Toni Morrison Remembers imagine...

"'She wasn't even two years old when she died', said her mother.

"'Too little to understand.'

"'Maybe she don't want to understand', said her sister.

"Ohio had been calling itself a state only 70 years

"when first one brother and then the next snatched up his shoes

"and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them."

TONI: There's my house.

That's where I was born, up there in the attic.

My mother said it was very cold up there.

-Mm, you had a terrace.

-You call that a terrace?!

That's a porch!

-Only hookers were born in hospitals in those days.

-Really?

Married women had their babies at home.

"'For a baby she throws a powerful spell', said Denver.

"'No more powerful than the way I loved her', Sethe answered.

"'Who would have thought a little old baby

"'could harbour so much rage?'

"'We could move', Sethe suggested once.

"'What'd be the point?

"'Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with

"'some dead Negro's grief.

"'We lucky this ghost is a baby.'"

This is me in the first grade with a dress my grandmother made.

It was red, and I had this bow in my hair

that is braided so tight,

you can barely close your eyes.

That little girl is now often called America's national writer,

their first Lady of Literature.

She is now an honoured citizen of her hometown.

Who is Toni Morrison, Zoe?

It says here that Toni was the first African-American

and the eighth woman to win the Nobel Prize.

I think that's cool because she must have inspired

a lot of African-American people.

What would you thank her for?

I would thank her for writing these books

because we know how people feel back then.

She shows what African-Americans had to go through.

Now I can have friends who are different races

like Julian, cos he's my best friend.

Discrimination is still going on today

because some people hate the President that we have

because of his race.

Toni Morrison has reimagined her own past and, with it,

that of black America, especially of black women.

TONI: I always felt like a partial American, a fraudulent American.

And finally not American at all, just I felt like a black person.

When this Nobel Prize was given to me,

I felt American, probably, for the first time.

Toni Morrison...

HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE

She may be establishment, but she's still 100% radical.

Her books are taught in schools but they're banned in some.

Her recurrent theme of childhood trauma

is too much for some people to face.

She's feisty, forthright,

an uneasy heroine for a still troubled nation.

Nowadays, Toni Morrison lives in an apartment

high up in downtown Manhattan.

But her quite astonishing first novel

was set in her hometown.

It's about a black girl

'who longed to have blue eyes.'

When The Bluest Eye first came out, the reaction to it

was pretty negative by a lot of the black community, wasn't it?

Well, the black community didn't like it

because it was, you know, incest.

I mean, my sister banned it - you talk about banned books,

she said she wouldn't let her children read it

until they were 18.

And they didn't sell any copies of it,

it was very low and, um...I got 3,000,

which I spent taking my mother and my father and my children

to Aruba.

We had a hell of a time, it was fantastic.

For people who'd never, you know...

My mother came home, she was talking about,

"Do you know what?

"They wash out your tub

"and do you know, they turn your bed down?"

None of this had ever been done for her,

she was in ecstasy.

That was the benefit of The Bluest Eye for me.

The main character, Pecola,

is the victim not just of white society,

but of her black father.

"There were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.

"We thought at the time

"that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby

"that the marigolds did not grow.

"We could think of nothing but our own magic.

"If we planted the seeds,

"and said the right words over them,

"they would blossom and everything would be all right.

"We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt

"just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds

"in his own plot of black dirt.

"The seeds shriveled and died. Her baby, too."

The trigger for that creation of Pecola in The Bluest Eye

was in fact a girl that you met at school?

Yeah, it was.

I think we were 10 or 11, she was a close friend,

and, um...

We were quarrelling about the existence of God

and I was very certain that there was a God

and she was very certain that there was not.

And then she stopped the conversation and the argument

by saying she had proof of His non-existence,

and I said, "What is it?",

and she said, "I have been praying for two years for blue eyes

"and obviously He has not delivered."

It was a real epiphany, because I looked at her

and thought this would be awful if God had given her blue eyes.

And I realised she was absolutely beautiful

and at ten, you don't think in those terms -

somebody's cute or, you know, whatever, but not beauty

and that was the first time I saw it.

She was very dark, she had these wonderful almond eyes,

high cheek bones, lovely, you could go on.

And she wanted something...other.

Well, you know, we all had these little dolls,

these little blonde dolls that the grown-ups gave us with affection.

-And the Shirley Temple, and the Mary Janes...

-Oh, God!

..and all those things.

-The Bojangles.

-Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

"I hated Shirley Temple.

