• GETTING ESTABLISHED
• AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS AND TRADE PUBLISHING
• TECHNIQUES FOR WRITING
• THE WORK OF WRITING
• THEMES
• GETTING THE WRITING UNDER WAY
• MORRISON’S CHARACTERS
• NOTES

GETTING ESTABLISHED

Morrison has said time and again that when she began working on The Bluest Eye, she did not think of herself as a writer. Writing was then more of a diversion than a vocation, something she did for herself—the only thing she does for herself, she once told an interviewer.¹ Her professional priority was editing. As she explained to Robert Stepto in a 1976 interview, “What I want to do with an author is to get him into the position to do the best work he can, and then to try to publish it so it will receive the widest amount of attention, and look elegant, and be well received.”² As an editor for Random House and one of only a handful of African Americans ever to work as a senior editor in a major publishing house, Morrison gained firsthand knowl-edge about the business of trade book publishing. Although her area of expertise was work by African American writers, she told Jessica Harris that the books she edited included topics ranging from “the women’s movement to railroads.”³ Through her commitment to her work, her ability to recognize and attract talented young African American writers, and her natural intellectual curiosity, Morrison soon gained a reputation as one of the most competent editors of fiction written by African Americans in the trade book industry. As she was helping to develop the projects of other novelists, how-ever, she kept her own efforts a secret from her employers. In a 1993 Paris Review interview she told Elissa Schappell that at Random House she never said she was a writer because “it would have been awful. First they didn’t hire me to do that. They didn’t hire me to be one of them. Secondly, I think they would have fired me.” She explained, “There were no in-house editors who wrote fiction, Ed Doctorow”—author of the novel Ragtime (1975)—“quit. There was nobody else’no real buying, negotiating editor in trade who was also publishing her own novels.”⁴ Morrison’s colleagues at Random House found out about her writing when they read reviews of The Bluest Eye in The New York Times.

Writing became work for Morrison after an editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston read parts of her manuscript, liked it, and offered her a contract.

Then it became “work to do well.”⁵ Holt, Rinehart and Winston was not the first publisher to whom Morrison submitted her work, however. She admitted to the novelist Gloria Naylor that her manuscript was turned down many times:

You know the little letters you get back from the editors. They wrote me nice letters. This book has no beginning, no middle, and no end’: or, your writing is wonderful, but … ‘I wasn’t going to change it for that. 1 assumed there would be some writing skills that I didn’t have. But that’s not what they were talking about. They thought something was wrong with it or it wasn’t marketable.⁶

AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITERS AND TRADE PUBLISHING

Prior to the founding of Afro-American studies programs in colleges and universities in the mid 1970s, trade book publishers made little effort to publish works by African American writers. A notable exception to this lack is the Harlem Renaissance, a brief period in the 1920s when a group of fledgling African American writers were brought to the attention of the New York literati. Under the guidance of their mentors—the philosopher Alain Locke, the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jessie Redmon Fauset, co-editor with Du Bois of The Crisis, the official publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—the names of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Wallace Thurman, and Zora Neale Hurston circulated in the mainstream press during the mid 1920s as new writers of considerable talent. The Great Depression of the 1930s and dissatisfaction among some of the writers with the often misguided philanthropy of their white patrons helped to bring the era to an end. The works of these writers quickly went out of print.

Similar to the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts movement of the 1960s was short-lived. Interest was generated in books by African American writers for about a decade then faded away along with the names of many promising young African American novelists. The prevailing industry attitude has been that African Americans do not

read and therefore do not buy books. Until recently, when the industry published the work of an African American writer—usually an African American male writer—they did little to advertise and promote his book. Without advertising or reviews in mainstream magazines, most books do not make it in the marketplace and are soon out of print. This has been the fate of books by African American writers since 1773, when Phillis Wheatley inaugurated the African American literary tradition with her collection of poems titled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.⁷ With die exception of writers such as Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison, whose novels frequendy were treated by critics and academics as sociological treatises on the so-called Negro problem rather than as literature, African American writers have been practically invisible in the trade book industry.

