Blacks, modernism, and the American South: An interview with Toni Morrison

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 1998 by Denard, Carolyn

DENARD: You are not a Southerner. You were born and grew up in Lorain, Ohio. So your sense of the South and what African-Americans value and/or hate about the South comes largely from your parents' memories of the Souththe stories told to you when you were growing up. What was the perception, the sense of the South that you gained from your parents?

MORRISON: They had diametrically opposed positions. My father was born in Georgia. My mother was born in Alabama. Both were from very small towns in those states. My father thought that the most racist state in the Union was Georgia and that it would never change. My mother had much fonder memories. She was very nostalgic about the South. But she never visited it-ever. While my father went back every year. Quarreling and fussing all the way, he went back to see his family-aunts, uncles-there. So I grew up with a complicated notion of the South, neither sentimental nor wholly frightening. On the one hand, with no encouragement, my mother was nostalgic about the Alabama farm, yet she would talk in a language of fear about her family's escape from the South. On the other hand, my father recounted vividly the violence that he had seen first-hand from White southerners, but he regularly returned.

DENARD: What about your own impressions of the South when you toured with the Howard Players, or when you taught at Texas Southern University, or when you've visited since then?

MORRISON: What impressed me when I first went to the South for a sustained period of time (with a theater group from Howard) was the sight of so many people like me, like my relatives. I think Ralph Ellison said something elegant but similar when he was trying to answer Irving Howe. Howe had asked why would he have any good feelings about the South, and Ellison said that the South was full of Black people. Well that's suddenly what I realized. When you go there, while it was true that I was going into a white domain, what I was aware of primarily are the Black people there, and they were like people in Lorain, Ohio. And I didn't have to change my language or my manners. The accents were different but the language was not. I recognized and participated in the culture. I mean the food, the music, the way in which you behaved in other people's houses, what you don't do with strangers, what you do-they were no different whatsoever from the way I had been reared in Lorain, Ohio. Also, I had a sense of-I hate to use these over-taxed words-a sense of belonging and community that was lifesaving. I used to tell my children about how I felt when my sister and I as young girls were in the company of so-called vaguely criminal men in Lorain. Men who gambled, sold illegal liquor, or what have you. But when we saw them on the street they were safety zones for us. If we needed to get home, they took us. If we were someplace where we shouldn't be, they told us. If we needed protection, they gave it. So I always felt surrounded by these Black men who were safe. I knew I was safe with them; the people I ran from were not them. I felt the same thing traveling through the South on trains. The porters-even when I was a grown woman traveling with my children the porters were the praetorian guard. They were the ones who gave me extra orange juice and didn't charge me for it because I had a little boy with me; they were the ones who gave me the pillow anyway whether I purchased one or not. It was a kind of chivalry that I had come to expect from Black men. You see a Black man, you know you're safe. And that was precisely the feeling I had in the South, of protection and care and solicitous, unflirtatious behavior. This very recent notion of Black men as threats stuns me.

DENARD: Were there other people in Lorain, other family members or friends or people you met at Howard, who had lived in the South and who expressed the similar views of the South that your parents did?

MORRISON: Many.

DENARD: Tell me about those people.

MORRISON: Many of my father's people lived in Chicago and most of my mother's people lived in areas around Ohio, Michigan and California, but all of them had come from the South originally. My mother came north very young. She was six. And she went to school in Ohio as did her sisters and brothers. And her parents, along with many of the aunts and uncles in Cleveland and Lorain, made up a culture that I didn't identify by region but only as Black. I learned later how pronounced the variations of culture-from state to state or region to region-are. I've never felt that sense of familiarity within variety anywhere else except in Brazil where you see evidence of intrinsic, even dominant, Black cultures-each one of which is strikingly different in cuisine and dress and music from the others, and they all speak different kinds of Portuguese. But somehow, however, they relate to each other. When you are in that company, you feel as though you are in exalted company.

There is another aspect of the South that I remember which exemplifies that notion of community that we talked about earlier. When I first went South with the theater group from Howard, we couldn't count on living quarters. I mean they made adequate reservations in advance, but we were traveling in several cars, and sometimes we arrived too late and the rooms were taken. As faculty members, they were all dedicated to making sure that we were all safe. So they looked in the yellow pages of the telephone book and called up churches. And invariably, the minister or his wife would answer, and the faculty would tell them who we were and where we were from and that we were on our way to do a performance at some school or whatever and then ask where we might find lodging. Invariably, the minister said "call me back" or "come." He would find three or four parishioners who were pleased to house us.