On this page: biography, excerpt of interview with Toni Morrison from The Nation, article by John Updike from The New Yorker, Interview from The Guardian, Colonial Williamsburg article about slavery, Encarta article about slavery

Biography from The Toni Morrison Society

Nobel-prize winning author Toni Morrison was born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio. Toni Morrison’s family of origin had a profound influence on her development as a writer. Morrison’s mother, Ramah Willis Wofford, was a gifted singer and was active in her  church and community. Morrison’s father, George Wofford, worked several jobs to ensure the financial security of his family. The Wofford household, which also included her maternal grandparents and her three siblings, was filled with music, stories, and a deep understanding of the history and struggles of African Americans. As a result, Morrison’s world was richly imbued with a sense of place, community, purpose, and identity that would infuse the rich fabric of her imaginative universe.

In 1949, Morrison left Lorain to pursue undergraduate education at Howard University. Upon graduation, Morrison continued her studies and earned a Master’s degree from Cornell University. Morrison completed her Master’s degree in 1955 and began her long career as a university instructor with an appointment at Texas Southern University.

Later, as a senior editor at Random House, she was responsible for shepherding the writing careers of a generation of African American writers including those of Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas, Michelle Cliff, and Angela Davis.  In 1970, Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, and her second novel, Sula, in 1973. Song of Solomon, published in 1977, was based loosely on the stories Morrison learned from listening to her maternal grandfather, John Solomon Willis. In 1981, Morrison published her fourth novel, Tar Baby. Dedicating her time completely to writing and teaching, Morrison left her position as an editor at Random House to accept an endowed chair at SUNY Albany.

During this incredibly productive time in her life, Morrison turned again to history as a source when she chose the story of Margaret Garner as a springboard for her fifth novel, Beloved (1987). Beloved received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to hold an endowed chair at an Ivy League university when, in 1989, she became the Robert E. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University. In 1992, Morrison published her sixth novel, Jazz and her literary critical text, Playing in the Dark:  Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

In 1993, Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Black woman to win the prize.  In response to national conversations about race, Morrison edited Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power  (1992) and Birth of a Nation'hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case in 1997.

Also in 1998, Toni Morrison published her seventh novel, Paradise and, in 2003, her eighth novel, Love. In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision, Morrison also wrote the children’s book Remember: The Journey to School Integration (2004) for young readers.  Demonstrating her broad artistic range, Morrison wrote the libretto for  the opera Margaret Garner with composer Richard Danielpour. The opera premiered in Detroit in 2005 to rave reviews.

In the spring of 2006, after a 17 year tenure at Princeton University, Morrison retired from full time teaching and became the Robert F. Goheen, Professor Emerita. The same year, the New York Times Book Review named Beloved as the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.

Toni Morrison continues to be one of the world’s most lauded and productive contemporary artists. In November 2006, Morrison served as guest curator at the Louvre in Paris at an exhibition entitled The Foreigner’s Home.  In 2007, her hometown, Lorain, Ohio, named its new local elementary school The Toni Morrison Elementary School. Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy, is scheduled for publication in November of 2008.

http://www.bucknell.edu/x44035.xml

Excerpt from Interview with Toni Morrison by Christine Smallwood

The Nation December 8, 2008

What are your thoughts on the state of African-American literature today?

I'm not terribly up on it, but my impression is that it is thriving. Really thriving. You have everyone from Edwidge Danticat to Colson Whitehead. And of course, the literature of young Asian writers is also very interesting to me. The range is what is so fabulous. For me, the thing was to write a book, a work of fiction, that was as good in its field as, say, black music was in its own. Which is to say, to write to that high critical standard that African-Americans have about everything. In athletics, music, art, whatever they were doing, people have had to face a highly critical African-American audience. I wanted to write a book that would have the same high standards. And if that worked, then the rest of the world would be interested as well, because it wasn't a protest novel! It would be about something else. And done in a manner that was worthy of the genre.

What kind of reading and research did you do for A Mercy? Was the process different from what it was for other books you've written?

A little bit more than usual because the novel is about such early stuff. I had a lot of help because historians and anthropologists and biologists have been writing about the era for years. The first thing I had to do was find out what was there--the plant life, the tree life, the weather. One book that was most helpful, which I read over and over, was Changes in the Land [by William Cronon]. I could find out if there really was lettuce or dandelions or how big the trees were. So that gave me a grounded sense of the places that I had chosen, which were upstate New York and down in Maryland and Virginia.

What about the colonists and the lives they left in Europe?