An annotated bibliography of “significant” books by African American writers published between 1965 and 1971, compiled in 1971 by the New York Public Library, includes forty-seven new novels. Ten of the novels in the bibliography were written by women. The Bluest Eye is among them. It is described as “A quiet, gentle story of one girl’s world as she grows up black, poor, and alienated.”⁸ A survey by Gloria Wade-Gayles of major novels by African American women published between 1946 and 1976 lists twenty-six titles. Of those she identifies twelve, including The Bluest Eye and Sula, as having been “well received by the general reading public and by critics.”⁹ Two other novels on Wade-Gayles’s list of twelve, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976), were edited by Morrison.

There was intense controversy surrounding the publication of Jones’s novels. Morrison discusses the controversy and defends her choices in a December 1976 interview with Jessica Harris for Essence:

Some women’s literature is very aggressive and sometimes hostile in what it says about men. Gayl Jones’s writing has enormous range, and it’s unfair for conclusions to be drawn about her from these books. Although there was a lot of other Gayl Jones material from which to select, I chose to publish Corregidora and Eva’s Man because I thought that they would receive an enormous amount of notice and I wanted that for her. But the men come off badly in Corregidora. They are violent, insensitive, greedy, selfish and mean. Men don’t like to be portrayed that way.¹⁰

Morrison felt that the attention she received for books she edited by Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Lucille Clifton, Muhammad Ali, whom she described as “very exciting and electric,” and Angela Davis, “a very coherent, bright, very loving woman,”¹¹ initially eluded her own first novel, The Bluest Eye, despite the publication of reviews of her novel by several major publications.

Morrison notes in the last lines of her afterword to the 1994 Plume edition of the novel that with “very few exceptions, the initial publication of The Bluest Eye was like Pecola’s life: dismissed, trivialized, misread.”¹² Haskel Frankel, in a review of The Bluest Eye for The New York Times Book Review, praised Morrison as “a writer of considerable power and tenderness,” but was critical of the way she constructed the novel. He felt that the scene between Pecola and Soap-head Church came too late in the novel to achieve the impact it might otherwise have had; that Frieda and Claudia “serve little purpose beyond distraction”; and that Pecola’s breakdown, “when it comes, has only the impact of reportage.” His criticisms notwithstanding, Frankel felt that Morrison showed great promise. He wrote, “The writer who can reveal the beauty and the hope beneath the surface is a writer to seek out and to encourage.”¹³ Criticism of the novel by L. E. Sissman, writing for The New Yorker, had to do with Morrison’s framing of the novel in “the bland white words of a conventional school ‘reader’—surely an unnecessary and unsubtle irony.”¹⁴ Sissman also accused Morrison of writing “an occasional false or bombastic line.” Another problem for Sissman was that Morrison “permits herself some inconsistencies.” Sissman gave as an example the way the real name of Soap-head Church is given, “Elihue Micah Whit-comb and Micah Elihue Whitcomb.”¹⁵

Reviewers from African American publications were more generous with their praise of The Bluest Eye. Liz Gant wrote favorably about the novel in her May 1971 review for Black World. The African American actress Ruby Dee wrote poignantly about the pain of reading The Bluest Eye in her review Dee called for a remedy to “some of the social elements of some of the people, black and white, that contribute to the erosion of innocence and beauty” as Morrison presents it.¹⁶ Although The Bluest Eye was included in the required reading lists of a few college courses in English and Afro-American studies in 1972 and 1973, by 1974 the novel was out of print.¹⁷

The greater commercial success of Sula can in part be attributed to the publication of the novel by Knopf. Founded in 1915 by Alfred A. Knopf, the company began publishing works by African American authors early in the twentieth century, including works by Hughes and James Baldwin. Committed to producing good books by

authors with first-rate minds, Knopf often published and strongly promoted works of fiction and nonfiction that were not destined to be best-sellers.¹⁸ By the time Knopf died in 1984, his company had published a formidable list of Nobel Prize winners from other countries, including Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Thomas Mann.¹⁹

