Throughout Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture there is a common reference to the story of the old lady and the bird. In the original story there is an idea that these young children came to mock the blind old lady and that she in a way, won the argument in the end. These children come in to a bling ladies house and questions whether she truly is as wise as everyone says by asking her if the bird in one of their friends however she answers with dignity and intellect by responding, “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”. In Toni Morrison’s lecture she turns this story into a story about language. About how the old lady really meant “She believes that if the bird in the hands of her visitors is dead the custodians are responsible for the corpse. For her a dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis.” In other words, she uses the bird to represent language and the old lady as a representation of a writer as she clearly stated after that quote, Toni Morrison is trying to say that the life of the bird (or in other words the life of language) rests in the hands of the visitors.
Through this, she is speaking about the protection of language and asks the question, “Whose job it is to protect this language”. It is clear through the story that she chooses that there are two sets of people: the youth and the older. On one hand, it seems the youth might be responsible for this protection of language. The words of the wise old women say that the life of the bird rests in the hands of the visitors however; this is not the only option Toni Morrison represents. Later in her speech she talks about other possibilities of the children’s visit. She poses the question of what if the children were the ones who were more thoughtful of their actions? What are the children didn’t come in with the sole purpose of making fun of the blind lady? What if the children in fact asked her this question in order to find out something more philosophical? A good example of this is when she states, “We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don’t you remember being young when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, could not mean? When the invisible was what imagination strove to see?”.
With this Toni Morrison explains that perhaps, the children wanted the bird to represent the idea of uncertainty and of youth and that the children in reality, went there for a guiding hand for their future and were instead met with a taunt from the old lady. It was an amazing way to answer this question that the author herself presented, that of the conservation of something as important and influential as the idea of language. Although the answer is far from clear whether the burden of the conservation of language lays in the hands of the youth or of the older generation I believe that the answer that Toni Morrison was trying to convey by showing both sides is that the answer is to both. The burden lives in all of us, to use and protect the true meaning of language in our everyday lives and that is the burden of the older generation, to pass us this information.
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