MONDAY
E-mail a friendToni Morrison
airdate February 3, 2004
Revered in the literary world, Toni Morrison's novels are heralded for their intricate storylines set against the backdrop of African American culture. With Song of Solomon, she gained national attention and went on to win the '88 Pulitzer Prize for Beloved and, in '93, became the first Black woman—and the last American—to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Morrison was also the first Black woman writer to hold a named chair at an Ivy League school (Princeton). A Mercy is her latest release.
Toni Morrison
Tavis: Toni Morrison was the first African American ever to win the Nobel Prize for literature. She's also the first African American woman to hold a named chair at an Ivy League school as a professor of humanities at Princeton. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's latest novel is called 'Love,' and Ms. Morrison joins us tonight via satellite. Toni Morrison, nice to see you.
Toni Morrison: Thank you, Tavis. Thanks for having me.
Tavis: I must tell you, though, that I'm so--while I'm delighted to see you, I'm disappointed that you are there and I am here. We were supposed to do this a week or so ago, and the bad weather kept you from coming out, so...
Toni: I'm disappointed, too. I wanted to be looking in your face.
Tavis: Well, I can see your face in this monitor. I'd much rather see you here, and you could have signed this book, 'Love,' that I'm loving. Talk to me about, in your own words, what this novel is about.
Toni: Well, it's a kind of continuation or extension of my own exploration into African American consciousness. Sometimes it's evolved, you know, over the last several hundred years, and it's nuanced, and it's blatant, and it's complicated. But by the time I got to this book, 'Love,' I was really interested in how the changes that came about as a result of the Civil Rights movement altered and affected a lot of the ways in which we think, exacerbated class divisions, and eventually interfered with a close, intimate community relationship that we may have had before...and ultimately interfered with love.
Tavis: Very nicely put. Thank you, first of all. Secondly--and we've discussed these issues before, some of these issues at least--you have never run away from your blackness. You've never run away from your black feminism, if I can put it that way, and the kind of stories that you like to tell. But I wonder whether or not it ever bothers you that some of your critics try to pigeon-hole you as a writer just for African American women?
Toni: Oh, sure. It's troubling because I think it's something that every black writer had to confront. Are you writing as a black person or for black people only, or... And then you sort of wonder what the rest of that sentence is supposed to be. Or what? But it's died down a little bit. It only comes up under certain kinds of situations when they're really questioning whether or not a non-black reader is supposed to enjoy or understand fully or participate fully in the book. And that's what the pigeonhole is for, to keep you contained and inaccessible, so to speak, to the rest of the world.
Tavis: If the critics' trying to label you as a writer just for African American women is their attempt to pigeon-hole you, let me ask the reverse or the flip-side of that question, I suspect, which might be: What has being the winner of the Pulitzer and the Nobel laureate done to free you in any sort of way? Or are they wonderful accolades, but they really haven't changed what you do or how you do it over the years?
Toni: That was a great thing that happened. I was very proud of it and delighted with it. It was an extraordinary kind of authentication, which I personally never felt I needed. I thought the work spoke on its own terms, but it was nice in a sort of public sense to have that. But it doesn't do anything else. It doesn't help you think through anything. You still have to be who you are. And it just so happens that I didn't begin to write until I was in my late 30s, and I never got any real serious attention until I was in my late 40s. So, in a way, I was already formed, you know. I wasn't a young person likely to believe totally and completely in your own press. I had already solved certain kinds of problems and knew what my work was. So I've never been, I think, overwhelmed or underwhelmed by public things that have happened.
Tavis: You mentioned that you started writing late, 38, as I recall, when 'The Bluest Eye' was rejected, not once, not twice, but a few times.
Toni: Yeah, about 12 times.
Tavis: About 12 times before it actually came out. Let me stop right there for a second. When you look back on those days now that you are this Nobel laureate, what does it mean to you now in retrospect to remember that 'The Bluest Eye,' your first piece, was rejected a dozen times?
Toni: I just thought they were wrong.
Tavis: Yeah. Ha ha ha!
Toni: I mean, I really did. Some of them wrote very dismissive letters, and some of them wrote long letters explaining that, 'Hey, I like it, but...' And I would read them very carefully, but I knew that I just didn't have an advocate. I didn't have the agent or the PR person or the editor to explain to these people what was really going on. So I just continued and felt that one day somebody would get excited about it. It was a period in which many, many black writers were coming forth, but my story was a little outside the sort of mainstream, and eventually somebody did.
Tavis: We're talking, I suspect, to... Well, I know we're talking to a lot of your fans across the country, watching this broadcast right now who may not have known that you started writing so late, in your late 30s, and got no acclaim until your late 40s. What do you say to those persons watching right now who have some writer in them and have received a number of those rejection letters and are advancing in age and haven't gotten their break yet, as it were?
Toni: Not to worry. If it's clear to you, and it's exciting and compelling to you, don't abandon it because somebody else who's in a position to sort of go through piles and piles of manuscripts, somebody else hasn't, you know, given you the nod. Sometimes people are annoyed because they haven't made or staked a claim when they're in their 20s, and we're such a youth-oriented society. People really fear that when they get past 35 or 40 that it's over for them. That is so, so untrue. So very untrue.
