Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

Meet and be humbled by the incomparable writer in "Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am." Timothy Greenfield-Sanders' gorgeous and inspirational documentary brings the exquisite wordsmith into your living room.

Morrison asks, "Why did my grandfather read the Bible five times? Because there weren't any other books." It was illegal for African-Americans to read or to teach reading.

Her sister taught Toni to read when she was three, and she learned to spell on the sidewalk. When her mom discovered her writing "fuck," Toni realized words had power.

She grew up in the mixed-race, steel town of Lorain, Ohio, where "poverty wasn't shameful then." She went to Howard University, where she performed in Shakespeare plays, but didn't learn about Black writers because there were no Black literature classes. She married, had two sons, and got divorced.

She taught at Cornell, then became an editor at the New York Review of Books, shepherding many writers of color. She considered this to be her activism, her contribution to the Black Power movement.

She compiled "The Black Book," a complete African-American history. Morrison wrote on the side, and started publishing her own work in the early '70s. Critics "accused her of not writing about white people," assuming all her readers were white; she's spent her career "knocking the white gaze off your shoulder."

Hilton Als, one of the stellar interviewees, says that the white world is peripheral to Morrison's writing. The author herself asks about Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" – "invisible to whom?"

Morrison sent "For Coloreds Only" signs back home to her mom because she found them absurd.

"Black women bathed white people, ate their food, but couldn't sit next to them? What a joke."

Her books are filled with Black female friendships, and young Black girls, and questions when these children become infected with self-loathing, a theme in "The Bluest Eye."

"If you don't understand the history of African-American women," Morrison says, "then you don't understand America."

Morrison talks about how racism is mental illness: "If you can only be tall when somebody is on their knees, then you have a problem."

"Where are you without racism? Are you any good?" she asks.

She notes that America is indeed a melting pot, and that Black people are the pot.

She knows her history, and writes about it in a "scorched earth" way, one notes.

The Nobel Laureate writer, editor and teacher is called an artist, a midwife and an architect by her storied peers in this vibrant biography, which is almost as remarkable as its subject.

Morrison gets up early to write. Why does she write? "I have to know, so I write it."

"Then I let you read it, so we both know."