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Toni Morrison Proved There’s No Time Limit for Success
Reminder: Toni Morrison took time to become Toni Morrison
This is what we know: More than once, Toni Morrison was a woman picking her way through a reinvention of her life.
She’d been Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, the daughter of a mother who loved books and a ship-welder father who taught her the pride of a craft well done. She’d been Toni Wofford, a drama-loving English major and homecoming queen at Howard University, and then she was Toni Morrison after getting married, adopting her husband’s surname and becoming a mother.
Then she became the Toni Morrison when, as a Howard University professor, she started penning short stories in an intensive faculty writing group. She was pregnant with her second son when her marriage dissolved in 1964 and she moved to New York City to start her new life with her boys and her next career as a book editor at Random House. Again and again, she fire-baptized new versions of herself with change.
I hope the story of how Toni Morrison became Toni Morrison will remind us of the flexibility of time and the mercy of reinvention.
