Pleased to have with us Toni Morrison for indepth conversation about her lifes work. Toni morrison, as he began, ive seen several citations that you told people that its easiest best most apt to describe you as a black woman novelist. Is that correct . Absolutely. What are we the public to take away from your choice of those three words . I think it was an attempt on my part to choose to be given the status of honorary white male writer. Generally speaking, womens work has been reduced to regional or merely or people complement ethnic writers by saying or implying that they are as good as mainstream writers and whereas i understand the complement, i thought it would be better for me to, at least in the late 60s early 70s to establish once and for all that all three of those things play, and black, i am a woman, and im a writer and they go together. Youve also always been a teacher. Yes. Why is that important to who you are and what you do . Edit quite know what else to do when i graduated because my first love was books so i thought i would choose a position or job where i talked them and had to read them and had to explain them to others and University Teaching was the thing i love the most and i still do. After all these years and all these other kinds of jobs that had ive always talked since i was 26 years old. Who instilled in you the love of reading . Im not quite sure. I know that i dont remember myself unable to read. I dont remember being a person abi know i read sometime before i went to the first grade and im assuming that came from my sister who was a year and and a half older but i sort of always knew how to do that activity and i remember very clearly being the only student in the First Grade Class that could read. I thought it was because the others werent interested. I lived in a very loving, chaotic, noisy full of music and argument comings and goings house. In that environment the only privacy there was was a books. So i developed this obsession i think with that form of escape. For those of you new to our indepth series, it is really that, we will have the opportunity to spend three full hours of Toni Morrison and tell you about how the process will work. We will talk here for about the next 15 minutes then our phone lines and email will be open for you to send in comments and questions. Thats really the beauty of the processes that we hear your questions and what thoughts you have on your mind. As we converse here, a way to phone in an email will be the bottom of our Television Screen and we welcome your participation. I know youve done this hundreds of times but tell me the story of lorraine ohio. Lorraine ohio is, was, not quite sure what it is now, working class town on lake erie, my parents appeared there around world war i, shortly after, you had mills, shipyards, steel mills, it was home to immigrants, east european, mexican, black people from the south, and board in the 30s so i remember the depression time. Then later during world war ii it was a booming town. But my formative opinion of it was this incredible place, with all the best parts of what ohio had to offer those people who were in the modes of abolition. Universities just up the road a little bit which was the First College to have women and blacks attended. So it was a melting pot really and truly because it was so few schools. One high school, for junior high schools i never lived on a block in which there was not white people. Other churches and social lives were separate. I thought thats the way most people lived but i learned later it was certainly not the case. Fascinating place to be, for all i have to tell you. How much connection you have with it today . Quite a bit, my sister and her family have nieces and nephews who still live there and my mother hasnt been dead that long, she was there all her life. So i have very Strong Family connections. When one looks at your family story, your biography, it struck me, at least, that almost the entire story of black experience in america grandfather, slave to sharecropper, the Great Migrations to the north and yourself, First Generation College and great success. That sounds formulaic in a way but i guess youre right. For me it seems enormously a long long time from my grandfather being born, he was five years old when the emancipation proclamation was a ahe was born in 1860. He was crying he was frightened. He kept hearing the adults say, its coming, its coming. The emancipation proclamation coming. He thought it was a monster. He crawled under the bed and they had to pull him out and explained to him it was a good thing. Im very keenly aware of the lifethreatening circumstances under which they live. The difficulty of my parents had as a young couple. And the miraculous thing i suppose in my generation. I knew i really want to go to college. My mother was not interested in my getting married. She didnt think that was necessarily the ultimate goal of a womans life. Rather, she thought it shouldnt come too soon. She and my father were very supportive and they told me, we dont have enough for you to get a full College Education but we do have enough for one year. I said, thats all i wanted just one year. Thats the way i went off convinced that i could survive financially for one year. In 1949, 50. Of course i was able to work and do the rest myself. But thats how iffy it was in those days about getting a College Education. Not just for africanamericans but for women. Yes. How did you finance the rest of your education . I had temporary jobs while i was in washington, Howard University where i was an undergraduate and actually my mother got a job, she was so happy i was here in college. She took a job at night as a woman in a ladies room collecting tips and she made 15 a week, five dollars a night and she sent it to me. In ohio . Yes. How did Chloe Crawford come your birth name, become Toni Morrison . A little bit of literacy i think and some vanity. My name is chloe, i love the name, children couldnt pronounce it, some adults would refuse to pronounce it and they called me cello or clo or other things that were not chloe. My family because my sister and i