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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Toni Morrison Talks with Hilton Als
00:48:36
Toni Morrison read The New York Times with pencil in hand. An editor by trade, Morrison never stopped noting errors in the paper. In 2015, during a conversation with The New Yorker’s Hilton Als, Morrison noted that the stories she cared about were once absent from the news. Now they’re present, but distorted. “The language is manipulated and strangled in such a way that you get the message,” she noted wryly. “I know there is a difference between the received story… and what is actually going on.” Morrison, who died on Monday, was the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the most beloved writers of the 21st century. In a wide-ranging interview with Als, Morrison discusses her last novel, God Help The Child, writing in a modern setting, and her relationship to her father, whom she says was complicated man and bluntly calls a “racist.” When she was older, she learned that he had wittnessed the lynching of two of his neighbors. “I think that’s why he though...
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- [00:00]
Toni Morrison
In the following episode, New Yorker writer.
- [00:02]
Narrator/Producer
Hilton Als quotes a line from Toni.
- [00:04]
Toni Morrison
Morrison's book Jazz that contains the N word. We've left the line uncensored.
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David Remnick
From one.
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Narrator/Producer
World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.
- [00:21]
David Remnick
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The sad news came early this week the that Toni Morrison, one of the greatest American writers of this or any other age, had died at the age of 88. Morrison was the first African American to win a Nobel Prize in literature. And it can surely be said that in her long career, first as an editor, then as an author and as a teacher, she helped transform the shape of our culture. Her novels, including Song of Solomon and Beloved, are at the core of the American language and our sense of collective memory. In 2015, Morrison published what would be her last novel, called God Help the Child, about a girl rejected and abused for the darkness of her skin. That was also the year that the country was still reeling from the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner at the hands of police officers. The previous summer and that fall, Morrison came to the New Yorker Festival to speak with the magazine's Hilton Als.
- [01:25]
Hilton Als
Tony, I've written this little ditty, and if you can bear with me, I'll bear. Okay, okay. In recent months and years, the black American male has been central to a number of debates, books, panels and editorials that end up being, for me at least, a weird or stilted business. Generally, the language around that familiar and unfamiliar form has little to do with his humanity and more to do with the pressure points, guilt, remorse, and so on. His dead or living self aggravates. And because he's less interesting in the context of joy, we know less about his achievements than not. The news is generally not so new, the continued violence to his body. This violence extends, of course, to his community, which includes mothers and brothers and all the people who never considered him invisible or trivial or tragic or extinguishable to begin with. In those family members eyes, the eyes of love, of complicated fraternity. Devastation is not an abstraction relegated to a town or village with names such as Ferguson, Staten island or Cincinnati, Ohio, but a very real thing attached to names given to the loss by parents or mothers or grandparents, people who attached great importance to Michael's name and Eric's name and Samuel's name. Every name comes with a story dear to those who have bestowed it. In her extraordinary career, the novelist Toni Morrison, author of 11 novels, several works of nonfiction, and 1993, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has given names to any number of her black male characters. Names that are story in themselves. Jolie, Breedlove, Shadrach, Jude Green, Macon Dead Milkman, Dead Guitar Son, Paul D, Joe Trace, Golden Gray, Deacon, Derek Morgan, his twin, Stewart, Bill Cossey, the Blacksmith, Inn A Mercy, Frank Money and Booker. In her last novel, 2015's God Bless the Child. Individual stories that not only put those black male bodies together again, but took them apart. The better for us to see plainly and complicatedly himself and the country and history that made him. Every great novelist reflects his or her times. Zola told us something about the Dreyfus case, Achmatava, Stalin's Rule, Baldwin, the Civil Rights Movement and Morrison. The total effect the war of history has on bodies and how behavior and absence shapes those bodies, too. She wants to erase that absence and fill in figures with her strong eye, sure hand. Years ago, when asked her opinion of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man, she was unqualified in her praise of Ellison's artistry. And yet the question remained, hung fire. Who was that black man invisible to, not to her? He was her brother, her father, her friend. Just as Toni Morrison, through virtue of her work, has become the unqualified, authoritative voice when it comes to describing a world that makes and unmakes all those brothers, fathers and friends. Ladies and gentlemen, our voice and our sister, Toni Morrison. Thank you. Here we are.
