Toni Morrison

by The Last Interview-

  And I also found it very different from what I’d thought.

  COSBY: In what way?

  MORRISON: Well, I had never been around what I suppose one calls the Black upper middle class, and they were different. They had different expectations. I came from a place where merit was prized above everything. The fact that I was an all-A student and on the National Honor Society and so was my sister was like, I was a star. But not having certain kinds of clothes or other accoutrement, you know, or not even knowing the difference between certain kinds of labels…

  Certain people made fun of other people if you didn’t have these things, or you didn’t have claims to a professional parent or what have you. I was not terribly bright in these ways, but the first thing I remembered is that people liked mean people in spite of the fact that they were stupid, they were mean, they didn’t get good grades. But they had either certain kind of hair or some kind of skin or their father was a lawyer or something, so they got away with it. I was just stunned. [Laughing] But it didn’t bother me too long because I found the Howard Players.

  Two things were happening there. One: We had to read these plays. I mean really read them. Not just the way you read them in an English class. You had to really understand them in order to be able decide what the character—you know, the whole thing.

  And we read—which we did not do in the English department at Howard—we read Black authors. We read Langston Hughes, people I didn’t even know vaguely, you know. But we never studied them. But they did in the theater department.

  Third thing is what got you the part was merit, talent, ability to carry the role. And the people who were popular or sought after or at the top of the heap were the best, the most talented people, and I felt comfortable there.

  And every summer some ten or nine or twelve of us, accompanied by faculty members, would travel through the south to campuses, Black campuses, and perform these plays. It was extraordinary. It was really…I can’t tell you.

  COSBY: But you also—now tell me if I am incorrect: You ran for a sorority queen while you were at Howard?

  MORRISON: Yes! [Laughing] I didn’t know what all that was about, you know. I didn’t win, I have to tell you. [Laughing]

  COSBY: Where did you go to earn your masters degree?

  MORRISON: Cornell.

  COSBY: Then you returned to Howard University to teach. Will you tell us about your particular students who became prominent writers and leaders?

  MORRISON: One of the most articulate, provocative students I had was Stokely Carmichael. He was really clever, very smart and fun…Claude Brown was a student of mine…Amiri Baraka—I don’t know, I’m not sure about him. He was on campus, but now you know, people say that I taught them when in fact they were my classmates. You know, I can’t tell now. All sorts of people say, “Oh, you taught me.” And I’m like, wait a minute, I thought we were in the same class? Because I was a student there and a teacher. So I’m not sure. David Dinkins. He was a student. I mean we were in the same class. He was an older gentleman. He was a veteran. [Laughing]

  COSBY: Will you tell us about your transition from an educator to a textbook editor for Random House publishing company?

  MORRISON: Well, I was not able to get a job when I left Howard University, went away, separated and had children. But in the meantime I saw this ad in the paper for a textbook editor and I thought, oh, I can do this. So I applied, and it worked out. That was in Syracuse, New York, because they were buying a company, a textbook company called LW Singer. Random House bought it. And they were going to move to New York and so it would only be in Syracuse for a year…If they were only going to stay in Syracuse I’m not sure I would have taken the job.

  COSBY: How long did you work at Random House altogether?

  MORRISON: Altogether I think it was about eighteen or nineteen years. A long time.

  COSBY: You edited Middleton Harris’s The Black Book, a scrapbook of African American history.

  MORRISON: Yes, I had an enormous education with that book…

  By the time I got into publishing, the world was opening up to a kind of integrated book, plus, I thought there was a market now because of the Civil Rights Movement.

  So I had already by that time published a book called The Bluest Eye, which sold maybe, you know, fifty or a hundred, two hundred copies. And they only printed fifteen hundred. So I thought well let me decide to do something that is both African American and good and popular.

  So I was looking around to find somebody to do this book and I came across Spike Harris. Middleton Harris. And he was a collector. He just had everything. Every newspaper, every button, every book—just everything. And he knew other people who were also collectors. So I called them all together. I mean, they had newspaper articles, old magazines; they had tales, they had stories, and out of that sort of collection of these four people came my notion of putting together this book that was unstructured. You know, it was sort of some music…little known things, odd things, newspaper articles…

  And one of the things that I located in there was this newspaper article about this woman, Margaret Garner, who had killed one child and was trying to kill the others in order that they not be returned to slavery. What was interesting was that I knew there was infanticide in slavery on the ships as well as other places. But what was interesting about that piece was that everybody was stunned because she wasn’t crazy. They kept saying, “Well she’s very logical; she’s very calm.” You know, she wasn’t a screaming hysterical woman…and that attracted me.

  COSBY: Yes. Somehow it appears that it would be all right if the person was crazy. But I’m assuming that many of those people were not crazy.

  MORRISON: No. Many of those people were not crazy. And many of them just threw those children away. And they were not crazy. Once they knew what it was like—slavery—what they would have to be subjected to, they decided…Because I think we forget something about slavery: There was an enormous amount of sexual license. People talk about, well, the money; the economy; the this…But you realize if you own a human being, you really own them. You can get them—boys, girls—to do anything you say, on pain of death. That’s what it means to own a human being.

