- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of One-On-One with Steve Adubato has been provided by PSEG Foundation.

Holy Name.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Working for a more a healthier, more equitable.

New Jersey.

Newark Board of Education.

The North Ward Center.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

And by New Jersey Sharing Network.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

And by New Jersey Monthly.

The magazine of the Garden State, available at newsstands.

- This is One-On-One.

- I'm an equal American just like you are.

- The way we change Presidents in this country is by voting.

- A quartet is already a jawn, it's just The New Jawn.

- January 6th was not some sort of violent, crazy outlier.

- I don't care how good you are or how good you think you are, there is always something to learn.

- I mean what other country sends comedians over to embedded military to make them feel better.

- People call me 'cause they feel nobody's paying attention.

_ It's not all about memorizing and getting information, it's what you do with that information.

- (slowly) Start talking right now.

- That's a good question, high five.

(upbeat music) - Hi, everyone, Steve Adubato for my colleague Jaccqui Tricarico and our team, at Remember Them, One-on-One.

Jacqui, today we look at the iconic, important Toni Morrison, extraordinary writer.

Talk about why this program is so important and why we remember Toni Morrison.

- Yeah, one of the most important writers of our history, most would say.

She started off with her first novel was "The Bluest Eye", which gained her a lot of recognition for her writing after she had already been an editor, a really established editor in New York City for many years, helping many people, many famous authors, publish their books over time.

And finally made sure that she-- - Jacqui, hold on one second.

I mean, on "The Bluest Eye", do you know that, I'm acting like I know this stuff.

I read it 'cause you put the research together.

The book was banned because it talked about violence and rape.

It was banned by many folks.

That was her first novel.

- Yes, that was her first published novel.

And she had so many others over the years.

One of them was "Beloved", another one.

A lot of people call it her master work.

It won her the Pulitzer Prize.

Toni Morrison, when we bring it back to here in New Jersey, she is a New Jersey Hall of Fame inductee.

She also worked and taught at Princeton University for a number of years.

And during her Hall of Fame induction speech, she talks about New Jersey, and Princeton in particular, being a place that she was able to work, live, and write, most importantly, write.

So she used her time here in Princeton as well to write.

And fun fact, when she won the Nobel Prize for literature, She was in Princeton, in Princeton University, going to teach one of her classes.

And that's how she found out.

All these reporters are there, people are there, saying, "You won the Nobel Prize".

- I mean, and again, it's one thing to recognize and remember and honor Toni Morrison for a very public success.

But you are gonna see two people on this program that understood Toni Morrison on a deeper level.

But also we're motivated by her, were inspired by her.

Jacqui, that's a big theme in this program, particularly for African American women who were inspired to do great things because of, in large part, Toni Morrison.

Please.

- Exactly, yeah.

Toni said she didn't wanna write about Black people, she wanted to write for them and to them.

And the language that she used, the way that she wrote all of these stories had such an impact on not just the African American community, but all of us in one way or another.

And there's a really great documentary that was done about Toni Morrison right before she passed.

Actually, it was released two months before she passed away in 2019.

And it's called "Toni Morrison, the Pieces I Am", which you can find online.

Really beautiful documentary all about her life and how she came up with these ideas and these concepts and what she wanted to write about, and just how powerful her words ended up being for so many people then and generations to come.

- So while Toni Morrison is no longer with us, she's with us in spirit, and she continues to inspire and motivate so many folks because of her important work.

So on behalf of Jacqui, myself, and our entire team, we remember the great Toni Morrison.

- [Presenter] It's my privilege and pleasure, on behalf of the Swedish Academy, to convey to you our warmest congratulations on the Nobel Prize in literature for 1993, and to invite you to receive the prize from the hands of his majesty, The King.

- [Narrator] Born in Ohio, Toni Morrison has carved out a career as one of this country's most popular and respected authors.

From 1989 until her retirement in 2006, professor Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen chair in the humanities at Princeton University.

Named one of the 30 most powerful women in America in 2001, Toni Morrison has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and a Grammy.

Some of her best known novels are "The Bluest Eye", "Song of Solomon", and "Beloved".

(upbeat jazz music) - Joining us now is Professor Farrah Griffin.

She is a William B. Ransford Professor of English and African Studies at Columbia University.

It's so great to have you with us, Professor Griffin.

- Thank you, I'm so happy to be here.

- So you and Toni Morrison herself are part of this 2019 documentary all about Toni Morrison, it was called "Pieces of Me", and it actually came out just a little bit before her passing.

And I was rewatching that recently, and about halfway through the documentary she's talking about identity and her birth name was actually Chloe.