- [05:38]
Toni Morrison
Yes.
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Hilton Als
Now, there was this very intense moment in my young life as a reader where I read part of a speech that you were given a talk. And you said that one of the things that was interesting to you about America was that despite bestial behavior, we had failed to produce a nation of beasts. We're going to get to that. And then when I thought of that quote again, I thought of what I call the elegance of survival that's in your books. Son in Tarabebe, for instance, is regarded as a sort of feral character. And yet he dreams of those women of color who restored order in the black church and in the world. Would you like to elaborate a bit on your original statement? And do you still feel it's a little true or less true?
- [06:41]
Toni Morrison
I was thinking when I made that statement. Of the really vile and violent and bestial treatment on slaves and their descendants. But they did not succeed in making those descendants reproduce that violence and that corruption and that bestiality. Their response was, it's a little contemporary, but I was not really surprised when the survivors and the family members of those people who had been killed in that church was not I want him.
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Hilton Als
Yes.
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Toni Morrison
It was something else. It was grander.
- [07:34]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [07:35]
Toni Morrison
It was humane, and it was eloquent and elegant. That response of forgiveness, which we always assume for some reason is a kind of weakness, and that we always. But sometimes we understand that kind of generosity, and I'm not going to let you tear me up as a kind of weakness. Whereas I always thought that that was extreme strength. Extreme.
- [08:05]
Hilton Als
Do you think that that's a way of preserving the community? That if you do this sort of eye for an eye thing, you're stepping outside of the community and then you're really in danger?
- [08:17]
Toni Morrison
Oh, indeed. Oh, yeah. If it's just about vengeance and what you think is justifiable punishment for someone who has done something violent or wrong, then you've made that connection. You're like that person and the community. I mean, I'm not so sure that it's true now, but I'm sure it's true in some places. But my notion of the community is the recollection of the one I knew best growing up, where I was saying to somebody recently, adults can no longer say, go outside and play because it's scary out there. For me, they used to say, all of us as children back in Ohio, go outside and play. It was almost like a command, go outside and play. And. And you came in at lunchtime, et cetera. And there are a lot of people in my generation who know that, even in places like New York City.
- [09:26]
Hilton Als
But now it was the discipline of care.
- [09:28]
Toni Morrison
That's right. But the point was that whatever you were doing, there was somebody else in the community who knew where you were, who you were, and whether or not you were in difficulty.
- [09:43]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [09:44]
Toni Morrison
Neighbors and people who walked by, and they all knew. So they knew each other. But, you know, those were the. That was a real community, not one that's just fearful and full of locked doors and maybe somebody will hurt me today or tomorrow morning.
- [10:04]
Hilton Als
Well, I thought, one of the things I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but fascinated me about home was the idea of sanctuary. That one of the things that happens in the book that you establish early on is that each person of color he meets helps him on his journey because they're not asking questions about his legitimacy. They know his legitimacy. And he gets home, which doesn't exist anymore, really, in the shape that he knew it as. But those people establish a fraternity of, you are us, you're our son.
- [10:46]
Toni Morrison
Oh, yeah. I remember traveling on trains when my children were small, going from, say, Washington back To Ohio. And in some of those places, when we were traveling in the south, not with my children, but before, there were cars where colored people sat and where white people sat in other cars. But the most important thing was the porters who gave you twice as much orange juice or four sandwiches and two pillows. They were so excessively generous and kind. So it was like a luxury car, what they thought. And I was thinking not too long ago that if I walked down the street at night in Ithaca, New York, when I was at Cornell, and if I saw a black man, I would run toward him. Then I thought these days, with all of the discussion about black men as threats, I would not do that. I may not do that, but I certainly wouldn't run toward a white man. I might just have to flip a long all by myself.
