Don't Make a Saint Out of Toni Morrison

Cannonball with Wesley Morris

The New York Times

News, News Commentary, Arts, Society & Culture

4.7 • 9.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Seven years after Toni Morrison’s death, we’re experiencing what the critic Parul Sehgal describes as a “wave of Morrisonia.” Eleven of her novels are being reissued by her publisher. There’s a new book of criticism about her novels. You can feel the effort to shore up her legacy. It’s an understandable impulse. This is the woman who wrote “Beloved,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that, as Parul writes, “invented a language for unassimilable pain, for the horrors of the Middle Passage, of bondage and its systematized torture and sexual brutality.” The book can feel like a kind of miracle. And Morrison, therefore, like a kind of saint. But sanctification — both Parul and Wesley fear — has its own risks. It puts Morrison up in the sky, where we can’t quite reach her. Too far away to touch. So in this episode of Cannonball, that’s what Parul, Wesley and their editor, Sasha Weiss, set out to do. Touch Morrison’s work — as she wanted us to.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Wesley Morris, and this is Cannonball today.
0:07.3	Butterfly in the sky.
0:10.0	I can go twice as high.
0:13.0	Take a look.
0:14.3	It's in a book.
0:15.3	It's in a book.
0:29.8	Book covers... book covers they're funny things maybe you can't judge a whole book by one but let me tell you sometimes a cover will seduce you to the book and intrigue you enough to pick it up
0:36.0	and read it i remember seeing a paperback of
0:39.4	Tony Morrison's beloved when I was maybe 12 or 13 and had a woman on the cover and a lacy dress
0:47.5	and a boder hat and she was translucent like her brown skin you could kind of see through it.
0:55.0	This was the same book that my mother and my aunts were talking about.
0:59.6	And I remember my aunt Katie telling me I wasn't ready for it.
1:03.2	But that cover made me want to know why.
1:07.1	So I finally opened it and eventually I got it.
1:11.8	I understood it's a hard book.
1:16.7	Like James Joyce hard, like William Faulkner hard, but emotionally too because eventually
1:24.1	I realized that the woman on the cover of that paperback is a version of the adult
1:29.8	ghost who comes back to haunt the mother who chose to murder her as an infant rather than let
1:36.4	a slave catch her take her away.
1:38.9	That's when I also realized Aunt Katie was really, really right.
1:43.2	I was not ready. But that's the thing about
1:46.5	Tony Morrison. Nobody's ready. She writes big and dark and bold humorously about black
	...

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