TONI MORRISON: THE LAST INTERVIEW AND OTHER CONVERSATIONS
Copyright © 2020 by Melville House Publishing
“Editor’s Personal Commitment Shapes a Scrapbook of Black History” republished with permission of Publishers Weekly / PWxyz, LLC.
From “Editor’s Personal Commitment Shapes a Scrapbook of Black History,” Lila Freilicher, Publishers Weekly, volume 204, 10 Dec 1973.
Permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center Inc.
“Interview with Toni Morrison” copyright © 1986 by Donald M. Suggs Jr. First published in River Styx.
“Toni Morrison on Capturing a Mother’s ‘Compulsion’ to Nurture in Beloved.” Interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault from PBS NewsHour. Copyright © 1987 NewsHour Productions, LLC. Used by permission.
“Toni Morrison on Love and Writing, and Dealing with Race in Literature.” From World of Ideas with Bill Moyers, courtesy Doctoroff Media Group. Copyright © 1990.
“The Salon Interview” copyright © 1998 by Zia Jaffrey. First appeared in Salon Magazine, February 3, 1998.
National Visionary Leadership Project interview conducted with Camille O. Cosby copyright © 2004 National Visionary Leadership Project. Used by permission.
“Toni Morrison’s Haunting Resonance,” first published in Interview magazine, copyright © 2012 by Christopher Bollen. Used by permission.
“The Last Interview” copyright © 2012 Alain Elkann. First published on Alain Elkann Interviews. Used by permission.
Reproduction in any manner in any language in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited.
First Melville House printing: May 2020
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION BY NIKKI GIOVANNI
THE FIRST INTERVIEW: EDITOR’S PERSONAL COMMITMENT SHAPES A SCRAPBOOK OF BLACK HISTORY
By Lila Freilicher
Publishers Weekly
December, 1973
INTERVIEW WITH TONI MORRISON
Interview with Donald M. Suggs, Jr.
River Styx
1986
TONI MORRISON ON CAPTURING A MOTHER’S ‘COMPULSION’ TO NURTURE IN BELOVED
Interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault
PBS NewsHour
1987
TONI MORRISON ON LOVE AND WRITING, AND DEALING WITH RACE IN LITERATURE
Interview with Bill Moyers
PBS TV
March 11, 1990
THE SALON INTERVIEW: TONI MORRISON
Interview with Zia Jaffrey
Salon
February 3, 1998
NATIONAL VISIONARY LEADERSHIP PROJECT
Video interview with Camille O. Cosby
November 5, 2004
TONI MORRISON’S HAUNTING RESONANCE
Interview with Christopher Bollen
Interview Magazine
March, 2012
THE LAST INTERVIEW
Interview with Alain Elkann
AlainElkannInterviews.com
October 14, 2018
INTRODUCTION
NIKKI GIOVANNI
I wish I owned a restaurant then I could run Specials: Today Toni Morrison Stew. An exotic mix of tears and sympathy. Nothing grows except The Bluest Eye and a special shot of Pecola which flies over very quickly because no one can really embrace the fear and hatred. The best thing about The Bluest Eye special is the Marigolds. They didn’t flower but the seeds are there. Drop a few in the bowl and see what grows. Or doesn’t.
I also really recommend the Sula. The mixture of two girl friends who lose each other. It does not come with dessert but it can have hot bread. When the Nel is ready to be taken out of the oven that’s the best time to put the Sula in the refrigerator. Timing is everything with this dish. It has to balance the desire with the impossible. Sometimes the chef will put a bit of college in to mix with that wonderful hat. The hat is a lot of fun because whoever catches it gets a free Song of Solomon and a fresh glass of milk.
Of course we’d mix Jazz Belovedly with a movie and a talk or two. Let’s call it The Morrison Café. Vodka, though my preference is cheap champagne. And only bottled water.
If Toni’s home had been open to gourmets there would always be porgies frying. Yeah sure everyone thinks fried food is bad for your heart or something but how did the Black Americans get through slavery and segregation without catfish and chitlins? Porgies were a treat. There was a restaurant in the Village that sometimes had porgies and knowing Toni loved them I would go to New York and pick her up. It was more than a poet could actually afford but she was, after all, Toni Morrison. I had my town car take me up to her home and take us to the café. I still don’t know what we talked about but when dinner was over I would ride back to her house. She always said she could call her own town car but I knew my Grandmother would have a heavenly fit if I let Toni go home alone. So I rode up said Good Night and came back to Manhattan. She must have known poets are poorer than novelists but she also knew we both were southerners and there were rules.
I didn’t ever know the home that burned down but what I loved about the home on the Hudson was the Nobel Prize citation in the downstairs bathroom. I am fortunate to call Toni Morrison friend. Mostly neither of us had much to say. There was always a comfortable silence when I visited her. My mother transitioned 24th June then my sister just after that on 5 August. I tried to do what any good daughter and sister would do and I think I got it done. But it was sad. One afternoon I was sitting at my desk just sort of being dismayed when I decided to call Toni. I probably talked more than ever and she was kind enough to listen. She finally said Nikki, Write. That’s all you can do. Write.