- [12:24]
Hilton Als
Figure it out along the way. I'm curious about that idea of. It exists so much and so beautifully in your books about fraternity. You know, we have guitar and milkman and on and on and on. And one of the things that I've always loved you saying is that you read the New York Times with a pencil. You copy at it while you go along.
- [12:50]
Toni Morrison
Yeah. Scratch out insert words. And.
- [13:02]
Hilton Als
There'S the split between the real life self who reads the papers and knows this and that about the world, and then there's the imaginative self who doesn't really work with the facts so much. Right. Reimagining the story. Do you feel, as a reader of the New York Times and as a writer that it's difficult or sort of complicated sometimes to separate the stories that you were just telling that we read in the papers and the story that you mean to tell about?
- [13:41]
Toni Morrison
Oh, there's an enormous difference.
- [13:43]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [13:44]
Toni Morrison
And it hasn't changed a great deal. It used to be sheer absence. Now it's manipulative. I remember when the New York Times started using the word try. So and so tried to. No one ever does anything. They just try. They don't say the Treasury Department, they say Obama. They don't say the FBI. They say, you know, it's a kind of code. Yeah. The language is manipulated and strangled in such a way that you get the message. Although the veneer of accuracy and forthrightness is there. They're not the only ones. The New York Times is just the New York Times. But, you know, I know that there's a difference between the received story, not just in the press, but also on tv, and what is actually going on. When I was writing home, I had the green book, the one that tells Black people where they can spend the night and where they can eat. And I got a copy of it, as a matter of fact, you know, from the library at Princeton so that I could have him go there and have porters or preachers or friends that he had met in a restaurant tell him where he could sleep or take him in. So that. But I never identified him originally. I gave in finally, but I never identified him. When I first wrote home as a black man.
- [15:31]
Hilton Als
You didn't?
- [15:32]
Toni Morrison
No, at all. I just wanted the reader to just. If he couldn't go to this fountain, the reader would know. If he couldn't go to the bathroom, he had to go in the bushes, the reader would know. But I never used the word. But my editor said, well, Tony, we have got to know. So I put a little something in there in the beginning. So if you're interested, it wasn't quite like paradise.
- [16:08]
Hilton Als
I was about to say that.
- [16:10]
Toni Morrison
So you can, like, focus on race and then you can hunt for it or you can ignore it or whatever, but this is not what it's generally about. But on his way. On his way back, he is stopped or he has to go someplace else. You know, it's a journey and he's a shell shocked, you know, he had. He's lost his friends, you know, in the war and so on. But I wanted home, the actual place that he loathed and wanted to leave because it was small and boring and whatever. To be so welcomed by him.
- [16:49]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [16:50]
Toni Morrison
And the reader. So I withheld all color of trees, flowers, whatever, until he got really close to home.
- [16:59]
Hilton Als
That's exactly right.
- [17:00]
Toni Morrison
And then he says, were the trees always this green and the flowers were this. So that, you know, without, you know.
- [17:08]
Hilton Als
Somewhere over the rainbow.
- [17:09]
Toni Morrison
That's right. So that the reader would feel that he. That he or she had returned to a place that was, you know, they may not like you, but they're not going to hurt you.
- [17:20]
Hilton Als
Yes. And it was fascinating to read and notice that. That the atmosphere was drained of color. That if you just simply did what Judy Garland did and opened the door to this new home.
- [17:33]
Toni Morrison
That's right. Out of Kansas. Right.
- [17:36]
Hilton Als
We're not in Kansas anymore.
- [17:37]
Toni Morrison
Right, right.
