Black author wrote to fill the silence
Life Story
By the time Toni Morrison published her fifth novel, Beloved, in 1987 she was already a successful writer. She had picked up a clutch of literary awards, appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1981 and had been fostering a new generation of African-american writers through her work as an editor.
Yet it was this tale of infanticide, perpetrated by a mother trying to spare her child from the horrors of slavery, that launched Morrison into international literary superstardom. The book is based on the true story of Margaret
Garner, who in
1851 escaped from a Kentucky plantation with her children.
Sensing that she was about to be caught, Garner killed all but her youngest child, claiming that death was preferable to bondage.
In Morrison’s retelling, the title character is a murdered child who survives as a ghostly reminder of a shameful past. She is called Beloved because the family cannot afford to put ‘‘Dearly Beloved’’ on her tombstone.
Reviewer Nicholas Shakespeare described it as ‘‘a great novel’’, declaring that ‘‘anyone who enters [this world] will be swayed by the sheer calypso power of [Morrison’s] dialogue and imagery’’.
When it failed to win the National Book Award, 48 black writers signed a letter of protest; soon after it received a Pulitzer prize. Five years later, in 1993, Morrison became the first African-american to receive the Nobel prize in literature.
Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. Her father, George, a shipyard welder, and mother, Ramah, were both descended from slaves. George believed whites were ‘‘genetically evil’’.
She was 2 when the family’s landlord set fire to their house because her parents were unable to pay the rent. Morrison recalled that her sensitivity to race did not come about until she was a teenager and started dating.
She studied English and classics at Howard University, a predominantly black institution in Washington, where for the first time she encountered racial segregation. Moving to Cornell University she wrote a master’s thesis about suicide in the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.
After a spell teaching at Texas Southern University in Houston, she returned to Howard to teach English. The civil rights movement was in full swing and, through the university, she met the poet Amiri Baraka and Andrew Young, a future mayor of Atlanta.
She also met Harold ‘‘Moxy’’ Morrison, a Jamaican architect. They were married in 1958 and had two sons: Harold, who followed his father into architecture; and Slade, an abstract artist and musician who worked on several children’s books with his mother, but died of pancreatic cancer in 2010.
Her marriage, however, was an unhappy one and she was divorced in 1964. She started writing to escape. ‘‘I wrote like someone with a dirty habit,’’ she said. ‘‘Secretly, compulsively, slyly.’’
Morrison cut an imperious figure, with her silverdreaded crown, her magnanimous ghostly melodrama and her lightning intellect . . .
She also joined a writing group. For one meeting she hurriedly prepared a piece loosely based on someone from her childhood, a girl who prayed to have blue eyes.
It became the basis for her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), which tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who feels her life would be vastly improved if only she had blue eyes like Shirley Temple. Her drunken father rapes her, leaving her pregnant and an outcast. It was, said Morrison, the book she had wanted to read but it did not exist. She was horrified later to learn it was being taught in schools as an insight into a typical black family.
Left alone with two young children, Morrison found work as an editor with L W Singer, the textbook division of Random House, in Syracuse, New York; she later moved to the fiction department, where she promoted the writing of black women writers such as Angela Davis and Toni Cade Bambara.
By 1983 Morrison was able to quit editing to concentrate on writing, from her apartment in Tribeca, Manhattan, or more often from a boathouse in upstate New York, where she relished the solitude. She also returned to academia, teaching at Princeton University. When doing neither she enjoyed gardening.
Beloved was made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998, and in 2005 Morrison wrote the libretto to Margaret Garner ,an opera by Richard Danielpour based on the book’s main character. In 2012 she received the presidential medal of freedom from President Barack Obama.
Morrison cut an imperious figure, with her silver-dreaded crown, her magnanimous ghostly melodrama and her lightning intellect, ‘‘like a haughty auntie who could slap you down with a single exquisite sentence’’, the novelist Diana Evans wrote in The Sunday Times in March.
At times she could be outspoken. In 2012, after Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Africanamerican boy, was shot dead by a neighbourhood watch co-ordinator in Florida, Morrison declared that there were two things she wanted to see: ‘‘One is a white kid shot in the back by a cop. Never happened. The second [is] a record of any white man . . . who has been convicted of raping a black woman.’’
She could also be great company. Ian Bloom, then a young British publisher, recalled looking her up in 1972 on his second day in New York. ‘‘She took me to lunch and afterwards we visited a sex shop, where we bounced together on a waterbed,’’ he said.
Morrison, whose final collection of essays, Mouth Full of Blood, was published in March, always made it clear that she wrote for black people; yes, there were white people in her books, but ‘‘the point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it’’.
The need to centralise African-american life and its history was the defining factor, so that those at the margins became the mainstream. ‘‘What was driving me to write was the silence,’’ she told The New Yorker. ‘‘So many stories untold and unexamined. There was a wide vacuum in the literature.’’
Morrison’s skill, and legacy, was to start filling that vacuum. –