12 | The Tribune | Weekend
Friday, June 18, 2021
literary lives – Toni Morrison (1931 – 2019)
The Nobel laureate who gave a unique voice to the Black experience Part I Sir Christopher Ondaatje writes about the American novelist, essayist and college professor who gained worldwide recognition when she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. “I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little coloured girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a world hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do.” – Toni Morrison Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah and George Wofford – the second of four children from a working class, Black family. Her mother was born in Greenville, Alabama, and moved north as a child. Her father grew up in Cartersville, Georgia. When he was 15 a group of white people lynched two Black businessmen who lived on his street. “He never told us that he’d seen the bodies. But he had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him.” – Toni Morrison Soon after the lynching Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, hoping to escape racism and secure meaningful employment in Ohio’s industrial economy. He got odd jobs and worked as a welder for US Steel. His wife was a homemaker and devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. When Morrison was two years old, her family’s landlord set fire to the house in which they lived – while they were at home – because her parents could not afford to pay the rent. Morrison recalls her parents laughing at their landlord’s actions rather than falling into despair. Morrison also recalls her parents telling African-American folk stories, ghost stories, and singing songs to instil a sense of heritage and language in the family. She was encouraged to read, and discovered Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy who became her favourite authors. When she was 12 she became a Catholic and took the baptismal name “Anthony” after Anthony of Padua – which led to her nickname “Toni”. She attended Lorain
High School, was on the debating team, the yearbook staff, and the school drama club. In her early teens she served as a housemaid for local white families. “I started around thirteen. That was the work that was available: to go to a woman’s house after school and clean for three or four hours. The normal teenage jobs were not available. Housework always was. It wasn’t uninteresting. You got to work these gadgets that I never had at home: vacuum cleaners. Some of the people were nice. Some were terrible. Years later I used some of what I observed in my fiction.” – Toni Morrison When she was 18 she enrolled at Howard University, in Washington, DC, searching out fellow black intellectuals. There for the first time she encountered racially segregated restaurants and buses. She graduated in 1953 with a BA in English and went on to earn a Master of Arts from Cornell University in 1955. Her thesis was titled “Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s treatment of the alienated.” For the next nine years she taught English at Texas Southern University in Houston, and Howard University – where she met and married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. Their first son was born in 1961, and she was pregnant with their second son when she divorced Morrison in 1964. Her son Slade was born in 1965. She kept her name Morrison. That year she began working as an editor for LW Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House in Syracuse, New York. Two years later she transferred to Random House in New York City, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department. “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” – Toni Morrison In her capacity as a senior editor at Random House, Morrison was instrumental in publishing African-American writers such as Angela Davis,
Toni Cade Bambara, Huey Newton (the Black Panther) and novelist Gayle Jones. One of the first books she worked on was the groundbreaking Contemporary African Literature (1972), and later the autobiography of world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, The Greatest: My Own Story (1975). She also published the work of Henry Dumas, a novelist and poet who had been shot and killed in 1968 by a transit officer in the New York City subway. The Black Book (1974) – an anthology of photographs and essays of black life in the United States from slavery to the 1940s – was also published. Morrison had been writing fiction herself when she was 18 at Howard University. One idea with which she was obsessed was about a black girl who longed to have blue eyes. It became her first novel