And when she was talking about identity she said, "One of those names is the person that is out there and the other one is the one that isn't, the one that doesn't do documentaries."

And that made me laugh a little bit and I was wondering from your perspective, talk about your relationship with Toni Morrison.

Were you lucky enough to be part of her life and see her, the one that doesn't do documentaries?

- Oh, absolutely.

Although it was hard to separate the two because I'd been a reader of hers from girlhood, so she was always the great Toni to me, Toni Morrison.

But certainly, fortunate enough, I was fortunate enough to get to know the person, the lovely, wonderful, funny, witty person who was not the one who was in front of the camera.

- So talk about your first introduction to Toni Morrison's work.

I think it was "Sula", right, that was the first novel that you read?

- Yes, so I read "Sula" as a teenager, as a teenage girl at about the age of 13, with other teenage girls.

And I think it was one of those books that we claimed as our own because no one gave it to us to read, it wasn't given to us by parents or teachers.

In fact, it felt a little risqué and taboo because it was an adult book.

But, for me, it was a life-changing book because it was so beautifully written and complicated, and I knew that I would probably return to it to understand it better, but that it was very meaningful to me.

- And talk about your first introduction to Toni Morrison herself and how she became a mentor to you.

- So I first met her when I was in college.

She would never remember this, she would have no reason to remember it but I was an undergraduate at Harvard and she had been invited to one of the houses, which is like a dormitory.

And she was talking to a small group of students there and one of my professors invited me to that small gathering, and I was the only African American girl there.

And after she finished talking she looked over at me in the corner, I was very shy, and she just kind of pointed her finger and told me to come to her.

And I went, and she asked me my name and what I was doing and what my major was, and that was very kind of life-changing.

I remember thinking, "I always want to be that kind of person, to see the person..." No matter how famous she was, she saw this kind of shy one in the corner and pulled me to the center of the room.

I later got to know her as a young professor who was a student of her work.

A friend, a mutual friend, Professor Cornell West, introduced us, and she was teaching at Princeton at the time.

And slowly a friendship developed, a friendship between an older woman and a younger woman, both who loved books and loved to laugh.

And the rest just, you know, we became very close friends.

- Talk about the impact that your relationship with her had and her writing had on your own writing, and what you decided to do with your career and your life after that initial meeting with her.

- Certainly, so I think her writing had more of an impact on me, my writing, and my career because by the time I met her I was already writing and doing scholarly work and I was teaching.

But it was her writing that really impacted me, it changed the way I thought, it helped inform the way I thought about American history and American literature, It helped me, gave me a voice to write in, to aspire to.

It was so beautiful and yet still so rigorous and complex that I think a whole generation of us wanted to be like Ms. Morrison in that way.

I think as friend, you know, it was just a way of being in the world that she modeled.

I think often now that I wish I could have conversations with her about complex things politically in the world where I would call her, and she just had such a kind of moral clarity about what was right, what is wrong, what is good, what is not good.

And those are the lessons that I learned from her that were more lessons about how to be a person in the world, that of course informed my writing and my teaching but really also have informed just my being a person.

- Well, let's dive into some of her most known works, one of them being "The Bluest Eye", that was her first novel that was published, right?

And some describe it as her rawest novel and most controversial book, often on the banned book list across the nation.

How much of "The Bluest Eye" was based on her own personal life and her experiences, and how important too is that message from that novel still today?

- Well, she famously would say that she did not write autobiography so, you know, it wasn't a story that was really based on her personal life.

I think the closest you could get is that maybe the two sisters were similar to she and her sister, Claudia and Frieda are like she and her sister, Lois, that they came from a loving working-class black family.

And some of the lighter moments in the novel are between those two sisters, and we need it because the novel is such heavy subject matter, and that it takes place in a, you know, Midwestern town like the one that she grew up in, small Midwestern city like the one that she grew up in.

But I think that, you know, this sense of growing up in a context that does not value black girls, a country that did not teach them that they were beautiful or valuable, what it means if they don't come from families or communities that help to counter those negative messages.

Toni came from a family that countered the negative messages that society gave her.

She gave us a character in Pecola who did not have that, and that was a very destructive consequence for Pecola and I think that that story continues to be very important.

And you're right, it is and has always been on the top of the banned book list, it's still banned in many places.

- But still an important novel for people to read, and we talk about it- - Absolutely.

- ... a lot on our programming that, you know, banned books but, you know, leaving it up to the parents to decide what books their children want to or should read.

- Absolutely.