"Not because she was cute,

"but because she danced with Bojangles,

"who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy,

"and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it

"and chuckling with me.

"Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing

"with one of those little white girls

"whose socks never slid down under their heels.

"I destroyed white baby dolls.

"But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror.

"The truly horrifying thing

"was the transference of the same impulses

"to little white girls."

Is that what drove you to write?

Because you had to tell a story

because you felt it hadn't been told?

I thought somebody probably wrote that book but I didn't know

what it was and every little black child in literature

or in theatre was a joke...

..or a pet,

a Topsy, like in Uncle Tom's Cabin,

and I was one of those little people

and I wanted to read about such a child.

It took five years for me to write that really small book,

um, to pay attention,

pay attention to this child.

It may be...

Maybe she's in difficulty, she's obviously hurt,

she's abused and misused,

but take her seriously, please.

It was a world full of secrets.

There used to be a house behind our house, a small little,

almost like a shed and a woman lived in there and her name was Trope.

We were not allowed to go there.

My grandmother thought she was...

She wasn't a street walker but she had...

She invited people in.

Nice-looking woman and I thought about her a lot

because she was the hidden, you know -

"Don't go over there because..."

Other places were out of bounds too.

"'We can't go all the way to the lake.'

"'Yes, we can. Come on.'

"We walked down tree-lined streets of soft grey houses

"leaning like tired ladies.

"The streets changed - houses looked more sturdy,

"their paint was newer,

"porch posts straighter, yards deeper.

"The lakefront houses were the loveliest.

"Garden furniture, ornaments, windows like shiny eyeglasses.

"The backyards of these houses fell away in green slopes

"down to a strip of sand and then the blue Lake Erie,

"lapping all the way to Canada.

"We reached a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains,

"picnic tables.

"It was empty now, but sweetly expectant

"of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents

"who would play there above the lake in summer

"before half-running, half-stumbling down the slope

"to the welcoming water.

"Black people were not allowed in the park,

"and so it filled our dreams."

Toni was looking back to her childhood

in the '30s and '40s -

the sense of exclusion,

the longing to be white.

But she was writing this in the 1960s.

There was a black proposition around

and Black is Beautiful in the '60s

and a sort of sense of "Let's move on",

but you weren't ready to move on, you wanted to go back.

No, no, no, I thought there was this little...

I understood Black is Beautiful

but I was...that was a generation a little bit younger than me

and I thought, "Wait a minute, why are you...?

"Do you have to say that? Of course we are."

And then...is that all? It's about beauty again?

Is that what makes us human, acceptable?

And besides, it's too frail.

It was part of what I really despise which was addressing white people.

"Who are you talking to, are you talking to me?"

"No, I know I'm beautiful."

Or it doesn't matter to me.

You're talking to white people who are saying you're not

and therefore you should be segregated or oppressed.

I'm not talking to white people -

I'm talking, in my books, I'm reading them,

so I'm talking to me

which means I'm talking to black people.

Whereas actually, whatever Black is Beautiful was,

it was a sort of...it belonged to the other, to the white gaze.

That's right, it was the white man's gaze.

-Which is your phrase...

-Yes, that's what I wanted to avoid.

Once...I always say this...

Once I took white people out -

I say white men, but I meant white people -

it's like the whole world opened up.

You could imagine anything, everything,

instead of that little, what Jimmy Baldwin used to say,

"Inside each of us,

"a little white man lives on our shoulders."

What's remarkable in your books

is the empathy you show for men as well as women,

even the rapist of this vulnerable child.

He himself is vulnerable - there was that terrible scene.

-Yeah, where he's...

-Where he is caught...

-His first sexual encounter.

-Yeah.

When he's innocent, he's innocent.

"After some trouble with the buttons,

"Cholly dropped his pants down to his knees.

"But the excitement collecting inside him made him close his eyes

"and regard her moans as no more than pine sighs over his head.

"Just as he felt an explosion threatened,

"Darlene froze and cried out.

"He thought he'd hurt her, but when he looked at her face,

"she was staring wildly at something over his shoulder.

"He jerked around - there stood two white men,

"one with a spirit lamp, the other with a flash light.

"There was no mistake about their being white, he could smell it.

"The men had long guns.

"'Get on with it, nigger' said the flash light one.

"'Sir?' said Cholly, trying to find a buttonhole.

"I said, 'Get on with it and make it good, nigger, make it good.'

"There was no place for Cholly's eyes to go."

I mean, this is one character of many in here and he is,

-in a way, the villain of the piece, you could say.

