Toni Morrison

by The Last Interview-

  JAFFREY: Have you ever been to Africa?

  MORRISON: No.

  JAFFREY: Do you have an urge?

  MORRISON: A big urge, yes.

  JAFFREY: Do you think it’s an important journey for black Americans, in general, to make?

  MORRISON: I don’t know. We romanticize it so much. But maybe so, for that reason. Because we’re so easily drawn, you know, into the myth of—whatever—a history—a useful little test story. And I want to go to Senegal, because I’ve been invited there by Ousmane Sembène, and I’m desperate to go. And now, South Africa, I’ve gotten a number of invitations there.

  JAFFREY: Right at this moment, it’s like watching 1776, but with black people deciding.

  MORRISON: That’s something I’m determined to do, because now, I’m hoping I can really make the trips, you know, that are not research trips or whatever else I’ve been doing all my life. But you just go, sit there and watch, and look, and talk.

  JAFFREY: I was there writing a piece on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was there for the Winnie Mandela hearing. Do you think it’s finally shifted so that people can acknowledge that, look, things went horribly wrong with Winnie Mandela, and maybe we ought not to embrace her?

  MORRISON: A South African woman, who was very close to Mandela, asked me, “Why do black Americans feel close to her?” And I was quite taken aback by her question, because she was very enabling and ennobling to black women in this country when she came, and she has endured things that are unspeakable. And it was only after that that I began to wonder whether there was some clouding over the eyes—deliberate and willful. It’s very difficult among many women here, professionally, to say anything derogatory about Winnie Mandela. Anything. I don’t know what I think about her. I have enormous—frankly, enormous—admiration for Winnie Mandela, but it’s based on her legendary past. And when she came here and I saw her, she’s terrific, she’s just magnetic. And then when I hear other kinds of things from Africans, or South Africans in particular, I have to fold that into my equation. So now I am curious, very curious, about what is the truth. I mean, what is the real person?

  Of course, Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It’s truly unbelievable. Truly.

  NATIONAL VISIONARY LEADERSHIP PROJECT

  VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH CAMILLE O. COSBY

  NOVEMBER 5, 2004

  CAMILLE O. COSBY: Professor Morrison, when and where were you born?

  TONI MORRISON: I was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio.

  COSBY: And what were your forename and surname?

  MORRISON: Chloe Wofford.

  COSBY: And what are the names of your parents?

  MORRISON: Ella Ramah Wofford, and my father’s George.

  COSBY: How many siblings do you have?

  MORRISON: I had two brothers, one sister.

  COSBY: Please talk about the history of Lorain and what it was like growing up there in the ’30s and ‘40s.

  MORRISON: It was unusual I think because Lorain, Ohio was right next to Oberlin. That part of Ohio was just loaded with abolitionists. Women were able to go to college at Oberlin before everybody else.

  The northern part was the industrial, so it was full of people like my parents who came at an early age from the south looking for work and it was industrial. Shipyards, steel mills, all of that kind of thing. Immigrants from all over the world there. So that when I went to school, it was with people who some of them didn’t even speak English. First generation immigrants, Mexicans, Black people from the south, and they used to pride themselves of calling themselves the melting pot. It was really like that there.

  COSBY: Where were your parents born?

  MORRISON: My mother was born in Greenville, Alabama and my father was born in Cartersville, Georgia.

  COSBY: Please share a little about your parents’ background—why they left the South and what life was like for them before they went to Ohio.

  MORRISON: Well, their stories of their childhood are, you know, rather painful. My mother left with her mother and all of her siblings, and there were seven or eight of them. And they left Greenville, Alabama at a crisis moment, when my grandmother said that she couldn’t stay there any longer because White boys were circling their farm. And she had a lot of girls. I never quite understood what that meant then. And then later of course, I understood exactly what she meant because her husband, my grandfather, had gone to Birmingham to earn some additional money, which he did by day work but he also played the violin and he earned money that way and sent it back. So she was literally a woman alone with all these children—young children.

  So she was frightened. So she got on a train and sent a message to her husband that if he wanted to see them again he would be on such and such a train at such and such a time. [Both laugh]

  And my mother remembers getting on the train and they couldn’t tell anybody—they had to leave in the middle of the night because they were sharecroppers. They didn’t let you go anywhere. And they were not sure that their father was on that train and the train pulled out of the station and they were all weeping because he didn’t show up. But when they got about sixty miles outside, he showed up. He was sort of in hiding. [Laughing]

  My father’s exit was a little bit different. I didn’t know much about it. I just knew he left when he was around fourteen years old and he went to stay with an older brother who was in California, and then eventually made his way toward Ohio.

  But I learned later—much, much, later, after he died—that he had witnessed lynchings of people in that town when he was a teenager. Neighbors…They were businessmen, who had just been taken out, and…whatever…and there were three or four, in the matter of eighteen months. So, I guess that was like a sign…I mean, you know, he left.

