TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052289/05228900.046

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 13.8 KB | 300 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 120

The Pain Of Being Black


TONI MORRISON, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her gritty
novel Beloved, smolders at the inequities that blacks and women
still face

By Bonnie Angelo, Toni Morrison


    Q. In your contemporary novels you portray harsh
confrontation between black and white. In Tar Baby a character
says, "White folks and black folks should not sit down and eat
together or do any of those personal things in life." It seems
hopeless if we can't bridge the abysses you see between sexes,
classes, races.

    A. I feel personally sorrowful about black-white relations
a lot of the time because black people have always been used as
a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war,
to prevent other kinds of real conflagrations.

    If there were no black people here in this country, it
would have been Balkanized. The immigrants would have torn each
other's throats out, as they have done everywhere else. But in
becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with
that other immigrant is contempt for me -- it's nothing else but
color. Wherever they were from, they would stand together. They
could all say, "I am not that." So in that sense, becoming an
American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me.

    It wasn't negative to them -- it was unifying. When they
got off the boat, the second word they learned was "nigger." Ask
them -- I grew up with them. I remember in the fifth grade a
smart little boy who had just arrived and didn't speak any
English. He sat next to me. I read well, and I taught him to
read just by doing it. I remember the moment he found out that
I was black -- a nigger. It took him six months; he was told.
And that's the moment when he belonged, that was his entrance.
Every immigrant knew he would not come as the very bottom. He
had to come above at least one group -- and that was us.

    Q. When you think about what the Jews did as leaders in the
civil rights movement, in the forefront of trying to break the
barriers, how do you account for the abrasiveness between
blacks and Jews now?

    A. For a long time I was convinced that the conflict
between Jewish people and black people in this country was a
media event. But everywhere I went in the world where there were
black people, somebody said, What about the blacks and Asians?
What do you think about the blacks and the Mexicans? Or, in New
York at one time, blacks and Puerto Ricans? The only common
denominator is blacks.

    I thought, Something is disguised, what is it? What I find
is a lot of black people who believe that Jews in this country,
by and large, have become white. They behave like white people
rather than Jewish people.

    Q. Hasn't the rift been brought about partly by the
anti-Semitic rhetoric of black Muslims like Louis Farrakhan?

    A. Farrakhan is one person, one black person. Why is it
that no black person seems to be rabid about Meir Kahane?
Farrakhan is rejected by a lot of black people who wouldn't go
near that man. It's not an equal standard -- one black person
is all black people.

    Q. But sometimes whites feel that all white people are
being similarly equated, when in fact attitudes among whites
range from the Ku Klux Klan right over to the saints.

    A. Black people have always known that. We've had to
distinguish among you because our lives depended on it. I'm
always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of
everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding
and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

    Q. You've said that you didn't like the idea of writing
about slavery. Yet Beloved, your most celebrated book, is set
in slavery and its aftermath.A. I had this terrible reluctance
about dwelling on that era. Then I realized I didn't know
anything about it, really. And I was overwhelmed by how long it
was. Suddenly the time -- 300 years -- began to drown me.

    Three hundred years -- think about that. Now, that's not a
war, that's generation after generation. And they were
expendable. True, they had the status of good horses, and nobody
wanted to kill their stock. And, of course, they had the
advantage of reproducing without cost.

    Q. Beloved is dedicated to the 60 million who died as a
result of slavery. A staggering number -- is this proved
historically?A. Some historians told me 200 million died. The
smallest number I got from anybody was 60 million. There were
travel accounts of people who were in the Congo -- that's a wide
river -- saying, "We could not get the boat through the river,
it was choked with bodies." That's like a logjam. A lot of
people died. Half of them died in those ships.

    Slave trade was like cocaine is now -- even though it was
against the law, that didn't stop anybody. Imagine getting
$1,000 for a human being. That's a lot of money. There are
fortunes in this country that were made that way.

    I thought this has got to be the least read of all the
books I'd written because it is about something that the
characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember,
black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to
remember. I mean, it's national amnesia.

    Q. You gave new insight into the daily struggle of slaves.

    A. I was trying to make it a personal experience. The book
was not about the institution -- Slavery with a capital S. It
was about these anonymous people called slaves. What they do to
keep on, how they make a life, what they're willing to risk,
however long it lasts, in order to relate to one another -- that
was incredible to me.

    For me, the torturous restraining devices became a hook on
which to say what it was like in personal terms. I knew about
them because slaves who wrote about their lives mentioned them,
and white people wrote about them. There's a wonderful diary of
the Burr family in which he talks about his daily life and says,
"Put the bit on Jenny today." He says that about 19 times in six
months -- and he was presumably an enlightened slave owner.
Slave-ship captains also wrote a lot of memoirs, so it's heavily
documented.

    There was a description of a woman who had to wear a bell
contraption so when she moved they always knew where she was.
There were masks slaves wore when they cut cane. They had holes
in them, but it was so hot inside that when they took them off,
the skin would come off. Presumably, these things were to keep
them from eating the sugar cane. What is interesting is that
these things were not restraining tools, like in the torture
chamber. They were things you wore while you were doing the
work. Amazing. It seemed to me that the humiliation was the key
to what the experience was like.

