You need to be able to read to be able to read . Especially if Toni Morrison did the writing. I at least thought I knew what it was for my eyes to sail across and down a page, through a flight of description or a feat of characterization. At 11, I thought I could read . Then I read her. My mother told me I wasn’t ready. Not for Toni. My Aunt Katie caught my little-boy eye on her brand-new, great big copy of “Beloved” and told me: That’s for grown people. I tried it anyway. Then Toni seemed to tell me: All that reading you did before? That won’t cut it. You have to read me. She was going to make us work, not as a task, not for medicine, but because writing is an art and a reader should have a little art of his own.

I come from a family with a history of zero fanciness. Cleaners and drivers and coaches and catch-as-catch-can. Few diplomas, fewer degrees. But the women liked to read. Gloria Naylor and Sidney Sheldon. Stephen King and Danielle Steel. A man once left my Aunt Marge’s place with her copy of “Roots” like it was a piece of Tupperware, and she cursed him for years. The book wasn’t for dinner.

Reading a novel was entertainment and a point of pride. Reading a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy. My aunts, my mother and her friends would tackle “Beloved” in sections then get on the phone to run things by one another. With all due respect to the recently deceased Judith Krantz, I don’t recall them needing to do that for “Scruples.”

[Read The Times’s obituary of Toni Morrison.]

They admired the stew of a Morrison novel, the elegant density of its language — the tapestry of a hundred-word sentence, the finger snap of a lone word followed by a period, the staggering depictions of lust, death, hair care, lost limbs, baking and ghosts. Morrison made her audiences conversant in her — the metaphors of trauma, the melodramas of psychology. She made them hungry for more stew: ornate, disobedient, eerie literary inventions about black women, often with nary a white person of any significance in sight. The women in my family were reading a black woman imagining black women, their wants, their warts, how the omnipresence of this country’s history can make itself known on any old Thursday.