-Mm-hm.

And yet there were so many stages in his life and in his experience,

and they don't necessarily come in sequence...

That's the other thing about your books.

We get some clues, a bit like a detective story,

enough to intrigue us.

It is like life, isn't it?

Things happen, you're not quite sure what happened,

and then suddenly, it all makes sense later.

It blazes before you.

I don't read my books

except publicly, when somebody asks me.

'Do you know, I read Beloved a couple of weeks ago.'

'I was signing it for somebody.'

-Thank you so much.

-You're welcome.

'And I just happened to turn to the first page'

and I started reading.

And I kept reading and I kept reading and I said to him

something I normally don't say - I sometimes think -

I said, "It's really good."

Now, when you've been reading passages from The Bluest Eye,

I'm thinking the same thing.

-Did I do that wrong?

-You cannot do anything wrong!

I wish the world knew that.

THEY LAUGH

Thank you for everything.

She is my reason for being a literary critic.

That inspired me.

It's Salamishah - S-A-L-A-M-I-S-H-A-H.

TONI LAUGHS

-That took all my strength.

-I'm sure it did.

-Oh!

-My parents' imagination.

Yeah.

Thank you very much for being you.

So many of my students tell me, "I just love The Bluest Eye."

Thank you, Ms Morrison.

And it is because it is a book that has saved a lot of girls.

I thought about asking you

to sign your name on my arm under your quote here.

Oh, my goodness.

The first time I saw her, it was so amazing to see

and a little bit alarming how people glommed onto her.

It was a largely black crowd and they were so proud of her

and also wanting the connection that I yearned for myself

because anyone with that kind of understanding of black life,

let alone maleness and femaleness, you do want them to cosy up to you

and tell you a few things about how to live yourself.

-You were fantastic. Thank you so much.

-My pleasure.

Next, please.

What I liked about her almost immediately was...

how...welcoming she was.

She made a sort of welcome table wherever she sat -

and also her incredible sense of humour.

LAUGHTER

And people are always amazed that, you know, if you're that smart,

then you can't be that funny too, but she gets to do both.

APPLAUSE

Would you get started with a reading from that novel

before we start a conversation?

LAUGHTER

I just happen to have...

Toni Morrison is making a now-rare public appearance

to promote her new book.

Now, if I pause in the reading,

it's not because I don't know what's going on...

..it's that I think I probably need and don't have my glasses.

LAUGHTER

At any rate, I'm just going to read a couple of pages in the voice

and tell a story of a young girl who is called Rain

because that is where the people who are taking care of her found her -

sitting on the steps, shivering in the rain.

"I don't want to kill them like I used to when I first got here

"but then I wanted to kill everybody until they brought me a kitten.

"She is a cat now and I tell her everything.

"My black lady listens to me tell how it was.

"Steve won't let me talk about it, neither will Evelyn.

"They think I can read, but I can't.

"Well, maybe a little. Signs and stuff.

"Evelyn is trying to teach me. She calls it 'home schooling'.

"I call it 'home drooling'

"and 'home fooling'.

"We are a fake family. OK, but fake.

"Evelyn is a good substitute mother

"but I'd rather have a sister like my black lady.

"When we started walking back home,

"after I told her everything about my life before Evelyn and Steve,

"a truck with big boys in it passed us.

"One of them hollered, 'Hey, Rain, who's your mammy?'

"My black lady didn't turn around

"but I stuck out my tongue and thumbed my nose at him.

"One of them was Regis, a boy I know

"because he comes to our house sometimes with his father

"to give us firewood or baskets of corn.

"The driver, an older boy,

"turned the truck around so they could come after us.

"Regis pointed a shotgun, just like Steve said.

"My black lady saw him and threw her arm in front of my face.

"The birdshot messed up her hand and arm.

"We fell, both of us, her on top of me.

"My heart was beating fast

"because nobody had done that before.

"I mean, Steve and Evelyn took me in and all,

"but nobody put their own self in danger to save me."

-You really inspired me.

-Good.

Toni has a fantastic memory, especially for childhood.

She really remembers how a small thing

can overwhelm a child.

You know, the taste of something or...

The ability that children have to do that,

and most adults lose this ability.

I know a lot about Toni's childhood that she's discussed with me and...

I mean, certainly...

What's amazing to me is that Toni is not...

She is not an angry person.

You know, there's a lot of anger in her books

and it's an anger...

