Toni Morrison's Lorain

Description

Clare Ansbery of the Lorain Journal interviewed Toni Morrison's mother, Ramah (Ella) Wofford about the author's childhood. "Toni Morrison's Mom Recalls Storytelling Days in Lorain" was published on January 12, 1982 in the Lorain Journal. 

Ella Wofford had her second baby girl upstairs in the mustard-yellow house with the green trim and brown porch on Elyria Avenue. The house sags a little to the right now and the snow fence between yards has grown sideways and wild with the briars.

The baby’s name was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, now Toni Morrison.

The Woffords didn’t live at the Elyria Avenue house for long. They were rental people, always moving from the back of a storefront to any half of a duplex. It was 50 years ago, just after the Depression when few people owned homes.

George Wofford worked at the steel mills. Ella stayed home and reared the children. She filled them with the stories her father and Auntie Bell told her when she was a girl in Greenville, Ala. After supper, her father would pull out his fiddle and the buck dancing would start. Auntie Bell would tell ghost stories, the kind that would make your hair on the back of your neck rise.

And no matter how many times Ella told the stories, Chloe wanted to hear more. “Mama please tell the story about this or that,” Ella Wofford remembered. “Finally I’d get tired of telling the stories over and over again. So I made up a new story.”

It was the story about the farmer who had fields and fields of golden corn. One year the locust came. Millions and millions of them. One locust went to one ear of corn and ate a kernel. The next locust went to another ear and ate a kernel. The next locust went to another ear of corn and ate a kernel.

“They (Chloe and her older sister, Lois) would be so eager at first, their heads leaning forward,” Ella said, “but pretty soon their little heads would begin to nod. Just like counting sheep.”

When she wasn’t telling stories, Ella Wofford would recite poetry. She held her face in her hand, shut her eyes and began Longfellow’s “Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, on The eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year.”

Years later, when Chloe was at Hawthorne Junior High School, one of her teachers wrote a note to the Woffords. “You and your husband would be remiss in your duties if you do not see to it that this child goes to college,” the note read.

Ella Wofford tucked the message in the back of her mind. She and her husband never considered sending Chloe to college. It was tough enough trying to figure how a laborer would send his two sons to school, let alone his daughter.

A few years later, the young girl, Chloe, was a young woman graduating from Lorain High School. She was headstrong, always speaking what was on her mind, her mother remembers.

“Mama, I want to go to college more than anything else in the world,” Ella Wofford remembers her daughter telling her. And she didn’t want just any college. She wanted to go to Howard University in Washington, D.C.

George Wofford decided Chloe would go to college no matter what it took. He began moonlighting, which was against the rules at U.S. Steel.

His supervisors found out, and he was called on the carpet for it. “Well you folks got me,” Ella Wofford remembers her late husband telling her about the confrontation. “I am doing another job but I’m doing it to send my daughter to college. I’m determined to send her and if I lose my job here, I’ll get another job and do the same.”

“It was so quiet after George was done talking,” Ella said, “you could have heard a pin drop, so to speak,” she said. “And they let him stay and let him do both jobs. It shows that there are good people everywhere.

Chloe went to Howard University. At first, she wanted to teach, then changed her major to journalism. Both were a little dull for Chloe, her mother thought. She was such a colorful girl, always dancing and singing. When her mother told the story of Cinderella, she would dance around the room as if she were the princess just arriving at the ball.

While at Howard University, Chloe changed her name to Toni. She converted to Catholicism and took the name of St. Anthony for her confirmation. Her friends at school shortened it to Toni and it stuck. She also married and took the last name of Morrison.

And it was also at Howard, that Toni started writing. She began as a ghost writer, earning money by writing speeches for Washington politicians. One time, she was paid $300 for writing a speech that a man delivered while on a trip to England.

It wasn’t until after Toni graduated and had two children that she really began writing and publishing fiction. Ella Wofford remembers reading her daughter’s first novel, “The Bluest Eyes.”

“I thought, ‘Oh, My Daughter the Writer,’” Ella Wofford said. “My Daughter, the Author. I cried a little bit. I laughed a little.” Ella Wofford recognized the streets of Lorain where Toni grew up, the people living down the streets and the stories her father told Ella as a girl and the ones she lulled Toni to sleep with years later. All were a part of the book.

“She writes such beautiful things,” Ella Wofford said. “There’s a lot of poetry in her writing and philosophy. I keep reading them all over and over again because there’s so much poetry.”

Ella keeps a running scrapbook of who said what about Toni’s newest book. Or what Toni was receiving.

“She (Toni) asked me how I was doing,” Ella Wofford said. “And I said ‘I’ve been getting forgetful lately.’

“And so she said, ‘Mama get a hobby.’ And I said, ‘I have a hobby,’ and she asked ‘What?’ and I said ‘You. I keep busy just trying to keep up with you.’”