- [17:38]
Hilton Als
There's something that has been on my mind a lot since I reread paradise and heard the horror about Planned Parenthood. And then I immediately thought of Mavis and the ladies in paradise and how the men in our particular government were not unlike the men who wanted to kill these women because of the mystery of female love and fraternity and support.
- [18:06]
Toni Morrison
And Absence of control.
- [18:08]
Hilton Als
Yes.
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Toni Morrison
They don't control them, so kill them. Well, not quite that simple. But they were not under the control of the authoritarian of the black town that had grown almost like the enemies they were running from where they were excluded themselves. And so they translated that into the superiority of blackness and control and maleness and authoritarian. So if they're going to live in an ex convent with these women who just drift in and out, who have different kinds of morals or activities and so on, that threatens their whole concept of themselves.
- [18:54]
Hilton Als
They can only see it in terms of themselves, not in terms of the women's lives.
- [18:57]
Toni Morrison
No, no, no. I see there are few men in the town that do, but the major ones, you know, who run that town, get together and slaughter them because they're dangerous. I mean, there are lots of places in the world where this happens. I won't mention them, but you know, where there's still stone women, you know, who get. Do something quote bad, like have an affair. So that necessity for control, that's male. See, my thing is this. I think that in the beginning, you know, there were a lot of female gods, goddesses in the early civilizations, because men thought that women just gave birth magically whenever they felt like it or wherever it was due. And then they began to farm and they had domesticated animals. And domesticated animals could reproduce in three months or one month short time. It didn't take a year or nine months. And so the guys said, hey, wait a minute. She's not the one who gives life. We are without us nothing. So all the gods changed names. There were some little girly gods around. That's my historical view of the change. Control.
- [20:59]
Hilton Als
Control. Was that the genesis of paradise for you was to explore that issue of male control or to explore the issue of female fraternity.
- [21:10]
Toni Morrison
That came a little bit later. What I was most interested in, I looked at these history of the black towns in Oklahoma and out west and in Kansas. And there were pictures in newspapers of men who were mayors or whatever, the administration of these black towns. And the ad was always come prepared or not at all. Come prepared or not at all. And they were all very fair, these guys who were standing there with hats. And I thought, well, maybe. What do you mean? If you don't have anything, can you get in? Well, they didn't let these men in. They were poor, they were very black. You know what they call eight Rock. And so they were rejected by a certain group of other colored men. And so they went on and founded their own town. Unfortunately, they became as discriminatory and authoritarian as the people who had thrown them out or wouldn't let them in and they were holding on to eight Rock and who belonged in the Klan and very retrograde. So any modernity from these women would be threatening to them and frightening to.
- [22:34]
Hilton Als
Them because it's reordering the social order.
- [22:36]
Toni Morrison
Exactly.
- [22:37]
Hilton Als
I see, I see. It's a great book.
- [22:41]
Toni Morrison
Thank you.
- [22:45]
Hilton Als
And one of the things that it makes me remember in terms of the early exploration of men and women and Malnutris was that there was this very great, I think, BBC documentary very early in your career, I think around the time a Song of Solomon had come out and you said that you really didn't have much to do with it, that the characters told you when something was just right. And in your first two books, Bluest Eye and Sula, it's the women, despite the hardship, who are just right. There's not one imperfect. Their imperfections are perfect to me. And important. Jude and the Deweys and so on are catalysts for Nell and Shadrach.
- [23:29]
Toni Morrison
Yeah.
- [23:30]
Hilton Als
Yes. And I was just wondering, can you share with us what you might have learned from looking at your sons and your father in order to move into Song of Solomon?
- [23:43]
Toni Morrison
Particularly my father, you know, writing about primarily women as the most. The largest characters in Louis Dynesong. In Sula, when I began to write Song of Solomon, which I thought was a horrible title, by the way. You didn't like it? No, no. Song of Solomon. What does that mean? I mean, there's somebody in there name's Solomon, but so what?
- [24:13]
Hilton Als
Anyway, let's get to that later.
