Toni Morrison and Crime

In September 2025, we surveyed 500 African American first-semester college students about their reading interests. In terms of modes of reading, the results showed that short stories were the top choice overall among all students, while men expressed the strongest interest in comic books. Across all students, crime and mystery emerged as the leading genre, pointing to an area worth exploring in more detail. 

So we decided to devote our October 6 and 7 Black Lit Network exhibit to crime in Toni Morrison's fiction. 

In Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977), the “Seven Days” is a secret group of seven Black men who answer racial violence with violence. Each man is assigned a day of the week, and when a Black person is murdered without justice, he must kill a white person on his assigned day. The society’s hidden cycle of revenge exposes the heavy costs of racial violence and retribution. 

In Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Joe Trace, an unhappily married man, shoots Dorcas, a teenage girl with whom he is having an affair. She later dies from the wound after refusing medical treatment. At Dorcas’s funeral, Joe’s wife, Violet, commits another startling act of violence: she slashes the dead girl’s face with a knife.

Related: 

• Black Lit Network Exhibits