  COSBY: Yes.

  MORRISON: He left.

  COSBY: Yes.

  MORRISON: So their recollections were, you know, miserable.

  COSBY: I heard you say in an interview that one of your grandparents and a great-grandparent were born into slavery and your grandparent—I think it was your grandfather, is that right?—was ten years old when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed?

  MORRISON: Yes.

  COSBY: Were your grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ experiences passed on in your families?

  MORRISON: Only that of my grandfather, who you just described, who was probably five when the Emancipation Proclamation came. And the story of the family is that he, as a kid, he’d heard this promise or threat—he didn’t know what it was because nobody took the trouble to explain to him what Emancipation Proclamation was, so on that day he hid under the bed because it sounded monstrous to him, and when they dragged him out he said he was frightened because this thing was coming. And it was this, you know, a funny story that everybody told.

  The story about him that I like best is his going to school one day to tell the teacher he couldn’t come back because he had to work, but his sisters would teach him to read. Because when I knew him, he’d do that all the time—you know, the Afro American and the Pittsburgh Courier and all those Black newspapers were in our house constantly, and he had this reputation of having read the Bible through, I don’t know, x number of times. So he was an avid reader and had relied on his sisters to teach him.

  COSBY: But they were older so they were in slavery, as well, is that right?

  MORRISON: They had been when they were young, sure.

  COSBY: And do you know how they learned to read?

  MORRISON: You know, one of the reasons I wrote one of my books, Beloved, was because in some places, in some families, in some areas, we skipped that part. We just skipped it. They didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t embed it in the poetry and in the songs. There were allusions to it—biblical, religious allusions, but no great details, and a lo
t of obfuscation as though if they were going to move on, they just had to move on because dwelling there was crippling.

  So it’s like this big sort of absence. Not in the history, but certainly in the art, of what was actually really going on. You know, when you read slave narratives, as I did, and you can hear the gaps and misinformation there in talking to somebody. “It was terrible, it was terrible. But my master, he was fine!” They don’t want to be penalized, you know?

  COSBY: It is kind of interesting though—or not so interesting; maybe a little depressing—to know that so many African Americans don’t want to deal with the issue of slavery.

  MORRISON: They don’t. It’s either humiliating or they felt there’s something crippling about it. My position is entirely the opposite. If you don’t understand your past, you can’t transcend it, you might repeat it, you don’t understand half of your life. Knowledge is what’s important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it.

  COSBY: Did family history influence the degree to which slavery and the legacy of slavery are present in your novels?

  MORRISON: Yes. By that time I had written Tar Baby, which was a kind of—it’s almost pre-slavery. I mean, it touches upon slavery but it’s all very magical and mystical and less political in terms of what goes on on the inside. Because I was working with that mythology of the “tar baby,” just converting it into something else, and that’s a very, very old story, and I assume its origins were African, not American. And so the melding of those stories was interesting to me—how you get, in the mythology, a lot of information that is just unavailable in the history because the history’s going to be written by the conquerors, obviously.

  But I remember thinking about Beloved, I really don’t want to do this. I really wanted to talk about that incident with a historical figure. But I was really upset because I had to talk about slavery in particular…and I didn’t want to dredge. Did the same thing I’m accuisng everybody else of, because emotionally it’s difficult. So, I did it and it was very, very hard, not so much to find the language for it; that was difficult enough. But for me in the process of writing, it is just not authentic or legitimate enough for me to look at it from the outside. You know, I always tell my students “It’s not a ‘Black father’—it’s yours. You know, the one you know? That one.”

  * * *

  —

  COSBY: You’ve said in the past that your parents had very different views about racism and social conditions and the possibilities for social change. Please describe your parents’ different views.

  MORRISON: Well, my father was convinced that White people were beyond correction, that as a group that you could not fix them and he was adamant. Now, we lived in a neighborhood in which there were White people all the time. I mean, he was living in that community and working at a steel mill and the shipyards with lots of White people, and was a very well-liked man. So I didn’t even know how adamant he was until a little bit later. I noticed he wouldn’t let them in his house, but I didn’t know why.

  COSBY: Of course then you didn’t know about the lynchings that he—

  MORRISON: I did not know that until after he died. He never talked about that. And he just found them incorrigible. Incorrigible. But he was not a fighting man, not an angry man. You know, he was calm, but he was finished as far as he was concerned.

  My mother on the other hand, treated every person she met as a possible friend. She always assumed the best. One at a time. One at a time. And my mother influenced me more than he did.

  Later on as things developed I—I had never been in the South and when I traveled there and began to look at things that were blatant, I could sense his feelings, as a college student and a post-college student, much more than when I was in high school and junior high school and so on. Because it’s so physically powerful, the segregation and the demoralization. It’s just putting you outside the human race.

  COSBY: How did their ideas about race have an impact on you?

