Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

The Cleveland-based newspaper, Plain Dealer, noted Toni Morrison's literary significance as early as the 1970s when many newspapers and magazines still cast doubt about the writer's achievement because of her race and gender. Alvin Beam was a promiennt book editor, journalist, and cultural reviewer, known for his insightful literary criticism and coverage of local broadcasting. He also reviewed Toni Morrison's The Black Book (1974) in the same year. His "Toni Morrison's Bright and Black Future" was published on February 10, 1974. This excerpt shows scenes from her childhood in Lorain.

It is important to her. Mrs. Morrison, a divorcee with two children — Ford, 12, and Slade, 8 —, has a master’s degree from Cornell University and has taught English and the humanities at Howard and Texas Southern universities. She is a full-time senior editor at Random House. And it is a delight to hear her switch from one’s own and her own conventional American speech to something a little black in tone and accent as she turns from general talk of writing to talk of the black condition and black history. Something very important in the human story will be lost forever if she and other black writers do not get it down on paper in perhaps just the next decade or two, she feels.

There are still the living who have been through a great deal of black history — through lowly, heroic struggles and through mere scratching along — to talk to and understand. There are her own magnificent parents, George and Ramah Wofford, whom she visits with her own children several times a year at their Lorain home. She loves the hominy-grits for breakfast and the cornbread done in a frying pan on top of the kitchen stove — and memory of the strength her father and mother gave her when there were the inevitable racial hurts. She always knew that there was something wrong with “them,” the white children, not with her, when there were incidents. The parents — the mother from Alabama, the father, now a retired steelworker, from Georgia — were strong, giving, firm.

I asked Mrs. Morrison whether she accepted the notion that she was “one of the country’s finest literary artists.” She said that she was one of “the most demanding.” She said that possibly no writer could have higher sights and that this stemmed from parents who always let it be understood that she was bright enough to accomplish anything in the world she wanted to. In Lorain there were teachers, too, who helped, and so she has always, always tried.