I consulted migration patterns to find out who these people were, the average person who came to the colonies. Then I had to know, what were they leaving behind? Most of them were told to leave or go to jail. I found this really extraordinary book called Hubbub: Filth, Noise and Stench in England, 1600-1770 [by Emily Cockayne]. She looked at the laws of the time--how you could not beat your wife after 9 o'clock--what rumors were like, how close people lived to one another. I got the feeling that when they came to this country, they were drunk because the air was clear--the umbrellas in England were black because the rain was full of soot! But all that's just a matter of surrounding yourself with the atmosphere and having a persuasive familiarity with more than just the story--the context. What were they running from, what could have happened to them, what about children and how people dealt with them? You have Oliver Twist, but when you see those children shipped to Virginia by the boatload! I could have spent years doing this because I love research, but at some point you have to write the book.

You've said that you need to hear your characters' voices before you start to write. In A Mercy there are several mesmerizing characters: the young slave, Florens; the Dutch farmer, Jacob Vaark; his wife, Rebekka, who has fled the poverty, filth, crime and sickness of London. Whose voice did you hear first?

I heard Florens's first, the girl. And she approaches language in a slanted way. She can read and write; she learned from a Catholic priest under scary circumstances. And she's taken someplace else; she doesn't know what they're talking about. When she was with her mother she spoke Portuguese. She knows Latin. So I just put all her language together and gave her an individual voice that was "I"--first person--and very visual. But also, once I realized that I could make her speak only in the present tense, it gave the narrative an immediacy, it made me disciplined in revealing what she thought, and it gave her a kind of innocence and, at the same time, a kind of sophistication.

You've talked about how official languages can stifle identity. Do you have any thoughts about the ways that technologies like e-mail and texting are changing how people speak and write?

Language changes--and should--because it is as alive as its speakers and writers. It is stifling or bad only when unclear, mediocre, false or wholly devoid of creative imagination. That may apply to some texting and e-mail, but not all.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081208/smallwood2/print?rel=nofollow

Dreamy Wilderness Unmastered women in Colonial Virginia.

by John Updike November 3, 2008

Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on. Her newest novel, “A Mercy” (Knopf; $23.95), begins with some kind of confession from an unnamed voice, which reassures the reader:

Don’t be afraid. My telling can’t hurt you in spite of what I have done and I promise to lie quietly in the dark—weeping perhaps or occasionally seeing the blood once more—but I will never again unfold my limbs to rise up and bare teeth.

We are not totally reassured. What blood? What have you (there in the dark) done? The darkness does not quickly lift: “You can think what I tell you a confession, if you like, but one full of curiosities familiar only in dreams and during those moments when a dog’s profile plays in the steam of a kettle.” A dog’s profile does what? “That night”—what night?—“I see a minha mãe standing hand in hand with her little boy, my shoes jamming the pocket of her apron. Other signs need more time to understand.”

“Minha mãe,” research reveals, is Portuguese for “my mother,” and in time we come to comprehend that it is 1690 in Virginia, and that the narrator is a sixteen-year-old black girl called Florens, who was, at her mother’s plea, impulsively adopted, eight years ago, by a white proprietor (“Sir” to Florens), in partial settlement of a debt owed him by an insolvent slave owner from Portugal called “Senhor.” This adoption constitutes the “mercy” of the novel’s title. It landed Florens in a tobacco-growing homestead populated by Sir, known to the wider world as Jacob Vaark; his wife, Rebekka, a hardy and good-natured London native the servants call Mistress; Lina, short for Messalina, a Native American whose people have been decimated by a plague, and who was sold to Jacob by the Presbyterians who rescued her; and Sorrow, a “mongrelized” young woman, possibly a sea captain’s daughter, who survived a shipwreck and was named Sorrow by a sawyer’s wife who cared for her until passing her on to the hospitable Sir and Mistress.

When Sir dies, this household becomes a typical Toni Morrison collection of “unmastered women,” each spinning “her own web of thoughts unavailable to anyone else.” Their vulnerable isolation is mitigated but not wholly relieved by the presence of Scully and Willard, two indentured laborers, homosexual and white, whom Sir hired to work on his quixotically ambitious mansion. After Sir’s death, they continue to work for the widow’s pay. With amiable competence, the two men deliver a child that Sorrow, who watched Lina drown her firstborn, has conceived. The infant safely born, Sorrow, long addled in the head by her shipboard traumas and her illusion of an advisory companion called Twin, regains focus and, to cap this saga of freighted names, renames herself:

She had looked into her daughter’s eyes; saw in them the gray glisten of a winter sea while a ship sailed by-the-lee. “I am your mother,” she said. “My name is Complete.”

