at the breadth of all that Morrison knew.

“I think about us, black women, a lot;” she wrote, “How many of us are battered and how many are champions. I note the strides that have replaced the tiptoe; I watch the new configurations we have given to personal relationships, wonder what shapes are forged and what merely bent. I think about the sisters no longer with us, who, in rage or contentment, left us to finish what should never have begun: a gender/racial war in which everyone would lose, if we lost, and in which everyone would win, if we won.I think about the black women who never landed who are still swimming open-eyed in the sea. I think about those of us who did land and how their strategies for survival became our maneuvers for power.”

I would like to invite us all to join her in thinking about those still swimming open-eyed in the sea. Who swim with us and into our pores, eyes and mouths when we enter the sea for ritual, relief and recreation. Further i’d like for us to consider new, or untraditional configurations of personal relationships. Shapes forged and bent. That constitute the wildness of a legacy that seasons us all.

Christina Sharpe’s offering of “residence time” from In The Wake helps to ease the posturing of theoretical distance some so-called “progressive” scholars of black studies like to take when discussing the middle passage. Technically defined as “the average length of time during which a substance, a portion of material, or an object is in a given location or condition” for Sharpe, residence time signifies the ways bodies thrown, or jumped overboard and never recovered during the middle passage have likely “broken down into various components, like sodium from their blood” that are still with us today. Hortense Spillers writes and Saidiya Hartman reminds, that it is while “suspended in the oceanic” that the captive africans are culturally unmade and ungendered into vulnerability and possibility.

The Carribbean sugar plantation has a different relationship to water than the US Southern cotton field, the middle Georgia cotton field has a different relationship to water than the Coastal Georgia rice plantation. Nevertheless at psychic, ontological and material levels the past is present. Those Africans will rise again as the water cycles, they will rain down, they will be consumed, but above all they will be here alongside and inside of us.

So now, how do we move forward? And perhaps that question is precisely the problem. Morrison, and her people, pose a new question; how might we tread this water? What does it taste like?

One portion of bodily salt I think about often is sweat. And I think of sweat in tandem with heavy breathing. Exasperation. The pulse of what Fred Moten might term “exhaustive celebration in and through our suffering.”

On March 5, 1974 Toni Morrison was photographed dancing at a New York Disco. In one of the black and white photos of her that evening owned by getty images, her right arm lifts towards the roof, fingers curled into a snap, her waist twists in dance and underneath the heavy/ of her unbridled breast we see the damp markings of a good time. I want to think with the moment that may have come sometime after. The moment her body stilled itself in a corner, folded over, hand to knees as she caught her breath. As her sweat, her salt, continued to bleed through the fabric of the evenings costume to be met with a breeze that she cherished.

(I know this moment exist in some capacity, however different from my fabulation, because of the things I wish to share with Toni Morrison, there are the contours of a body black and feminine , there are folds of flesh that hold moisture, there is a heart and there are lungs)

How might this sweat, This moment of the body following pleasure to its outpour, connect us to what Gwendolyn Brooks terms, those maternal armies lining the oceans floor? How are our waters linked? How is our breath shared? What might it mean to conspire, in this way, with those who can’t breathe, who don’t need to?

How does one channel this ethos into an ethic let alone a literary career? Morrison knows. Her wildness is a contagion spread throughout a rhizomatic network of sisters. Black women protecting each other (and their shared genius) fiercely. Mutual aid in a cooked meal and an informal ‘fellowship check.’ Posthumous collaboration. Sister-circles. Rigorous care in the margins of draft after draft of Manuscript.

Morrison wrote things that she believed, so every biting moment of the text, ever tear she provokes, is intentional. The lingering presence of her voice in your head is by design. She baits you out towards the wild thing of your own imaginative doing. And even when you don’t know its her hand reaching out towards you through the bush (Jazz), she’s left her mark.

Huey P Newton. Muhammad Ali. Angela Davis. Henry Dumas. Gayl Jones. Nettie Jones. Toni Cade Bambara. And so many others. Toni Morrison midwife’d a bevy of wild imagination.

In her honor, we fix our mouths to cherish the taste of our own fearlessness.

Let The Church say Axe!