Age hasn’t dimmed the fire in Toni Morrison, 84. The unwavering voice of black America talks about her latest novel and what it will take for racism to be a thing of the past

4/20/15-Toni Morrison is, without a doubt, a world-class novelist. Her work as an editor, however, has received much less attention. Morrison worked at Random House for 20 years, leaving in 1983, just before she set out to write her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved.

At her apartment in lower Manhattan, I ask her about the ways in which American literature has changed, and she volunteers that she “had something to do with that”. But she is not referring to her own fiction. “I said, I can’t march, I have small children,” she tells me. “I’m not the marching type anyway. So when I went into publishing, I thought, the best I can do is to publish the works of those who are out there – like Angela Davis, Huey Newton – and the literature. And let it be edited by someone who understands the language, and understands the culture.”

One of the books Morrison published in those Random House years was the autobiography of Muhammad Ali. The Greatest: My Own Story came out in 1975 and was deemed to be, in one critic’s estimation, “the greatest contribution to sports literature perhaps ever”. Things between Morrison and Ali weren’t always easy. “Ali wouldn’t even answer my questions,” she says. “I’d be in a room full of guys. They’d say, ‘Oh my God, look at his hands. Ooh. And look at his neck. Ooh…’ They weren’t doing anything but saying, ‘We love you’.” If she asked Ali a question, he would reply to one of the men.

^{Toni Morrison in 1977 (REX)}

Then Morrison remembered something, a story about an old Jewish lady on the West Side, who was about to be evicted from her apartment, and how Ali had helped her pay the rent. “And I thought, you know what? Ali pays respect to older women.” Morrison was 44 at the time; she was bringing up two sons on her own, and had written two novels – The Bluest Eye and Sula. “So I put on my grown-up shoes, and next time I saw him I had my arms crossed. I said, ‘Ali, get up from there. You have an appointment.’ And he stood right up. He did everything I said after that.” When you are in the company of Toni Morrison, there’s really no mistaking who’s in charge.

Morrison is forbidding and theatrical in appearance, her smile glorious when it comes, her long grey locks clasped at the back of her head, looking as if they’ve been spun out of silk and steel. Though she is 84, and pain now makes her shuffle slowly across the floor, weakness is not a word one would ever associate with her. Her voice can be wispy and girlish, toying with an idea as if holding it up to the light, but her natural timbre is lower, warmer, with a faint suggestion of thunder.

On the walls of her new apartment (she moved because the old one had too many stairs) are several haunting paintings by her son, Slade, who died five years ago of pancreatic cancer. “He was painting these mouthless people,” she explains, pointing to a monochrome smudged portrait above the fireplace. “A girl came in here once, looked at that painting and burst into tears. She had been molested as a child, and something in there, with the inability to speak and the sad eyes, got to her in some profound way.”

The day we meet, Morrison herself is in a mood for laughter – occasionally at herself but, on a more serious note, at the rationale of cruelty, as if what it deserved most were ridicule. I have come to ask about her latest novel, God Help the Child, which she began in 2008 and returned to when she decided that the memoir she was contracted to write was not something she wanted to do.

^{Toni Morrison with Oprah Winfrey at the premiere of Beloved in 1998 (GETTY)}

In the book, a very black woman, who has been raised by her mother to believe she is ugly, turns her blackness into a source of strength. But it’s all superficial, and over the course of the novel she finds herself shrinking, losing her womanhood, until she can learn how to rise above appearances. Beside the question of “skin privileges” – the superior treatment by black people of the light-skinned among them – every character is touched by child abuse.

And there’s a particular view of racism, not hammered home but abundantly clear. One of the protagonists becomes a postgraduate economics student because he finds the African-American Studies department fails to address a simple proposition: that “most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labour, sharecropping, racism, Jim Crow, prison labour, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money”.

Is that what Morrison thinks? “I know it,” she says. “Race is the classification of a species. And we are the human race, period. But the other thing – the hostility, the racism – is the money-maker. And it also has some emotional satisfaction for people who need it.” Slavery, she suggests, “moved this country closer to the economy of an industrialised Europe, far in advance of what it would have been.” Even now, she points out, “they don’t stop and frisk on Wall Street, which is where they should really go”.

Last summer Morrison came to the Hay Festival and made three appearances over three days. In the course of those conversations, she touched on this issue a number of times, spinning it out, examining it, not tub-thumping but the opposite, as if there were still nothing conclusive to say. The question of race, she reflected, “is not static. You just have to swim in it for a bit”.