- "Beloved" is another one that definitely, it's known as her masterwork in many ways, won her the Pulitzer Prize.

Why was that novel so groundbreaking and important during that time in our history?

- Oh my goodness, absolutely groundbreaking novel because it called attention to the history of slavery in the United States in ways beyond kind of the anonymity of the enslaved, it gave them names and stories and a sense of purpose and an interiority, an interior life.

- Particularly the women, right, particularly the women.

- The women, especially the women.

And when Toni wrote that book, as she said, "There was no museum or monument, no public recognition."

So the novel itself was a kind of public recognition of what had happened.

And since then, largely because of that novel, we now do have things that acknowledge and recognize that painful and difficult history, but it was groundbreaking at the time; and it not only shaped American fiction but it shaped the way we tell history and film, and so many things.

It just had such a broad reach.

- And it stemmed from an article she saw in a newspaper from years and years prior, correct, that talked about this woman who was enslaved and something that she did, and that just, Toni Morrison described in that documentary, just stayed with her and she knew that was a story she had to write one day, right?

- Exactly, it stemmed from the Margaret Garner story, where Margaret Garner escapes to freedom with her children and then the slave catchers come after her, and she makes the in the moment decision to kill her children rather than send them back to slavery.

And historians would go on and write about what happened, and Tony would instead just use that decision to spark her imagination to create a whole kind of narrative and world around what are the conditions that would lead a mother to make that decision, and how do we judge or think about that mother.

That's exactly what happened for her.

- Fast forwarding a little bit to her winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

What did that honor mean to her being the first African American woman to win that prestigious award?

What did that mean to her personally?

- Oh, she loved it.

(laughing) She loved all the pageantry around it, but I think that for her she also realized and thought, "Yes, I won this as an individual for all the work that I've done, but that I'm bringing in the room with me all of the writers who came before who probably, you know, would not have received this recognition.

Not that they weren't great writers or extraordinary writers, but that the world just wasn't ready to give them the kind of recognition that it's willing to give me."

So that she understood that she brought with her a tradition, but she was very, you know, honored and thrilled and enjoyed it, and had that Nobel medal there on display for anyone who would want to see it, as well as the letters and the pictures and the memories, and all of those wonderful things about that time.

- And for you and for all of us, really, what do you think is the most important thing we should remember about Toni Morrison?

- Oh, I think it's that she had a moral clarity and that she used her gifts, which were gifts for fiction writing, to write about hard things, hard and difficult and complicated things, whether they may be personal or political, national or international.

I think also that she used her platform to give voice to people like writers who were being censored or in prison, she was devoted to making sure that art was not censored and that those writers were not censored here and elsewhere.

That she was always much larger than the kind of individualistic ways that we tend to think about our great artists.

I think that's something very important, she was always on the side of good, I think, she sought to be on the side of good.

- And there is so much more we could have dove into here talking about the great Toni Morrison, and one way our viewers can find out more is through that "Pieces of Me" documentary, which you are a part of as well.

Just so much great information about the great Toni Morrison.

Thank you so much, Professor Griffin, for joining us.

- Well, thank you so much for having me and for doing this segment.

- Thank you.

Stay with us, we'll be right back after this.

- [Narrator] To see more One on One with Steve Adubato programs, visit us online at stateofaffairsnj.org.

If you would like to express an opinion, email us at info@caucusnj.org.

Find us on Facebook at facebook.com/steveadubatophd and follow us on Twitter @steveadubato.

- I am honored to have been chosen to stand among this company.

I am so pleased to be introduced by the Mayor of Newark, and someone who has given me years of pleasure, more than I would like to admit.

(audience laughing) New Jersey welcomed me 20 years ago.

I was able to work here on the campus at Princeton in an extraordinary environment.

I have family here now, I have a house here now.

I have to tell you that the most important thing about the welcome I felt, and still feel about being here, is that I was able to work on novels here, and that's not true of a lot of places.

Thank you very much for my choice.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) - We're now joined by Mame Diarra Speis, co-artistic director of Urban Bush Women, and also co-creator of the Toni Morrison Project.

Mame Diarra, so good to have you with us.

- Thank you, it's so wonderful to be here with you.

- You know, Toni Morrison has had an impact on so many people's lives, and so before we talk about her work and the influence on others, her impact and influence on you.

Talk about it on a personal level, please.

- Absolutely.

What I can say about Toni Morrison's impact on me as a person, as an artist, is to embrace my voice, to embrace the bravery that I hold and the courage that I hold.

It's really important, specifically as a Black woman.

- Put in context.

First, I'm gonna ask about the Toni Morrison Project.

