Excerpt from “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1983): A Tribute

In its Winter 1983 issue, Contemporary Literature published Professor Nellie McKay’s interview of Toni Morrison in which she discusses her first four novels: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Tar Baby.¹ As a tribute to the author who passed away on August 5, 2019, an excerpt from the interview is republished here. This excerpt captures features of Morrison’s distinguished writing that made her a singular success with both literary critics and a larger reading public: haunting characters who stay with readers long after the last page, a use of black speech that summons a visceral immediacy, and plots that swing between the present and the past, bringing the full force of history to bear on characters.

One of American letters’ greatest voices, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved in 1988 and was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She penned eleven novels, three collections of essays, and four edited collections on issues ranging from race and justice, freedom of speech, immigration, and the media. Morrison also composed a libretto about runaway slave Margaret Garner, a play with Malian singer Rokia Traoré, and close to a dozen children’s books with her son Slade Morrison. In her fifteen-year career as an editor, she facilitated the publication of a broader array of African American voices from Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, Gayl Jones, to Huey P. Newton. Reflecting on this career in a 1981 keynote lecture at the American Writers Congress, Morrison spoke candidly about the role of editors in an increasingly profit-oriented world of publishing, which sets writers “in an adversary relationship with publishers.” In her own portrait of a vast swath of American history, unusually told through the prism of small Midwestern towns, Morrison showed the way by attending to her own fascination over literary expectations.

an Interview with TONI MORRISON conducted by Nellie McKay

In life and in art, the outstanding achievements of writer Toni Morrison extend and enlarge the tradition of the strength, persistence, and accomplishments of black women in America. In life, her immediate models are first, her grandmother who, in the early part of this century, left her home in the South with seven children and thirty dollars because she feared white sexual violence against her maturing daughters; and second, her mother who took “humiliating jobs” in order to send Morrison money regularly while she was in college and graduate school. Her artistic precursors are equally impressive. The first black person in America to publish a book was a woman—Phillis Wheatley—a slave, whose Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773. The single most substantial fictional output of the much celebrated Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was the work of a woman, Jessie Fauset, who published four novels between 1924 and 1933. In 1937, Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, heralded the coming of the contemporary black feminist heroine to American literature. Morrison is aware of both the burdens and the blessings of the past. “In all of the history of black women,” she told me during our interview, “we have been both the ship and the harbor. . . . We can do things one at a time, or four things at a time if we have to.”

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1930s. Southern roots extend up and out from both branches of her family background. Her mother’s parents traveled North from Greenville and Birmingham, Alabama, by way of Kentucky, in a flight from poverty and racism. There her grandfather worked in the coal mines. The search for a better education for their children provided the incentive that propelled them to Ohio. Morrison’s father came from Georgia, and the racial violence with which he grew up in that state had a lasting impact on his vision of white America. The most valuable legacy he left his daughter was a strong sense of her own value on her own terms.

Black lore, black music, black language...