I wish I had a restaurant then I could also cook up a special Morrison Stew to help us all go through this. The title of this book is The Last Interview but there will never be a last interview with Toni. Her books live and talk to us. She could have said Read. But she said Write. And she is Right.
THE FIRST INTERVIEW: EDITOR’S PERSONAL COMMITMENT SHAPES A SCRAPBOOK OF BLACK HISTORY
BY LILA FREILICHER
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
DECEMBER 1973
The idea of publishing a nostalgic scrapbook of black history is such a natural that it seems a wonder it wasn’t done years ago. Nevertheless it took Random House’s vivacious black editor, Toni Morrison, to think of it: “The Black Book” (February 26, $15; paper $5.95), and it took Bill Cosby to describe it: “Suppose a 300-year-old black man had decided, oh, say when he was about 10, to keep a scrapbook—a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would keep newspaper articles that interested him, old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks and posters…stories, rumors, dates. And he would end up with a journey of Black America: a book just like this one…”
No such 300-year-old gentleman was available to Toni Morrison, but she had something almost as good at her disposal—the black memorabilia collections of four men: Middleton (Spike) A. Harris, Morris Levitt, Roger Furman and Ernest Smith, all credited as authors of
“The Black Book.” Toni supplemented this material with recipes, quotes, stories and other contributions from her friends and relatives—“just plain folks”—because her idea was “to put together a book that the average black person could relate on a personal level.” Toni calls this “real black publishing,” as opposed to black publishing programs that produce scholarly black histories for a select audience.
Illustrated on every page, “The Black Book” traces the history and culture of black people from their origins in Africa through slavery and freedom, giving examples of black contributions to music, American history, the arts, and sports, and including chapters on folklore and voodoo. There’s the New York Caucasian newspaper; a poster proclaiming the “Public Sale of Negroes”; slave owners’ records and photos of beatings and lynchings.
But all is not grim. In fact, says Toni, “If I had to summarize the book’s main point, I’d say it is survival—triumph despite everything.” We see Bessie Smith winning a roller skating contest; Sophie Tucker belting out her theme song, “Some of These Days,” written by a black man; Matt Henson, who accompanied Admiral Perry to the North Pole; Frederick Douglass, reared as a slave, who became Marshal of the District of Columbia; and patents testifying to the invention, by blacks, of modern-day fountain pen, the egg beater, street sweeper, corn harvester, and much more. And the book admits, also, to what the jacket copy calls “the ways we failed”: ads for Golden Peacock Bleach Crème, Dr. Palmer’s Skin Whitener and records of blacks who owned slaves.
Work on “The Black Book” got started last spring after Toni Morrison had completed work on her new novel, Soula* (Knopf, January 7), and for the last several months the book virtually became a full-time job for her. Even so she managed by working long hours to simultaneously edit books by six other authors. Says Toni, “The designer, Jack Ribik, and production manager, Harold Ragland, and I practically moved in with one another putting the book together page by page. It fell into shape as though it had a life of its own. For example, the poster I found for a New York play about miscegenation, ‘The Real Widow Brown,’ took on greater meaning juxtaposed with the Virginia black laws. Other photos and posters went well with black poetry and gospel songs, quotes, newspaper clippings, and stories which I had selected and divided into chapter groupings. In this way the material began to speak for itself, with no editorial rhetoric.”
Working on “The Black Book” was “a wild and wonderful experience,” says Toni. “Everyone I knew was sending me in material. I even called my mother! I got a recipe for tun mush, a 19th century cornmeal concoction, from a cook I know; my aunt wrote up a story on how her sharecropping family escaped North in 1919 with only $30 cash; a friend of mine gave me her uncle’s ‘dream book’ (Did you know that if you dream about bed bugs it means your friends are unfaithful and the number to play is 522?); Author Ishmael Reed sent me his collection of voodoo recipes for keeping a girlfriend faithful, finding lonely people lovers, and triumphing in a lawsuit.”
It’s obvious that “The Black Book” is a project very close to Toni Morrison’s heart. She says, “You have to be black to understand black people’s anger, frustration, and enduring hope, so I doubt that any white person could have edited this book. Of course I know it has a certain personal bias in that it contains the material I judged to be most relevant to black history. The result is the kind of book I will be proud to give to my children, I have the confidence that other black people (and white people) will feel the same way.”
*The book was published as Sula.
INTERVIEW WITH TONI MORRISON
INTERVIEW WITH DONALD M. SUGGS JR.
RIVER STYX
1986
DONALD M. SUGGS JR: Your first novel, The Bluest Eye, deals with the destruction of a young black girl at the hands of a black community that had adopted white standards of beauty. How did you develop your own literary values in the academic and publishing worlds, both dominated by white standards of excellence?