At Knopf, Morrison had the good fortune to work with Robert Gottlieb as her editor. She knew from her own experience as an editor that good editors are crucial for serious writers. By most accounts, Gottlieb is one of the best. According to Boston Globe writer Mark Feeney, “Gottlieb is … the most celebrated book editor of his generation, the possessor of the pair of eyes such authors as Joseph Heller, John Cheever, John Le Carre, and Toni Morrison wanted to have first look at their work.”²⁰ Morrison described Gottlieb, who edited all her books at Knopf through Beloved, as “superlative for me … What made him good for me was a number of things: knowing what not to touch; asking all the questions you probably would have asked yourself had there been the time.”²¹ She also found him “funny … literate and really able to tell you things.”²² After she wrote Sula, Morrison was persuaded by Gottlieb that the appellation writer was one she needed to claim.²³ Whereas Morrison began to write as an antidote for loneliness, by the time she finished The Bluest Eye, she was already thinking about her next book. Writing had become more than work: it was an obsession.

TECHNIQUES FOR WRITING

Novelists who teach creative writing are regularly asked whether or not the art of writing can be taught. Morrison’s response is that some aspects can be taught. As a teacher with years of experience in professional editing, she feels that what she can offer students is guidance. “I can follow their train of thought, where their language is going, suggest other avenues.”²⁴ What neither she nor anyone else can teach is “vision or talent,” which must be discovered and developed by the writer alone.²⁵ Morrison’s talent for writing was revealed early in her childhood. She remembers being “very little" and writing stories for classes and knowing that the teacher did not believe that they were her compositions.²⁶ She also apparently continued writing in high school, since she has said that she began working on the story that became The Bluest Eye when she ran out of the old high school “junk" she had been reading at the writing group she joined while teaching at Howard.²⁷

The idea for The Bluest Eye came from a memory of a girl Morrison knew in elementary school, who told Morrison that she wanted blue eyes. Morrison recalls being angry and then repulsed by the girl’s expressed desire for “very blue eyes in a very dark skin.”²⁸ This notion of beauty was alien to Morrison at that time. The idea of beauty she had imagined for herself was not physical; it was not external: “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”²⁹ As the story developed, Morrison found herself focusing “on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society; a child; the most vulnerable member: a female.”³⁰ In this and in her subsequent novels, her writing was guided by a series of questions. A strong motivation for Morrison as a writer is questions for which she seeks, if not answers, understanding. As Morrison told Jane Bakerman, writing became “a sort of compulsive thing because it was a way of knowing, a way of thinking that I found really necessary.”³¹

In The Bluest Eye Morrison’s questions have to do with standards of beauty. What would cause a young African American girl “to feel that it was better to be a freak than what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on die beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her.”³² Once she had established her theme, Morrison began tackling some of the problems of writing that she later discusses more fully in her essays on fiction. One problem was what she calls the problem of centering: how to keep the weight of the novel’s inquiry from overwhelming such a “delicate and vulnerable a character” as Pecola, this totally victimized child; how to keep her from being “smashed” to the point that it would provoke in readers a feeling of pity rather than an “interrogation of themselves.” Morrison tried to resolve the problem by breaking the narrative into parts which the reader would have to reassemble, a solution that later dissatisfied her.³³

Another problem—one that continues to occupy Morrison—was how to manipulate the spoken language of African American people into “race-specific yet race-free prose.”³⁴ What she strove for was an expressiveness that relied on the “full comprehension” of “codes embedded in black culture” that would “effect immediate co-conspiracy and intimacy” between the reader and the text, and that would “transfigure the complexity and wealth of Black-American culture into a language worthy of the culture.”³⁵

Twenty-three years after the publication of The Bluest Eye, Morrison examined her earliest work with the careful eye of a scholar and critic. In 1965, after she committed herself to completing the story she had started at Howard University, her concern was with the act of writing: giving her story shape and form, developing and refining her characters, making those characters speak truthfully, and putting it all down on the pads of paper she continues to use to draft her novels.

THE WORK OF WRITING

Morrison often has stressed the point that her writing is not the result of inspiration. Writing for her is work. It involves thinking, reading, writing, and rewriting. To do her work well, she has to organize her time carefully. In Syracuse, New York, where Morrison lived until she transferred to Random House in New York City in 1967, Morrison found it necessary to write early in the morning before her two sons got up, because she was not able to do so at night. Working early in the morning—in the predawn hours—soon became a habit, one that she continues today.

