Terry Gross:
In 1978, my guest Toni Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her novel Song of Solomon. All of her books, which include Tar Baby, Sula, and The Bluest Eye, have been praised for how they so richly and honestly portray black American experiences. Morrison’s new novel, Beloved, is set in 1873 after the Civil War, and it’s about escaped and emancipated slaves who are trying to build new lives but are haunted by the past.

The main character, Sethee, lives with the ghost of her two-year-old baby girl. Sethie slit her baby’s throat 18 years earlier, rather than let her be recaptured into slavery. The ghost is known as Beloved, the one word that was printed on her tombstone. In this week’s Sunday New York Times Book Review, Margaret Atwood wrote, “If there were any doubts about Morrison’s stature as a preeminent American novelist of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest. In three words or less, it’s a hair-raiser.”

I spoke to Toni Morrison earlier today from the NPR Bureau in New York, and she told me how she prepared herself emotionally to write a book about slavery.

Toni Morrison:
Well, I couldn’t determine it. It was very ad hoc. I found, or I always suspected that I didn’t have the emotional stability to live in that world for the three or four years, however long it would take to examine it. And so I did it, I suppose the way they did it, which was a little bit at a time, I had to keep telling myself that if they could live in it, then it must be possible for me to write about it. And whenever I got or felt overwhelmed, I would just stop. It was very difficult.

Terry Gross:
You were reimagining that period and having to immerse yourself in it, to write about it. But what did you do to actually put yourself back in time to understand that time and to get the kind of detail that you needed for the book?

Toni Morrison:
I relied on small entrances into that world. The very serious problem of trying to make the story overwhelm the situation. Because if you start out to write a book about slavery, you are probably already lost because it’s big and it’s long. And you discover how long 200 years is. Not five years, not 10, but 200. So that you have to have an anchor or a mooring. And the mooring is a group of characters who you are caring about very deeply, but a small group in one place with some central action, all of which is impacted by the condition of slavery. But you couldn’t tell yourself, or I couldn’t tell myself, that I was writing a book about slavery because I would have drowned in that. So I went into it sort of backwards and concentrated on the theme that I had begun with, which has to do with that tension between nurturing and being an individual.

Terry Gross:
I think there have been a lot of books and movies that have actually really trivialized slavery, or where slavery becomes the backdrop for a romantic story or something like that. Did you feel in advance of sitting down to write this book that there were certain traps that you had to avoid in order to really get to the truth of the experience?

Toni Morrison:
Yeah, I think that was part of the fear, trying to avoid the routine treatment. The first, of course, is just trying not to have the plot be slavery, since that’s predictable and boring and you’re in it and you want to get out. In other words, not to have slavery drive the book. The second is that, and I’m included in this group, everybody thinks you sort of know all about it. But until you project into it, most of the information is so sensational, so exotic, so alien, and so pathological that it’s difficult to grasp. And the fact is that most slave stories that focus on the slaves focus on them as the pathological ones, and never focus on the pathology in which they live and in which they are exercising everything they know about being human in order to maintain that position. So that the trivial treatments of slave stories sometimes as written and sometimes as filmed is as though this was the kind of, as you say, seen in which other things of infinitely more interest than the lives of the slaves were going on.

Terry Gross
Part of your novel is about Beloved, which is the ghost of a two-year-old baby. And I wonder if this idea of a two-year-old baby’s ghost coming back to haunt the house of her mother is based on a story that you ever heard.