^{Toni Morrison receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2012 (GETTY)}

Since then, Eric Garner has been strangled by white policemen on Staten Island, Michael Brown has been shot by white policemen in Ferguson, Walter Scott has been shot by a white policeman in South Carolina. “People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race,’” she says now. “This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back,” Morrison says finally. “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”

Toni Morrison – who was then Chloe Wofford – grew up understanding none of this. In the small industrial town of Lorain in Ohio, where she was raised, the stories told by her Southern parents seemed unreal. Her father was a welder in the shipyards. Most of their neighbours were European immigrants, and in her high-school yearbook there were only two other black students.

Had her father really witnessed a lynching when he was 14? Did they really have separate water fountains for white and coloured people in Georgia? It was only when she went to Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC, that she began to realise how things were. And off-campus, in the late 1940s, the city was segregated. She stole one of the wooden bars used to keep blacks at the back of buses and sent it to her mother as a grim keepsake.

But it was the two summers she spent touring with the drama group that taught her most. “There were really dramatic and theatrical inconveniences in being black in the South,” she says. The faculty would arrange for the troupe to stay somewhere, and often they would find that, as she puts it, “it wasn’t such a nice place. Maybe it had a little ‘uh!’ on the side”. One of the faculty members would go to a phone box and leaf through the yellow pages until he found the name of a church that was likely to be African-American.

The pastor would listen to their story and say to call him back in 15 minutes – by which time he would have found homes for them to stay in. “What I remember,” Morrison says wistfully, “are the sheets and the pillowslips. They were washed and hung out to dry on bushes, so there was this wonderful odour – it’s the kind of stuff they bottle now and sell! It was the best time. On the one hand there was this, ‘You can’t come here, you can’t drink here – die!’, and on the other there were these wonderful sort of underground railroad people.”

^{With her son Ford after being awarded the Legion d’Honneur in Paris in 2010 (GETTY)}

As a result, Morrison began to feel an affinity, a fascination. What emerged was a career-long project to – in her words – “turn the gaze”. She didn’t want to write in order to persuade white people, as the abolitionists Frederick Douglass or Solomon Northup had. She wasn’t interested in assuming a white person’s worldview, like the mid-20th century writer Ralph Ellison (“Invisible to whom?” she says of his famous novel The Invisible Man). She didn’t want to join in the black power cries of “screw whitey”. When the revolutionary 1960s turned into the 1970s, she wanted to say, “Before we get on to the ‘black is beautiful’ thing, may I remind you what it was like before, when it was lethal?”

So she wrote from the point of view of little black girls in her first two books, of 17th-century slaves in Mercy, of a child killed by her mother to save her from suffering in Beloved. She combined the metaphorical stories of her grandparents with the facts on the ground, and arrived at what she calls “imaginative resistance”. To tell a tale, you have to pick up its pieces, she once suggested, comparing storytellers to Hansel and Gretel. “Their momma doesn’t want them. They leave a little trail. That trail is language.”

In words that are simple and cadences that are sometimes incantatory, through action that is both true to life and magical in its habits of thought, Morrison has conveyed a series of black perspectives, thrown her readers into a world they had not previously met in fiction, and realigned American history by choosing the people through whom it might be told. From the first page of her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970) – inspired by a desire once harboured by a (black) classmate of hers to have blue eyes – she began her dangerously true fictions.

^{The cover of her latest novel, God Help the Child, which she began in 2008 (GETTY)}

“We had dropped our [marigold] seeds in our own little plot of black dirt, just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.” That book was initially rejected by 12 publishers; African-American critics found it shaming; it was banned all over the country. The rest is literary history, and a Nobel Prize: incest, child abuse, murderous mothers and ferocious love – all would be laid out before us.

Morrison has now retired from her teaching post at Princeton, and is some way through another novel, set in 1946. Her musical taste develops all the time: though the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett is her “real true love” she has started listening to rap, whose language she finds “flexible and wild” (her latest musical crush is Kendrick Lamar). She has two granddaughters, the children of her son Ford, who is a scientist (she married Harold Morrison in 1958; they were divorced six years later). The death of Slade still feels recent. “There is no closure on stuff like that,” she says. “Not with a child. A child’s supposed to bury you. I think about him all the time.” And although she has decided not to write a memoir, she is the kind of raconteuse who makes you long for one – assuming, of course, she would include the story about Marlon Brando regularly ringing her up to read out bits of her novel Song of Solomon (“I still have his number in my iPhone! How could I erase that?”).

Morrison used to tell her students to set little store by the pursuits advertised in the Constitution. “This world is interesting and difficult,” she would say. “Happiness? Don’t settle for that.”

Source: Telegraph

Gaby Woods