Toni Morrison Quotes
Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild...It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.
Morrison, Toni. Jazz. Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 58.
At the time, Capetown was under the control of the Dutch East India Company which had recruited Gordon from Scotland. There was a wave of liberality following the Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and the very vocal English, anti-slavery, reformers. The Dutch were concerned mainly with making money, and that they thought that meant stability and the status quo. Gordon was their strong spokesman on this. Like American Southern slave owners, Gordon read the Bible as God endorsing slavery and the inferiority of Blacks. Thus, reformers did not "believe in God any more".
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