- [24:16]
Toni Morrison
Okay. Me and my title. But I do remember thinking, I don't really know what the interior life of a man is as a writer. Maybe as a human, but certainly as a writer. And just before that, my father died. And I remember thinking, I wonder what my father knew about his friends and so on. And he didn't say anything because he was dead. But I had this incredible serene feeling that I would know that somehow it would come to me that I could write about this young middle class Macon dead and his friend Guitar and his search for things. And it was true. And I felt secure and I felt strong. As a matter of fact, there was so much of the maleness in it that when Pilate appeared, I just had to shut her up. She was just taking over the book.
- [25:25]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [25:26]
Toni Morrison
And I kept saying, wait a minute, this is my book, not yours. She was a very, you know, sort of forceful character. Very, you know. So I shut her up and she Said something at the funeral.
- [25:39]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [25:40]
Toni Morrison
And then something at the or when.
- [25:41]
Hilton Als
Milkman asks her, where's her navel? What happened to her navel? And she says, beats me. I've always loved hearing you talk about your father because he seems like the most incredibly supportive man in the world. And you've also said in several interviews that he was a racist.
- [26:03]
Toni Morrison
Oh, big time.
- [26:04]
Hilton Als
And that we know, we know racism grows out of a kind of hurt. Or not, in his case.
- [26:12]
Toni Morrison
I didn't understand him. I just knew that he wouldn't let white people in the house. You know, the little insurance man and this, you know, and I thought, uh, that's him. And my mother was just the opposite. She didn't care who you were, you know, if you were nice to her. That's what you heard. Line means nice to me. And also, we didn't live in black neighborhoods. You know, there were Hungarians next door and Polish people and Jewish people. Anyway, but I just thought that was a quirk. And then I learned. I went down to the little town where my father was born.
- [26:46]
Hilton Als
What was the name of that town, Tony?
- [26:48]
Toni Morrison
Cartersville.
- [26:49]
Hilton Als
Mm.
- [26:50]
Toni Morrison
Georgia. And a man there, his name is Wofford. And there's a Wofford Church, there's a Wofford College. So we know who owned the joint.
- [27:01]
Hilton Als
Walford is your maiden name, and Walford.
- [27:03]
Toni Morrison
Is my maiden name. But one of the men who was a child at the time and grew up in that little town said that my father had seen two black men lynched on his street. They were businessmen, they had little stores and so on. And so he was 14, and he left and went to California, and then he ended up in Ohio. But I think seeing that at 14, not the murder of some terrible person or the lynching of some bad person, but the lynching of two neighbors. And I think that's why he thought that white people were. What does he say? Incorrigible. You know, they were, like, doomed. But listen to this. He went back to Georgia every year to visit family. And my mother, who thinks of her days in Alabama were the sweet, lovely, you know, little kitty and, oh, in the woods and the flowers and my aunt this and my aunt that. She never went back. So I can't trust him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he was. You know, I had probably written about this several times. He did a couple of things. I had a little job cleaning a woman's house, and I was about 12, 13 years old, after school, job, and the woman was, quote, mean to me, meaning I didn't know what she was talking about. I'd never seen a washing machine or a vacuum machine or a stove that was anything other than. So I didn't know quite I was doing it. So I complained to my mother and my mother said, quit? No, I was getting $2 a week. And I gave $1 to my mother and the other dollar I kept for candy. And I told my father and he said, go to work, get your money and come on home. You don't live there. Oh, okay. This was it. I mean, it was a whole different. I haven't had an employment problem since. That's not where I live. I live here with your family, you know, that's right. But my father, you know, after. During the war, those of us black people and poor people got really good jobs when they were not drafted. And my father became a welder in a shipyard, which was a, you know, highly skilled job. And he came home one day and he said, do you know today I welded a perfect seam on the ship? And I said, yeah, but daddy, nobody's going to see it, you know. He said, it was so perfect. I put my initials underneath GW and that's what I said. Nobody's going to see that. He said, I know, but I know it's there. And it really was not so much good work for show. It was good work that he approved of, even if it was hidden in private. And that sense of, you know, self approval. That's right. Was very important to me.