Toni Morrison
Well, no. I’ve heard a lot of ghost stories. Not that one. But in imagining the life of this woman, this woman, Setha, whose life I invented, although it was based on the life of a real woman, a real slave woman, who in fact did precisely what Setha did. In inventing it, it seemed to me that the questions to be asked of a mother that made that claim could best be asked by the daughter she killed, that the legitimate query about motherhood and Individuality and freedom and responsibility and all of these questions about love should be asked by the daughter. So that I made history or the past flesh palpable and just created a situation in which the dialogue could take place one on one. It’s not new for me because I frequently use presences in order to illustrate whatever I have to say about the past or about history and also to reflect that intimate association between the living and the dead, which is part of older black culture but also suggest something about memory and the past which I can handle better in narrative than, you know, with real presences than I would be able to. I think I don’t want to be abstract and, you know, to pontificate and editorialize about these things. So the drama of having the murdered self or the abused past sit down at the table with you was just a strategy that I found extremely exciting for myself. And also I was in competition with slavery. I mean the imagination of the slaveholders and the sensational aberrations that slaveholders came up a kind of really creative cruelty was simply too much to absorb it. So I had to keep cleaning it up and pushing it back and making my story much less sensational than the real story of what slavery was about. And my competition would involve my stress on the, you know, sort of personal exotic nature of this confrontation between a woman and her daughter who is dead.

Terry Gross:
Novelist Toni Morrison is my guest and we’re discussing her new novel, Beloved. Were there ghost stories passed on in your family or stories that were told even to scare the children at night that lay behind you, including the story of a ghost in your novel?

Toni Morrison:
Well, I think we, I certainly remember ghost stories that were told in my family among all the adults. And I think it’s representative of pre-television family entertainment. I meet a lot of people who had similar childhoods. But they were certainly not for us in the sense that these were not adults telling stories to children in order to instruct or scare or even entertain them because they were telling these stories over and over again to themselves and we were listeners to them, but they enjoyed the repetition of these stories, certainly as much as we did. And then when, you know, as we got older, we were asked to tell our own and retell those that we had heard. So in that sense, it was a pickup, you know, a sustained line of storytelling that I have, complete recollections of stories that my mother told me and my father told me and my aunts and uncles that their parents had told them and their parents had told them in that way they vary a great deal from Some of those same stories I’ve seen printed but yes, it was a very strong tradition of storytelling.

Terry Gross:
Do you think that kind of storytelling had anything to do with you being a writer?

Toni Morrison
I guess it must have done although I started writing so late. I don’t, I didn’t give it any real value in the beginning.

Terry Gross
My guest is novelist Toni Morrison and her new novel is titled Beloved. It’s just been published by Knopf. We’re going to talk some more about her life and her writing, but first we’re going to take a short break. This is Fresh Air.

Narrator:
Fresh Air is produced live from WHYY in Philadelphia and is distributed by National Public Radio.

Terry Gross:
Novelist Toni Morrison is my guest. There’s a sentence in your book where one of the characters talks about “the serious work of beating back the past.” I really like that sentence very much, or that fragment of a sentence. And it really gives a sense of kind of keeping bad memories and things that haunt you away and all the effort that it takes to not remember those things. And I wonder if slavery was a memory like that in your family, if that was information that was kind of kept out and kept from the children?

Toni Morrison:
Well that I wouldn’t know. The people in my family whom I knew who had been born in slavery did not pass on that kind of information. And that’s probably the provocation for dealing with it anyway. You know there’s an enormous necessity to get on, to have a future, to wake up the next day so that the creative processes of forgetting become elaborate. In addition, there is the absolute necessity for remembering certain things. This business of not confronting the past, of not knowing it, of living in a world in which we are so satisfied with guilt instead of the real emotion, that guilt simply stands for. And it seemed to me a very contemporary problem as well as one of slavery because beating back the past, not recognizing all of the information in the past, is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a curse because you lose a lot of information. The necessity for being innocent, which is you know, the classic American novel’s desire is that the hero didn’t do it, is somehow innocent and free and washed white, makes us sometimes appear to be simple-minded because it seems overwhelmingly important in the mainstream literature that no one has any responsibility for the society in which he or she lives. And that has been the so-called result of a country, you know, which is based on the erasure of the past and the future, the pioneer, the territory, the immigrant who gets rid of the old country and the wicked past and cleans the slate. On the one hand, that’s a sort of a desirable dreamy sort of existence, but on the other it makes it impossible for anybody to take seriously the history that is the country. And of course that would affect black people as well, who may or may not pass on for purely reasons of psychological and emotional survival, information that was too terrible to describe. So that at the end of the text with some tongue in cheek, but with some accuracy as well, I write the sentence three times: this is not a story to pass on. Although, in fact, that is what I’m doing in the text.

