Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

Jean Strouse's article on Toni Morrison illustrates her biographical background including her childhood and family in Lorain. It details her grandparents who chose to move from Alabama and then Kentucky to Akron and Lorain, Ohio, in order to raise their children with more opportunities and freedom. The full article is here.

[About Her Family] Born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, she was christened Chloe Anthony Wofford. Her mother’s family had migrated north from Greenville, Al., around 1910. “They had lost their land, like a lot of black people at the turn of the century, and they were sharecroppers, which meant they were never able to get out of debt. My grandfather had left Greenville for Birmingham to earn money playing the violin. He sent money back, but my grandmother began to get nervous, all alone in Greenville, because her daughters were reaching puberty and that was a dangerous business in the South, in the country, because white boys began to circle. So my grandmother decided to leave. She sent her husband an oral message: “We’re heading north on the midnight train. if you ever want to see us again, you’ll be on that train.’

“She didn’t know if he got the message, but with $18 to her name she packed up her six or seven children and got them all to the train in Birmingham. It was the first city my mother had ever seen--she still remembers, ‘We had white bread!’ My grandfather was nowhere in sight. As the train left the station the children began to cry--then about an hour later, he showed up. He’d been there all along, hiding for fear somebody would recognize hi and stop them for owning money.”

They traveled to Kentucky, where her grandfather worked in a coal mine. “My grandmother did washing, and my mother and her sister went to a little one-room school. One day the teacher, who was about 16 and white, was doing long division and having trouble explaining it. Since my mother and her sister already knew long division, they explained it to the teacher and the class. They came home all excited and proud of themselves, crowing, ‘Mama, guess what we did? We taught the teacher long division!’ My grandmother just said to her husband, ‘Come on, Johnny, we have to move’.”

They continued north, settling in the steel-mill town of Lorain on Lake Erie. The story of Morrison’s father is “different but the same.” “My father was a racist,” she declares with a smile that does nothing to detract from the seriousness of what she is saying. “As a child in Georgia, he received shocking impressions of adult white people, and for the rest of his life felt he was justified in despising all whites, and that they were not justified in despising him.” Did his racial attitudes cause his children (53/54) to distrust whites? “Not when we were little,” says Morrison. “I knew he was wrong. I went to school with white children--they were my friends. There was no awe, no fear. Only later, when things got . . . sexual. . . did I see how clear the lines really were. But when I was in first grade nobody thought I was inferior. I was the only child who could read!”

Her father did provide her with a strong sense of her own value on her own terms. At 13, she cleaned house for a white family after school. One day she complained to her father because the work was hard and the woman was mean. He said: “Girl, you don’t lie there. You live here. So you go to your work get your money and come on home.”

[About Ghost Stories] All her early life she absorbed the black lore, music, language, myths and rituals that give her prose its special flavor and tone. “We were intimate with the supernatural,” she recalls. Her parents told thrillingly terrifying ghost stories. Her mother sang constantly. Her grandmother kept a dream book and played the numbers off it, decoding dream symbols to determine what number to bet on. Morrison’s world, like the world of her novels, was filled with signs, visitations, ways of knowing that reached beyond the five senses.

As a studious adolescent, she read the great Russian novels, “Madame Bovary,” Jane Austen. “Those books were not written for a little black girl in Lorain, Ohio, but they were so magnificently done that I got them anyway--they spoke directly to me out of their own specificity. I wasn’t thinking of writing then--I wanted to be a dancer like Maria Tallchief--but when i wrote my first novel years later, I wanted to capture that same specificity about the nature and feeling of the culture I grew up in.”

She does. In that astonishing first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” she wrote about “the people who in all literature were always peripheral--little black girls who were props, background; those people were never center stage, and those people were me.” Pecola Breedlove, the little black girl in “The Bluest Eye,” thinks everything would be all right if only she had beautiful blue eyes. (54)

[About Pain of Oppression] There are virtually no white people in Morrison’s first three novels. She concentrates instead on the “village” culture of blacks in small, Midwestern cities like Lorain, where people have names like Chicken Little, First Corinthians and Milkman Dead--and where the owner of Reba’s Grill “cooked in her hat because she couldn’t remember the ingredients without it.” The pain of oppression makes itself constantly felt.  (56)