- [30:49]
Hilton Als
And so when you. I think your father was alive when you first started to publish, what was his response to my mother?
- [30:59]
Toni Morrison
I don't know. My sister said he was reading the bluestine. He was laughing. I never asked him what was funny about it, but he was chuckling, you know.
- [31:10]
Hilton Als
Yes. An acknowledgement of having something happened.
- [31:14]
Toni Morrison
Yeah, right.
- [31:14]
Hilton Als
Having welded your perfect scene seam. Yes. One of the things that we've talked about a little bit is your work in the theater and how that going inward to the character and having the character say aye to that person and so on has I think been under explored in your work. Your love of theater has continued from writing the book for New Orleans in 1983.
- [31:46]
Toni Morrison
Oh, yeah.
- [31:46]
Hilton Als
I remember writing Dreaming Emmett in 1985.
- [31:51]
Toni Morrison
Yes. That was good.
- [31:52]
Hilton Als
That's a great play.
- [31:54]
Toni Morrison
That wouldn't let anybody see now.
- [31:58]
Hilton Als
And also the lyrics for, of course, you wrote Margaret Garner. Margaret Garner, Honey and Rue.
- [32:04]
Toni Morrison
Yeah. Songs. Yeah.
- [32:05]
Hilton Als
Yes. And also your work with Peter Sellers. Desdemona.
- [32:09]
Toni Morrison
Desdemona.
- [32:11]
Hilton Als
Have the scripts working in that medium. Have they informed the novels which have great moments of dramatic intensity.
- [32:20]
Toni Morrison
I think it's the other way around.
- [32:21]
Hilton Als
The other way around.
- [32:21]
Toni Morrison
I think the novels inform the plays. The plays very much. Because the novels are very visual to me and staged in a way. I mean, I hope they don't feel staged. But I do see scenes, theatrical scenes and dialogue. The hardest thing for me was the last one, Desdemona, because that was, you know, Peter Sellers did Othello. He said he would never do Othello. And I said, why? He said, it's too thin. There's nothing going on. And I said, what are you talking about? And he said, well, it's just this. I said, look, it's not that. I said, people just think it's this black guy who kills this white girl. And something, something, something. I said, but that's not it. I said, think about her. Here's a woman who ran away, eloped with a moor.
- [33:25]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [33:26]
Toni Morrison
And went to war with him. I mean, this is not some little shrinking, little ooh, ooh, girl. This. So I went on. So anyway, he did Othello in his interesting way. And then he asked me, did I want to do Desdemona? And I sort of did, thinking of her the way I just described and thought, look, I'm not competing with William Shakespeare here. I couldn't think how I could do it. That was not sort of a silly parody or pastiche and dumb. Yeah, some dumb stuff. Until I got the first line, which was, my name is Desdemona. Desdemona means death. Desdemona means. And then the rest. It was sort of her voice.
- [34:15]
Hilton Als
She could name herself.
- [34:16]
Toni Morrison
That's right, yeah.
- [34:18]
Hilton Als
So I've been rereading a lot and thinking about the ways in which the men have this relationship to their fathers that is often uneasy and fantastic in all senses of the word. And in jazz, there's that extraordinary scene with Golden Gray and his father. He tracks down his father, who's black, and Golden Gray is mixed race. And he says, I don't want to be a free nigger. I want to be a free man. And the father says, henry Lestroy is the father. And he says, be what you want. White or black, choose. But if you choose black, you got to act black. Meaning, draw your manhood up. Tell me what you. What he was trying to express there. Because it's two different generations, right?
- [35:21]
Toni Morrison
Yeah, yeah.
- [35:22]
Hilton Als
It's a novel about modernism, that's true.
