Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

The Essence magazine published the conversation between Judith Wilson and Toni Morrison in July 1981. It suggests Morrison's understanding of the importance of acknowledging ancestors, especially mothers and grandmothers. The article is reprinted and edited by Conversation with Toni Morrison, edited by Danille Taylor Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994).  This book is also available here.

Essence: In Tar Baby you set up a conflict between Jadine’s kind of freedom and her idea of the kind of woman to be, and her Aunt Ondine’s reminder about the duties of daughterhood. Can women like Jadine, who have options black women never had before, reconcile freedom with responsibilities--to elders, men, children?

Morrison: We have to.

Essence: How?

Morrison: It has to be done; otherwise, we are dead. If you kill the ancestors, you’ve just killed everything. It’s part of the whole nurturing thing. My mother took care of men when I could not go to the bathroom or feed myself. When she gets in that position, I have to do that for her. And my children have to see that; they have to participate in it. If the race is to survive, it has to take care of its own--that’s not an agency’s job.

Nobody really lives where they were born anymore. So you have little children who knock old people in the head--because they don’t know ‘em. And it’s too bad, because the children are losing something valuable. They’re losing their childhood.

In Tar Baby, Son loves those pie ladies from his hometown. They are his past. They are anchors for him--just the notion of them at those church suppers. They’re the people who tell you to uncross your legs and meddle you all your life and raise you, in that sort of tribal way in which every adult raises every child. Which is really what I think it takes, ‘cause I don’t think one parent can raise a child. I don’t think two parents can raise a child. You really need the whole village. And, if you don’t have it, you’d better make it.

Son loved those women, but Jadine found them “backwards.” She perceived his relation ship with them as spoiling--”They spoiled you and kept you infantile,” she says--which she is not about. She has lost the tar quality, the ability to hold something together that otherwise would fall apart--which is what I mean by the nurturing ability. That’s what one surrenders, or can surrender, in order to do this other thing--in order to go and get a degree in art history, learn four languages and be in the movies and stuff. That sounds like I’d putting it down; I’m not. I’m only saying that the point is to be able to do both.

Essence: Isn’t that asking for Superwoman?

Morrison: Since it was possible for my mother, my grandmother and her mother to do what they did, which to me is scary, really scary--snatching children and roaming around in the night; running away from the South and living in Detroit, can’t read or write; in a big city trying to stay alive and keep those children when you can’t even read the road signs--now, those are hard things to do. And if they can do that, surely I can work at Random House and cook--I mean, what is it after all? You know, the worst that can happen is that I get fired and have to do something else.

I know I can’t go to those women [mothers and grandmothers] and say, “Well, you know, my life is so hard in New York and it’s just…” They don’t want to hear that! They were boiling sheets and shooting pheasant and stuff, then they got married to people and had children and fights. And the world was different then--white people were not punished for killing Black folks.

That’s history means to me. It’s a very personal thing--if their blood is in my veins, maybe I can do this little part right here. I don’t want to meet them people nowhere--ever!--and have them look at me and say, “What were you doing back there?” (86)

. . .

Essence: Until Tar Baby, all of your novels were set in the Midwest, which seems atypical in terms of what we think of as the Afro-American experience. Do you feel there’s a distinction between Black language or culture in the Midwest and in other parts of the country?

Morrison: I know the Midwest and I’m from it [Lorain, Ohio]. My feeling is that much the same way. If I go to California and see my aunt, or if I go to Carterville, Ga., or if I go up here on Riverside Drive [in New York City], there will always be the same thing. There are similarities between any body’s Links party and anybody’s barbecue. I can move anywhere in there and ehar the same thing.

The first time I went south, it was staggering! It was like going home.