From her first novel, “The Bluest Eye” (1970), Morrison has worked, in line with the celebrated Faulknerian dictum that the past is not past, in a historical vein. “The Bluest Eye,” bristling with sixties literary trickiness and protest, takes place in 1940-41, and includes an impressionistic map of black flight from the South during the Depression; stepping momentarily into the present, the author offers a retrospective history of the structure “on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain, Ohio,” which for the time of the narrative was occupied by the doomed and desperate family of the thorough loser Cholly Breedlove. “Sula” (1974) opens with an elegiac sketch of a black neighborhood called the Bottom and dates its chapters from 1919 to 1965. “Song of Solomon” (1977) begins four years after Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, in 1927, and “Beloved” (1987) takes place a few years after the Civil War. The shorter novels that have followed—“Jazz” (1992), “Paradise” (1997), and “Love” (2003)—share a reminiscing narrator and a sense of the bygone as reverie, a dream that it is a struggle to remember and piece together.

“A Mercy” takes us deeper into the bygone than any of Morrison’s previous novels, into a Southern seaboard still up for grabs: “1682 and Virginia was still a mess.” Indian tribes haunt the endless forest; the colonial claims of the Swedes and the Dutch have been recently repelled, and “from one year to another any stretch might be claimed by a church, controlled by a Company or become the private property of a royal’s gift to a son or a favorite.” Jacob Vaark, coming from England to take possession of a hundred and twenty acres bequeathed to him by an uncle he never met, rides from Chesapeake Bay into “Mary’s land which, at the moment, belonged to the king. Entirely.” The advantage of this private ownership is that the province allows trade with foreign markets, and Vaark is more trader than farmer at heart. The disadvantage is that “the palatinate was Romish to the core. Priests strode openly in its towns; their temples menaced its squares; their sinister missions cropped up at the edge of native villages.” His claim lies in Protestant Virginia, “seven miles from a hamlet founded by Separatists” who “had bolted from their brethren over the question of the Chosen versus the universal nature of salvation.”

In “A Mercy,” Morrison’s epic sense of place and time overshadows her depiction of people; she does better at finding poetry in this raw, scrappy colonial world than in populating another installment of her noble and necessary fictional project of exposing the infamies of slavery and the hardships of being African-American. The white characters in “A Mercy” come to life more readily than the black, and they less ambiguously dramatize America’s discovery and settlement. When Vaark strides ashore through the Chesapeake surf, he is Adam treading the edge of an immense Eden:

Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. . . . Unlike the English fogs he had known since he could walk . . . this one was sun fired, turning the world into thick, hot gold. Penetrating it was like struggling through a dream.

When Rebekka sails to join him, the indignities of steerage are made vivid—she says, “I shat among strangers for six weeks to get to this land”—as are the squalor and the gory public executions of the London she is escaping:

The intermittent skirmishes of men against men, arrows against powder, fire against hatchet that she heard of could not match the gore of what she had seen since childhood. The pile of frisky, still living entrails held before the felon’s eyes then thrown into a bucket and tossed into the Thames; fingers trembling for a lost torso; the hair of a woman guilty of mayhem bright with flame.

When she disembarks in the New World, “the absence of city and shipboard stench rocked her into a kind of drunkenness that it took years to sober up from and take sweet air for granted. Rain itself became a brand-new thing: clean, sootless water falling from the sky.”

In so keenly relished a near-virgin environment, the diverse “unmastered women” blend into the moonlit trees like guilty phantoms in Hawthorne. Rebekka, who had disembarked as a “plump, comely and capable” young woman, becomes Mistress, and, after gamely coping with the wilderness, the deaths of three infant children and of a five-year-old daughter, and her husband’s untimely dying, takes to her bed in despair: “The wide untrammeled space that once thrilled her became vacancy. A commanding and oppressive absence.” She falls ill, and orders Florens to find a free black man she thinks might cure her, a blacksmith once hired by Jacob to help build “the grandest house in the whole region”—an unfinished mansion that becomes haunted by its dead master. Florens, travelling alone through the forest primeval, finds the blacksmith living in a cabin, where he has taken in a small male foundling. He returns to Mistress, and effects a talking cure: he is asked, “Am I dying?” and answers, “No. The sickness is dead, not you.” Back in the cabin, Florens proves to be a poor babysitter for the foundling and injures his arm. The blacksmith, who had been her lover, is displeased.