  MORRISON: I found that I couldn’t use blanket hatred. It was just not useful to me, intellectually it wasn’t and emotionally. I couldn’t even write out of anger. I mean you have to get someplace else. It paralyzes you, in a sense. And I thought, you know, what’s interesting about racism is that no matter what African Americans do, somebody will say, “Yes, but you can’t do that.” And you spend a lot of energy trying to prove that you can. And as soon as you prove that you can do that, they say, “Oh yes, but you can’t do this.”

  And the effect of it is that you don’t move. You just sit there and hate White people or hate racism or hate apartheid and all your energy’s going there. I don’t mean that politically it can’t be confronted. I’m talking about creative energy. Suppose we just did our work?

  COSBY: And make your statement in your work.

  MORRISON: And make your statement in your work—those of us who could…So I got out of it imaginatively, certainly. So, I was much more like my mother in that regard in personal relationships. But what was significant is that I could not dredge up a kind of plastered on, invented anger in order to do my work.

  COSBY: The concept of community recurs throughout your novels. What kinds of traditions and values characterize the community in which you grew up?

  MORRISON: Well, I think I recognized the kind of community I grew up in is the African American community where I lived in Ohio, and, as I told you, the first time I began to travel south, because it was the same language. Even though this was like Black neighborhoods in the ’50s in the south, the same menu; the same behavior that they expected of us and the same rights that adults felt that they had over us, which is to say anybody on the street could correct you.

  I remember putting on some lipstick when I was fourteen and some woman came up to me and wiped it off.

  COSBY: Did you know the woman?

  MORRISON: Yes, but you know, she wasn’t my mother. [Laughing]

  COSBY: She was just some woman.

  MORRISON: Well she was in the neighborhood, and so I knew her, but I didn’t say “What are you doing? Don’t touch me.” I just let her take it off and shake her finger at me and send me home.

  I knew Black men who may have been rogues, but who if they saw me someplace where I shouldn’t be would take me home. They were safety for me. On trains, you know, the porters used to give you extra food and little extra napkins, you know. So I always looked at them as safe. And the same thing that I saw as true on the street among Black people in Lorain, Ohio, was true in the South. I had school friends—say, a White girl whom I went to school with and liked a lot. She was a neighbor. I hadn’t seen her in about twenty years and went back and she called my mother by her first name. [Laughing] It would never occur to me to call an older woman by her first name. Those little things, you know, that one is aware of as a kind of cultural exchange in a certain kind of currency—it’s very conservative, very hierarchical. So I was amused and impressed when my great-grandmother came in to visit us and all these uncles of mine who were sixteen, seventeen, stood up when she walked in the room.

  COSBY: This was the great-grandmother who had been enslaved?

  MORRISON: Oh, yes. They stood up. She had a cane. She was six feet tall. She walked in the room and I’m a little kid and I see those kids—I don’t know, eighteen years old, a sixteen-year-old—they seemed to be to me rough, you know, out there, dangerous. And then this woman walks in the room and they shut up. It was very impressive.

  COSBY: What were some of the tangible as well as intangible signs of segregation or racism in Lorain?

  MORRISON: Well you know, they never had the laws that they had in other parts of the country. But what they did have were understandings. And I became aware of them when my mother and her brothers were very interested when new places opened up in the town. A new theater. My mother was always on her way to the theater the day it opened.

  She would go in Saturday morning, the first
day, just to see where the ushers were directing Black people. And she would always deliberately go someplace else. Or she would make us sit in these places where we didn’t want to sit because none of our friends were there, right? Just to make sure they weren’t going to impose any de facto segregation on us.

  Same thing for swimming pools. I remember my uncle going into Eisley’s ice-cream store where they had a counter and booths and we all knew we could go in to get ice cream. You could get the ice cream and leave but we thought that maybe you couldn’t sit down. So he goes in and orders and he sits down in the booth and there’s a little altercation there but I mean…

  COSBY: But they couldn’t actually get rid of him?

  MORRISON: They could not.

  * * *

  —

  COSBY: When you left Lorain in 1949, what university did you attend?

  MORRISON: I chose Howard University in Washington, D.C.

  COSBY: And earlier you talked about touring the South. Was that when you were with the Howard University Players?

  MORRISON: Yes. That was a major and profound part of my education at Howard. I really wanted to be at a Black school because I had never had Black teachers. And I wanted to be around Black intellectuals. I really did. And I remember my mother and father saying, “Well, we have enough money that we can give you one year.” One year. And I said, “That’s fine.” Just one year. And we’ll figure out what to do later or maybe I wouldn’t have second year. And mind you, it was $35 a quarter.

  So, when I went there I found it to be, on the one hand, everything I’d hoped, which was my being with principally Black girls and boys, men and women. And almost completely, totally Black faculty. There were lots of Europeans who were teaching there and Americans as well. But it had that really wonderful comfort zone of being without that little extra stress that’s there, that you don’t know is there until it disappears.