Thread: The first African- American Woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, dies.

Vale, Toni Morrison. Her writing was strong, provocative, sometimes with a simplicity that belied their dark roots. A small example,

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She is a friend of my mind,” a character in “Beloved,” a former slave, thinks about the woman he loves. “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.” "

Beloved, was based on a true story.

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Before the war, Sethe , a slave, had escaped from the Kentucky plantation on which she worked and crossed the Ohio River to Cincinnati. She also spirited out her baby daughter, not yet 2.“Sethe had twenty-eight days — the travel of one whole moon — of unslaved life,” Ms. Morrison wrote. “From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face to her oily blood was twenty-eight days. Days of healing, ease and real- talk. Days of company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at dawn and decide what to do with the day.”Then a slave catcher tracks Sethe down. Cornered, she cuts her daughter’s throat rather than see her returned to a life of degradation.

Toni Morrison, ‘Beloved’ Author and Nobel Laureate, Dies at 88

The most influentual American author of her generation.

The most influential American author of her generation, Toni Morrison's writing was radically ambiguous