Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

This interview by Charles Ruas was initially published in Fiction Writer's Market, edited by Laurie Henry in 1987 (page 4-10). This excerpt includes the author's reflection on childhood in Lorain. 

CR: When I began [reading] Song of Solomon I thought, the King James Bible is the spine of this style.

TM: The Bible wasn’t part of my reading, it was part of my life. In coming to writing I rote the way I was trained, which was [laughs] scholarly bombast, so that I had to rewrite a lot. Getting a style is about all there is to writing fiction, and I didn’t realize that I had a style until I wrote Song of Solomon. Yes, there’s a formality and repetition in it, and I like that risk. I like the danger in writing when you’re right on the edge, when at any moment you can be maudlin, saccharine, grotesque, but somehow pull back from it [laughs], well, most of the time. I really want this emotional response, and I also want an intellectual response to the complex ideas there. My job is to do both at the same time, that’s what a real story is.

. . .

CR: Were there family influences that eventually made you turn to writing?

TM: Like is very short--they couldn’t think of that. When I graduated from high school, it was a huge thing. My mother had graduated from high school, but not my father. They assumed that all my life I should work. And I guess they assumed that I should get married. It never occurred to me that I could get married and not work. What was needed was skill. I had an uncle who had gone to college, and I was surrounded by people who had done extraordinary things under duress in order to survive. I didn’t know it, but I think I had a feeling that I probably wrote well, because when I was very little and we were asked to write stories in classes, I just remember that I knew the teacher didn’t believe I wrote those stories. I thought that other people didn’t write well because they weren’t interested. (7)

. . .

CR: Your characters have dreams and waking dreams, but, also, spirits will come to speak to the characters. You differentiate that from the religious, which is often narrow and hard.

TM: As a child I was brought up on ghost stories--part of the entertainment was storytelling. Also, I grew up with people who believed it. When they would tell you stories about visions, they didn’t tell them as though they were visions. My father said, “Oh, there’s a ring around the moon, that means war.” Indeed there was a war in 1941. I remember his saying that; now, whether he was also reading the newspaper or not, I don’t know.

My grandmother would ask me about my dreams and, depending on the content of them, she would go to the dream book, which would translate dreams into a three-digit number. That was the number yo played in the numbers game. You dream about a rabbit, or death, or weddings, and then color made a difference--if you dreamed about dying in a white dress or a red dress--and weddings always meant death and death always meant weddings. I was very interested because she used to hit a lot on my dreams for about a year or two. (8)