Tanya Mosley

There is the joke there.

The joke is he's all, you know, his last name is dead and they're talking about death and murder.

But the names of these characters, Milkman, Guitar, Pilate, Magdalene, Hagar, each one carries the weight of the story in really interesting ways.

What did her choice of names tell us about how deliberate she was in her writing?

Our guest today is author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell.

We're talking about her new book On Morrison.

We'll be right back.

I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

Morrison seemed to have a complicated relationship with history, specifically with the idea that fiction owes history accuracy.

So in The Song of Solomon, she includes Emmett Till's murder, but she changes the details.

She spells his name wrong.

She changes how he died.

She changes the year.

Why would she deliberately alter the facts of one of the most documented murders in American history?

You mentioned the play, Dreaming Emmett, and it's about Emmett Till's ghost coming back to stage a play about his own death.

And in the final version, the ghost actually isn't Emmett Till at all.

It's a different black boy who invented himself as Emmett.

And reading about that play, Namwali, made me think about the visceral pain that Black folks feel when we see racist, brutal acts of violence against us.

It actually hurts so bad it might as well be us.

Let's take a short break.