Toni Morrison Read online

  SUGGS: You’ve said that you feel that questions about the role of black women are best examined in the context of the black experience. How do you respond to criticism of what is sometimes seen as an unfair portrayal of black men in the world of black women writers?

  MORRISON: Women writers, some of them, are very sensitive to the special considerations of black males in white, patriarchal society. Because of the intimacy, they understand the nature of racism and they do not lump black men in the category of simply alien men. Others of them seem to, but I don’t find it as strident among black women as I do among white women. When you see a very militant white feminist, it’s very exclusive. They tend not to permit male sensibilities in their world. I don’t find that as strong among black women. Although people tell me, and I guess that perhaps they’re right, because I’m not familiar with all of it, that black men complain about the kind of men in literature that black women write. Nobody’s tender and nobody’s reasonable. But I think that they’re mistaken. I think that Paule Marshall doesn’t write about men that way. I certainly don’t. Some of them are terrible and some of them are nice. Tony Cade Bambara doesn’t write about men that way. Gloria Naylor doesn’t write about men that way. So I think that they’re misinformed, because there are those who—whenever they see that men are not wonderful—get alarmed. Their sensitivity is real. They should be sensitive, because no one should take the easy route when describing male characters. There are some books in which black men are just foils for the women’s growth. And you don’t believe them for a minute. It may be useful for your story, but I don’t believe it. So men have a right to be alert and sensitive to that problem, just as we have a right to be sensitive to the opposite problem, of how black women are treated in the books of black men.

  SUGGS: An interviewer once asked you about the effect of the number of one-parent families on the black community. Could you expand on your answer that black women could use the absence of a man as a resource for independence?

  MORRISON: I believe that suggesting that a one-parent family is crippled in some way is somebody else’s notion. I do know that no one parent can raise a child completely. But it is also true that two parents can’t do it either. You need everybody. You need the whole community to raise a child. And one parent can get that community. You have to work at it. You have to decide. I mean community, not meaning neighborhood the way it was meant when I was a little girl. There was a street and a block. That doesn’t exist now for most of us, particularly if you’re a single working parent. You have to collect around you the people who can serve that function for you, and provide multiple kinds of resources for your children. I have women friends who raise their children alone and are working, whose children relate to her friends like family members. They call on one another in times of crisis and duress. They really use each other as a kind of life-support system, so that you don’t have this kind of single, one-on-one relationship that is too tense for the child and too tense for the parent. Nobody can deliver that much. The parent can’t and the child can’t, so you do need these other people. You need a tribe. I don’t care what you call it, extended family, large family. That’s what one needs.

  SUGGS: Alice Walker has criticized books which she felt had “white folks on the brain.” What effect might it have on the works of black women writers who have been commercially successful largely due to whites at the bookstore cash register?

  MORRISON: There is an advantage to having a wide relationship, both black and white, which is that it makes it possible for lots of other writers to get published. Once there’s a market—and you have to remember that the whole system is controlled by whites—once that readership exists, then it’s likely that other black writing will be purchased by companies and distributed and sold. That is important. As far as it affects the writings, it can’t. I suppose one could let it. Writing for the gallery is something that a writer must resist no matter who he is. You know the writers that are writing for their audience because they write the same book over and over again with the sort of cute things their readership likes. Serious writers write things that compel them, new challenges, new situations, and a new landscape that they have not been in before. But I had always made sure from the beginning that the address of the novel would be interior, that I would writer for a reader who wanted what I wanted, and I could put myself up as a person whose demands were at least different and then would be higher and higher. But paradoxically, what happens is that the more specific one is, the more specificity there is in the writing, the more accessible it is. Tolstoy was not writing for little colored girls in Ohio. He was writing Russian, specifically upper-class things about certain situations and so on. And so was everybody who was of any interest. That subtle racist argument about how universal art works better than any other is fraudulent entirely. Anybody who sets out and writes a universal novel has written nothing. The more concentrated it is in terms of its culture the more revealing you find it, because you make those connections. You see, there are more connections among us than differences, and that is the point. You don’t wipe out a culture. You don’t wipe out the ethnic quality. You certainly don’t address yourself to a parallel or dominant culture. Some black writers did. Much of what was written during the Harlem Renaissance was written with white readers in view, very sort of “let me show you how exotic I am.” You can always hear that voice. That may be what she meant. There are contemporary writers who do it still. I don’t think that readership has anything to do with it. I suppose there may be black writers who have a large white readership who write for that readership, but I can’t imagine it. That only happens on television. You have these little comic book things. You try and straddle some line where it’s this, but really it’s that. It’s blackface really. It may be in different dress, but that’s what it is, black people playing black people. It’s interesting though that there are a lot of women who write books with an audience of men in mind. I can feel when they’re getting over on some man. He looms too large. What is this? The wilder they get in their approbation, the more important he must have been. That’s a mighty big gun, isn’t it, for just that little character over there? A big Gatling gun they used to call it, just to blow this little man away. So really he must have been important. The gun’s just too big.