- [35:25]
Toni Morrison
But at the same time, you've got to act black for him would mean grow up, get tough. You know, there's nothing to hold you. Be Strong. That's what acting black like a black man meant to Henry Lisjoy, as opposed to whining and complaining. And you did me wrong. Something I did me wrong. That was powerful for him. A black man is a powerful thing, a tough thing, a strong thing in his mind.
- [36:06]
Hilton Als
The move into the well. Back to a little bit of Henry Lestroy, whom I loved in Jazz as much as I loved his son. And there's this extraordinary Flannery o' Connor quote I wanted to share with you where she says, black men, the black male, Southern. But why Split Hares is a man of very elaborate manners and great formality, which he uses superbly for his own protection and to ensure his own privacy.
- [36:46]
Toni Morrison
That's true. That's accurate.
- [36:48]
Hilton Als
The men in Jazz, despite the severity of their actions, are all private figures. Paul D, to me, in his love, is also a private figure. They move, they journey. But there's a great deal to risk if you share.
- [37:14]
Toni Morrison
Oh, yeah, don't love nothing too much, you know, which is not what Paul D. Says. Woman says that. But he has, what, tobacco tin in his chest where he keeps everything lidded, all the profound emotions, the breakdown emotions. And he doesn't want anybody to open up that little tobacco tin, which is his version of a heart. And it is protection. He's been through some terrible times. It's like, I can't remember her name. One of the women in the town who says, don't love nothing. She doesn't mean, don't care for things, but don't get too involved. Don't let it sweep you away. Don't let it curdle you, in a sense. And he tries that and does that and succeeds in it. Until, of course, he meets Sethe, you know, who he does come back to.
- [38:22]
Hilton Als
And they're touching through trauma, right?
- [38:26]
Toni Morrison
Big time.
- [38:27]
Hilton Als
It is, to me, the greatest human endeavor or action that we can do is to get past ourselves, to touch somebody else in a real way. And one of the things that happens to me when I'm reading your books is there's always a scene where the impossible happens. The impossible meaning through the trauma of race or sex or history. There's a moment where they want to touch another person. It's like Milkman's sister says, First Corinthians. She says, do you think that your life is that hog gut between your legs? And you were saying, I felt when I read the book, it's not as limited as that, that it is something about getting past that and be a person. So it's the Humanity and the pathos of getting past the trauma to even trying.
- [39:40]
Toni Morrison
Yeah. Everything I have written, including the first book I wrote, even there. Yes. Although I didn't know I was going to forever do it. Every one of those is a movement toward knowledge. And if somebody doesn't know a main character doesn't know something extremely important at the end of the book that he or she didn't know in the beginning or throughout, then it doesn't work for me. It's not like a happy ending. I don't mean that it's just. And it's not an aha moment. It's just that you grow, you learn something, you know.
- [40:31]
Hilton Als
Transforms.
- [40:32]
Toni Morrison
Yeah. In Home, he could never have buried that man and said, here lies a man.
- [40:38]
Hilton Als
Yes.
- [40:39]
Toni Morrison
Which is all the way from the beginning of the book when he sees these horses and they look so male and so powerful and masculine, violent, masculine violence, beauty, Horses fighting one another. So at the end, that sentence, they fought like men, becomes here lies a man, a real man who permitted himself to be killed so that his son could live. Could live.
- [41:18]
Hilton Als
Does that transformation happen? Can it happen without sacrifice? Or is it something.
- [41:25]
Toni Morrison
I don't think it can. I mean, a little sacrifice doesn't have to be severe punishment.
- [41:31]
Hilton Als
But.
- [41:33]
Toni Morrison
That'S the press. That's the urgency about life.
- [41:37]
Hilton Als
That's the volition.
- [41:38]
Toni Morrison
Yeah. That's where I push so that when Seth is saying, oh, she was my best thing, and Paul D. Says, you're your best thing. And she says, me? You know, like, who me? I mean, that's a. She never thought of herself as the valuable one.
