Windows to the Soulful

She remains annoyed that she didn't put her foot down. "I said, 'Oh, four people are going to read this book' -- oh, man."

It's true that "The Bluest Eye" didn't sell immediately. (Much later, an Oprah pick would help.) But nearly four decades after she published it, Morrison's impact is hard to overstate. She helped shape a wave of African American literature that has yet to crest.

As an editor at Random House, where she worked until she was confident her writing would support her, Morrison published writers ranging from Chinua Achebe to Toni Cade Bambara. As a writer herself, she crashed the front ranks of the world's novelists while bringing the specific experience of black America to life.

Take 1987's "Beloved," the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that vivifies the enormity of slavery in one woman's story. Morrison spent years researching and thinking before she wrote a word.

"I didn't know anything," she says, but at some point she realized that "all the narratives about slavery were by men." Then she read a newspaper article about Margaret Garner, who had killed her own daughter to keep her from being returned to bondage.

"She did it and didn't regret it," Morrison says, ticking off things that struck her about Garner's story. "The man who interviewed her was astonished because she was so calm and not drooling -- I mean, she wasn't insane. And her mother-in-law said, 'I neither approved nor disapproved.' She just couldn't make up her mind.

"And that was exactly the point."

Morrison tried to imagine killing her own child. She couldn't get there. "But I thought the real person who might be able to judge her -- that she would pay attention to -- would be the dead daughter. And once I knew that, then I just had to make it work."

Take "Jazz," the novel Morrison published a year before her 1993 Nobel. She sees it as part of her continuing need to re-imagine history, to "tell it again properly, fill in those silences, those things that people just, whooooh, blew over." What's blown over in all the talk of the Jazz Age, she says, is the migration behind the music, the syncopated liberation that came with leaving the rural South for northern cities.

"It's transition from the blues, it's different, it's anger, it's seduction, it's below-the-belt stuff," Morrison says. "It was not just the music, it was the style. It was free." Back home, you loved who was next door, but here "you could choose to love somebody."

Maybe it wouldn't work out. "But the point is, it was choice -- black choice."

Or take "Song of Solomon," Morrison's breakthrough book. A sprawling, mythic family saga whose plot resists summary, it won the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award and got compared to the work of Gabriel García Márquez. It's also the rare Morrison novel centered on a man.

Hmm.

Might that be why Marlon Brando used to call to talk about it?

"He would read passages to me, of my own book. In that voice," says Morrison, who never met the actor in the flesh. "He said, 'Do you remember this part?' " She laughs. "He'd keep you on forever. I was scared to hang up."

Barack Obama wasn't quite so scary. But when the candidate called to ask for her endorsement, he talked about the same favorite book.

"Before I speak to you about anything else," she recalls Obama saying, "let me tell you about 'Song of Solomon.' " As it happens, she had been impressed by his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." It's filled with scenes and dialogue and reflection, she says, not just the usual "and then and then." So they talked about writing and she told him, "You and I have a connection that way -- but politically, I don't know."

She had admired Hillary Clinton for years. She had never made a presidential endorsement.

Then she did.

"It really was about this thing that I dared to call wisdom," she says now.

Interesting times. Morrison can't stop thinking about them.

"I have to say, I wish Jimmy Baldwin were here," she says quietly. "There's so many people that I wish -- I would just like to hear them at this point, you know?"

And what does she think her old friend's reaction to the Age of Obama might have been?

She gets quieter still, as though she knows a bittersweet laugh is coming.

"I think he would be desperately, desperately in love," Toni Morrison says.