Much has been made of Florens’s love for the blacksmith:

The shine of water runs down your spine and I have shock at myself for wanting to lick there. I run away into the cowshed to stop this thing from happening inside me. Nothing stops it. There is only you. Nothing outside of you. My eyes not my stomach are the hungry parts of me. There will never be enough time to look at how you move.

Alternating chapters take up her stream of consciousness during the hazardous journey to deliver Mistress’s message and reunite with the blacksmith. Morrison has invented for her feverish mind a compressed, anti-grammatical diction unlike any recorded patois: “Both times are full of danger and I am expel. . . . With you my body is pleasure is safe is belonging. I can never not have you have me. . . . I dream a dream that dreams back at me.” But the blacksmith rebuffs her love in his own firm diction: “Own yourself, woman, and leave us be. . . . You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind.” This rejection and her subsequent violence are the bitter fruit, then, of the mercy that Jacob Vaark showed her when she was eight years old.

On the book’s last pages, Florens’s mother somehow returns, as a disembodied voice, and recounts her enslavement in Africa (“The men guarding we and selling we are black”), the middle passage in “a house made to float on the sea,” her arrival in the hot sun and cane fields of Barbados, and her “breaking in”—her rape—by white men who apologize and give her an orange as consolation. Florens and her brother resulted, and the moment of Vaark’s mercy is recalled, but, in view of the dismal outcome, to sadly little point. Of the other characters, Lina remains a stoic source of domestic order and a nurturing substitute mother to Florens when she is docile, before love turns her feral. Sorrow/Complete is, in this household of orphans, the hardest to picture. By her own account, she had always lived on a ship and was brought to land by “mermaids. I mean whales.” The insemination that produced her two pregnancies is mysterious, at least to me. She seems less a participant in the action than a visitor from the Land of Allegory, a “curly-haired goose girl” whose only human skills are sewing, acquired on shipboard, and, eventually, motherhood.

In the dark stew of seventeenth-century America, procreation seems the one intelligible process available to slave, servant, and mistress, and love and disease threaten to make martyrs of them all. Motherhood is so powerful a force in Morrison’s universe as to be partly malevolent; its untidy agents, menstruation and sex and birth, come with a menacing difficulty. This author’s early novels were breakthroughs into the experience of black Americans as refracted in the poetic and indignant perceptions of a black woman from Lorain, Ohio; as Morrison moves deeper into a more visionary realism, a betranced pessimism saps her plots of the urgency that hope imparts to human adventures. “A Mercy” begins where it ends, with a white man casually answering a slave mother’s plea, but he dies, and she fades into slavery’s myriads, and the child goes mad with love. Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful though the language is, it circles around a vision, both turgid and static, of a new world turning old, and poisoned from the start.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/11/03/081103crbo_booksound

Predicting the Past Interview by Susanna Rustin

from The Guardian November 1, 2008

Toni Morrison breaks off from explaining a crucial passage in her new novel - Florens, the main character, has just been searched by a posse of witch-hunters - to check her mobile. "It's my son," she apologises, "is he kidding me?" She calls him back for a quick discussion about the latest presidential election headlines.

"We're gonna have such fun!" she exclaims afterwards. She will watch Tuesday night's TV coverage with friends, she says excitedly, but her assessment of what an Obama presidency might mean is measured: "It would be good, it would be interesting, it would have an impact, I think." Morrison famously described Bill Clinton as "the first black president" ("I said he was treated like a black man, and he was, but anyway they ... what can I say? Nuance is not a strong point"), and took her time in coming round to Obama. "I didn't know him," she says. "I knew Hillary. I really, really liked her and for years admired her." The first time Obama called and asked for her support she said no, but "we chatted for quite a while". In January she changed her mind and wrote a letter of endorsement that glowed with praise for his "wisdom".

A Mercy, Morrison's first book in five years, is published in the UK on Thursday, and is released in the US a few days later. Though publishing schedules are fixed months in advance and production of the book must have been well under way by the time Barack Obama was finally selected as the Democratic candidate, the timing is surely no accident.

In A Mercy, the 77-year-old Nobel laureate writes directly about American slavery for the first time since her celebrated 1987 novel Beloved. Though A Mercy is a very different book - around half the length, more episodic than epic, set in the 17th century rather than the 19th - it is billed by her publisher as a companion piece, or "prelude". Morrison says the new work is an attempt to separate racism from slavery, "to see how it was constructed, planted deliberately in order to protect the ruling class" from the "unpaid labour" on which their new civilisation and wealth depended. So as the US looks set to elect an African-American president, its pre-eminent African-American writer delivers her own vision of America uncorrupted - or only beginning to be corrupted - by racial thinking.

