August 5, 2019, Toni Morrison passed away at the age of 88. There will be articles swarming the press, memorials and appraisals of her literary legacy, her activism and voice, and even Obama will commend her talents on Twitter. It is a sad day, one that will be mourned by the literary community and beyond for a long time. More so than other public figures, the loss of a great writer feels personal; there is an intimacy between writer and reader, by holding their words we behold the world inside them. And the only true way to mourn, to give justice to the soul of, and celebrate a writer as great as Toni Morrison is to read her work.

In 1993 Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first African American woman to do so. Beloved is the novel for which she received the award. On winning the award, Toni remarked:

“When I heard I’d won, you heard no ‘Aw, shucks’ from me. The prize didn’t change my inner assessment of what I’m capable of doing, but I welcomed it as a public, representational affirmation of my work. I was surprised at how patriotic I felt, being the first native-born American winner since Steinbeck in 1962… I felt pride that a black and a woman had been recognized in such an international forum.”

Beloved traces the life of an ex-slave, Sethe, as she is haunted by the spirit of the daughter she killed to prevent her from being traded into slavery. Beloved returns incarnated as a full-grown woman, who begins to wreak havoc on their home. We travel through the halls of Sethe’s memory: the trauma of her life on the plantation to escaping and giving birth on a boat crossing the river to freedom. Her mother in law, Baby Suggs and Paul D are the two steady forces in the novel, rooting us in a reality that Sethe so often drifts away from.

The novel is mystical, haunting, spiritual. In this way, Toni introduces new forms of storytelling. She weaves through the narrative and allows her characters to unfold the mysteries of their past. Her words are alive on the page, her sentences chilling to the bone. Toni reworks our definitions of fiction, of literature as she pulls at our emotions from all angles; truth and non-truth are as conflated as the living and dead throughout Beloved. It is this ambiguity, this liminal space that Toni works in that wakes us up from the familiar reality we rest in.

In an interview, Toni remarks on the subject of writing her novels that she “came at it not as a writer but a reader.” She was eager for a different story, a story that represented the destructive power of racism and the reality of black experience in America. Her novels, especially Beloved, accomplish this and more. Not only has she changed the narrative, but she has transformed the way we think about fiction and writing.

Toni Morrison knows magic, it lives in her words, in her ability to wring you like a towel with her power of storytelling. In the divided world we still live in, we must focus on the voices that mend that divide. Toni’s is one of them. We must read her words to understand, to fully appreciate the loss we experience today.