Windows to the Soulful
In a New Book as in Life, Toni Morrison's Probing Goes Well Below Surface

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 4, 2008

NEW YORK

Toni Morrison has a little trick for judging character. She's tried it on Tiger Woods, on the Mona Lisa and -- why not? -- on Barack Obama, too.

"You know, he's got a very pleasant, even disarming smile," the novelist says of the incoming president, whose candidacy she endorsed in January, a few weeks after he politely called to ask. Then she holds up a hand, at mouth level, to show how she edits out that telegenic smile's effects.

"I do this all the time. Just look at his eyes."

What did she see? She'll get there in a moment. First, she wants to tell you what she saw in the eyes of the world's greatest golfer.

"Death," she says. There's a burst of laughter, abruptly cut off. "He wants to win. And he will destroy all."

How about the Mona Lisa, with whom Morrison got up close and personal in the Louvre?

"Everybody talks about her smile, that little mystery," Morrison says. "And I went over there and I did like that" -- she holds up her hand again -- "and I literally jumped back."

She lowers her voice.

"There's nothing but evil there. Pure, distilled."

The only living American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature is sitting at the kitchen table in her Manhattan apartment, a skylight silvering her braided gray hair. She's mostly talking about her latest novel, "A Mercy," from which she will read tonight at a sold-out Washington appearance at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue. But the name Obama keeps coming up.

So what did she make of those smile-free presidential eyes?

"Steely. I would say steely."

Which is a good thing, she thinks, given these "interesting times."

Interesting they are. But Morrison's new book evokes an America at least as fascinating as today's. Set in the late 17th century -- before race-based enslavement became such a central American institution -- it serves as a thought-provoking bookend to the era we are entering.

" 'A Mercy' was sort of pre-racial to me," Morrison explains. And though she's not ready to call the present day post-racial, it does promise "something else, something different, a new slant on all that."

A Toni Morrison novel usually begins as a question in the author's mind. What was it with this book?

"How might it feel," comes the prompt reply, "to be a pitch-black slave girl in a time when slavery was not associated with racism? How's that?"

The notion of a bound population -- whether called serfs, peasants or something else -- used to be commonplace, Morrison says. Yes, there were African slaves in North America in 1690, but the continent also was filled with white indentured servants who'd signed up for years of bondage in return for transportation and the basic necessities. What's more, in the days before laws explicitly divided the races, "indentured servants and black slaves and free whites and free black people worked on those plantations together."

What came next, after she had her central question?

"I get the narrative and the ending. I have to know where I'm going. I don't always know how to get there."

And how did this particular narrative start?

"Well, I have this needy girl. She's going to go on a journey. By herself. Usually, guys go on journeys in narratives and the women stay home.

"I wanted her to go somewhere, endangering herself."

The girl is a 16-year-old slave named Florens, living on a farm in Upstate New York. She's needy because her mother, or so Florens believes, has thrown her away. Her journey is a rescue mission -- her mistress is sick and asks her to track down a man who might help -- but it's personal, too, because Florens is desperately in love with the man she seeks.

"You alone own me," she tells him. She has not yet learned to look inside herself for what Morrison has called "the beloved -- the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."

How might it feel to be Florens?

As Morrison fleshed out her answer, other characters emerged.

First came Jacob Vaark, Florens's owner, who accepted her from a far worse master in payment for a debt. Morrison found Vaark's name on a ship's manifest and thought "that's lovely." The character's Dutch ancestry was a necessary result.

Next she conjured Jacob's wife, Rebekka, whose prospects in England were "servant, prostitute, wife" and who thought it a blessing when her father shipped her across the Atlantic to marry an unknown man.

Lina, a young Native American woman, gave Morrison pause. "Oh God, now I've got to know all about these tribes," she says she thought. But she didn't, she soon realized, because Lina's people were all dead from disease.

Late in the game, a mysterious, mixed-race girl named Sorrow slipped in, solving some structural problems for Morrison. Then there were Willard and Scully, white servants who began with bit parts and ended with a chapter of their own.

"I was so pleased with them," Morrison says, in part because she liked Scully's sharp insights and in part because the pair made clear the nature of indentured servitude.

Meanwhile, she needed to see her characters' worlds, both new and old. William Cronon's 1983 study "Changes in the Land" showed her America before the Europeans arrived: "how tall the trees were, and the fish, the weather, the flies." Emily Cockayne's recent "Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England 1600-1770" helped her understand why the Europeans came.

Questions of race and servitude, the search for a true self, life-shaping encounters with a new world: All that adds up to a novel that has drawn mostly raves. Washington Post critic Ron Charles called it "a fusion of mystery, history and longing that stands alongside 'Beloved' as a unique triumph in Morrison's body of work."

John Updike was less enthusiastic. In the New Yorker, he complained that it was hard to know what was happening in the opening pages. Perhaps "the pernicious influence of William Faulkner" was to blame?

Morrison shrugs this off.

"That was kind of funny. But I like being reviewed by writers," she says.

At 77, she is old enough to have acquired one of those plastic organizers that reminds you what pill to take when. She is also old enough to have discovered -- after a hospital letter informed her that "we have declined your Medicaid or Medicare or whatever because you are an illegal alien or incarcerated" -- that it's impossible to reach a human being at a Medicare phone.

"Sixty minutes' wait!" she says. "I finally had to go to a congressman, because I thought it was identity theft. And I got it straightened out, but not by doing what they tell you to do, which is call and push buttons."

The good news is, there's no retirement age for writers. Morrison has two more novels in mind already, one set in the 1950s, one in the present.

"I'm getting better," she says.

And that means?

"I get there faster. I don't have to write badly."

Chloe Ardelia Wofford (the name Morrison's parents gave her) wrote her first words on the sidewalks of Lorain, Ohio, in the mid-1930s. "My sister probably taught me. I was about 3," she recalls. Her mother and father told a lot of stories "and I lived in the library, down on the floor, because they had all the little children's books down there."

At 12, she became a Catholic and took the baptismal name Anthony, soon shortened to "Toni." She went to college at Howard, got a master's in literature from Cornell. When her brief marriage to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison ended, she was left with two young sons and a name she had no intention of putting on a book.

"I was going to be Chloe -- Chloe Wofford," she says. But in 1970, when she saw "Toni Morrison" on the galleys of her first novel, "The Bluest Eye," and said, "I don't want to use this name," she was told, "Sorry, it's already in the Library of Congress."

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.