Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

Toni Morrison's essay, "A Slow Walk of Trees (as Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (as Grandfather Would Say)," shows that the newer generation in Lorain seem to have a different experience in terms of race from their older generation. Her parents and their parents witnessed racist practices in the South and faced the tenacious prejudice against Black people. However, the author notes the change that she experienced in her childhood.  Reflecting on this, Morrison talks about her family history from the mid-nineteenth century. This essay was originally published in New York Time Magazine, on July 4, 1976. The following is excerpted from the essay.

"My parents took issue over the question of whether it was possible for white people to improve. They assumed that black people were the humans of the globe; but had serious doubts about the quality and existence of white humanity. Thus my father, distrusting every word and every gesture of every white man on earth, assumed that the white man who crept up the stairs one afternoon had come to molest his daughters and threw him down the stairs and then our tricycle after him. (I think my father was wrong, but considering what I have seen since, it may have been very healthy for me to have witnessed that as my first black-white encounter.) My mother, however, believed in them- their possibilities." 

“So I grew up in a basically racist household with more than a child’s share of contempt for white people. And for each white friend I acquired who made a small crack in that contempt, there was another who repaired it. For each one who related to me as a person, there was one who in my presence at least, became actively ‘white.’” 

“…Like most black people of my generation, I suffer from racial vertigo that can be cured only by taking what one needs from one’s ancestors. John Solomon’s cynicism and his deployment of his art as both weapon and solace; Ardelia’s faith in the magic that can be wrought by sheer effort of the will; my mother’s open-mindedness in each new encounter and her habit of trying reasonableness first; my father’s temper, his impatience, and his efforts to keep ‘them’ (throw them) out of his life. And it is out of these learned and selected attitudes that I look at the quality of life for my people in this country now.” 

"So the black female college graduate earns two-thirds of what a white male high-school dropout earns. So the black people who put everything into community-action programs supported by Government funds have found themselves bereft of action, bereft of funds, and all but bereft of community." 

"Although statistics about black teen-age crime and the 'failure' of the courts to gut them are regularly printed and regularly received with outrage and fear, the children I know and see, those born after 1960, do not make such great copy. They are those who have grown up with nothing to prove to white people, whose perceptions of themselves are so new, so different, so focused they appear to me to be either magnificent hybrids or throwbacks to the time when our ancestors were called 'royal.' They are the baby sisters of the sit-in generation, the sons of the neighborhood blockbusters, the nephews of jailed revolutionaries, and a huge number who have had college graduates in their families for three and four generations." 

"So how is it that, with nothing to love, nothing they need to know, landless, turfless, minus a future and a past, these black children look us dead in the eye? They seem not to know how to apologize. And even when they are wrong they do not ask for forgiveness. It is as though they are waiting for us to apologize to them, to beg their pardon, to seek their approval." 

"Maybe they finally got the message that we had been shouting into their faces; that they live here, belong here on this planet earth and that it is theirs. So they watch us with the eyes of poets and carpenters and musicians and scholars and other people who know who they are because they have invented themselves and know where they are going because they have envisioned it."