Toni Morrison

by The Last Interview-

  JAFFREY: Who’s your editor at Knopf?

  MORRISON: I have two editors.

  JAFFREY: Erroll McDonald and Sonny Mehta?

  MORRISON: Yes. You know, I had an editor, Bob Gottlieb, for all my books through Beloved. Then he went to the New Yorker. I had to find an editor. And everybody said, “You don’t need one, do you?” And I said, “Yes, because I used to be one. I know the value of a good editor.” I mean, somebody just to talk to. Bob was very good at that. I learned a lot, just in the conversations. He’s funny, he’s literate and really able to tell you things—it’s not so much writing in the margins of the manuscript, but…

  JAFFREY: Macro-thinking?

  MORRISON: That’s right. And so Sonny followed him at Knopf—whom I like a lot, who is terrifically smart about books and publishing. But he was the president of Knopf. Bob Gottlieb was also the president, but he was the only president that also edited manuscripts, who line-edited. Sonny doesn’t do that. I mean, he shouldn’t do it. Most presidents don’t do it. But I wanted someone who—

  JAFFREY: Would have that capacity—

  MORRISON: That’s right. So they said, “What combination do you want?” Even though Erroll McDonald works at Pantheon.

  JAFFREY: So Erroll is your actual editor?

  MORRISON: He’s my…yes. My lines. I have no hesitancy about his abilities at all; he’s extremely good, oh man, and he’s read everything, he can make connections. And he monitors the book in-house, you know, to see what people are doing—you know, the covers—the fabric and paper and all of that really important stuff. Jazz was pretty much complete when I engaged this dual editorship, so he had less to do with that. With Paradise, I was able to send him the manuscript, say, when I had 100 pages, and get some feedback on it. So the levels of intensity have been different because I’ve submitted the manuscript under different circumstances.

  JAFFREY: So did he actually line-edit the full manuscript, or is it hands off on the fiction?

  MORRISON: What he does is write me long, interesting letters. And the letters contain information about what’s strong, what’s successful, what troubles him, what stands out as being really awful, that kind of thing. Which is what you want.

  JAFFREY: You have stated, I think it was in the Times, that there was still work to be done, you realized, on Paradise.

  MORRISON: I regard them all that way, all those books I’ve written. Years later, I read them, or read them in public, and say…

  JAFFREY: “Should have done that…”

  MORRISON: Or “Should not have done this,” or maybe, you know, this line. And it goes on forever.

  JAFFREY: In terms of Paradise, what is your personal assessment of—

  MORRISON: Of what I could have done? I wanted another kind of confrontation with Patricia, the one who kept the genealogies together.

  JAFFREY: Yes, which she burns at the end.

  MORRISON: And some of those young women. You know, like Anna. She has a confrontation with Reverend Meisner—but you know about her, what they think about her, but she has a very subjective view. She’s the daughter of someone whom she felt they despised, so she has an ax to grind. So she’s reevaluating everything, and has come to learn some terrible things, she thinks, about this town.

  JAFFREY: A friend said to me, “Why don’t you ask Toni Morrison what makes her really angry?”

  MORRISON: You know, I’ve lost it [the anger]. It’s a very, very strange thing. I was telling someone this summer that I felt some [turning point], and I didn’t know what it was, you know. It’s because I’ve lost the anger now—and I’m feeling really sad. And that seemed so sad to me. Really sad to me. Now, I did get angry recently, about this daughter [in the book]. And I hadn’t felt that furious about someone who isn’t in my personal life. Because I get angry about things, then go on and work. And today I was a little angry about Justina.

  JAFFREY: Justina?

  MORRISON: Justina was that little girl whose mother helped the lover kill her.

  JAFFREY: Oh God. In the New York Post, yes.

  MORRISON: And the part that reduced me to just smoldering anger was when she says she held her hands, as she was drowning.

  JAFFREY: That was just the most horrible detail.

  MORRISON: And I dwelt on it, and dwelt on it, until I was in a state. Yes, I really wanted to write about her, the child. So I get enraged about something like that, but generally speaking, I guess it comes with being over 64, you just get sort of melancholy.

  JAFFREY: Melancholy—meaning you’re resigned, or passive, in your responses?

  MORRISON: It’s overload. You sort of struggle to do four good things when you’re my age, and then not deal. I even tell my students that: four things. Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

  JAFFREY: What are those four things?

  MORRISON: That I do?

  JAFFREY: Let’s say, in the last year?

  MORRISON: Well, I think the book is one, [my teaching] is another, and the other two, I don’t want to talk about.

  JAFFREY: Can we talk about O.J. for a second?

  MORRISON: [Laughs]

  JAFFREY: What about this notion of “black irrationality”?

  MORRISON: The story of the case is a marketable story. And that story is made up of black irrationality, and black cunning, and black stupidity, and the black predator. That’s what the story is about. So if you take black irrationality out of it, you don’t have a story. Black men in particular, and black people in general, are supposed to be able to do opposite-ends-of-the-scale things, and we don’t have to make sense. We’ve always been considered to be irrational, emotional, lunatic people. So if you have someone that was accepted in the mainstream world as exactly the opposite of that, the threat that one may fall back into chaos is always there. That’s not just in this case. It was just played out theatrically, although it’s true in almost everything—narratives, stories, about black men in particular. So what concerned me was not even what my little hunches were…

  JAFFREY: But your hunches, you have written, were that he was innocent.