Morrison feels that it is important for writers to establish a ritual preparation for entering their writing space, “that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process.” She tells her students that “one of the most important things they need to know is when they are at their best, creatively. They need to ask themselves, What does the ideal room look like? Is there music? Is there silence? Is there chaos outside or is there serenity outside? What do I need in order to release my imagination?”³⁶ Morrison’s preparatory ritual is simple: she makes a cup of coffee while it is still dark—“it must be dark”—and drinks it while watching the day dawn.³⁷ Her ideal writing routine is one she claims never to have experienced: days, “say, nine uninterrupted days,” of writing in an uncluttered space with “huge tables” during which she would not have to leave the house or answer calls.³⁸

For Morrison, the physical act of writing is simple. She writes her drafts on yellow legal pads, usually with a number two soft Dixon Ticonderoga pencil.³⁹ The hard part is “releasing the imagination” so that the writing will come. It does not always happen in those ideal spaces Morrison encourages her students to seek. If the writer has released her imagination, the writing will come at anytime and anywhere. Morrison resolved many literary problems while doing other things—traveling on the subway to her job, for example. The important thing is to be ready when the writing arrives. Speaking about some of her previous work, Morrison said, “There was no blank time,” especially when she was working on the “strong interior lives” of her characters, because “something was always churning.”⁴⁰ She refrains from reading her work aloud while writing it. She fears that doing so might interfere with her efforts to “write language that can work quietly on a page for a reader who doesn’t hear anything.” She wants the language to direct the reader’s attention to “what is in between the word.” She believes that it is “what you don’t write that frequently gives what you do write its power.”⁴¹

What Morrison writes are powerful stories about African American people that rely heavily on their interior lives, on what they are thinking and feeling at a given time or in a given set of circumstances. Morrison does not exclude whites as subjects of her writing—in Tar Baby, Valerian and Margaret Street, a white couple, are essential to the story—but she feels that African American characters best manifest the themes she wants to explore. Furthermore, she views the world from the perspective of an African American woman who is thoroughly grounded in African American culture. She brings to the work of writing a rich repository of materials gathered from the stories her parents used to tell when she was growing up, from her extensive reading of literature and research on African American history and culture, and from her keen sensitivity to the tones, rhythms, cadences, and nuances of the English language as spoken by African Americans.

Morrison is stimulated by what has not been written about African Americans. She wrote The Bluest Eye because there were no novels about the kinds of African American girls she portrayed. They were absent in the fiction of her youth, superseded in popular culture by the image of the child movie star Shirley Temple. In Sula Morrison focused on a theme she felt had received little attention in African American fiction—that of friendship between women. She told Claudia Tate, “Nobody ever talked about friendship between two women unless it was homosexual, and there is no homo-sexuality in Sula. Relationships between women were always written about as though they were subordinate to some other roles they’re playing.”⁴² Like many of the characters and events in her fiction, the friendship she writes about in Sula is not representative of what most people experience in their daily lives. As girls, Nel and Sula share a dark secret. As an adult, one betrays the other and dismisses her actions on the basis of their long friendship.

Morrison also is motivated to write novels that offer new challenges in terms of narrative techniques. The challenge of Song of Solomon was to write from a masculine perspective, and to envision the fictional world she created from the perspectives of two African American men, Milkman and his father, Macon Dead. In Jazz, arguably her most experimental novel, Morrisons concern was with creating a narrative structure akin to the kinds of improvisation found in jazz music. She explains in “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV” that what held her interest in Jazz was the “melody,” as she calls the plot, and the satisfaction of recognizing it whenever the narrator returns to it, just as the musician’s return to the melody after a long improvisation is recognized. For her, “the real art of the enterprise” was “bumping up against that melody time and again, seeing it from another point of view, seeing it afresh each time, playing it back and forth.” Citing the jazz musician Keith Jarretts performances of “Ol’ Man River,” Morrison adds, “the jazz-like structure wasn’t a secondary thing for me-it was the raison d’etre of the book. The process of trial and error by which the narrator revealed the plot was as important and exciting to me as telling the story.”⁴³