..that obviously partakes of the totally appropriate anger

of American blacks about what was done to them

and what is still being done to them in a very different way.

But that is always mixed with something personal,

and I don't know Toni's history as a child,

as a young girl, enough to know

whether she is an angry person or was an angry person

and that the anger that she expresses

for this external reason,

the history of blacks in America,

isn't also connected to a personal anger,

because you can't separate these things.

You talk about your father, his anger with white men.

How did that manifest itself when you were a child?

Well, he wouldn't let them in the house.

You know, the insurance guy would have to stand out

if he was in the house.

And he always said, "They will never be better,

"nothing good will happen with white people ever",

and it was personal.

I think I was telling a story,

watching him throw a white man down the steps

and the person I was talking to said,

"Well, didn't you feel horrified at the violence?"

I said, "No."

I thought, "Oh, my father is strong enough to protect me."

You have to know that we were evicted from every place. You know...

Where you really? Why was that, then?

Because we were all poor.

I mean, the rent was 4. Oh, we...

Sometimes you can't make it.

My father was working three jobs, my mother's not working,

so I don't know how...

4 doesn't sound like much, but for them, it was.

You know, he gets 45 cents here, 30 cents there.

You've got to do stuff.

But my mother, when they put the eviction notice up on the wall...

..she just snatched it off.

THEY LAUGH

We were always moving from one...

Everybody was moving because you couldn't stay anywhere -

the money ran out.

And then, wonderfully for improvement,

there was World War II.

People of my father's age - say 38, 40 - with a family

were not drafted

and...got jobs in shipyards.

-He was a welder.

-A welder. Paid decent money.

And eventually, you know, we bought a house.

You know, the man who threw that white man down the steps

is the same man who told me...

I was working for a white woman when I was around 12,

cleaning up after school.

Yes, you were a domestic.

I was a domestic, very happy to be it.

I got 2 every week and I gave one to my mother

and one I could keep.

But when I started at this woman's house,

I told my father,

"She's mean to me, Daddy, she complains all the time,"

and he said...

"Go to work, get your money and come on home.

"You don't live there."

One place she virtually did live was the local library,

where she read and read and later got a job

that she much preferred to cleaning.

In those days, children's books, fairytales,

were on the bottom shelf where you could read them...

..and the next shelf was Faulkner or Tolstoy.

There was no YA - young adult - there was no transition physically.

They just put all the fairytales down there and then they got serious.

My grandparents, they were southerners.

They were sharecroppers.

They were unschooled...

..and they couldn't read.

They were in a world where it was against the law to read.

You could go to jail or be fined

if you were white and taught a black person to read.

That says it all about reading.

So my family took the whole thing very serious.

It was like a revolutionary act.

So, as a child, she read all the classics.

But stories also came from her mother

who was brought up in the South.

My mother was eight when she left.

She talked about the South like it was paradise.

-Did she?

-Oh, yeah.

She talked about ghosts that she'd seen in the woods,

she talked about relatives

and it was like this fairytale place for her.

She was always smiling when she remembered it.

But she never went back.

My father, who said he hated it,

went back every year to visit relatives and so on.

-And then there were ghost stories that your...?

-Oh, yes.

Ghost stories, killings... I mean, you know...

Think of Little Red Riding Hood - that's grotesque!

Every story was a horror story.

Then there was the radio.

When you listened to a little 15-minute narrative on the radio,

as it was in the '30s, you had to imagine it,

because you could only hear it.

-You had to picture it.

-Yes, you had to picture it.

# Hear, you sinners, hear my call

# Satan's waitin' for you all

# Better get your souls washed white

# Better see the light

# Amen! #

The third thing, which is really important,

is that my mother sang all the time...

..and she had the best voice I have ever heard in my life.

You know, maybe Jessye Norman, but that's a tight race. SHE LAUGHS

I have said to her very often that she wasn't so much writing

as she was channelling.

The ancestors were speaking through her

and I think they continue to do so.

And she doesn't deny it.

She accepts my silliness

when I'm talking to her about her writing.

But I really do feel that there is so much to be said,

so many experiences,

the collective and the individual experiences.

She doesn't spare the rod, she tells the truth

and she tells it in a way

that makes it possible for people who are resistant to this history

to simply...

They are forced to embrace it, forced to acknowledge it

and forced to recognise the power of her words.

My goodness.

It is after the Civil War and black Southerners

are establishing their own settlements in the West.

"Here, freedom was not entertainment,

"like a carnival or a hoedown that you can count on once a year.