  MORRISON: Absolutely. I have never been more convinced of anything than that, precisely because of “motive” and “opportunity.” Forty minutes.

  JAFFREY: Forty minutes. You mean, how could it be done in that short a time?

  MORRISON: Well, I’m sure that, scientifically, it could be done, but it is truly irrational. Truly almost impossible.

  JAFFREY: Physically impossible?

  MORRISON: It’s not impossible.

  JAFFREY: You mean there had to have been two people, or something like that? What is your theory?

  MORRISON: I have no theories.

  JAFFREY: He had these dream-team lawyers, and they never even bothered to—

  MORRISON: No. They decided to just get him off, and not produce an alternate—a television show would have found the guilty party. But that’s not the way the legal system works. But the rest of it is, you know—there was a lot of money involved in that case. People got jobs, whole industries started up. Every issue surfaced in it. I think sometime we’ll know a lot about it.

  JAFFREY: The kids—I don’t understand how they heard nothing.

  MORRISON: They heard their mother crying.

  JAFFREY: But then they heard nothing afterwards, with this violent thing, and the dog barking…

  MORRISON: No, it’s a very intricate, strange case. He’s not very helpful himself either, in clarifying much. But my feeling about it was sort of like…you know, like when prostitutes can’t be raped in court, because, well, they’re prostitutes. It’s that kind of thing. If you’re going to be specific, and try to find out if someone did this thing, that’s what you ought to do. Part of the reason that the truth never emerged was not just the success of the defense team, but the media’s layering on. All these other issues were layered into this.

&nb
sp; JAFFREY: Here’s a different question: Whose work, among contemporary authors, do you rush out and read?

  MORRISON: Hmm. I follow Márquez. I read anything by Márquez. Peter Carey is someone I’ve read off and on, but now I’ve become devoted to. I read Pynchon. I buy those books, list price. And who else? Jamaica Kincaid has a new book out that I haven’t read. I love her work. I relish her work. It is incisive and beautiful at the same time.

  JAFFREY: Do you want to get remarried? I mean, did your marriage change your thinking about the notion of marriage?

  MORRISON: No, I like marriage. The idea. I think it’s better to have both parents totally there, and delivering something for the children. Where it’s not preferable is if that’s all there is, if it’s just a mother and a father. That’s an isolated horror. I would much rather have a large—a connection—with all of the members of the family, rather than…Because, usually, marriage, you think, that little atomic family, which I deplore. But I learned a lot in marriage, in divorce. I think women do. They don’t know that they do. I remember sitting around with some friends, all of them who had either been divorced, or separated, or on second or third marriages, had had that in their lives—some collapsed affair. And I said, “You know, I suspect that we all talk about that as a failure. But I want you to tell me, ‘What did you learn? Wasn’t there something really valuable in the collapse of that relationship?’ ” And they began to think, and I did too; and they said extraordinary things. One woman said, “I learned how to talk. For the first time, I learned to talk.” And another woman said, “I learned high organizational skills. See, I was a mess, as a young woman, you know, keeping house,” and her husband was worse. So, to stay in the house together, she had to really get it together. The skills that she now uses all the time. So I said, you know, we should stop thinking about these encounters—however long they are, because they do not last—as failures. When they’re just other things. You take something from it.

  JAFFREY: What, for you, was a lesson?

  MORRISON: I learned an enormous amount of self-esteem. Even though the collapse of the relationship suggested the opposite. For me, I just had to stand up. When I wanted a raise, in my employment world. They would give me a little woman’s raise, and I would say, “No. This is really low.” And they would say, “But…” And I would say, “No, you don’t understand. You’re the head of the household. You know what you want. That’s what I want. I want that.” I am on serious business now. This is not girl-playing. This is not wife-playing. This is serious business. I am the head of a household, and I must work to pay for my children.

  You can’t always explain [divorce] to the children. My children were, you know, accusatory. They were teenagers. Now, of course, they’re delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren’t my children. But when they were young, 5 and 6, they didn’t understand what this was about. And I never, never, ever spoke ill of their father, ever, because that was their relationship. And I wouldn’t do that. You know, maybe I was wrong. I didn’t want to put that burden on them. I didn’t want them to choose.

  JAFFREY: When raising your sons, did you try to protect them or guide them through the racial issues that they would encounter?

  MORRISON: No, I failed at that. Miserably, in fact. One of my kids was born in 1968. I thought they were not going to ever have the experiences that I had. I mean, there were going to be political difficulties, obviously, the haves and the have-nots, and so on. But they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to. Or, worse, my mother. Or worse, her mother. That it was all getting better. Not perfect, and not even good, but that at some level they wouldn’t have that. I was dead wrong.

