Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

Toni Morrison passed away on August 5, 2019, a month and a half after this film was released.

Accompanying the opening credits, film footage shows someone's hands creating a cumulative set of collages that are assembled from mixed-and-matched pieces of photos of the face of the documentary's subject, Toni Morrison. At the start of this sequence, Morrison is heard in voiceover saying, "She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am? She gather them and give them back to me in all the right order". (These words are from her 1987 novel, "Beloved".) As the portrait pieces come and go, the representations of Morrison's face show her aging from young adulthood to the time the film was made, ending with pieces from a portrait taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the film's director.

Edited into Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am - Deleted Scenes (2019)