“You know it was like listening to jazz musicians, black people in music were very, very critical. They hated the mediocre. So I wanted it to be like that. I wanted it to be so good, where the judgement of people who knew the community was so powerful, that I could not play.
“I knew how to play up to a white reader, I knew how to manipulate that, that was easy but writing for black people is tough. Really tough, if they take you seriously.”
And while her writing needed to resonate with those readers about the complexities of the black experience, she was careful to not succumb to any expectations about how people wished it to be portrayed.
“Now some of them thought ‘well we would like a little more best foot forward here. You are always writing about violence, you are always writing about depraved people, why are you so gothic?'” she told the BBC.
“And I would always say ‘whose eye is looking at this? Is it you or are you telling me to shape up because there is a white reader out there who might get the wrong impression of you?’ Now once you get rid of that you are home free, you can just write.”
Her origin story
Although she was known and celebrated globally as Toni Morrison, she was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford, on 18 February 1931. She grew up in the small Midwestern town of Lorain in Ohio, one of four children in a working-class family.
Her early life was shaped by the sharp end of the racial violence and discrimination that her family experienced while she was growing up. She would later recall how a landlord set fire to their family’s home while they were in it, in order to evict them.
But that childhood was also imbued with the rich cultural tapestry and lyrical storytelling of her parents and their community. Both of these early influences would feed into her writing and literary style.
“My family in those days, people didn’t have televisions and things, they told stories, and we told stories and we were called upon to tell stories. We had to shape them, reinterpret them, perform them,” she said.
“So the habit of that, it means I hear it. And it has a rhythm, it has silence, it has rest. It has some combination of reality and magic.”
