Song of a Reformed Headhunter

In these lectures-turned-essays, Toni Morrison provides a very suggestive approach to the critical study of classic American literature. Arguing that literary whiteness is constituted against literary blackness—freedom against slavery, innocence against experience, civilization against savagery—she calls for the study of what she names as Africanism in literature produced by white writers. This is not so much for the purpose of critical subversion or ideological rallying as for the richer, more complex, and more nuanced study of American literature. She demonstrates this approach in brief analyses of Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girl , Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn , and Hemingway's novels. I wish she had more room, in either the lecture series or the book publication, to deploy the approach to the works of Thoreau and Henry James, both reckoned to be American masters. The comment on Melville's Moby Di...

Missouri He came into the world with Halley’s Comet and went out with it, as he fore-said. He trained as a steamship pilot and studied the river’s every swirl and snag. He nicked his penname from an old sailor, an old river cry, meaning, mark the two fathoms that give safe passage. He changed his mind. He decried the domination of the Philippines and praised the Chinese Boxers. He was against slavery but made his masterpiece, Huck, struggle with the common prejudice, terrified he was going to hell for freeing Jim. Have I read it? No… I’d rather float with this boat downriver and think of his dark last years when his daughter Suzy died, and then his wife Olivia died, and then another daughter, the youngest, Jean.