Why am I passionate about this?
For me, the American story is about “mixedness”—about the ways in which people of various backgrounds and beliefs have come together, oftentimes despite themselves, to make up our modern racial stew. It has been true since the Founding and is all the more so now, even as we, as a society, continue to want to resist it. These novels achieve what I aspire to in my own writing: the white characters are as complex as the Black ones. And in their struggles to make sense of the world, they all reveal the complexity and contradictions of American identity.
David's book list on complicated Black-white relations
Why did David love this book?
I came to Toni Morrison a little late. This was in the 1980s, after she’d won the Pulitzer. I read Song of Solomon first, upon the recommendation of a friend who told me he couldn’t read the end of the novel without bursting into tears. Next, Beloved: I was so awed that I reread it five times in a row!
At that point, I realized that I needed to circle back and start with her first books. The Bluest Eye and Sula both stunned me.
Then came Tar Baby. I immediately understood it to be different from the others. The novel has significant, primary characters who are white. In the other early novels, white characters might be present, but they are few and very secondary.
Six people live in relative luxury on a Caribbean island. Yet, despite themselves, their racial assumptions inform how they view and treat one…
1 author picked Tar Baby as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner
Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.