  JAFFREY: Because the 1980s came along…

  MORRISON: And black boys became criminalized. So I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are. I mean, if you can find police still saying they thought a candy bar was a gun, or they thought whatever they thought—things that would never be coherent if they had shot a white kid in the back. Could they tell those parents, “It looked like a gun to me, but it was a Mars bar”? It’s just surreal. So that is what they are prey to. And I just couldn’t fathom it, for years and years and years. That it was that bad. I knew it was really bad, but I didn’t know it was that bad.

  JAFFREY: Did either of your sons go to Howard, where you went?

  MORRISON: One did go to Howard. In architecture. Didn’t like it. Thought it was not the best place for that. It was a personal decision about the school of architecture. But they were not averse to going to places like that…Unlike me, they were focused on where’s the best school for what they wanted to do, rather than on the sociological myths, and so on. I appreciated that. But a very close friend of mine, Angela Davis, has known them since they were children. The kinds of women that I had as very close friends were very independent women, very progressive, so they grew up amongst those kinds of women. So they have a different feeling; they’re very sensitive about social change, and so on. But what I didn’t know was just how, on a day-to-day basis—step into an elevator, and everyone gets out…I just couldn’t have imagined. If I had raised them earlier or later, I would have said, “Now look, this is what you do.” And I would say things like the things my father would always tell me, “You don’t live in that neighborhood.”

  JAFFREY: You don’t live in that neighborhood?

  MORRISON: No, you don’t live in that imagination of theirs. That’s not your home. What they think about you…

  JAFFREY: The reality that they think you are, you are not.

  MORRISON: That’s right. You are not.

  JAFFREY: He told you that? That’s amazing.

  MORRISON: He was wonderful. He was very insightful. Go to work, get your money and come home.

  JAFFREY: He was a welder, right?

  MORRISON: Yes. So…That helped me, because I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient—intellectual, emotional—about such people. I still think so, but I didn’t communicate it to my children enough. I think they have suffered. And being male, too. They’re competitive, they feel it in a different way. Maybe as a woman you get so used to being abused and dissed, that…

  JAFFREY: You just think, “I’ll shut this out.”

  MORRISON: Right. I’m not even going to deal with that one. But they don’t do that.

  JAFFREY: They deal with it.

  MORRISON: They try. And it causes them, I think, more pain than it did me.

  JAFFREY: My stepfather, who is black, recently said he would advise young black men to go into therapy. It’s helped him come to terms with prejudice. I thought it was interesting.

  MORRISON: That is interesting. Because I used to complain bitterly that psychiatry never considered race. I remember saying that, you know, in the moment when you first realize you’re a boy or a girl or your toilet training is this or whatever—all these little things that happen in your childhood—no one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That’s a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything. And it’s a profound psychological moment. And it’s never talked about, except as paranoia, or some moment of enlightenment. It’s just as devastating on white children, I read in those novels all the time. Those moments when you found out you were white. In Lillian Hellman—any of those Southern writers—the moment when black and white children play together, and then there’s a moment when that’s all over, because they can’t socialize together. And then the white child, sometimes it happens with their nurses.

  JAFFREY: It’s like: I love this person, and then, boom, she’s gone.

  MORRISON: And now this person is gone. Then you don’t trust
your instincts. You mean, I loved something unlovable? I loved something that’s not really among us? I mean, the trauma of that is interesting to me. And I mentioned it in a lecture once, and some psychiatrists asked me to lecture further on the subject. And I said, “No, you ought to be thinking about it.”

  JAFFREY: I read recently that you once suffered a terrible house fire. Did you lose manuscripts? What happened?

  MORRISON: Oh, I remember that. It was my house up in Rockland County. It was just a routine, stupid Christmas fire, in the fireplace, with the coals and the pines smoldering. The wreaths, you know—the detritus, the dried needles were around on the floor and not swept up. And the fire leaped to one of those and leaped to the couch, where it smoldered, and no one knew. I wasn’t there. One of my kids was there. And by the time he got downstairs, it was shooting through the roof. So he called the fire department, but it was a terrible winter, and the water was frozen in the pipes. And I lost…I write by hand…I was able to save some books, but I had all my manuscripts, notes from old books, in my bedroom on the second floor, in a little trundle underneath the bed, where there was some storage space. It went up first. I said to somebody later, “Why did I think that having those things near me was safer than having them in the basement?”

  My manuscripts, I didn’t care, I mean, I’m never going to look at that stuff again, so that wasn’t the hurtful part to me. They had a value, I think, to my children. As an inheritance. But I know I would never look at that stuff again. I would never look at The Bluest Eye—seven versions, in hand, of it—again. So I was not that upset about that. Other people might be interested in that. For me, it was the pictures of my children and of myself. Family. And I have nothing. Everything’s gone. So, I’m sorry about my children’s report cards, I’m sorry about my jade plants, certain clothes.

  I also had first editions of Emily Dickinson, first editions of Faulkner—I mean, all the stuff that you just hang on to. Only about 30 or 40 books, but they were all marked up. I had a Frederick Douglass—not the first edition, but a second edition, done in England. And letters, over the years. Whatever there was is gone. It’s just the wrong place to store stuff. No excuses. The house burned. I lost a lot of stuff.