Tavis: What is it then that keeps you going? Back to all of the accolades. I mean, you've won just about every acclaim that there is for you to win in your discipline. You have a chair at Princeton. What is it that gets you up every day?Not just gets you up into that classroom, but indeed that keeps you writing? Some folks might have been afraid to come out with something after having won the Nobel Prize, the Nobel award for literature because how do you top something like that? What keeps you going?
Toni: Well, that pressure that people speak to me of, you know, how does it feel to be... 'Having won the Nobel Prize, now what do you do?' And it's an interesting question but a sort of misleading one at the same time 'cause I think what they're really saying is, 'Hurry up and fail.' Now that you've won, they're waiting carefully. But the point for me is that the work is just so much of what I do in my life and in my mind. That is what I do. And having a book to write, or some research to do, or having to solve these technical problems, or having to forge or reforge language and to make things clear that may have been unclear before, or to muddy up things that you thought you knew so clearly before--that is absolutely bliss for me. It's absolutely bliss.
Tavis: Your novel 'Beloved' is in the news again a lot lately because, one, Oprah Winfrey just turned 50, and I saw all sorts of retrospectives on her life and on her career and the ups and downs of her life. One of the down points that people--at least tried to label it a down point, was when she optioned your book 'Beloved,' and the movie did not do so well at the box office. Now that there's some distance between here and there, or here and then, share with me your thoughts, if you might, on how you thought that movie was received, or not received, as it were.
Toni: Well, it was interesting. It had absolutely the most exciting and positive rave reviews, but in the actual theater, the crowds were not there, and those that were, particularly young people, were befuddled, I gather. They didn't know, is this a ghost movie? Or I don't know what.
It may have been something that... I don't really quite know about the film industry, but I was very encouraging to her because I kept telling her, 'Listen, no matter how beautiful or wonderful this movie may turn out to be, there has never been a box office hit in this country told from the slave's point of view.' All the hits that we know vis-a-vis slavery are 'Birth of a Nation' or 'Gone with the Wind,' and those are told by the planters, by the plantation owners. But when you tell the story from the slave's point of view, no matter what the intellectual responses may be, it's a very difficult sell. You know, 'Amistad' was out at the same time.
Tavis: Right.
Toni: That revolution on that slave ship by Spielberg, I think, sank. So that it's as though, at least in the form of film, the country may not be quite ready to see things that they're obviously ready to absorb via a book. Because the book sold extraordinarily well following and accompanying the movie.
Toni: We're getting closer, Tavis. We really are. I know it looks bad because we are aware of all the instances in which it just simply doesn't work, and if you bring it up, politically speaking, then, you know, you're silenced. And, also, you have generations now who don't really have that experience, where being black or being African American now to a lot of people is mostly style. And in some instances, it's not even that. It's just a brand because their personal experiences are not that deeply embedded in the culture of the neighborhood. And that, I think, is gonna continue. It's part of, I suppose, what it means to complete assimilation. And I find lots of young black people who don't really know what you're talking about.
Tavis: What's the danger in that? I assume that there is a danger there. What's the danger in that reality as you see it?
Toni: Well, I think you lose your power as a race. You also forget some important things to remember about your history: the things that made us strong and complicated and sophisticated and interesting. It also affects the art, I think. It gets watered down. It gets accommodationist, and it may lose its vitality. You know, whatever you can say about early blues or early jazz or those paintings is that it was rich, forceful. It was complicated. It was sophisticated. It was angry. It was consoling. It was complex. And what you get later is the sort of blatant, out-front, in-your-face style without the richness, you know, of the culture. I hope I'm explaining this properly to you because I worry about it more in terms of the output of creative activity than I do about, necessarily, the political consequences, which are dire, by the way, and may be getting worse, but nevertheless, those things can be more rapidly changed.
Tavis: That made perfect sense to me. Let me ask you to share with me a little bit about the book you have coming out just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board ruling--a children's book, I understand.
Toni: Yes. I was persuaded to look at some of those very beautiful and very evocative photographs that recorded the life of African Americans before the onset of the Civil Rights movement, before Brown vs. Board of Education and after.
What it is, is interesting--not just the photographs, which are beautiful and provocative--but I imagined and wrote what I thought might be the interior thoughts of some of the children involved. What it means to come into this school, your parents taking you by the hand, leading you. You're 8 years old or 10 years old; you're going into this white school for the first time. And even though it's right and you're brave and you're ready...it's so strange. And you have to do it by yourself. You do it alone for those kids, you know, and that first wave of forced protected integration.
And I just think that there's some children now, as the publisher did, who have no recollection of how violent the responses were to black and white children sitting together in the same classroom. And how difficult it was and all the barriers that were put up. And also they may not know that was the beginning of a movement which encompassed people in this country from all walks of life. All races, all professions, you know, came together in order to do this important thing. And it may be lost, in a way, for very young children with just the parades and the memorials, but I wanted to record it as it was on a sort of daily-lived life. And that's what that book is. It's called 'Remember.'