TONI MORRISON: I think that when I was writing The Bluest Eye that idea was uppermost in my mind even in attempting it. It was my desire to read such a book, one that had its own aesthetic integrity. I didn’t phrase it in that way. What I thought was that I would like to write a book that didn’t try to explain everything to white people or take as its point of departure that I was addressing white people, that the audience for it would be somebody like me. And when that happened certain things just fell away: certain kinds of editorializing, certain kinds of definitions, and to think about the subject matter—those girls—their interior life, my interior life, to do, I suppose, what black musicians have done which is to make judgements myself about what was valuable, what was not valuable, and what was worth saving. That was the impetus for writing it, because I had read a lot of very powerful black literature by men, but I had the feeling they were talking about somebody else. It was not for my enlightenment. It was for clarification…It was extremely important for them to do this, for Richard Wright to say, “let me show you America.”
SUGGS: Could you elaborate on how the process you’ve described extends to teaching black students?
MORRISON: That’s very difficult because I’ve done it with mixed classes, but never to an all-black class. It might be interesting to see how that works. But in mixed classes you have an obligation to everyone in the class. So the important thing is not to start with white value systems and then see how blacks reflect off them. The problem has been to start with a black value system and how the texts connection with it or reject it. That was the pedagogical problem, for me to draw up what I think are the characteristics of all black art, the given reality of the black world, which even some black people don’t articulate, and the perceived reality. Identify them and then we can go to the books.
SUGGS: Teaching white students must present special problems. How do you approach realities of the black experience which might be commonly accepted in an all-black class?
MORRISON: You start by saying, in the beginning there was dispossession and violence. Then you look at what happened, what positive things came out of that, what black people were able to do with the forms of reclamation and dignity, the forms of that resistance and so on. I take a lot for granted, I used to, rather, and I thought that everybody knew what I meant. But they don’t, so I try and say what does it mean to have no self? When the “other” denies it, which is what slavery is, and what do you have to do to reclaim the self or status, and what it means to have no art that you can claim. I just bring in all these quotes from everybody in the world, from then to now, in which it’s clear in the criticism that what they’re saying is that black Americans don’t have anything.
SUGGS: What about black schools? Teaching in that setting, is the task any easier?
MORRISON: It should be. I don’t know that it is. Because as a student and a teacher there, those years were pre-Civil Rights years, I left in 1964, were years when the measure of excellence was to outstrip the white schools at one thing or another. Presumably, after Civil Rights curriculum changes were made that were significant and the emphasis was on interior study. I don’t know how that turned out. I hear interesting things. I think, for example, that Howard is supposed to be one of the best schools for child development. I don’t know what happened to liberal arts. In addition, it was an unfair situation that they were placed in because the hoped-for consequences of Civil Rights were that students could go anywhere. They didn’t have to go to Howard for the so-called best education. They could go to other schools, and so could the faculty. They lost the crème de la crème, or whatever the mythological pull was in the ’60s when the established, superior white schools started recruiting black kids who didn’t have to go to Howard or Fisk or those schools. There were always some who didn’t, but I mean in large numbers. So they were in a very difficult position because Howard was always at the forefront of the integrationist fight. And then when that happened you got white kids coming to Howard. You k
now, the medical school down there is almost two-thirds white.
SUGGS: In your novel, Sula, you explore a friendship between two black women, set entirely in the black community. If a woman like Sula were alive today and writing books, how might she reconcile her emphatically black female sensibility with a more mainstream feminist view of relationships and gender?
MORRISON: It would be a little problematic for her. Clearing the field for some intelligent discussion of gender, and say, feminist problems are important. It’s not a cul-de-sac. It’s not an aim in itself. And a world deprived of male sensibilities is an incomplete world. So it’s very delicate. It’s not a line. It’s where two things come together and touch. Each one, hopefully, is enhanced by its relationship to the other. What I’m trying to say is that white feminist views are in some areas so problematic for me, since I’m going to assume that I can do what Sula would do. If she was unorthodox enough, she probably would be interested in unorthodox, or at least non-mainstream solutions. But then she might not.
The divisiveness is unfortunate, that we have words like “either/or” in the vocabulary that are taken too seriously. I think that forced to make a choice between my sons and feminists…If I do, it will not be the latter. But I don’t know why I have to make that choice, and I refuse to. It’s like abortion and right to life, as though there were an inevitable conflict there. There isn’t. But it’s being drawn up as a battleground when it doesn’t exist. Nobody is saying you have to do this.
The idea of conflicting modes of life existing in the same place has always been a troublesome thing in this country. People are always drawing up sides and battle grounds. And the other side should be killed. It can’t contain two points of view in a harmonious society. That is just the way we are educated toward conflict and destruction. Because if you’re proven right and the other person is wrong, then wrong means death. You can’t exist. As a woman with X and Y chromosomes, it seems to me that what women ought to be able to do it make reconciliations among these various types. The idea of ideological slaughter of the other is chewing up everybody’s intelligence. People are making the most unbelievable statements about the other based on that kind of insistence that the person who disagrees with you fundamentally can’t exist. These are political statements as well as biological and everything else. The hierarchy being established is what’s problematic. So there are those who want to accommodate themselves into a man’s world, those who want to take over the freedom and access of a man’s world, and those who want to exclude men entirely from the world that they live in. They run the gamut, it seems to me, all based on some hostility. Not that they’re not legitimate complaints. The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things is the enemy, patriarchy in medicine, patriarchy in schools, or in literature.
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