Her light-brown eyes, with their perpetually listening or amused expression, are the eyes of a watcher-and of someone who is used to being watched. When she was mock-amazed by an insight, she flushed. Her long silver dreadlocks cascaded down her back and were gathered at the end by a silver clip. Morrison had on a white shirt over a black leotard, black trousers, and a pair of high-heeled alligator sandals. When she is not writing or teaching, she likes to watch “Law & Order” and “Waking the Dead”-crime shows that offer what she described as “mild engagement with a satisfying structure of redemption.” She reads and rereads novels by Ruth Rendell and Martha Grimes. She is known for her powers of concentration. As we chatted, Morrison wasn’t in the least distracted by the telephone ringing or the activities of her housekeeper or her secretary.
TONI MORRISON MOST FAMOUS BOOKS WINDOWS
Sun streamed through the windows and a beautiful blue-toned abstract painting by the younger of her two sons, Slade, hung on the wall. We were in the third-floor parlor, furnished with overstuffed chairs covered in crisp gray linen, where we talked over the course of two days last summer. She shook her head and said, “Let’s not go there.” “But what they can’t save are little things that mean a lot, like your children’s report cards,” she told me, her eyes filling with tears.
Because it was a very cold winter, the water the firefighters used froze several important artifacts, including Morrison’s manuscripts. A decade ago, when Morrison was in Princeton, where she teaches, it burned to the ground. The boathouse is a long, narrow, blue structure with white trim and large windows. Morrison spends about half her time in a converted boathouse that overlooks the Hudson in Rockland County. At the center of Morrison’s new novel, “ Love,” is a deserted seaside hotel-a resort where, in happier times, blacks danced and socialized and swam without any white people complaining that they would contaminate the water-built by Bill Cosey, a legendary black entrepreneur, and haunted by his memory. 124, chained to a history that claims its inhabitants. For years each put up with the spite in his own way.” Living and dead ghosts ramble through No. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. “124 was spiteful,” she writes in the opening lines of “ Beloved” (1987). Morrison’s houses don’t just shelter human dramas they have dramas of their own. Visitors who drive to this tiny town wonder why it has not been torn down, while pedestrians, who are residents of the neighborhood, simply look away when they pass it.” Rather, it foists itself on the eye of the passerby in a manner that is both irritating and melancholy. “It does not recede into its background of leaden sky, nor harmonize with the gray frame houses and black telephone poles around it. This is the building Morrison imagined when she described the house of the doomed Breedlove family in her first novel, “ The Bluest Eye”: “There is an abandoned store on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain, Ohio,” she wrote. “It doesn’t limit my imagination it expands it.” Photograph by Richard Avedon for The New Yorker / © The Richard Avedon Foundationįrom Morrison’s birthplace it’s a couple of miles to Broadway, where there’s a pizzeria, a bar with sagging seats, and a brown building that sells dingy and dilapidated secondhand furniture. However, it went on to win the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in addition to the Pulitzer.“Being a black woman writer is not a shallow place to write from,” Morrison says. When it failed to win either the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award, 48 black critics and writers, including Maya Angelou, protested in a statement published by The New York Times. "Beloved" was a New York Times best-seller for 25 weeks, receiving acclaim from the likes of Margaret Atwood. Morrison's novel imagines Garner's dead daughter returning to haunt her and her family as a ghost. Garner intended to commit suicide, but was captured before she could kill herself, too.
"Beloved" is inspired by a true story of Margaret Garner, a slave who killed her 2-year-old daughter after escaping and being pursued by slave catchers. President Barack Obama will award Morrison a Medal of Freedom at the White House later this spring. In this file photo, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison smiles after delivering a speech during the Rutgers University commencement ceremony, in Piscataway, N.J.