- [42:01]
Hilton Als
God Bless the Child takes place in the contemporary, so called contemporary world.
- [42:10]
Toni Morrison
Yeah.
- [42:11]
Hilton Als
How was that for you?
- [42:13]
Toni Morrison
Oh, Gary, I started home. I started God Bless the Child, which I thought was a horrible title also. And I started home and finished it because that was a period that I could sort of understand. I couldn't write about now, I felt, because it was so slippery. It wasn't definite enough until I thought I realized that what was very definitive about now is so powerfully, powerfully self. Reverential selfies. Look at me. Novels about me, stories about me. And I thought, okay, if she goes becomes this glamorous creature, it will be in cosmetics, which is all about beauty and looking good and so on. And for him, it would be hanging on to the absence of his older brother. It doesn't have anything to do with what his sisters think or what his father thinks or his brother. They lost that child also, but he really lost him. So he leaves and he Goes away to college and nothing is satisfactory. He's better than everything. He's going to write the great books he's going to do. You know, he has all. He doesn't do any of it. He can't even play a decent horn. I mean, you know, he plays a little bit, but nobody takes him that seriously. So he's cutting himself off at the leg because he's hanging on to, you know, this what about me and how I feel. So the coming together when somebody can listen to a conversation between these two people and they can listen to each other and know that there's something valuable that they need in the other person. And that's a good ending.
- [44:26]
Hilton Als
When you have. But when you talk about that idea of me and selfies and all of that, that noise, let's say that doesn't exist in other centuries or other times. Were you, this goes back to the reading. Were you distracted by the reality of now before you could tell the story?
- [44:49]
Toni Morrison
You know, I always say, you know, remember when I was a girl, a young girl, we were called citizens. American citizens. Don't then American citizens this, American citizens that. We were second class citizens, but that was the word. And then after World War II, in the 50s and 60s, they started calling us consumers. The American consumer needs or should or meh. And so we did consume. Now they don't use those words anymore. Listen, the American taxpayer. And those are different attitudes. If you're a citizen, you think your block or your neighbors or your town or something is part of you. If you're a consumer, you just go to the store and shop and lay away and unlay away and so on. But if you are only a taxpayer, you are worried about who's got some money that you pay, you paid and.
- [45:57]
Hilton Als
That you don't have.
- [45:59]
Toni Morrison
Yeah. You don't want the government to distribute its own resources that are based on taxes to anybody. You're sort of angry. It's like your money because they called you a taxpayer, not a citizen. All you do is pay taxes. That's a whole different thing. So that's part of what I was feeling. But generally speaking, when I was writing God Bless the Child, that's what I thought was distinctive, you know, about the period. I want to tell you what the title of that book was before I was forced to change it. I called it the Wrath of Children.
- [46:50]
Hilton Als
That's a great title.
- [46:51]
Toni Morrison
Yeah, yeah. Everybody hated it. No, my agent, my editor, the editor in chief. Da da da da da da. I said, yeah. Ah, they just fussed and fussed And I know I don't always have good titles, but I thought the Wrath of Even so, this one sounded like Billie Holiday or somebody. You know what I mean? This is great.
- [47:19]
Hilton Als
Thank you, Tony. I'm going to be one of those boys in the ring getting up.
- [47:26]
Toni Morrison
Thank you.
- [47:27]
Hilton Als
Thank you.
- [47:31]
Toni Morrison
Thanks darling. Really lovely.
- [47:39]
David Remnick
Toni Morrison died this last Monday. She spoke with the New Yorker's Hilton Alls in 2015 at the New Yorker Festival. You can read Hilton's profile of morrison@newyorker.com.
- [47:53]
Narrator/Producer
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Toon Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rhiannon Corby, Jill Deboff, Karen Frillman, Kala Lia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell and Steven Valentino, with help from Rhonda Sherman, David Ohana, Bradley, Gee, Meng, Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment.