Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

This interview was conducted by Bill Moyers and produced/directed by Gail Pellett. The interview as part of A world of Ideas series was aired on PBS in 1988 and 1990. More information about the interview can be found here. This is part of the interview.

“We have to do something nurturing that we respect before we go. We must. It is more interesting, more complicated, more intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody. To take care of somebody. To make one other person feel good.” (58)

 “[I]n my family there are women who presented themselves to me that way. They are just absolutely clear and absolutely reliable. They have this sort of intimate relationship with God and death and all sorts of things that strike fear into the modern heart. They have a language for it. They have a blessedness maybe. But they seem not to be fearful. /  It’s to those women that I really feel an enormous responsibility. Whenever I answer questions such as the ones you put to me about how terrible it all is and how it’s all going down the drain, I think about my great-grandmother and her daughter and her daughter and all those women. Incredible things happened to those people. They never knew from one day to the next about anything, but they had to pass that on. And they did it. So when I confront there little twentieth-century problems--” (59)