THEMES

The themes and ideas for Morrison’s stories come from many sources. Her richest source is her imagination. Growing up in a household with parents who enjoyed telling their children stories, and particularly ghost stories, Morrison had many opportunities to imagine herself in situations she would never encounter in real life. An avid reader even today, Morrison’s love for fiction and her subsequent formal study of English and Classics helped to enrich and keep fresh the material stored in her imagination, as did the Bible, which, Morrison exclaims, “wasn’t part of my reading, it was part of my life.”⁴⁴ As a girl, Morrison’s task was to read the Bible aloud to her dying grandmother.⁴⁵

Visual images and historical documents are other sources for Morrison. The idea for Jazz came from her involvement with Camille Billops’s The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978), a book of funeral portraits by the African American photographer James Van Der Zee, with poetry by Owen Dodson.⁴⁶ Morrison, who wrote the foreword of the book, was struck by the portrait of a young girl in a draped coffin surrounded by floral arrangements.⁴⁷ The girl had gone to a party where a jealous lover shot her with a gun equipped with a silencer. As she lay dying she refused to tell people who shot her, saying only “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” thereby allowing her lover to get away.⁴⁸

Beloved grew out of her research for The Black Book. Morrison for years was obsessed with a newspaper article she read about Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave and mother of four children. The woman was so determined to prevent the return of her children to slavery after slave catchers tracked her down in Ohio that she tried to kill the children. She succeeded in killing one of them before she was apprehended. Morrison was struck by newspaper accounts of the woman’s calmness and serenity during an interview after the incident. The more Morrison thought about the event, the more she realized that this deed was not that of a madwoman, but rather one of a mother who loved her children too much to see them live as slaves.⁴⁹

In Beloved Morrison fills in the silences left by the slave narratives. Writers of slave narratives such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs were constrained in what they could present about the condition of slavery by the strict codes of nineteenth-century decorum and deference and by the purposes for which they wrote—the abolition of slavery. Although Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) offered glimpses of what was going on in the mind of her heroine, in Beloved Morrison delves deep into the interior lives of the slaves to reveal slavery’s effect on their psyches.

The spark that ignited Morrison’s imagination for Paradise was the motto “Come Prepared or Not at All,” which she “stumbled across” six years prior to the publication of the novel in 1998.⁵⁰ These and the other ideas that have sown the seeds for Morrison’s fiction did not immediately reveal themselves as themes, however. She did not immediately recognize the story of Beloved in the newspaper article about Garner. She told Tate that what obsessed her in both the article and the Van Der Zee photograph was the love these women had for something other than themselves: that Garner “would not see” her children “sullied” and that the woman in the Van Der Zee photograph “had loved a man or had such affection for a man that she would postpone her own medical care or go ahead and die to give him time to get away.”⁵¹ As these themes began to take shape in her mind, it became increasingly clear to her that they could evolve into the trilogy now completed with the publication of Paradise.

GETTING THE WRITING UNDER WAY

Morrison begins writing as soon as she recognizes the story in the ideas she has gathered. Sometimes this takes years, as in the case of Beloved. A notable exception is Tar Baby. Morrison told Tate that when she finished Song of Solomon, she did not have an idea for another book. She dismisses the notion that she might have experienced a writer’s block. She believes that “when you hit a place where you can’t write, you probably should be still for a while because it’s not there yet.”⁵² This statement suggests that the ideas for Tar Baby—considered by most critics to be Morrison’s weakest novel—were not quite the obsession that the ideas for her other novels seem to have been.

When writing the first drafts of her novels, Morrison’s starting point often is not what becomes the beginning of the work. She believes that trying to write the beginning first can be inhibiting because of the tendency of writers to try and “get it just right.” She starts with whatever persists in her mind. For example, with Sula she started, not with her title character, but with Shadrack. Endings are easier for Morrison. She told Bakerman that she usually knows how

the story will end before she begins writing. She writes from notes rather than an outline. Morrison explains, “It’s like a plot, but it isn’t; it’s just things I think about the people and what happens. Notes. They’re notes, I suppose, but sometimes they have continuity. Parts of that stuff, I’m able to use verbatim, and some of it, I’m not. But it does give me a sense of the whole.”⁵³

