I have to admit, when I was first introduced to Toni Morrison’s work, I hated it. I was a freshman in high school, hung up on Angela Davis and The Black Panthers, and completely aversed to anything that resembled “slave language.” What’s laughable now, is how I failed to realize that even with the vernacular she used, Toni Morrison’s words exemplified Black empowerment and endurance in the midst of our struggles. It’s amazing to look back and see how foolish you were in your youth.

The greatest gift Toni Morrison gave me was her use of language. She used it with skill of a potter, molding words like clay to tell stories so beautiful, powerful, and relatable to all of us. It communicated our joy, love, sorrow, and suffering so well, that for me, reading her work was like a bud bursting open from a seed. A glorious growing, a shattering of my innocence and ignorance.

The first time Toni Morrison broke my heart was when I read, “The Bluest Eye.” It was as if she saw my little girl soul and spoke right to it. As a kid, I saw my younger sister get treated better than I because she was lighter than I was. Relatives revered her beauty, and ignored mine. I used to wish I could be lighter and it wasn’t until much later, as a teenager, that I discovered I was beautiful. Pecola Breedlove’s desire to be beautiful, to be seen, to be loved, was something I related to easily and there have been several times in my life where I was tempted to fall into a fantasy world where I was beautiful and loved. To know that there was someone who knew this pain and understood how to communicate that pain to the masses was Earth shattering for me and it made me more receptive to reading Toni Morrison’s work.

When I got to college and studied her work deeper, Beloved and Sula broke me open further. Beloved is my favorite novel. It is one of the deepest novels I have ever read and every time I read it, I learn something new from it. The depth of a mother’s love for her children, her desire for a better, free life for her children, and the bonds of a mother and her child are a few of the things that touched me most about the novel. With the horrors of slavery serving as the backdrop, Beloved is one of the first novels I actually sobbed while reading it. The pain, the cruelty, the desperation, the love reverberated from the page, directly into my soul. I haven’t been touched by a novel that deeply, since. The way Toni Morrison wrote that book, fascinated me. I admired the courage it took to dive deep into our history, bring out the ugly and the horrible brutality of it to tell a story that is just as beautiful as it is haunting. The novel means a lot to me, as a woman who not only loves children, but yearns deeply for every Black child to be their free, beautiful self.

We may be sad by Ms. Morrison’s passing, but there is so much to be grateful for in its wake. We can be thankful that Toni Morrison was unapologetically proud of her Blackness. We can be thankful that she saw us and loved us enough to tell our stories, to use language as her weapon against racism and to flummox her critics by resoundly telling them, “Yes, I am a Black writer and I am proud to be.” We can be thankful that Toni Morrison guided other Black writers, advocated for them, and made a table where all of us Black writers can sit and share our own stories.

Most importantly, I am thankful that Toni Morrison loved us all. She loved us enough to show us that we can love thick, that we can have joy, and that we can fly. Her voice belongs to the ages now, but her soul and spirit will live forever through us. If that isn’t the thickest love, I don’t know what else is.