TCNJ

23 WINTER 2020 Gay How did you decide to become a book club? Bennett I don't think we knew it was a book club at first. I had an idea and I threw that out to Cassandra saying, "Hey, what if we were to write something between memoir, cultural criticism, but also literary criticism, using Morrison as our muse?" Jackson And I said, "Oh, hell no." I just thought all these people have written about Morrison. There were so many who felt a certain kind of ownership of her legacy. Honestly, it felt intimidating. So I told him, "You get Winnie to agree to do it and I'll do it." Brown-Glaude I'm the sociologist. Cassandra must have thought I would shy away from it, but when Juda asked me to be a part of this project, I thought it was so exciting. Gay Were there any tensions you were not able to resolve when you were talk- ing about anything, not necessarily race? Jackson There were never any big blowups. But the one thing I would say akin to that was getting information out of Winnie, which is not easy. When Winnie cracked, I was like, "Oh, we got this," because she was the emotional Fort Knox of the group at the time. You want to talk about that, Winnie? Brown-Glaude I had to give myself permission to open that box and share that anger and fear and feel OK about it. It took a little while for me to go there. Part of it has to do with our undocumented status when I first came to this country with my family. That stuck with me into my adult years. Bennett We'd get together around my kitchen table to talk about process or how to shape chapters, and it would evolve into just chatting as friends. If I could give an example, Winnie said, "Well, you know [my husband] Eddie and I were debating whether we should buy a gun for protection." And we're like what? "You gotta write it." 4 They sent a portion of their manuscript to Toni Morrison in the summer of 2019. Word came back to send the full manuscript, but Morrison died on August 5, 2019, at age 88. 5 If you or your book club reads The Toni Morrison Book Club, please tell us about that experience at magazine@tcnj.edu. Bennett I thought you would stretch the group because you are coming from a different place. Gay I noticed you are not afraid to talk about race and the ways in which race complicates how we interact in the world. How did you get to a place of being able to have those difficult conversations without, for example, making the white guy feel comfortable in his whiteness? Williams It helped that we were already friends. I never thought Juda was someone I can't have a conversation with about race. There's definitely white people you cannot talk to about race. Brown-Glaude There are chapters that Juda wrote that didn't make the book where he's really trying to wrap his mind around and interrogate whiteness. But just his willingness to even go there with us brought us closer. It was safe for us to be honest and vulnerable. Listen to the podcast Bennett, Brown-Glaude, Jackson, and Williams recorded their interview with Roxane Gay via Skype. Listen to the full discussion at tcnj.edu/Morrisonpodcast.

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