In most of her novels Morrison presents her plots in the first few pages. Like a writer of detective stories, she wants to “hook” her readers right away. She wants to tell them what happened in such a way that they will keep reading to find out how it happened, who did it, and why.⁵⁴ The opening sentence of Paradise—“They shoot the white girl first”—is dramatic and effective.⁵⁵ The reader is indeed hooked until the end of the novel. With Beloved Morrison felt that it was important that Sethe’s act of infanticide and the details that drove her to it be immediately known but that the scene itself be deferred. Her concern was with trying to avoid “engorging herself or the reader with the violence” of Sethe’s actions. Morrison told Schappell,

I remember writing the sentence where Sethe cuts the throat of the child very, very late in the process of writing the book. I remember getting up from the table, and walking outside for a long time—walking around in the yard and coming back and revising it a little bit and going back out and in and rewriting the sentence over and over again… . Each time I fixed that sentence so that it was exactly right, or so I thought, but then I would be unable to sit there and would have to go away and come back. I thought that the act itself had to be not only buried but also understated, because if the language was going to compete with the violence itself it would be obscene or pornographic.”⁵⁶

Among the charges made against Morrison is precisely that her novels contain a great deal of violence. That violence often is committed by women—mothers who stick, slash, and bum their own children. Morrison manages to keep the violence from becoming “obscene or pornographic” by carefully and economically contextualizing it. Sethe’s actions in Beloved are shocking. Infanticide among enslaved African Americans was rarely discussed prior to the publication of Beloved. Within the context of the narratives of Sethe, Baby Suggs, and Paul D., Sethe’s motivations for killing her children, while not easily justifiable, cause the reader to think about the culpability of the African American community, which should have been on guard. This context also reminds readers that the fugitive slave laws allowed slave owners to go into states where slavery was prohibited and reclaim runaways. Eva Peace in Sula is another mother who does the unthinkable. Not only does she manage to lose a leg in order to collect insurance for the support of her children; she kills one adult child by immolating him rather than see him die the slow death of a drug addict, and nearly kills herself trying to put out the flames engulfing the body of another. Similar to Cholly Breedlove’s brutal attack on his daughter Pecola in The Bluest Eye and Margaret Street’s abuse of her son in Tar Baby, the violence in Sula serves to show the danger of misguided and distorted love. Furthermore, Morrison cautions that the situations and characters she presents in her novels are not representative. They are drawn almost exclusively from her imagination.

MORRISON’S CHARACTERS

Morrison insists that she neither writes about herself nor about people she knows: “In fiction, I feel the most intelligent, and the most free and the most excited, when my characters are fully invented people. That’s part of the excitement. If they’re based on somebody else, in a funny way it’s an infringement of a copyright. That person owns his life, has a patent on it. It shouldn’t be available for fiction.”⁵⁷ Even historical figures such as Garner are more invented than documented. When she was preparing to write Beloved, Morrison chose not to do in-depth research on Garner’s life. She read only what she needed to render what it might have felt like, internally, emotionally, to be a slave. Morrison told Schappell,

I’m not interested in real-life people as subjects for fiction—including myself. If I write about somebody who’s an historical figure like Margaret Garner, I really don’t know anything about her. What I knew came from reading two interviews with her. They said, Isn’t this extraordinary. Here’s a woman who escaped into Cincinnati from the horrors of slavery and was not crazy. Though she’d killed her child, she was not foaming at the mouth. She was very calm, she said, ’I’d do it again.’ That was more than enough to fire my imagination.⁵⁸

Morrison enjoys “taking control of her characters,” placing them in difficult situations, trying to figure out how they would act, and creating for each of them a distinct way of speaking and of being that is different from any other characters. To do so requires that they be “very carefully imagined”⁵⁹ and that she guard against grafting onto to her characters her own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. After years of editing, Morrison is able to maintain sufficient distance to let her characters come into their own, although occasionally she has to shut them up. She told Schappell that when she was writing Song of Solomon she had to make Pilate shut up, “otherwise she was going to overwhelm everybody. She got terribly interesting; characters can do that for a little bit. I had to take it back. It’s my book; it’s not called Pilate.”⁶⁰

Pilate is one of many memorable characters in Morrison’s fiction. Along with Consolata and Lone DuPres in Paradise, the midwife Circe and Jake in Song of Solomon, Baby Suggs in Beloved, and Therese in Tar Baby, Pilate represents the kind of ancestral figure Morrison discusses in an essay titled “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.”⁶¹ They are “timeless people whose relationships to the other characters are benevolent, instructive, and protective and they provide a certain kind of wisdom.” For Morrison, who admits to being superstitious, that wisdom arises out of a blending of the realms of the supernatural with “a profound rootedness in the real world” as the African American people among whom she was raised understood it. It is through this kind of blending and her continuing efforts to refine and free up the aural qualities of her language that Morrison hopes to engage readers everywhere more deeply in the culture of African American people.