Morrison's great achievement, in a career spanning four decades and nine novels, has been to combine deep psychological insight with a vigorous and original critique of American history. "My books are always questions for me. What if? How does it feel to ...? Or what would it look like if you took racism out? Or what does it look like if you have the perfect town, everything you ever wanted? And so you ask a question, put it in a time when it would be theatrical to ask, and find the people who can articulate it for you and try to make them interesting. The rest of it is all structure, how to put it together."

In her debut, The Bluest Eye (1970), written in the early mornings while she was working full-time and raising two sons in New York, Morrison crafted a highly literary fiction out of the interior lives of poor black girls growing up in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio. Sula (1973) told a story of female friendship, partly inspired by her own life as a single mother and a more complex, ambivalent view of "sisterhood" than many in the feminist movement would then allow, while Song of Solomon (1977) took its alienated protagonist, "Milkman", on a voyage of discovery to the deep south.

But with Beloved, her prizewinning novel set in the aftermath of abolition, Morrison hurled herself at the legacy of slavery and the 20th-century American literary canon head-on. Inspired by a newspaper cutting she found while editing an African-American history anthology, The Black Book, and audaciously weaving together realist, modernist and supernatural elements, it tells the story of a runaway slave who, rather than give up her children when her former owners come looking for her, cuts her daughter's throat.

It is a novel of unspeakable horrors. But even more than the physical brutality, Morrison confronts us with the irreparable harm done by what Margaret Atwood described in a review as "one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised", a system that sought to deprive human beings of what it is that makes them human.

"We were very keenly involved in the culture of African America, so of course slavery was back there," Morrison says of her upbringing in the midwest, "yet the pressure was not to remember it, but to get over it. So when I was writing Beloved, part of the architecture was the act of forgetting." When Beloved failed to win the National Book Award, a group of 48 African-American critics and writers including Maya Angelou and Alice Walker wrote to the New York Times praising Morrison, and the novel won the Pulitzer soon afterwards. Morrison herself is alert to the ways in which black and women's writing have been patronised and excluded from the mainstream, and after winning the Nobel in 1993 she wrote that she felt she had earned a "licence to strut".

Her novels found an influential champion in Oprah Winfrey, who chose four of them for her book club, ensuring huge sales. Winfrey also produced and starred in the 1998 film of Beloved, directed by Jonathan Demme. Morrison's response to critics who suggest her canvas is too narrow is to cite Joyce and Dostoevsky: no one complains that Joyce always writes about the Irish, or Dostoevsky about Russia. She projects a formidable self-belief, but the impression of imperiousness is offset by her soft voice and almost girlish manner.

A few years ago she bought a house on Princeton's main street, a long straight avenue with the university campus on one side and a parade of colonial-style architecture, bookshops and ice-cream parlours on the other. She has done the top floor up for her two grand-daughters, as "classical little girls' rooms with all the pillows ... I know it's just a luxury but I had such fun." The contrast to her own childhood in Ohio could hardly be greater. "There were factories there, shipyards, steel mills, and people came from all over to work," she says. The town was not segregated along racial lines - "Mrs Gallini lived next door and the Terschaks on the other side, that's the way it was and I thought the whole world was like that." Both her parents' families migrated north to escape poverty.

Morrison, who was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 - Toni was the nickname she took as a student, Morrison is her ex-husband - had two younger brothers and an older sister. Her father worked as a welder, but "after the war began, my parents had less and less, and their conflicts were the conflicts poor people have."

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison depicts Lorain as a town cruelly stratified along class and caste lines. Homelessness, or "being outdoors", is "the real terror of life", and while Pecola Breedlove is doomed by her perception of her own ugliness, the more spirited Claudia is frightened by urges to harm the "little white girls" whom even black women seem to prefer to their own daughters. Morrison has said she would have brought up her sons differently had she anticipated the poisonous race relations of the 1980s, but of her own youth she says she "felt like an aristocrat", and when I ask if she remembers when recognition of her own blackness dawned, wondering whether she too suffered from feelings of rage or insecurity, she fires back: "That's not the question, the question is when you first understand you're white."