were so close in age we were always together they called us lois and chloe. I didnt have supple syllables for myself. To make a long story short. When i gone away to howard i use the name toni which was short form of my saints name anthony. You married and became a mother and were you writing at this point in your life cannot. I think i was but i certainly didnt call myself a writer, i was a teacher. I was interested in the work of some local people here in washington, some faculty members, some artists, they had a group of writers and i was invited to attend i brought with me some frail Little Things i worked on as a very young person. One of them was a little story that i had to write fresh because they wouldnt let me come if i didnt bring anything new. So i wrote a story and brought it to that meeting. I used it much later as the heart of the first novel i wrote. That was called . a id like to show it to the audience. As i do, would you explain how this book actually made it to print from that beginning . I wrote the story for the club, i remember my baby, my oldest son was hanging on my shoulder, pulling my earrings while i was writing and i remember him spitting up on some orange juice and i always tell the story, it must be important because i didnt wipe it up around the way. I will grow around it. Before somebody was interested to take it. Alan kinsler Holt Rinehart and winston. To remember the letter or the phone call but said yes we will take this. It was a phone call. There were so many phone calls about, i wish i could take this book but i dont think they will. Is important to me and ought to have a style immediately not to have to develop one. I had to learn how to write better. How to seduce the reader faster. How to challenge a reader. How to open up the world. How to manipulate but what i am pleased about and i didnt know it until i wrote the second book was that they really truly do have a recognizable style if i took one page out of those books and read it i think i would know it was me and not somebody else. I think thats true of readers who know my work. For people who know you who havent yet read your work, can you put words to that style and the stories are trying to tell . This style is inevitable at the moment but its kind of welcoming style. The voices welcoming and doesnt blink and tells you very difficult things but a voice that makes it all right to hear. This is not to be an easy trip, the journey is gonna be bumpy but im going to tell you the truth and you can hear it because ive already been there and im holding your hand and you can go with me and its gonna be all right. Thats the comfort level. The stories are funny, sad, odd combinations that reveal the complexity and the profundity and the size of human life. Sometimes we live is so small in our imagination i mean small frightened lives and sometimes people in the books do but generally speaking the most important thing that happens is that their lives are larger and that they learn something at the end of the book that but for the book they wouldve never learned. Let me take a minute to give people the telephone number so they can join the conversation, if you live in the eastern half of the United States the number to reach Toni Morrisons 2027370001. The western half the mountain or pacific time zones right now 2027370002. Will begin taking telephone calls in about five minutes. If you would indulge me, i shouldve asked you this before we were on camera but i thought maybe we could hear your voice through a little bit of your work. I was struggling with what to choose and i decided upon really the operative moment within beloved. Please give us a quick synopsis of beloved. Its a story based on the historical figure of a black woman who killed her children, or tried to, when she was a fugitive and didnt want to return to slavery. Beloved is about her life as imagined by me significantly altered by the return of what she believed to be the daughter she killed. We pick it up when the fugitive slave is about to be enforced abfugitive slave act is about to be enforced picking up by the group of people. The sheriff turned . The sheriff turned and said to the others, he better go on looks like your business is over. Mine started now. Schoolteacher beat his head against his thigh and spit before leaving the wood chips. They didnt look at the woman in the pepper plants at the flower in her head and they didnt look at the abfaces that had edged closer in spite of the catches rifle warnings enough for now, little neighbor boy eyes open and saw us come a little nigbor grow eyes staring between the wet fingers that held her face so her head wouldnt fall off. Little nigbor baby eyes crinkling up to cry in the arms of the old and the arms of the old nigbor whose own eyes were nothing but slivers looking down at his feet but the worst ones were those of the nigbor woman who looked like she didnt have any. Except for whites and disappeared and as black as the skin she looked blind. They unhitched from School Teachers course the mule that was to carry the fugitive woman back to where she belonged and tied her to the fence. Then with the sun straight up over their heads they trotted off leaving the sheriff behind among the damnedest bunch of cones theyd ever seen. All testimony to the results of a little socalled freedom imposed on people who needed every care and indulgence in the world to keep them from the cannibal life they preferred. You chose an interesting one. My efforts to think the way committed slaveholders think. The naturalness of their content. The effortlessness of their belief in their superiority to people coming in the book at a moment after the reader has been in the lives of these people that is categorized as nigger woman, nigger man, nigger baby, nigger boy, because the characters are so familiar and intimate to the for trade come of this house hoping the section i read comes with a chill, not just because of the events of the slaughter but the way in which at this point youre being looked at. How you get inside the psyche of these people . Its difficult but i used when i think our methods may be actors