Marilyn Mobley was close friends with Toni Morrison, so it was particularly fitting for her to give the Sojourner Truth Lecture at George Mason University on Feb. 18, which would have been Morrison’s 89th birthday.
Mobley, a Toni Morrison scholar and former president of the Toni Morrison Society, was close to the late Nobel Prize-winning author and told the audience in Harris Theater that each year she would send Morrison orchids and call her on her birthday. Mobley said that although she is still grieving the loss of her friend, she took solace in the fact that Morrison “was now dancing with the ancestors.”