"Here, freedom was a test administered by the natural world

"that a man had to take for himself every day.

"If he passed enough tests long enough, he was king.

"They were proud that none of their women had ever worked

"in a white man's kitchen or nursed a white child.

"Although field labour was harder and carried no status,

"they believed the rape of women who worked in white kitchens was,

"if not a certainty, a distinct possibility,

"neither of which they could bear to contemplate.

"So, they exchanged that danger for the relative safety of brutal work."

Toni does most of her writing now not in her New York apartment

but in her boathouse up the Hudson River.

A fire here 20 years ago destroyed most of her possessions.

But she did save some family photos

'and her high school yearbook from when she graduated in 1949.'

-We're nearly there. The Vs.

-Those are the Vs?

-Yeah.

'She was called Chloe Wofford then.'

-Zowada, Whitaker, Wilcox...

-SHE LAUGHS

Where am I?

-Ah!

-There she is!

This is Chloe Wofford.

She's been dolled up for it, as well, for the occasion.

-I wore earrings, no lipstick.

-Yeah.

Wow.

Now, here you are in this picture.

"They led the 1949ers."

Does that mean that you distinguished yourself?

Yes, well, I was the treasurer.

Great skirt. I remember it.

-Dark maroon...

-And white socks.

-..and cream...

Oh, yes, thick white socks, we all wore those.

-Physical education.

-Oh, dear.

"Senior and junior girls who are interested in books

"are given an opportunity to work in the school library

"under the direction of Miss Pitts."

Oh, yes, I remember her.

What was she like?

She was rather sweet.

-Miss Pitts was the typing teacher.

-A-ha!

You know, in those days, women who were teachers were highly respected.

It was one of the few professional jobs.

So they were very proud of themselves and we looked up to them.

Home economics. That's called cooking in English.

THEY CHUCKLE

Dear Lord...

'From school, she went on to Howard in Washington,

'the most prestigious of the black universities.'

Oh, wow! That is a picture!

SHE LAUGHS

"Howard University coming home queen...

-"Runner-up, Toni Morrison."

-I didn't win.

You should have won. Look at that!

He's a good-looking guy.

-Yeah, there were all lovely.

-Yeah.

"Without any drowsiness or warning,

"she fell asleep.

"There out of that dark void sprang a vivid, fully felt dream.

"Booker's hand was moving between her thighs

"and when her arms flew up and closed over his back,

"he extracted his fingers and slid between her legs

"what they call the pride and wealth of nations.

"She wrapped her legs around his rocking hips

"as though too slow them or help them or keep them there.

"Bride woke up moist and humming."

I did say to Toni very early on, "I really like your sex scenes."

I know!

It's like, more, more!

But they're all so different, aren't they?

-They are.

-The book is full of them.

There's one in Sula where Sula gets into bed with her lover

and wants desperately for him to make love to her and he won't.

And I remember as a teenager, I thought, "This is horrible!"

"This is my idea of a nightmare."

And this one is completely different.

They're all different, but luscious.

God Help The Child gives a modern twist

to the themes of her first novel -

the favouring of light-skinned over dark,

not just white over black,

but a hierarchy among black people, too.

This reared its head at college, in the South.

I learned about what we call skin privileges

when I went away to college -

powerful racial discrimination.

If I saw a white man walking down the street and I was by myself,

I'd cross the street.

If I saw a black man, I would run toward him for safety.

And on campus, where I was feeling safe and happy,

there was this other kind of discrimination

where people were ranked on the colour of their skin socially.

In the new novel, the main character is rejected by her mother

because she is too dark,

but as an adult makes a virtue of her ebony blackness.

"I became a deep, dark beauty

"who doesn't need Botox for kissable lips

"or tanning spas to hide a deathlike pallor.

"I sold my elegant blackness to all those childhood ghosts.

"I have to say, forcing those tormentors -

"the real ones and others like them -

"to drool with envy when they see me,

"is more than payback.

"It's glory."

Toni Morrison studied and later taught at Howard.

Her friend Jessie Norman was there soon after.

Unlike Toni, Jessie was brought up in the South.

It must have been a defining experience for her as a writer.

I'm certain that it had to be.

Imagine the students that were there

and their stories from Arkansas and Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi

and all of these incredible experiences,

and so that had to have been a widening of her own thought

about what had happened

and what was still happening

and what unfortunately is still happening.

I recognise everything that she writes

because it actually happened and it wasn't that long ago

that we had people gathering at a lynching,

a person with a rope or something around the neck

and hung from a tree.

