美国国家公共电台 NPR Toni Morrison, Whose Soaring Novels Were Rooted In Black Lives, Dies At 88

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Toni Morrison, one of the giants of literature, has died. She was 88 years old. Morrison's work focused on African American life and culture. It dominated an industry where the vision of black life frequently was limited and sometimes descended¹ into stereotype². Karen Grigsby Bates has this appreciation³.

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES, BYLINE⁴: Toni Morrison stood before the Swedish Academy when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Tall with a leonine mane of natural hair streaked⁶ with silver and steel, Morrison spoke⁷ in her signature measured cadence⁸.

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TONI MORRISON: I hope you will understand when the remarks I make begin with what I believe to be the first sentence of our childhood that we all remember, the phrase, once upon a time.

BATES: Her masterwork, "Beloved," was a once upon a time based in bloody⁹ truth. Its inspiration was Margaret Garner¹⁰, a real-life escaped slave who killed her children rather than have them captured and returned to slavery. "Beloved" was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.

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BATES: A decade later, Oprah Winfrey made a movie based on the book and played Sethe, the mother, in this scene. Sethe is asked if she really thought slavery was worse than death.

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OPRAH WINFREY: (As Sethe) It ain't my job to know what's worse, Paul D. It's my job to know what is, and to keep my children away from it. 'Cause I'd rather know they had peace in heaven than live in a hell here on earth, so help me Jesus.

BATES: Morrison was 56 when "Beloved" was published, but she'd been living with stories since childhood. Born Chloe Wofford, she grew up with tales being told all around her in her hometown of Lorain, Ohio. Her grandparents, like millions of blacks, left the segregated¹¹ South for the North, part of the epic¹² Great Migration¹³. Young Chloe listened when the adults told stories about their southern homes. In a 2010 interview, she said their language stayed with her.

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MORRISON: In my own family, there was street language. There was sermonic language. You know, people actually quoted the Bible to you.

BATES: Chloe Wofford went to college at Howard University, where she became Toni, using the nickname of her baptismal saint, Anthony. She earned her master's at Cornell and married architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons. They divorced after seven years. She started her early publishing career as an editor, first in textbooks then for general circulation books. At the 92nd Street Y in New York, she told an audience she wasn't happy with how most black books were being edited back then.

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MORRISON: I thought the editing was sloppy¹⁴. I thought the productions (laughter) were mishandled. Even the great books, like "Roots" and things, you know? When you read them carefully, you see that nobody was paying any attention.

BATES: So she consciously sought out good black authors, pulling them into what was and mostly still is the alabaster¹⁵ publishing industry. She edited Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali and the novelist Gayl Jones during the social upheaval¹⁶ of the late '60s and early '70s. Morrison saw this as her contribution to the civil rights movement.

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MORRISON: I made it my business to collect African Americans who were vocal¹⁷, either politically or just writing wonderful fiction.

BATES: Even as she edited, Morrison secretly wrote for herself, getting up before her children were awake. Her first book, "The Bluest Eye," was published in 1970. It's a tale about a dark-skinned little girl who believes blue eyes will make her beautiful and cherished. Piper Huguley, a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, remembers how she felt when she read "The Bluest Eye" as a college student.

PIPER HUGULEY: At that young point in my life first came across the whole aspect of colorism and its connection to self-loathing and how deeply embedded¹⁸ that could go.

BATES: Morrison elaborated on this in one of her later books. She read from the book for Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 2015.

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MORRISON: (Reading) I hate to say it, but from the very beginning in the maternity¹⁹ ward⁵, the baby, Lula Ann, embarrassed me. Her birth skin was pale, like all babies, even African ones. But it changed fast. I thought I was going crazy when she turned blue-black right before my eyes.

BATES: Piper Huguley says that kind of frankness about race has made Morrison's work essential reading.

HUGULEY: She exists in a class we call Seminal²⁰ Writers that every English major must take, and that means that she belongs, for us here at Spelman and no doubt elsewhere, as part of the African American literary canon. That is, an author who must be read.

BATES: Morrison's stories weave between the familiar and the fantastical. In "Song Of Solomon," a key element was an ancient folk tale about black people flying away from enslavement and back home to Africa. The theme of mother-daughter love runs through several books, like "Beloved" and "A Mercy," where women make terrible sacrifices for their children. These are books that focus, without apology or explanation, on black lives and black culture. Some wondered why Morrison didn't make white characters more central to her stories. In 1998, she told talk show host Charlie Rose she had no interest in that.

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MORRISON: And I've spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant²¹ one in any of my books.

RICHARD YARBOROUGH: That statement, I think, suggests her grounding in the sort of black cultural liberationist²² art of the 1960s where, really, for the first time, that younger generation of black writers expressed their mission in exactly that way.

BATES: Richard Yarborough teaches African American literature at UCLA and says generations of black women writers, no matter their genre²³, have been touched by Morrison.

YARBOROUGH: Morrison is such a monumental figure that there's no way you could write about black women's experiences without taking her into account, even if you decided²⁴ you were going to strike out in your own way.

BATES: She has shown by example the validity of black women's lives. And through her many once upon a times, Toni Morrison's expansive vision of black humanity now resonates around the globe.

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BATES: Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.

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UNIDENTIFIED SINGERS: (As characters, singing) How woo (ph).

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) Hallelujah.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) Hallelujah.