Tavis: I look forward to 'Remember' and having a chance to see, in your mind's eye, what you think was going through the heads of these children at the time. I'm also fascinated, though, by the fact that you are obviously in the classroom right now every day at Princeton.
Let me ask you what it is you're going to be saying or are already saying to your students as we approach this big anniversary that, as you well know, both the left and the right politically in this country are going to seize upon to make their own points, their own case about the state of education today. What are you saying to your students about the enduring lesson, the enduring legacy, if you will, of this Brown v. Board decision?
Toni: I'm trying to clarify in terms that have to do with multi-disciplines--not just art but also history, also political science, also lyrics--of just what it means to come up and achieve or be blocked from achievement: how stressful that is, but how important it is, and how enormously long that battle has been. I just want them to have the context and not take everything for granted.
Tavis: Let me interrupt one second, and I hate to interrupt you ever, but I don't want to lose this thought. When you say how important it is to be blocked, you have to back up and explain. What do you mean by the importance of being blocked? That doesn't sound like a nice thing.
Toni: Of being interfered with?
Tavis: Yes, yes.
Toni: It--you get strong. Or you collapse. But you're trained, either by your experience or by your family or by your community, that here is the obstacle: there it is. Now what are you gonna do about it? Are you gonna back up, fold up, crawl away? Are you gonna leap, you gonna fight, you gonna make it through?
I always assumed that there would be obstacles in my life. I took that for granted. I always assumed that most people were going to tell me no. That was already a given. The question was not the obstacle but what my response was gonna be to it. Was it gonna knock me down or was I gonna leap over it in a creative way. Not just with a chip on my shoulder--what I deserve. But the work, the work would never suffer. Because that was what was gonna get me through.
But without that, without that perceived--and I don't mean inconvenience. I mean real barriers where people just don't let you in the door. You know, I was talking to my son recently, and he was complaining when he was a teenager about being followed by security people in a department store because he's a black male and they think he might steal something.
Tavis: They call that 'shopping while black.'
Toni:
Tavis: You don't need another position. You're awfully busy as it is. But if in fact you were the secretary of education in this country, since we're talking about Brown v. Board 50 years later, what would you do? Where would you start at least fixing whatever it is you perceive as wrong with education in this country even though it is now supposed to be separate and equal? We got some major problems, obviously, with education, certainly public education. Where would you start?
Toni: Oh, the money. Money. They need tons and tons of money.
Tavis: But you know there are a lot of folk who say that's the problem with people like you, that all you want to do is throw money at the problem. The problem in education isn't about throwing more money at it, Professor Morrison.
Toni: I understand that, but they never say that about Princeton. They never say that about private schools. They never say that about any school that's first-rate. The alumni and the business corporations throw money at those schools. And you can tell that money is there. They have the best teachers. They have the best laboratories. They have the extracurricular activities. They have all they need in order to educate one child or one thousand. It's not throwing money away. Shifting money away from the public schools is one of the worst things that can happen in this country.
Tavis: You were a single mother and raised 3 children...and went on to, again, be a Pulitzer-Prize winning and Nobel-Prize winning author. What do you say specifically to parents now who are in these inner cities and who have kids who have to go to these schools where they don't have the greatest resources and they're fighting against everything to try to get their children a quality education?
Toni: That's a complicated one. I always thought the parents should just go in those schools and sit down. You know what I mean? When they were having these difficulties and this child was obstructing, this one was violent, this one wasn't learning and the teachers were overwhelmed and couldn't handle everybody, I thought... I mean, even at the time when my kids were, early on, in public school, you just have to go there and you have to be in those halls and you have to shut people up and you have to 'encourage' them--I was gonna use a stronger word--sit down! This is not a game. Education is freedom. You have to know it.
And it has to be--it should be an exciting journey in order to acquire knowledge. That's all the brain does, you know. It doesn't do anything else but learn. That's all it does. Now, if you're not gonna learn certain things, it's gonna learn something else. But it's busy. The appetite for knowledge is constant. It can't stop learning unless it's in coma or dead or doped up. But it cannot stop unless you force it to. So, since that's what the mind does, let's give it something nourishing to learn, and the excitement of the acquisition of knowledge is what I think we have to teach and transfer. And the other thing is that this is really one of the most important things a human being can do, is to know about the world you live in, whether it's science or history or religion or what have you. That's the life of the mind--as well as all these other things--is the life that will accompany and enhance the soul.
Tavis: I've got a tight 15 seconds here. What is your enduring legacy going to be?
Toni: Oh... I hope people will learn to re-- live certain aspects of African American life in my work and will enjoy and take heart from that.
Tavis: Well, we do already, and for time eternal, we will. Toni Morrison, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on, and next time you gotta get to the studio here.
Toni: All right.
Tavis: Nice to see you. Take care now.
That's our show for tonight. As always, you can catch me tomorrow on NPR, National Public Radio. Back here next time on PBS. Until then, thanks for watching. From Los Angeles, keep the faith.
Back to February 3, 2004