That people gathered to look at this

as though it were some sort of entertainment.

It wasn't that long ago.

MUSIC: Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday

# Southern trees bear a strange fruit... #

Lynchings carried on well into the 20th century.

# And blood at the root... #

This was in 1911.

# Black bodies swingin'

# In the Southern breeze. #

It was fashionable to take photographs of lynchings

and circulate them as postcards.

# From the poplar trees. #

Toni Morrison put pictures like that into a book she edited -

The Black Book, a sort of scrapbook,

which gave black people a history.

The book for which she later became famous, Beloved,

was inspired by this cutting.

"When the slave hunters came to the house

"in which they were concealed,

"she caught a shovel and struck two of her children on the head,

"and cut the throat of the third."

The Black Book was the fruit of the Civil Rights Movement

and Black Power.

She was now Toni, not Chloe,

and Morrison after a man she'd married and divorced.

She was working in publishing.

It was her form of activism.

I thought, "I'm not out in the streets marching,

"I'm not giving speeches", etc - it was a very active time.

So I thought, "Well, I want the voices documented,

"I don't want them distorted by this columnist or this political...

"I want them to say what they say."

And so I deliberately chose Toni Cade Bambara,

Gail Jones, the writers, the poets,

Dumas, who's an incredible writer,

and along with the political figures, their story.

It was deliberate, it was calculated

and I thought, "I can't leave that up to 'them'."

She published Muhammad Ali,

the boxer who was persona non grata in some circles

since he'd changed his name

and started championing black political causes.

Muhammad Ali, he was marvellous.

He didn't pay much attention to me as an editor in the beginning.

If I asked him a question,

he would answer a man or turn to a man,

and I thought, "Oh, God."

And the men, the sales force, the other guys, they were in awe -

"Look at his hands! Oh, my, did you see his...?"

They weren't gonna tell him anything and they did anything he wanted to.

And I thought, "This is not gonna work."

And then I remembered that I had read an article in the New York Times

where an older woman was being evicted.

He did something to prevent it,

and I thought, "He respects older women."

So I went into my mommy role

and while everybody else was oohing and aahing

I'd say, "Ali, get up for a minute," and he would stand up.

I'd say, "Go over there, sit down, the reporters are coming."

He did everything I said so long as I was not a girl.

It's extremely difficult to win the revolutionary struggle.

No...more...prisons.

In the lengthening list of embattled black militants,

the name and already the legend of Angela Davis are unique.

Another fighter that Toni edited was the FBI's most wanted, Angela Davis.

A young academic, a communist, a Black Panther,

she bought the gun that was used by black prisoners in an escape bid.

A highly controversial figure, she became a heroine of the left.

Toni Morrison contacted me

shortly after I was released from jail.

She raised the prospect of my writing an autobiography.

My first response was, at...how old was I then?

I think I was 27.

How could I possibly write an autobiography?

I was far too young.

So that was the beginning of our friendship.

Angela came to the office and we talked

to see whether she liked or trusted me and she did.

And so she wrote the book, I edited it, shaped it a little bit.

She helped me to think about a very different type of writing,

by asking me, "Well, what was in the room?

"What did it look like, what did it sound like?"

And eventually, the autobiography emerged from those conversations.

Morrison was a mentor to others, but all the while, she was writing,

she was leading a double life.

I was in the secretarial pool at Random House.

She said, "Would you please type something for me?

So I said, "Sure, fine."

We realised later that we were typing parts of The Bluest Eye.

I would often ride with her

from her house to the office in Manhattan.

She always had a small pad nearby and a pen,

and when the traffic stopped, she would write something.

She was also single mother with two small sons.

And at her house, cooking for her sons,

she might take 30 seconds out of that task

and she would scribble something down.

She was really so immersed in the lives of her characters

that she was living simultaneously in two worlds.

How did you manage all that?

I am only aware now of the errors I made,

um...the difficulties,

because during the time of rearing them and working and running about,

it was just the next thing to do.

I remember sitting in my office with a yellow legal pad

and I was so overwhelmed that I wrote a list of everything I had to do,

everything, you know.

Something my mother, something New York Times -

you know, everything.

And then I decided to write what I wanted to do

and there were two things -

the first was mother my children, the second was write books.

"'You think I don't know what your life is like

"'just because I ain't livin' it?

"'I know what every colored woman in this country is doing.'

"'What's that?'

"'Dying. Just like me.

"'But the difference is they dyin' like a stump.

