INTERVIEW, Page 120The Pain Of Being BlackTONI MORRISON, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her gritty novelBeloved, smolders at the inequities that blacks and women stillface
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
