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| Photo Contributed by Neil Olsen. |
Rev. Luk De Volder and Rev. Kyle Pedersen took the front of the room at Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green. Attendees shifted and settled in their seats. It was a special morning: the day’s scripture included the gospel of Toni Morrison, whose words have guided faithful readers for decades.
“I have never been interested in or impressed by evil itself, but I have been confounded by how attractive it is to others,” they read. “I am stunned by the attention given to its every whisper and shout.”
Sunday morning, they were just a few of the readers at “Still, I Rise,” the 17th annual African-American read-in at Trinity in downtown New Haven. Held on the second day of Black History Month, the read-in featured passages from Morrison’s Sula, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Song of Solomon and more, including much of the author’s nonfiction.
The read-in is inspired by the National African-American Read-In, launched in 1990 by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). In New Haven, it is organized by Black Caucus and the NCTE member Eleanor Q. Tignor, a retired professor of English who has been a congregant at Trinity for 49 years. Tignor also served as the mistress of ceremonies of the event.
Tignor said she first brought the read-in to the church 18 years ago. In addition to Tignor and faith leaders at the church, members of the Trinity Players and congregants are invited to read.
Before the event, Tignor said that she wanted to dedicate this year’s readings to Toni Morrison because of the author’s monumental impact on American literature and death last August. A prolific writer of both fiction and nonfiction, Morrion spent her life weaving worlds, making history as the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Some readers spoke of the very personal impact that Morrison has had on their lives. Robert Windom, a member of the church vestry, recalled the day he learned that Morrison won the Nobel Prize.
When the news first broke that the winner of the Nobel Prize was a woman, he and his colleagues made a list of potential winners, culled from all the authors they could think of. There were no people of color on the list. Then an announcement came crackling over his radio.
“I pulled my car over and cried,” Windom said to the audience. “Not because she was a woman, but because she was the first African-American woman to receive it.”
Windom read from a 2017 interview between Morrison and Harvard historian Davíd Carrasco, joined by readers Ruth Risberg and Lilian Revel as the lines coasted over attendees.
Deborah Johnson, another reader at the event, said that Morrison’s work has motivated her to learn more about the literature and history that she was not taught in school, and that she still considers "missing" from the mainstream.
Departing from the fiction for which Morrison may be most well-known, she read from Morrison’s 1987 eulogy of James Baldwin, a soaring and poetic tribute to the author’s friend that still resonates 30 years after it was written.
“You gave me a language to dwell in, a gift so perfect it seems my own invention,” she read, and the audience once again remembered the instant power Morrison wielded with her word.
“I have been thinking your spoken and written thoughts for so long I believed they were mine. I have been seeing the world through your eyes for so long, I believed that clear clear view was my own. Even now, even here, I need you to tell me what I am feeling and how to articulate it. So I have pored again through the 6,895 pages of your published work to acknowledge the debt and thank you for the credit.”
Others let the words speak for themselves. Trinity member Murray Harrison read Morrison’s tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. De Volder and Pederson, still wrapped in spirit of an earlier 9 a.m. service, read excerpts from Morrison’s 2012 lecture “Goodness: Altruism and the Literary Imagination,” first delivered at Harvard and later published in the New York Times.
Towards the end of the event, many attendees and readers expressed their love for Morrison’s hold on language, the power of which remains even after her death.
To learn more about Trinity Episcopal Church on the Green, check out their website.