Terry Gross:
Well, you’re doing it generations after it happened. I guess that makes a difference.

Toni Morrison
Yeah, it makes a difference because I’m not always sure that such stories can be written at the time they take place anyway. I mean I’m just not sure that anybody in 1873 or 76 in Reconstruction could have written it anyway. I mean or if they did they would have written something else. The slave narratives and the speeches and the letters of the period were you know quite different and whether or not the whole thing could be encompassed in a novel, I mean many people have believed that it could be and have tried their hands at it, but that would never have occurred to, I don’t think, a black person in 1873 because no novel, you know, the imagination has already been, you know, sort of overwhelmed by the fact.

Terry Gross:
You know, but I think a lot of children who grew up in families of Holocaust survivors or families in which there was, you know, history in, a history of slavery someplace, get almost parables told to them about what could happen and why you have to live life a certain way to, you know, protect yourself against certain evils and how you have to rise above the horrors that were inflicted on your grandparents or whatever. Did you get lectures like that from your parents?

Toni Morrison:
No, I didn’t. I got other messages from them which were much more valuable because those are very negative, the ones you just recited. I mean, it’s undue burdens as though I’m somehow responsible for all of that. What they did, which I found really quite healthy, was they assumed, without ever articulating it, that we were capable and quite bright, and in some way morally superior to those who had degraded themselves by trying to degrade us. And that information was so consistent. They seemed to feel that, you know, there were rich people or there were white people or there were wicked people who really had a lot of answering to do for themselves. And we were not like that. So I always felt very special. I’ve always felt, for purposes of xenophobia doesn’t work, but I always thought that we were on a higher plane than other people. Not because there was fear out there, not because white people could make me into something less, because they never believed that was the case. What they could do would be to kill me or maim me, but they could never make me be without quality. And that was so much a part of my upbringing and everybody else I knew in that town. We were very, very poor people that I, it took me years to be able to articulate what it was that made me feel like I belonged in this place. And it was this rather than giving me all these sort of sermonizing about terror. In other words, I was not afraid.

Terry Gross:
But you had a lot of self-respect.

Toni Morrison:
Yeah, because…

Terry Gross:
That’s what this is about, building self-respect.

Toni Morrison
But it wasn’t, you must have, I hear people say, you are somebody, you really are good.

Terry Gross:
Yeah, that helps, right.

Toni Morrison:
And then people say, oh yeah, but then maybe it’s a possibility that I’m not, but they were not surprised at superior work.

Terry Gross:
Were you the first person in your family to go to college?

Toni Morrison:
No.

Terry Gross:
Really? I had an uncle who went to Ohio State.

Terry Gross:
So it wasn’t a big symbolic thing for you to go?

Toni Morrison:
It was a big economic problem for me to go. And so shaky, money being so scarce, that my mother took a job to help out. My father had two and, more often than not, three jobs in order to take care of us, but I remember them saying, look, we can guarantee you one year. After that we’ll see. So I went away feeling very blessed about the fact that there was a year available to me, but not ever believing that I would have a second year or be able to pay for a second year, and I also worked, but you know, things were very different then.

Terry Gross:
You went to a black college, you went to Howard University in Washington. Looking back, are you glad that you went to a black university instead of a, well, I guess so many of the universities then were really basically segregated.

Toni Morrison:
Oh sure they were. There was a white versus black situation probably in the…

Terry Gross:
Well, you went to Cornell, though, after it’s for graduate school, where you were one of just a handful of black students, right?