But on the lessons of the past her parents were deeply divided: "My father never trusted any white person at all, would not let them in his house, insurance people and so on. Luckily my mother was entirely different, she was always judging people one at a time. My mother talked about her childhood in the south - she left when she was about six - as if it was the most wonderful, romantic, nostalgic, lovely [memory]. And my father talked about it in diametrically opposed ways. But he went back every year to this place he hated [Georgia], while my mother never went back to Alabama, the place she loved."

Such conflicts recur in her novels, which dig away at rather than paper over the cracks in the African-American story, exposing divisions of religion, politics, class and gender. She chose to go to the traditionally black Howard College in Washington DC because she "wanted to be around black intellectuals", and has sought to explore the compromises and sacrifices as well as the triumphs of integration. Her novel Paradise (1998) is a brutal fable of what happens when the dream of an all-black community turns sour, while Love (2003) mourns the ruin of an African-American entrepreneur's dream: an upmarket black holiday resort crumbling into the sea.

She edited books about the controversies surrounding OJ Simpson's trial for murder and the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the supreme court, while her criticism has drawn attention to the racial themes of such classics as Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. African religion, medicine and stories are shown to have vivid meaning for Morrison's characters, but she has never been to Africa: "something always happened or I couldn't get there". In Beloved, Stamp Paid reflects that "Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood." But there are black racists in her books too, who believe whites are subhuman, devils.

With its focus on a time before the slave system, A Mercy confirms Morrison's determination to think beyond racial categories. The novel sets out to blur the lines and its characters include indentured servants, slaves, a Dutchwoman sold into marriage (whose filthy voyage is the closest Morrison has come to writing about the slave ships) and a free black man. She also writes from the point of view of a white slave owner for the first time, and when I ask whether she and others are now moving towards a "post-racial" literary discourse - in a parallel development to what commentators have described as Obama's "post-racial" politics - she concurs, before offering the qualifier that "you have to walk that line, you don't want the culture de-raced".

But she agrees that the emphasis placed on race by critics has meant that other aspects of her writing have received less attention. The questions she asks in her books have deep ethical and philosophical dimensions. What is love? Can a woman recover from having killed her baby? What does it mean to be forgiven? Like Beloved, the new novel springs from the action of a mother, a slave who gives her daughter away to a different master in the belief that he will be kinder, but when I say what a terribly sad story it seemed to me - Florens is desperately hurt, and then rejected again by her first lover - I am briskly corrected: "No, no no! Think about her, she was completely needy, yearning, selfless, 'my life is in you, I can't live without you'." The heartbreak of the novel, in its author's view, teaches its protagonist a lesson: "do not give yourself over completely to anybody. At least you know she'll never do that again."

Morrison calls Jazz (1992), a love story set in 1920s Harlem and narrated in such a way that the book itself speaks in the first person, her "best book" in terms of the technical obstacles she set herself. She relished the challenge of 17th-century dialogue posed by A Mercy, and describes her experiments with vocabulary and tenses. She has been reunited with her original editor, Robert Gottlieb, a former New Yorker editor and her exact contemporary.

She has never got over her house in Rockland County, New York, burning down in 1993: "My books and manuscripts I couldn't care less about, but my children's report cards ... There's a picture of my son shooting a basketball into the sky and it's gone." But she jokes that at least she won the Nobel prize that year as well, and has made an anecdote out of the fact that, for a long time, she could talk only to other people who had suffered house fires. ("Maxine Hong Kingston - she and I were on the phone every day!")

The prospect of a book tour is more daunting than it once was, and she hopes her son Ford will join her on this one. But she has two more book projects already in mind, one of which promises a departure. Only once before, with Tar Baby (1981), has she set a story in the present, and that was in the Caribbean, but she says "I've got sketches which are very much now".

For 40 years she has written of passionately experienced sexuality, and every possible permutation of family. Her early marriage to Harold Morrison, an architect from Jamaica with whom she had her two sons, lasted only six years, and she has rarely discussed it. When I ask whether she would have liked to remarry, she bats away the question with a "no, no, no", and she dismisses the idea that she might ever write her memoirs: "It's just not interesting, my life is not adventurous ... The life of the mind is interesting, but all these other little foibles? Please."