  COSBY: Will you tell me about your roles as an editor and mentor for other African American writers during your time at Random House?

  MORRISON: I was specifically interested in finding African American writers, people that agents didn’t even know about or didn’t have. So I threw out a net, so to speak, and I got lots of interesting people. Maya Angelou published at Random House, her first books. And when I met her and some of her friends, I got more information about who was doing the work. And once they knew, then other people would come. But I was always on the lookout and located people like Toni Cade Bambara, who was very special. And I published the first, I think probably the only, book that Lucille Clifton did that was in prose. She did this book Generations, about her family.

  And I did publish Angela Davis. It was a big thrill for me just to know her and meet her and work with her on that book.

  I published Huey Newton, his collection. I published Muhammad Ali. I published the ones that you would expect that I would vie for and the company wanted me to publish. But finding Gayl Jones, for example, Henry Dumas—Eugene Redmond brought him to me and I just saw this stuff. It was just incredible.

  So yes, I was working very hard to find writers.

  COSBY: No resistance from your bosses?

  MORRISON: Some. Some. But they gave me a lot of slack until they realized that the market wasn’t quite there with some authors, like Leon Forrest. I published three books by Leon Forrest and they’re beautiful, powerful books, but very difficult books. And so even though he’d had the support of academics, and I think even Ralph Ellison gave him a very strong recommendation, the sales were very low. Now that they did not let me keep on publishing—books that weren’t making any money. Although at on
e time in publishing you could do that…They decided that they had to make some money, you know, as all those publishers eventually did. You can see the consequences of it now.

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  COSBY: What are some of the challenges that are specific to being a woman writer?

  MORRISON: Well, you know, you’re not really in the big leagues if you’re a woman writer. Notwithstanding Black woman writers; any woman writer. There’s something called women’s fiction. There used to be. In critical terms, that was always difficult to break out of. I mean, people pay lip service to it but you’re never really sure…The very popular, very powerful and very good male writers really are the alphas of the writing world. It’s changing slowly, but you always understood that you were coming from a smaller space.

  COSBY: And so many Black writers or artists don’t want to be known as Black this or Black that. And you embrace that.

  MORRISON: Yes.

  COSBY: Both Black and woman.

  MORRISON: That’s right. In order to change the labels. No, don’t move me out of that category and say that I don’t belong; I’m too good to be—as a matter of fact, earlier criticism that I remember distinctly, people—White critics, women—said “She’s too good to limit her canvas to just Black folks. If she’s going to really be competitive, she has to move out of that very small area.” So that just angered me so completely, you know.

  COSBY: If it’s White, it’s broader.

  MORRISON: That’s right. That’s what it meant. That’s what it meant.

  COSBY: You’d said that in the past African American writers wrote for White audiences, but that you write for readers like yourself, for Black people. How do you address your audience differently than African American writers who wrote for White audience?

  MORRISON: It’s a very nuanced thing. The assumption is in the language. There’s a little extra editorializing where the writer who understands the major readers to be White people has to explain stuff that he wouldn’t have to explain to me because I would know.

  So you can feel the little explanations. You feel it in Richard Wright…you feel it even in Jimmy Baldwin. You know, there’s this little…editorial work going on. There is none in Jean Toomer’s Cane. You don’t feel that explanatory—

  COSBY: Or the obligation to explain.

  MORRISON: —the obligation, yes, to make it clear. And the other thing is a kind of address. One of the most important books probably written in the United States is Ellison’s Invisible Man. There’s no question about that. But think of what that title is: Invisible Man. Accurate, but he’s talking about invisible to them, to White people. Not to Black people.

  That’s a real confrontation and it’s extremely important what he did, but that was just a very theatrical version of what I meant by re-addressing this to another. Assume the reader knows as much about it as I do. As a matter of fact, I used to get some complaints, although they were mixed with praise, particularly from young Black women, about The Bluest Eye. They would say, you know, “I really and truly loved that book but I was very angry with you for exposing us.” And I would say, “Well how could I move you if I didn’t tell the truth?” I don’t have to apologize for our humanity.

  The point is that we’re these interesting people who’ve triumphed in extraordinary ways. I dare anybody to go through centuries and centuries and centuries of this in this place. We should all be dead. This is an incredible story, not just of survival but of thriving. Think what it might have been like if we didn’t have to do any of that since what is a consequence is this extraordinary culture, which is indigenous; it’s new world culture that we have made in this country.

  COSBY: And it’s amazing that we have traveled this far.

  MORRISON: Of course. It’s a stunning story.

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  COSBY: Song of Solomon is so rich in folkloric, mythic, biblical and supernatural imagery. Will you talk about some of your sources for this text and the effect of juxtaposing, for example, biblical imagery with an African folktale?

