It is through jazz, actually, that one can best understand the imaginative power and technical mastery that Morrison has achieved over the course of her literary journey. No American writer I can think of, past or present, incorporates jazz into his or her writing with greater effect. Her work doesn’t bristle with jazz. It is jazz. Her novel of the same name is an homage to the genre. Jazz eats everything in its path — rock, classical, Latin. Like the great jazz musicians who evolved out of bebop and moved to free jazz, and whose later work demands listening, Morrison’s later novels are almost as enjoyable listened to as read. That is why, I suspect, she spends exhausting hours in the studio recording her books, instead of letting actors do the job. She’s the bandleader. She wrote the music. She knows where the song is going.

One way to appreciate Morrison’s supreme blend of technical and literary creativity — without reading a word of her books — is to listen to the unedited version of Nina Simone’s recording of the swing-era song “Good Bait,” made famous by Count Basie. Simone, a singer and musical genius, doesn’t vocalize on the recording. She plays piano. She begins with a gorgeous, improvised fugue, is joined by a bassist and a drummer and leads the trio in light supper-club swing, and intensifies into muscular Count Basie-like, big-band punches. She then breaks loose from the trio altogether and blasts into a solo, two-part contrapuntal Bach-like invention, which develops momentarily into three parts. She blows through the fugue-like passages with such power you can almost hear the bassist and drummer getting to their feet as they rejoin. But she’s left them. She’s gone! She closes the piece with a flourishing Beethoven-like concerto ending, having traveled through three key changes and four time signature changes. That’s not jazz. That’s composition. It’s also Toni Morrison.

It bears mentioning that young Nina Simone auditioned for entry into Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, America’s premier music institution, and was turned down, a snub she never forgot. Similarly, Morrison was not a favored child in the publishing industry or any other kind of industry in her young years. She was born in Lorain, Ohio, to lower-middle-class parents. After graduating from the historically black Howard University and getting an M.A. from Cornell, she taught in two different states and raised two boys as a single mother before settling into an editing job in New York, where she unearthed several important black writers, including Toni Cade Bambara and the gifted poet Henry Dumas. Her generosity toward young writers is not well known outside the industry, hidden by a shy, cautious personality and a straightforward, matter-of-fact persona. A few years ago she recounted to an interviewer that as a young girl, she had a cleaning job in a rich white person’s home. Her employer yelled at her one day for being a useless cleaner. She ran home in distress. Her mother told her to quit, but her father, a steelworker, gave her a stern lecture that Morrison never forgot: “Go to work, make your money and come home. You don’t live there.”

I am so glad she took his advice. I used to believe that God created Toni Morrison for the voiceless among us, that He knelt down and encouraged a little black girl in Lorain, Ohio, to whisper “I want blue eyes” to her friend Chloe Wofford, who, 30 years, two children, one divorce, one name change and more than four cities later, would sit down at age 39 and stick a pin in the balloon of white supremacy, and in the hissing noise that followed create “The Bluest Eye,” one of the greatest sonnets in the canon of American literature. But I don’t believe that anymore.

Toni Morrison does not belong to black America. She doesn’t belong to white America. She is not “one of us.” She is all of us. She is not one nation. She is every nation. Her life is an instruction manual on how to be humble enough, small enough, tiny enough, gracious enough, heartful enough, big enough, to do what Ella Fitzgerald did at Harvard 37 years ago. To take an unknowing audience in the cradle of her hand and say, “I love you … and you … and you. …” To love someone. It’s the greatest democratic act imaginable. It’s the greatest novel ever written. Isn’t that why we read books in the first place?