Toni Morrison:
Well, you know, I wanted very much to go to Howard University, not a black college, but one in particular, and that was Howard, which was different from many other black colleges because I had not ever been among black people who read as much as I did and I thought would be as smart as I was in terms of reading and learning because I had never lived without the presence of white people in school and in neighborhoods and so on and I really wanted to know what life was like with nobody else there but us the way it was in my family but not on the street so I was very much interested in that and I lived very close to Oberlin and I remember my mother thought Oberlin was a very good idea and it had such a wonderful history of you know admitting women and blacks and so on without being persuaded long, long time ago before the Emancipation and Proclamation. Anyway, I didn’t want to do that. And I went to Howard and I don’t regret it. And I went to graduate school at Cornell because it had an English department that had an extraordinary reputation. And I would not be in a situation that was unlike all my 12 years of public school by being in a predominantly white school because I was always in a situation of being the only black, or the one of three blacks from first grade through 12.

Terry Gross:
You said you wanted to go to Howard to see what it was like when it was just black people. Was it what you expected?

Toni Morrison:
Partly. The faculty was extraordinary, I think. And I ended up with a group of students whom I found to be certainly the best of any that I’ve ever met. But there were differences there that I had not anticipated, and they were class differences. I had not been among what I suppose now we call middle class black people who were mirror images of middle class white people. That was a surprise.

Terry Gross:
When did you start to write?

Toni Morrison:
Not too long ago.

Terry Gross:
Come on.

Toni Morrison:
No, I was an adult. I was not a young aspiring writer. I had two children.

Terry Gross:
You had children already when you started? That’s funny because so many writers stop for a while when they have children or find it very hard to write when they have children.

Toni Morrison:
They do. They say they do. But I didn’t. I mean, my life changed completely. I found myself eager to read a certain kind of book. So I didn’t know where it was. So I played around with writing it and liked the process and I wasn’t at that time all that interested in publishing, even though I was in publishing by then. But I just was, it was a way of thinking and remembering. It was order out of chaos. It was everything that every writer’s ever said. That process, that creative process is. All I know is that when I did that first book, I didn’t ever want to not be without something like that to do. So in the evening, young children sleep early in the day. So I had three, four hours in the evening. And that’s what I did. Maybe it was another way of doing what my family and friends had done when I was young, which is telling stories at night to entertain yourself, but in any way it ended up being a novel.

Terry Gross:
For years you were an editor as well as a writer and I think you recently gave up editing, is that right?

Toni Morrison:
That’s true, I did.

Terry Gross:
Did you do that to have more time to write?

Toni Morrison:
I don’t know, I think I had some very clear reasons for it at the time I did it, when I’d done it a long long time, and then too I think at some point I didn’t think of it as with more time, although that is in fact what happened, but I had some problems with grabbing that so to speak for myself. I didn’t even call myself a writer until after I’d published the third book. I always called myself an editor who or a teacher who. It was very difficult to say, “I’m a writer and that’s what I do and I don’t do anything else,” because I never been able to not do anything else. But I thought that I really wanted to see, to take a risk. With children you can’t take certain kinds of risks. But I wanted not to end up in my grave not having done some things. And one of them was to see whether or not it was possible to live and support myself and my family and the other people who have claims on me by writing and or lecturing or as I put it at that time to live like the grownups did. So that meant to leave the security of the publishing company. In addition to that I think there were some, I must have been feeling that I didn’t want to take care of other people’s business anymore. I wanted to take care of my own.

Terry Gross
Has it made writing any easier to have stopped doing the editing part of your work?

Toni Morrison:
Oh no, writing’s never easy.

Terry Gross:
Never easy.

Toni Morrison:
Well, what did happen, though, is it got better, I think. The writing got better because of the way in which I could shape the time. You know, you have longer time to not write badly.

Terry Gross:
Because you’re not squeezing it in?

Toni Morrison:
Yeah, you don’t have to rewrite. I mean, you know, I rewrite so much that when I’m doing it on in the evenings and weekends and it’s short spurts that takes a long, long time. This time I could do rewrites better because there were sustained periods you know because I didn’t have to sort of go to work in the middle of it.

Terry Gross:
Right. Well I want to thank you very much for talking with us about your life and your writing. Thank you. It was a pleasure for me.

My guest has been Toni Morrison. Her new novel is titled Beloved, and it’s published by Knopf. I’m Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.