Toni Morrison by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2020-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

NATIONAL VISIONARY LEADERSHIP PROJECT

VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH CAMILLE O. COSBY

NOVEMBER 5, 2004

CAMILLE O. COSBY: Professor Morrison, when and where were you born?

TONI MORRISON: I was born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio.

COSBY: And what were your forename and surname?

MORRISON: Chloe Wofford.

COSBY: And what are the names of your parents?

MORRISON: Ella Ramah Wofford, and my father’s George.

COSBY: How many siblings do you have?

MORRISON: I had two brothers, one sister.

COSBY: Please talk about the history of Lorain and what it was like growing up there in the ’30s and ‘40s.

MORRISON: It was unusual I think because Lorain, Ohio was right next to Oberlin. That part of Ohio was just loaded with abolitionists. Women were able to go to college at Oberlin before everybody else.

The northern part was the industrial, so it was full of people like my parents who came at an early age from the south looking for work and it was industrial. Shipyards, steel mills, all of that kind of thing. Immigrants from all over the world there. So that when I went to school, it was with people who some of them didn’t even speak English. First generation immigrants, Mexicans, Black people from the south, and they used to pride themselves of calling themselves the melting pot. It was really like that there.

COSBY: Where were your parents born?

MORRISON: My mother was born in Greenville, Alabama and my father was born in Cartersville, Georgia.

COSBY: Please share a little about your parents’ background—why they left the South and what life was like for them before they went to Ohio.

MORRISON: Well, their stories of their childhood are, you know, rather painful. My mother left with her mother and all of her siblings, and there were seven or eight of them. And they left Greenville, Alabama at a crisis moment, when my grandmother said that she couldn’t stay there any longer because White boys were circling their farm. And she had a lot of girls. I never quite understood what that meant then. And then later of course, I understood exactly what she meant because her husband, my grandfather, had gone to Birmingham to earn some additional money, which he did by day work but he also played the violin and he earned money that way and sent it back. So she was literally a woman alone with all these children—young children.

So she was frightened. So she got on a train and sent a message to her husband that if he wanted to see them again he would be on such and such a train at such and such a time. [Both laugh]

And my mother remembers getting on the train and they couldn’t tell anybody—they had to leave in the middle of the night because they were sharecroppers. They didn’t let you go anywhere. And they were not sure that their father was on that train and the train pulled out of the station and they were all weeping because he didn’t show up. But when they got about sixty miles outside, he showed up. He was sort of in hiding.

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