"'Me, I'm going down like one of those redwoods.

"'I sure did live in this world.'

"'Really? What have you got to show for it?'

"'Show? To who?

"'Girl, I got my mind and what goes on in it,

"'which is to say I got me.'"

Lorain, Ohio, my hometown.

After the success of her third book, Song of Solomon,

she gave up her job in publishing to write,

though she kept one foot on the ground by teaching too.

She wasn't just championing women and their lives,

she wanted men to be free as well.

Song of Solomon was very representative

of the world my father came from,

the black bourgeoisie,

but it was also an evocation of something

I was afraid of for myself, which was to claim space.

How did you claim space and not suffer as a black man?

The entire book turned my world around

by showing me that I had been living there the whole time,

I just had never had any language for it.

The main character in Song of Solomon

is known as Milkman,

because he was breast-fed for so long.

His father was called Macon Dead.

Slaves had no names of their own -

they were called after their owners or had made up names.

I'm always intrigued to know

what people are going to be called in your books,

whether it's you doing it or it's really,

you know...where it comes from.

They tell me what their names are.

-They tell you what their names are?

-Yeah.

-Do they speak to you, your characters?

Oh, yes. You know, I can...

If I used the wrong name, nothing happens with the character.

If I get the right name, if I hear it right,

then they come alive.

They sometimes kind of threaten you a little bit.

In Song of Solomon, Pilate, I had to shut her up.

Macon Dead, where did that come from?

Oh, well, some historical stuff I read about.

Freed slaves taking names and getting names and choosing names,

and the indifference of the northerners

who were writing this down.

"'Papa couldn't read, couldn't even sign his name,

"'had a mark he used.

"'They tricked him.

"'He signed something, I don't know what,

"'and they told him they owned his property.

"'He never read nothing.

"'Everything bad that ever happened to him

"'happened because he couldn't read.

"Got his name messed up cos he couldn't read.

"'His name? How?'

"'When freedom came, all the colored people in the state

"'had to register with the Freedman's Bureau.'

"'Your father was a slave?'

"'What kind of foolish question is that?

"'Of course he was.

"'Papa was in his teens and went to sign up

"'but the man behind the desk was drunk.

"'He asked Papa where he was born.

"'Papa said, 'Macon.'

"'Then he asked him who his father was. Papa said, 'He's dead.'

"'Well, the Yankee wrote it all down but in the wrong spaces

"'and in the space of his name,

"'the fool wrote, 'Dead' comma 'Macon.'

"'But Papa couldn't read so he never found out

"'what he was registered as till Mama told him.'"

Even if it's hundreds of years ago, it doesn't go away.

Oh, yeah, it doesn't go away. It doesn't go away.

The past colours the present, and the present contorts the past,

so that's life.

You have to live like that.

Slavery haunts her books.

Beloved is the story of Sethe,

a slave woman who escapes the south across the Ohio River.

The Ohio was their River Jordan,

their passage to the promised land.

But even north of the river, Sethe and her baby were not safe.

She could be seized by slave catchers

and taken back south.

"Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt

"at the feet of a nigger woman

"holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand,

"and an infant by the heels on the other.

"She did not look at them.

"She simply swung the baby toward the wall planks,

"missed, and tried to connect a second time

"when out of nowhere

"the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them

"and snatched the baby from the arc of its mother's swing."

It's the dead baby, Beloved,

who returns to haunt Sethe's house.

This slave pen was just south of the Ohio River,

on a farm in Kentucky,

a farm like Sweet Home,

where Sethe was raped and savagely beaten.

My great-grandfather, I got to see every day,

and he was born before slavery ended

and his family was brought across

from Virginia into Kentucky.

This building, it's a human warehouse,

a place where people of African descent were kept and stored

and then later marched from Kentucky

760 miles to Natchez, Mississippi to be sold.

Sold by skin colour, by skill.

One of the myths is we were only good for farm labour.

My great-grandfather was the Westmorelands' blacksmith.

As my dad told me when I was eight,

anything that was made of metal on that plantation,

my great-grandfather made it.

So their value was twice that of the ordinary slave,

sometimes three times.

In America, one of the most painful parts of being despised

is being told you're nobody and that you have no history,

you have no value

and that you're just a burden, a waste.

People think that we came here to take something,

to be given something.

This building teaches that we came and we had value,

we built, we contributed...

..and that when people needed money,

..we were sold, just like a tractor...

..or something of real value

and that, in the process, these people with dark skin,

people with beige skin,

people with almost white skin, helped to build America.