and actresses use when you have a big character or try to make it specific so realized and you want to be in that persons head if youre on stage to wear the clothes, where the shoes, behave the way that person would so you have to enter or project and know where they parked their hair, what kind of soap they would wear, what food they dont like, whether or not it appears in the book, try to imagine all those things. That works for me. I can suspend, i dont judge my characters that way, whether i want to have lunch with them or not, something quite different. You have to love them for the moment of their portrayal, whether they are men, women, old, young, children, what have you. And they sprung from your pen fully formed, or develop as you write cannot. As the book comes up do you already know the story you tell . I know the questions the story is supposed to answer, or unprovoked as i was by margaret garner, what must it feel like . Or paradise to hear about the people who walked all that distance to get to free black towns that were turned away by black people who had also been slaves like them and they were not welcome. I thought, what that must feel like . I know what the stories about, i sort of know the journey. Now i have to find out whos in work that out for me . Margaret garner i didnt want to know too much about her, what she looked like etc. , i wanted to inventor so i only need just a few strokes to start and then i sort of put them together. So there never fully realized immediately. They always take currying and coddling and stroking and personal introductions anything i can do to get them to do to speak and trust me. As you can see, our lines are lighted up. Our first telephone call from Richmond Virginia welcome to our conversation you are on the air. First of all, i want to thank you for writing the book song of solomon, its been one of those momentous occasions for me in my life. I had an opportunity to be at your First Reading for paradise at the abcouple years ago. I wanted to know, he made a statement at that particular time that you thought that book should remain books and someone asks you about your excitement about putting all your books into movies and plays and since that time you had one your books, beloved, produced into a major Motion Picture which in particular i was disappointed in but i still enjoyed the book and still had to go back to the book. I wanted to know, with you in the future hold more artistic control over your books being put into another generation . Thank you. No i wont. I dont want artistic control over other genres being developed in my books. I believe books are singular, maybe they dont have to remain books but they certainly are books. If there made subsequently into movies, good movies, great movies. The book has to stand on the shelf by itself. Its a special kind of pleasure in it. I am a very controlling person when i work. If emma can make the movie, produce it, choose it, fund it, i dont want to be involved in it as a kind of consultant without power. And without knowledge because i dont know how to make movies. I dont know how to write screenplays and i dont want to learn how to do that either. I respect the people who do and i give them whatever information they solicit from me but i dont want final cut on these things unless i own the whole shop. Our next question is an email comes from abwho is a teacher at Seabreeze High School is about beloved. She writes your novel beloved abmy questions are related to its text and interested in knowing the significance of the parallel structure you implemented in the final chapter but it was not a story to pass on, it was not a story to pass on and this is not a story to pass on additionally, my students often inquire whether beloved is physically pregnant. They seem to conclude shes actually carrying paul dees baby. Personally i tried them that they watched one too many so purpose. Your students are ahead of you this time. In a way, i wanted beloved to be all things, i wanted her to be the returned child that set the loan for and the daughter denver long for. They need her to come back and say let them work out their at the same time, the buried scene concerns a little passage maybe this girl is a survivor of the Middle Passage, traumatized by it, kept lockup somewhere, but only the memories of what that mustve been like and for me the two things came together. Resurrections from the dead in order to demand love, which could be the dead baby. Resurrections from slave ship journeys in order to demand love. Those two stories seem to me to be parallel. I never came down on one side or the other but there is a clear indication that beloved is a historical figure rather then the ghostlike figure. Next telephone call from hampton virginia. This question is about song of solomon. How did you come up with the great strategy of the water stain on the table to be a physicality of milkmans mother memory for her for her past life . The other thing is, it seems to be the first book where there is a male protagonist and wanted to know what was that shift for you from going to a female protagonist to a male protagonist . I searched around a little bit for something quiet and unobtrusive, persistent, a bit of amar to explain something about the characterization of milkmans mother and the water stain. If your housekeeper you know its impossible to remove there not an overwhelmingly dramatic mark but one that you keep working at. It seemed good and domestic for her. The shift to writing about men was a mighty shift i thought it would be not so, i had written cameos with men in them before but to have the book engine driven by men was far more completed than i thought it would be. I had to rely, for entrance into the advantages of world on my father or my uncles and men i knew, in trying to see a render, how they saw the world. I think also i was unprepared for the impact that women have on their lives. It wasnt just male bonding, but i can assure you, it was a very powerful and different imaginative process that i had to go through to center that book on male protagonists. And it sold more than it had even t