  TONI MORRISON ON CAPTURING A MOTHER’S ‘COMPULSION’ TO NURTURE IN BELOVED

  INTERVIEW WITH CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT

  PBS NEWSHOUR

  1987

  As one of America’s most formidable women of letters, Toni Morrison always gets a lot of attention when a novel of hers is published. Her latest, Beloved, came out in September, and is already in its third printing. It’s fast moving to the top of the bestseller list, following the pattern of Morrison’s four other novels published over the last sixteen years: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby. When Tar Baby was published in 1981, Morrison’s stature in the world of fiction earned her a Newsweek cover story. Beloved is the second Morrison novel to become a Book of the Month Club main selection.

  Beloved is the story of the runaway slave, Sethe, who tries to kill her children rather than see them return to slavery. She succeeds in killing only one: a daughter named Beloved. The story unfolds around the return of Beloved’s angry ghost. She moves into the house with her mother and sister, Denver. Here, Morrison reads from a passage that illuminates Denver’s view of the murder, and Sethe’s need to make Beloved’s ghost understand it.

  CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Toni Morrison, what inspired this theme?

  TONI MORRISON: I’d read an article, in a nineteenth-century newspaper, about a woman whose name was Margaret Garner, who had indeed killed or tried to kill her children. She was a fugitive slave, and rather than have them go back, she decided to take them all into a permanent place of oblivion. And it was an article that stayed with me for a long, long time, and seemed to have in it an extraordinary idea that was worthy of a novel, which was this com
pulsion to nurture, this ferocity that a woman has to be responsible for her children. And at the same time, the kind of tensions that exist in trying to be a separate, complete individual.

  HUNTER-GAULT: You’ve said that she has no, she had no right to do it, but I would’ve done the same thing, I mean—

  MORRISON: It was the right thing to do…[Laughing] but she had no right to do it. I think I felt the claims—you see, those women were not…parents. They could have—well, people insisted that they have children, but they could not be mothers because they had nothing to say about the future of those children, where they went, they could make no decisions, they fricking couldn’t even name them. So that they were denied humanity in a number of ways, but they were denied that role, which is…uhm…early…uhm…I mean, it has nothing to do with history. It’s what women do. And so, she claimed something that she had no right to claim, which the property—her children—and claimed it so finally that she decided that she could not only dictate their lives but end them. And when one knows what the life—what their future would be—her decision is not that difficult to understand.

  HUNTER-GAULT: You’ve talked about previous accounts of slavery being simplistic, and not probing the interior being of the characters. Is this—how difficult was it for you to probe the interior being of characters, albeit black, still from a long, long time ago?

  MORRISON: Exactly. Well, my disappointment in some of the accounts, uh, was based on the fact that this is so large, you see. And then the big problem is that slavery is so you intricate, so immense, and so long, and so unprecedented, that you can let slavery be the story, the plot. And you know what that story is. And it is predictable. And then you do the worst thing, which is you de—you—the center of it becomes the institution and not the people. So, if you focus on the characters and their interior life, it’s like putting the authority back into the hands of the slaves, rather than the slave owner.

  HUNTER-GAULT: What is the rationale for the ghost?

  MORRISON: First of all, I really wanted her past, her memories, her haunting memories, not to be abstract. I wanted her to actually sit down at the table with the things she’s been trying to avoid and explain away, which is this past, this terrible thing that happened, to confront it. As a way of saying that’s what the past is. It’s a living thing. It’s this relationship between ourselves and our personal history, and our racial history, and our national history, that sometimes gets made, you know, sort of distant. But if you make it into a person then it’s an inescapable confrontation. The other was that it was part of the milieu of black people to think in terms of a very intimate relationship between the living and the dead. They didn’t have that, you know, sort of modern dismissal—they didn’t dismiss those things.

  HUNTER-GAULT: This book, Beloved, has received almost, uh, no, uh, critical, uhm, reviews. I mean, just total acclaim. But one of the things that critics have said both about this book in the character of Sethe and other works of yours is that you draw characters that are larger than life. Does that disturb you, or is that even a criticism as far as your concerned?

  MORRISON: It used to disturb me. But I realized that what they are saying is that life is small. My characters are not bigger than life. They are, in fact, as big as life. And life is really very big. We tend to cut it down these days, smaller and smaller and smaller, to make it fit—I don’t know what—a headline or a room.