NOTES

1. Jane Bakerman, “The Seams Can’t Show: An Interview with Toni Morrison" in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), p. 31.

2. Robert Stepto, “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 23.

3. Jessica Harris, “Toni Morrison: I Will Always Be a Writer,” Essence, 7 (December 1976): 56.

4. Elissa Schappell and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV,” Paris Review, 35 (Fall 1993): 98.

5. Harris, p. 91.

6. Gloria Naylor, “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, pp. 199-200.

7. Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. By Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley of Boston (London: Printed for Archibald Bell and sold in Boston by Cox & Berry, 1773).

8. No Crystal Stair, A Bibliography of Black Literature: Books Published Since 1965. Compiled by The New York Public Library, 1971.

9. Gloria Wade-Gayles, No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Gender in Black Women’s Fiction, Revised and Updated (Cleveland, Ohio: The Pilgrim Press, 1997), pp. 1-14.

10. Harris, p. 56.

11. Ibid., p. 90.

12. Toni Morrison, “Afterword” in The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1994), p. 216.

13. Haskel Frankel, Untitled review of The Bluest Eye in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), pp. 20-21.

14. L. E. Sissman, “Beginner’s Luck,” in Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. Anthony Appiah (New York: Amistad, 1993), pp. 4-5.

15. Ibid., p. 5.

16. Ruby Dee, Untitled review of The Bluest Eye in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, p. 19.

17. See the syllabi in the appendices of All the Women Are White, AH the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (Old Westbury, N.Y.: The Feminist Press, 1982), pp. 360-378.

18. “Alfred Knopf, Man of Letters, Dies at 91,” anonymous, San Diego Union-Tribune, 12 August 1984.

19. W. J. Weatherby, “Nobel House,” Guardian (13 August 1984).

20. Mark Feeney, “Literally a Legend,” Boston Globe, 21 November 2000, Cl.

21. Schappell and Brodsky Lacour, p. 91.

22. Zia Jaffrey, “The Salon Interview: Toni Morrison,” Salon.com (2 February 1998).

23. Kathy Neustadt, “The Visits of the Writers Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 88.

24. Jaffrey.

25. Ibid.

26. Charles Ruas, “Toni Morrison” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 98.

27. Mel Watkins, “Talk with Toni Morrison” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 44.

28. Morrison, pp. 209, 211, 216.

29. Ibid., p. 209.

30. Ibid., p. 210.

31. Bakerman in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 210.

32. Morrison, p. 21.

33. Ibid., p. 211.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., p. 215.

36. Schappell and Brodsky Lacour, p. 87.

37. Ibid., pp. 86-87.

38. Ibid., p. 87.

39. Ibid., p. 89.

40. Jaffrey, p. 3.

41. Schappell and Brodsky Lacour, pp. 89-90.

42. Claudia Tate, “Toni Morrison” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 157.

43. Schappell and Brodsky Lacour, p. 110.

44. Ruas in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 97.

45. Ibid., p. 104.

46. James Van Der Zee, Owen Dodson, and Camille Billops, The Harlem Book of the Dead (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.: Morgan & Morgan, 1978).

47. Ibid., pp. 52-53.

48. Ibid., p. 52.

49. Naylor in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 207.

50. Paul Gray, “Paradise Found,” Time.com (19 January 1998).

51. Naylor in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 208.

52. Ibid., p. 206.

53. Bakerman in Conversations with Toni Morrison, pp. 32-33.

54. Schappell and Brodsky Lacour, pp. 109-110.

55. Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998), p. 3.

56. Schappell and Brodsky Lacour, pp. 110-111.

57. Ibid., p. 105.

58. Ibid., pp. 123-124.

59. Ibid., p. 106.

60. Ibid.

61. Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, edited by Mari Evans (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), p. 343.