    There was this ad hoc nature of everyday life. For black
people, anybody might do anything at any moment. Two miles in
any direction, you may run into Quakers who feed you or Klansmen
who kill you -- you don't know. When you leave the plantation,
you are leaving not only what you know, you are leaving your
family.

    Q. Have you any specific proposals for improving the
present-day racial climate in America?

    A. It is a question of education, because racism is a
scholarly pursuit. It's all over the world, I am convinced. But
that's not the way people were born to live. I'm talking about
racism that is taught, institutionalized. Everybody remembers
the first time they were taught that part of the human race was
Other. That's a trauma. It's as though I told you that your left
hand is not part of your body.

    How to breach those things? There is a very, very serious
problem of education and leadership. But we don't have the
structure for the education we need. Nobody has done it. Black
literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a
serious, rigorous art form.

    I saw on television some black children screaming and
crying about the violence in their school. But what do we do
about that?

    Q. But there is violence in schools that are all black,
black against black.

    A. Black people are victims of an enormous amount of
violence. I don't have any answers other than what to do about
violence generally. None of those things can take place, you
know, without the complicity of the people who run the schools
and the city.

    Q. That's a strong condemnation. Complicity suggests that
these conditions are seen as O.K.

    A. Human beings can change things. Schools must stop being
holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market
and off the streets. They are real threats because they may know
more, they may have more energy, and they may take your job. So
we stretch puberty out a long, long time.

    There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the
economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not
concern black people. That's where the problem is. Are you going
to build a city to accommodate more black people? Why? They
don't pay taxes. Are you going to build a school system to
accommodate the children of poor black people? Why? They'll want
your job. They don't pay taxes.

    Q. Many people are deeply concerned that these young black
students are dropping out.

    A. They don't care about these kids. I don't mean that
there are not people who care. But when this wonderful "they"
we always blame for anything say we've got to fix the schools,
or we have got to legalize drugs, what they care about is their
personal well-being: Am I going to get mugged? Are the homeless
going to be in my neighborhood?

    Q. You don't think there is great concern out there that
American society has things seriously wrong with it? Not just
because "I can't walk down the street"?

    A. Yes, but I do not see vigorous attack on the wrongness.
I see what I call comic-book solutions to really major problems.
Of course, a new President can make a difference -- he can
reassemble the legislation of the past 20 years that has been
taken apart and put it back. They said it didn't work. It's like
building a bridge a quarter of the way across the river and
saying, "You can't get there from here." Twenty years! It never
had a generation to complete the work. Somebody has to take
responsibility for being a leader.

    Q. In one of your books you described young black men who
say, "We have found the whole business of being black and men
at the same time too difficult." You said that they then turned
their interest to flashy clothing and to being hip and abandoned
the responsibility of trying to be black and male.

    A. I said they took their testicles and put them on their
chest. I don't know what their responsibility is anymore.
They're not given the opportunity to choose what their
responsibilities are. There's 60% unemployment for black
teenagers in this city. What kind of choice is that?

    Q. This leads to the problem of the depressingly large
number of single-parent households and the crisis in unwed
teenage pregnancies. Do you see a way out of that set of
worsening circumstances and statistics?

    A. Well, neither of those things seems to me a debility. I
don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken
family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head
is a man.

    Two parents can't raise a child any more than one. You need
a whole community -- everybody -- to raise a child. The notion
that the head is the one who brings in the most money is a
patriarchal notion, that a woman -- and I have raised two
children, alone -- is somehow lesser than a male head. Or that
I am incomplete without the male. This is not true. And the
little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn't work. It
doesn't work for white people or for black people. Why we are
hanging onto it, I don't know. It isolates people into little
units -- people need a larger unit.

    Q. And teenage pregnancies?

    A. Everybody's grandmother was a teenager when they got
pregnant. Whether they were 15 or 16, they ran a house, a farm,
they went to work, they raised their children.

    Q. But everybody's grandmother didn't have the potential
for living a different kind of life. These teenagers -- 16, 15
-- haven't had time to find out if they have special abilities,
talents. They're babies having babies.

    A. The child's not going to hurt them. Of course, it is
absolutely time consuming. But who cares about the schedule?
What is this business that you have to finish school at 18?
They're not babies. We have decided that puberty extends to what
-- 30? When do people stop being kids? The body is ready to have
babies, that's why they are in a passion to do it. Nature wants
it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when
the income can handle it.

    Q. You don't feel that these girls will never know whether
they could have been teachers, or whatever?

    A. They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We
have to help them become brain surgeons. That's my job. I want
to take them all in my arms and say, "Your baby is beautiful and
so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be
a brain surgeon, call me -- I will take care of your baby."
That's the attitude you have to have about human life. But we
don't want to pay for it.

    I don't think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless
they're black -- or poor. The question is not morality, the
question is money. That's what we're upset about. We don't care
whether they have babies or not.

    Q. How do you break the cycle of poverty? You can't just
hand out money.

    A. Why not? Everybody gets everything handed to them. The
rich get it handed -- they inherit it. I don't mean just
inheritance of money. I mean what people take for granted among
the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy
network. That's shared bounty of class.