Toni Morrison said she saw no memorials to slavery,

so that was what Beloved was for.

Her words inspired people to make a memorial.

"There is no place you or I can go to think about or not think about,

"to summon the presences of, or recollect the absences of slaves.

"There's no 300-foot tower, there's no small bench by the road."

This is now a place to sit and remember.

"She shouted, 'Let the children come',

"and they ran from the trees toward her.

"'Let your mothers hear you laugh',

"she told them, and the woods rang.

"The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

"Then, 'Let the grown men come', she shouted.

"They stepped out one-by-one from among the ringing trees.

"'Let your wives and your children see you dance', she told them,

"and ground life shuddered under their feet.

"Finally, she called the women to her.

"'Cry', she told them.

"'For the living and the dead. Just cry.'

"And without covering their eyes, the women let loose.

"It started that way, laughing children, dancing men,

"crying women, then it got mixed up.

"Women stopped crying and danced, and men sat down and cried,

"children danced, women laughed, children cried until,

"exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the clearing

"damp and gasping for breath."

Through that account of a woman who would rather kill her child

than see it sold into slavery,

I came to understand something about a history that I'd been studying

that I had never understood before.

Just the way the language moved, the music, the underlying music

of the language, was so delightful to me,

it was so...

It was just so intensely pleasurable a reading experience,

notwithstanding the heart-breaking subject matter,

that I remember thinking,

"Not only is this the way that I want to write one day,

"this is the only thing I ever really want to read."

And that there was this literary master being introduced to me

who looked in some way like me meant the world to me.

# Roll up the bed

# Springs hard as lead

# Feet like old Ned

# Wish I was dead

# All my night through I've been so black and blue...#

Singing was never just entertaining,

it was always about something,

it was like a powerful, rhythmic sound of poetry,

spirituals, the blues.

You know, it's always interesting to me that the blues

-is about lost love...

-Yes.

..where a man loves a woman or "Where's my man?"

But they're never stingy.

For me, it's identifiably part and heart of the black culture,

is that generosity and that openness.

Somebody once said nobody loves like black people.

"When spring comes to the city,

"people notice one another in the road.

"On trolleys and park benches they settle thighs

"on a seat in which hundreds have done it too.

"Copper coins dropped in the pan

"have been swallowed by children

"and tested by gypsies,

"but it's still money and people smile at that.

"It's the time of year when the city urges contradiction most,

"giving you a taste for a single room,

"occupied by you alone,

"as well as craving to share it with someone you passed in the street."

I love the lyricism of her writing.

You read a paragraph and think, "Oh, that is wonderful.

"Why can't I think like that, or talk like that?"

Because there is music in her writing.

It's free-form, fragmented, wheeling around in time,

just like jazz.

Toni is influenced by a multiplicity of traditions...

..African-American cultural traditions...

..as well as high modernist traditions,

and so many of the things that we might find, um...curious...

..such as disrespect for chronology,

are traits that we can find in masterworks

of 20th-century literature.

She has appropriated those techniques

in telling these tales

that have nothing to do with the high modernist tradition.

"I'm crazy about this city.

"Daylight slants like a razor, cutting the buildings in half.

"The city in 1926.

"At last, at last everything's ahead.

"Here comes the new. Look out!

"There goes the sad stuff, the bad stuff,

"the things nobody could help stuff.

"The way everybody was then and there, forget that -

"history is over."

I'll never forget that image in Beloved...

..where there are two little...

The imprints of the two little hands of a child on a cake,

you know?

It's just a...

It takes one's breath away

in the way that many poems,

but few novels do.

In Toni Morrison's writing,

the pressure per square inch is very high.

Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved

and went on to win the Nobel.

She says two things matter to her,

being a writer, and a mother.

She's always been both.

Yeah, that's the picture.

Sadly, her second son, Slade, died five years ago of cancer.

She lives surrounded by his paintings, and his picture.

"'They will blow it', she thought.

"'Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrows.

"'What waste.'

"She knew from personal experience how hard loving was,

"how selfish and how easily sundered.

"Withholding sex, or relying on it,

"ignoring children or devouring them.

"'I was pretty once,' she thought, 'real pretty.'

"'And I believed it was enough.'

"And now she lived alone in the wilderness,

"knitting and tatting away,

"grateful that at last

"Sweet Jesus had given her a forgetfulness blanket,

"along with a little pillow of wisdom

"to comfort her in old age."

I like her.