  MORRISON: I thought that one of the reasons that writing out of, and within, African American culture was precisely this load of information from everywhere. In my own family, the mixture in the language, there was street language; there was sermonic language. You know people actually quoted the Bible to you as a child, they had biblical phrases in regular conversation. Or they had lyrics from songs…My mother sang like a dream. She just had the best voice that ever was…And she sang all day. I mean, there was a time when people used to walk around singing, you know, before radios and before television. Just walk up and down the street, you hear people singing. Or in the backyard or in the kitchen. And that was not just my mother. My aunts, all of them.

  Now that quality of richness, when I began to write something like Song of Solomon and I was trying to pull from the kind of culture that existed already in a northern town…the history was in their songs and the history was also in the little tales they told themselves.

  And notice that book stops in 1963. I wanted to get it just before things broke out and became much more articulate and focused, you know, along with the Civil Rights movement. But up until that time that’s where that information was coming from.

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  —

  MORRISON: Remember I told you about this great-grandmother of mine? She was really, really Black. Very Black. Black-skinned. Really tall and really mean. [Laughing] But she was something to be adored. People used to come to her for advice from—she lived in Michigan—from all over the state. And this woman said to us, and her own daughter, that we had all been “tampered with” because our skin was not Black like hers. She said the race has been “tampered with.” You are no longer pure. That was very hurtful.

  COSBY: She used the word “tampered”?

  MORRISON: She said “tampered with.” You’d been “sullied” and so forth. Meaning she was not. So that was when I was a young girl. When I went to Howard and I saw this reverse skin stuff, in my mind was this woman who was the baddest thing I knew who said that the color of my skin was less than pure.

  So anyway, when I was doing Paradise and I read this story in a newspaper about these slaves who had gone to one of these towns and been turned away, I started reading more of those newspapers. They had newspapers all over Oklahoma—“Come. Come. New territory. Settle here.” And then I looked at the pictures of the founders. They were all light-skinned men and this particular group had walked this long distance to get into this town were turned away because they didn’t have any money, really. They didn’t want to take on somebody they had to feed. And it was interesting because this was at the time when everybody was saying, “Oh, welfare’s terrible. All the Black people are on welfare,” and so on. I said, “Oh, Lord.” So I made them all Black and pure. I just changed that a little bit and made them very proud, very pure and maintaining their purity and superceding all these other people who were told that they couldn’t get in…which is the nature of Paradise, you know what I mean? If anybody can get in it’s not paradise, right?

  But that worked well for me in order to say something about that historical period and the resistance, which I continued a little bit in Love—the resistance of certain kinds of African Americans to any kind of progress.

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  —

  COSBY: When did you feel more confident about your color?

  MORRISON: I’m still not.

  COSBY: Not yet?

  MORRISON: Well you know what? The only person that I knew who felt this way—same way I do—is Toni Cade Bambara. She was my friend and I told her this and she said, “You know, I always am surprised at pictures of myself,” she said, “because I think I’m darker than that.” And I do, too. When I see pictures of myself on the backs of books and things [Laughing] I always say why is she so White?

  COSBY: Your great-grandmother’s words are powerful.<
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  MORRISON: And more powerful now, because you know what? I have been running around all my life saying that I have no White blood. Because the non-Black blood in me is Indian—my mother’s grandmother was an Indian lady. Anyway, then my son calls me up and says, “What about that man whose name was Morgan?” which is my father’s mother’s maiden name. “Who was this White man?” And I said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “There are no White men in our family.” So he tells me I’m losing my mind. I’m 73; I’m not responsible, right? So I call up my sister who remembers everything and sure enough. There was this Reverend Morgan. He was a preacher. A White man who married Carrie and had ten children.

  COSBY: Carrie is a Black woman?

  MORRISON: Um-hmm. Married. Ten children. Five girls; five boys, out of which come these Morgans and the Walkers. So, this just happened like two weeks ago.

  I don’t know how I missed it because I think I just erased it. [Laughing] Racism is terrible, I mean you just can’t even work your way through it while you’re working your way through it. I’m working my way through it. I’m working my way through it and then up comes something I realize I had invented this fabricated story about no White blood in my family.

  COSBY: Thank goodness your son enlightened you.

  MORRISON: I know. He remembered.

  TONI MORRISON’S HAUNTING RESONANCE

  INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN

  INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

  MARCH 2012

  We are unaccustomed to artistic or social revolutionaries receiving high honors during their lifetimes. Usually, America’s regard for its cultural innovators is, at best, a backward glance. Thus the legion of prizes that have been bestowed upon Toni Morrison might lead one to suspect that she chronicles the preferred version of American events rather than the darker, harder stories of who we are. Among the awards received by the 81-year-old writer from Lorain, Ohio, are the 1988 Pulitzer Prize, and, in 1993, she was the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Moreover, the breathless veneration put forth by her fans—who include Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey—might indicate that Morrison is too mired in the establishment for her novels to provoke or critique. All of these assumptions are dead wrong. The author’s journey through the literary landscape has always been one of defiance. Ever since her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, when the then-39-year-old Morrison was a single mother living in Queens raising two boys and working as a senior editor at Random House, her fiction has remained both unflinchingly visceral and almost biblical in proportion. Her language can be spare, but every color, description, and emotional or collective massacre has a haunting resonance.