Morrison's family still call her Chloe, and she has often said that her pen name of Toni Morrison was a kind of accident. She says that when her father died, she was upset that she hadn't kept the name Wofford, and tells a story about a talk she gave in England where a young black woman in the audience asked her how she wanted to be remembered. "I said as an honest, trustworthy person - I think I even put humour in there. And the girl said 'What do you mean? You just won the Nobel prize and you want to be remembered as a trustworthy person?' And I didn't know what to say. I was talking about how I want to be remembered by my family. Do I want to be remembered by my sons as a writer who won the Nobel prize? There's a persona, Toni Morrison, and there's me, Chloe. They were asking Toni Morrison and I answered as Chloe."

But she is in no doubt as to what enabled her transformation from one into the other. "My sons needed me to be real, to know what I was doing, you know? When people say they don't have time to write with small children, well, for me it was the opposite. I didn't write anything before I had them. They gave me that."

Morrison on Morrison

"I walk alone except for the eyes that join me on my journey. Eyes that do not recognise me, eyes that examine me for a tail, an extra teat, a man's whip between my legs. Wondering eyes that stare and decide if my navel is in the right place if my knees bend backward like the forelegs of a dog. They want to see if my tongue is split like a snake's or if my teeth are filing to points to chew them up. To know if I can spring out of the darkness and bite. Inside I am shrinking. I climb the streambed under watching eyes and know I am not the same. I am losing something with every step I take. I can feel the drain. Something precious is leaving me. I am a thing apart. With the letter I belong and am lawful. Without it I am a weak calf abandon by the herd, a turtle without shell, a minion with no telltale signs but a darkness I am born with, outside, yes, but inside as well and the inside dark is small, feathered and toothy. Is that what my mother knows? Why she chooses me to live without?"

At this point Florens has already had the first sense of self-loathing, where the people say they associate blackness with Satan, and after they've examined her body she feels like a different species under their gaze. Something has died in her, and everything looks like it's looking at her in that hostile way. The trees are looking at her, everything. And she's thinking if they are looking at her because she's black, and finding that a problem and possibly evil and satanic, then it's something she has to think about. Now that she's by herself, she thinks maybe they mean there's something inside of me that really is bad and maybe they're right? It's the crumbling of the psyche.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/01/toni-morrison

Introduction to Colonial African American Life from Colonial Williamsburg

Slavery existed in every colony

At the dawn of the American Revolution, 20 percent of the population in the thirteen colonies was of African descent. The legalized practice of enslaving blacks occurred in every colony, but the economic realities of the southern colonies perpetuated the institution first legalized in Massachusetts in 1641. During the Revolutionary era, more than half of all African Americans lived in Virginia and Maryland. Most blacks lived in the Chesapeake region, where they made up more than 50 to 60 percent of the overall population. The majority, but not all, of these African Americans were slaves. In fact, the first official United States Census taken in 1790 showed that eight percent of the black populace was free. [Edgar A. Toppin. "Blacks in the American Revolution" (published essay, Virginia State University, 1976), p. 1]. Whether free or enslaved, blacks in the Chesapeake established familial relationships, networks for disseminating information, survival techniques, and various forms of resistance to their condition.

Slave labor required for farming and tobacco cultivating

The majority of blacks living in the Chesapeake worked on tobacco plantations and large farms. Since the cultivation of tobacco was extremely labor-intensive, African slave labor was used, despite questions of whether slavery was morally right. Tobacco cultivation rivaled the sugar production of the British West Indies. Tobacco was an eleven-month crop. Cultivation began in late January with the preparation of the fields for planting, mending tools, and laying out the seed beds. Once the soil was ready (usually in March), tobacco seedlings were transplanted to the fields. By mid summer, tobacco was growing in the fields, but the delicate plant required constant care. At harvest time, tobacco was gathered and prepared for its shipment to England.

Plantation and farm slaves tend crops and livestock

For slaves working on farms, the work was a little less tedious than tobacco cultivation, but no less demanding. The variety of food crops and livestock usually kept slaves busy throughout the year. Despite the difficult labor, there were some minor advantages to working on a plantation or farm compared to working in an urban setting or household. Generally, slaves on plantations lived in complete family units, their work dictated by the rising and setting of the sun, and they generally had Sundays off. The disadvantages, however, were stark. Plantation slaves were more likely to be sold or transferred than those in a domestic setting. They were also subject to brutal and severe punishments, because they were regarded as less valuable than household or urban slaves.

Few men on domestic sites

Urban and household slaves generally did not live in complete family units. Most domestic environments used female labor; therefore there were few men, if any, on domestic sites. Most male slaves in an urban setting were coachmen, waiting men, or gardeners. Others were tradesmen who worked in shops or were hired out. In general, urban slaves did not have the amount of privacy that field slaves had. They lived in loft areas over the kitchens, laundries, and stables. They often worked seven days a week, even though Sunday's chores were reduced. Their work days were not ruled by the sun; instead, they were set by tasks. But there were advantages to working in town.

