When she was two years old, her family's landlord set their house on fire with everyone inside, over unpaid rent. Standing in the street watching the smoke, her family did something remarkable: they laughed at the sheer absurdity of that much moral bankruptcy. That refusal to let someone else's malice dictate her reality became the foundational lesson for Chloe Ardelia Wofford of Lorain, Ohio, the girl the world would know as Toni Morrison. Raised inside a home her father kept as a fortress against a world that had shown him lynching in Georgia, and filled by her mother with folklore, ghost stories, and music, she absorbed an oral tradition operating on a completely different frequency from the Western canon.

This episode follows her from the Jim Crow shock of 1940s Washington through her years as Random House's first Black woman senior fic ...