What is the Toni Morrison Project?

Then I'm gonna ask you about Urban Bush Women.

- The Toni Morrison Project was a commissioning through the McCarter Theater-- - In Princeton.

- At Princeton University, yes.

The McCarter Theater worked in collaboration with Princeton University on an exhibition that would celebrate Toni Morrison and her receiving the Nobel Prize.

And so through that, the director at the MacArthur Theater was really interested in commissioning artists who would be inspired by the archives, as well as how they lived inside of Toni Morrison's work.

And so through that, myself and Daniel Alexander Jones were commissioned to be in response and inspired by Toni Morrison's archives in relationship to this exhibition, "The Sites of Memory" that would be happening through Princeton University.

- Terrific, and talk about your organization as we put the website up, Urban Bush Women.

- Absolutely.

Urban Bush Women is a dance theater company based in Brooklyn, New York.

We are an ensemble of artists who share through movement, through song, through text, through research-based embodied learning and experiences to share the untold and undertold stories of the voices of folks whose voices are underheard or underneath and beneath the surface, that are not often shared, that are marginalized.

And so that's the work that we do through dance performance as well as through our community organizing, community engagement.

- You know, first of all, thank you for that description of your organization.

We're talking about Toni Morrison, "Beloved," which is her, by some people's standards, most well known.

It was one of many, many books that she wrote, and she is, again, won the Nobel Prize in literature, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

But what's interesting to me is if it were not for Toni Morrison telling stories of African American life, particularly African American women, we wouldn't...

There's a whole range of things we would not know or even try to begin to understand, and the influence she had on others, it may not have played out in the way it's played out, even though we have such a long way to go.

Please talk about...

I know that's a loaded question.

I don't even know it's a question, but it just made me think about who she was and why she mattered so much and why she still matters, please.

- Yes, absolutely.

What I can speak to with regards to that is the work, "Beloved," "Sula," even "Jazz," all of the work that Toni Morrison created, she imagined, she wrote, it made space for one, I can speak for myself, to see my humanity, to see the humanity of others, and through that, grow, through that, connect, reconnect.

Because in our society these days, we're, you know, we have all of the technology and AI now, it's like we're slowly disconnecting from ourselves.

We're disconnecting from our bodies.

And so every time I go back and reread her work or a passage from her work, I'm always reconnecting to myself.

I'm always reconnecting to my humanity.

And then that does make space for me to say, oh, and open and expand outside of myself to see outside of myself.

And I think the work that she has created ignites that in people.

- What do you think Toni Morrison would think and feel about where we are in 2024 as a country, particularly as it relates to race and race relations?

- Hmm.

I don't know what she would actually think, because I don't-- - What do you think she would think?

- What do I think she-- - You've been through the archives.

You've read things nobody else has about her original materials.

Well, what do you think she would think?

- I think that she would be inside of what she has always been inside of which is organizing and creating spaces for voices to continue to be heard.

And that's something that she has also done in her work, as she's been a web, she's been a web for women, Black women, writers.

She's been a web for young people.

You know, I think about myself as a 20-year-old reading her work and being just ignited with, "What is it that I need to do?

How do I do this?"

And so it just reaffirms that, yes, we are, you know, we're in difficult times and the difficult times that we're inside of aren't new.

However, how am I going to make an impact on what's happening?

And I think that she serves as a portal, as a gateway to support people finding their power, finding their voices.

And I think that in this time, she would be more vocal, as she was already, she would be more vocal.

She would be making work.

She, you know, she would be in the thick of it, and she would be making ways for others to bring their voices forward and to find ways to create change.

- Before I let you go, we're remembering Toni Morrison, that she's no longer with us on this Earth, but in so many ways, her work, her spirit, her legacy lives on in people like you, fair to say?

- Oh, absolutely.

- And you're not alone.

- Not at all.

Not at all.

- Yeah.

Hey, listen, Mame Diarra, I cannot thank you enough for joining us to help us honor, remember, and pay respect to an extraordinary, not just writer and artist, but American and a citizen who made a difference, not just in this country, but in the world.

Thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you, I appreciate it.

- You got it, I'm Steve Adubato.

More importantly, remember Toni Morrison.

See you next time.

- [Narrator] One-On-One with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Celebrating 30 years in public broadcasting.

Funding has been provided by PSEG Foundation.

Holy Name.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Newark Board of Education.

The North Ward Center.

The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Community FoodBank of New Jersey.

And by New Jersey Sharing Network.

Promotional support provided by New Jersey Globe.

And by New Jersey Monthly.

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