Urban and domestic slaves usually dressed better, ate better food, and had greater opportunity to move about in relative freedom. They also were go-betweens for field slaves and the owners. They were privy to a great deal of information discussed in the "big house." They knew everything from the master's mood to the latest political events. The marketplace became the communal center, the place for "networking." At the marketplace, slaves would exchange news and discuss the well-being of friends and loved ones. They often aided runaways, and they kept a keen ear to those political events that might have had an impact on their lives. Regardless of a slave's occupation, there was considerable fear and angst caused by an environment of constant uncertainty and threats of violence and abuse.

Slavery a part of 18th-century Virginia society

Slavery was an integral part of 18th-century Virginia society. Attitudes and class structure legitimized a slave system based on color of skin; slavery touched virtually all aspects of life in 18th-century Virginia. Beginning with the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown in 1619, an initially unplanned system of hereditary bondage for blacks gradually developed. Over the course of 150 years, slavery became entrenched in Virginia society, increasingly supported by a series of restrictive laws and reinforced by the teachings of the community and family.

Slavery was the foundation of Virginia's agricultural system and essential to its economic viability. Initially, planters bought slaves primarily to raise tobacco for export. By the last quarter of the 18th century, wealthy Virginia farmers were using slave labor in a diversified agricultural regime. Enslaved African Americans also worked as skilled tradesmen in the countryside and in the capital city of Williamsburg. Many also served as domestics in the households of wealthier white Virginians.

The constant interaction between black slaves and white masters (as well as blacks and whites in general) created an interdependence that led to the development of a distinctive Virginia culture. That interdependence was as destructive as it was unequal. The horrors endured by enslaved African Americans, whether physical or mental, were numerous. White Virginians were caught up in a system that measured social distinction based upon ownership of slaves. Economic reliance on slavery, fears about the consequences of emancipation, and unyielding racial prejudice and cultural bias all contributed to the continuation of slavery in an era of independence.

http://www.history.org/Almanack/people/african/aaintro.cfm

Slavery in the United States

Slavery in the United States, the institution of slavery as it existed in the United States from the early 17th century until 1865. Slavery played a central role in the history of the United States. It existed in all the English mainland colonies and came to dominate agricultural production in the states from Maryland south. Eight of the first 12 presidents of the United States were slaveowners. Debate over slavery increasingly dominated American politics, leading eventually to the American Civil War (1861-1865), which finally brought slavery to an end. After emancipation, overcoming slavery’s legacy remained a crucial issue in American history, from Reconstruction following the war to the civil rights movement a century later.

Slavery has appeared throughout history in many forms and many places. Slaves have served in capacities as diverse as concubines, warriors, servants, craftworkers, and tutors. In the Americas, however, slavery emerged as a system of forced labor designed for the production of staple crops. Depending on location, these crops included sugar, tobacco, coffee, and cotton; in the southern United States, by far the most important staples were tobacco and cotton. A stark racial component distinguished this modern Western slavery from the slavery that existed in many other times and places: the vast majority of slaves were black Africans and their descendants, while the vast majority of masters were white Europeans and their descendants.

There was nothing inevitable about the use of black slaves. Although 20 Africans were purchased in Jamestown, Virginia, as early as 1619, throughout most of the 17th century the number of Africans in the English mainland colonies grew slowly. During those years, colonists experimented with two other sources of forced labor: Native American slaves and European indentured servants. The number of Native American slaves was limited in part because the Native Americans were in their homeland; they knew the terrain and could escape fairly easily. Although some Native American slaves existed in every colony the number was limited. The settlers found it easier to sell Native Americans captured in war to planters in the Caribbean than to turn them into slaves on their own terrain.

More important as a form of labor was indentured servitude. Most indentured servants were poor Europeans who wanted to escape harsh conditions and take advantage of opportunities in America. They traded four to seven years of their labor in exchange for the transatlantic passage. At first indentured servants came mainly from England, but later they came increasingly from Ireland, Wales, and Germany. They were primarily, although not exclusively, young males. Once in the colonies, they were essentially temporary slaves; most served as agricultural workers although some, especially in the North, were taught skilled trades. During the 17th century, they performed most of the heavy labor in the Southern colonies and also provided the bulk of immigrants to those colonies.

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761580652/slavery_in_the_united_states.html