  HUNTER-GAULT: Do you think that modern readers have a diminished view of life?

  MORRISON: The readers don’t, but the writers are making it smaller and smaller.

  HUNTER-GAULT: Why? Television?

  MORRISON: Maybe so. We’ve been cut down to screen size, and to short articles. Dwelling in the life of a complicated person, over a complicated period, in fiction, is not in vogue. It’s shorter, it’s smaller, it’s a narrower geography. One can do it in history and biography, but not in contemporary life.

  HUNTER-GAULT: You said many years ago—well, not many years ago, back in the seventies—that—you were an editor at that time at Random House—and you were saying that you wanted to participate in developing a canon of black work beyond black self-flagellation, the kind of entertainment that you felt was being encouraged among black writers by white editors or the white society. Did you succeed in particular, and has the publishing world succeeded in general, in having a better balance of work?

  MORRISON: A little. There’s still resistance, because the fix on who that reader is hasn’t changed a great deal, uh, the reader is somebody between forty and sixty who’s white and lives, you know, in a suburb near a big city—the sort of classic profiles of who buys books. But something happened in the meantime, and a huge readership emerged—black and white and female—which made a difference in what was published. When I mentioned the self-flagellation I was particularly aware of some titles in particular, but more importantly the eagerness with which publishers and, uh, people in the book industry were interested in books by black people that said, ‘Let me…tell me how angry how are. Let me see your anger. Tell us how terrible it has been for you.’ And so there was a sly encouragement to sort of expose the horrors of being victim, which some people played into. But it was like feeding the vampire with one’s own blood. Instead of describing, you know, a complicated, extraordinary, uh, survival life. Which doesn’t mean you wipe the slate clean and all the black people are heroic—and there was a mood of that. But you have some—what I regard as some of the most complicated and interesting and mysterious people in the world. A whole group of them. And they need to be revealed for what that life is. Not simply to reveal, and educate, or even play into the hands of the yearning—what used to be a yearning—for the guilt, expressions of guilt by white people. And that’s what I meant by that, sort of, large book. And I wanted that to change. And many black women writers have succeeded along those lines because there was this active growing readership out there who was just desperately hungry to see themselves set the stage for change.

  HUNTER-GAULT: What happens as a Toni Morrison who has been responsible for introducing so many new voices into American fiction, letters…as you move farther and farther away from your editing responsibility because of the success of your own publishing, uhm, who fills that void? And what does that—how does that make you feel? I mean, [Laughing] in a way you are abandoning your children!

  MORRISON: [Laughs] It’s true, I am abandoning them as an editor. But I am convinced that the more I am well known—the better known I am—the easier it is for other writers to come along. If I till that soil myself, in publicity, travelling around Europe, selling books, lecturing, what have you, then all of the younger people who won’t have to break down those same doors, they’ll be open. They will write infinitely better than I do. They will write of all sorts of things that no one writer can ever touch. They will be stronger, and they will be delicious to read. But part of that availability and accessibility is because six or seven black women writers, among whom I am one, have already been there and tilled the soil.

  TONI MORRISON ON LOVE AND WRITING, AND DEALING WITH RACE IN LITERATURE

  INTERVIEW WITH BILL MOYERS

  PBS TV

  MARCH 11, 1990

  BILL MOYERS: [voice-over] Toni Morrison seems always to be in two worlds. There is the visible world, bustling around her, and there is the world of her novels, whose characters tell us about an interior reality hidden from the eyes of strangers.

  In her five books, she has transported millions of readers into the experience of being black in America. The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby. In Beloved, perhaps the most painful and beautiful of her creations, Toni Morrison reached back into the 19th-century years of slavery.

  Her writing has won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon in 1978, and the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved in 1988. Fifteen universities have awarded her honorary degrees.

  Like many
fiction writers, Morrison has earned a living by other means. She was an editor for Random House, and taught at Howard University, Yale, and the State University of New York at Albany. She is now teaching in the humanities at Princeton University.

  She is also a trustee at the New York Public Library, where we talked about how the invented world of fiction connects to life as it is.

  [interviewing] There is such a gulf between the “inner city” today and the rest of the country, in both imagination and reality and politics and literature; frankly, very little communication takes place. If you were writing for the rest of the country about the inner city today, what metaphor would you use? And I ask that question because you struck a common metaphor in Song of Solomon, the metaphor there was flying, everybody’s dream of literally being up and away in the air, all of us could identify with that. But what, if you were writing for the rest of the country, would you use as a metaphor for the inner city today?