2021年1月23日发(作者：精冲)


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About The Author

An unflinching champion of her race and its heritage, Toni Morrison confesses to
unthinkable.
In
her
Pulitzer
Prize-winning
novel
Beloved,
she
explores
infanticide,
rape,
seduction,
madness,
passion,
wisdom,
alienation,
powerlessness,
regret,
tyranny,
and
the
supernatural. A bold novelist, she has staked out fictional turf on which to dramatize the fact that
black
people,
the
center
of
her
microcosms,
are
not
marginal
racial
anomalies,
but
a
genuine
human society. In rebuttal of less inclusive philosophies, Morrison states:
the
land
that
there
are
black
people
or
Indians
or
some
other
marginal
group,
and
if
you
write
about
the
world
from
that
point
of
view,
somehow
it
is
considered
lesser.
Rejecting
anything
other than full membership in humanity for black people, she asserts her credo:
not aliens. We live, we love, and we die.

Childhood

Although
reared
in
the
North,
Toni
Morrison
is
the
genetic
and
historical
offspring
of
southern
traditions.
These
traditions
derive
from
her
maternal
grandfather,
a
carpenter
and
farmer
who,
seeing no chance for advancement in Kentucky's racism and poverty, moved his family to Ohio.
Morrison's father, sharecropper George Wofford, had similar reasons to escape racial oppression in
Georgia and relocate in northern shipyards, where he found welding jobs that he supplemented by
washing
cars.
In
the
relative
calm
of
the
far
north,
Wofford,
an
embittered
racist,
still
found
reasons
to
distrust

word
and
every
gesture
of
every
white
man
on
earth.
In
contrast,
Morrison's
mother,
Ramah
Willis
Wofford,
a
more
educated,
trusting
person
than
her
husband,
offered her family a gentler, less vitriolic point of view concerning race relations.

The
second
of
the
four
Wofford
children,
Morrison
(n
閑

Chloe
Anthony
Wofford)
was
born
February 18, 1931, and grew up on the western fringe of Cleveland, which sits on the south shore
of Lake Erie. In the multicultural environment of Lorain, Ohio - a steel town of around 75,000,
blending Czech, German, Irish, Greek, Italian, Serb, Mexican, and black suburbanites - Morrison
experienced
exclusion
but
did
not
suffer
the
intense
racism
leveled
at
other
black
writers,
as
demonstrated
in
the
autobiographies
of
Maya
Angelou,
Dick
Gregory,
and
Richard
Wright.
Although a landlord torched their apartment with the Woffords inside in 1933, Ramah, in order to
foster
mental
health,
taught
her
daughter
to
avoid
animosity.
(However,
an
experience
with
insect-riddled food from the welfare dole provoked Mrs. Wofford to write a letter of complaint to
President Franklin Roosevelt.)

Brought
up
in
a
nurturing,
religious
environment,
Morrison
says,

were
taught
that
as
individuals
we
had
value,
irrespective
of
what
the
future
might
hold
for
us.
The
women
of
the
black community, whether aunt, grandmother, or neighbor, served as a tightly woven safety net.
The
oral
tradition,
carried
on
by
both
men
and
women,
cushioned
blows
to
self-esteem
with
stories and songs about the Underground Railroad, daring rescues, and other perils and triumphs
of black history. In addition, Morrison absorbed stories about the post- Reconstruction South from
her
maternal
grandparents,
John
Solomon
and
Ardelia
Willis,
who
emigrated
from
Alabama
in
1912.

Stronger
than
the
men
in Morrison's
memory,
the
women
of
the
black
community
were,
as
she
says,
make beautiful biscuits, plow; they could hold you in their arms, honey, and you'd think you were
in heaven.
that

Education

A born mimic, actor, storyteller, and reader from early childhood, Morrison was expected to excel,
even though she had to fight the paranoia that accompanied growing up in an educational milieu
that ignored the contributions of nonwhites. Undeterred, she wrote and told stories, read poetry,
and followed the example of ballerina Maria Tallchief, who Morrison idolized for her ability to
promote
her
Native
American
culture
while
simultaneously
enriching
the
arts.
At
Lorain
High
School, Morrison completed four years of Latin and graduated at the top of her class. She then
surprised her family by insisting on leaving Lorain to obtain a college degree, which her father
paid for by working three jobs.

Having educated herself in the achievements of blacks, Morrison - already steeped in the fiction of
French, English, and Russian novelists - entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., where
she changed her first name to Toni. She studied under strong African-American spokesmen: poet
Sterling Brown and philosopher and critic Alain Locke, a Rhodes scholar who edited The New
Negro.

Morrison
received
the
standard
English
education:
a
strong
grounding
in
the
white
males
who
dominate literature - Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Melville, and Wordsworth. She immersed herself in
the
Howard
Unity
Players,
the
university
repertory
company,
and
toured
the
South
for
the
first
time, playing to black audiences during the unsettled pre-civil rights era. Morrison graduated with
a
B.A.
in
1953
and
completed
a
master's
degree
in
English
at
Cornell
two
years
later,
with
a
concentration in the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

Teaching and Writing

The
first
two
years
after
Cornell,
Morrison
taught
humanities
and
English
at
Texas
Southern
University. She then worked for eight
years as an English instructor at Howard University. Her
two
most
promising
students
were
civil
rights
activist
Stokely
Carmichael
and
Claude
Brown,
author of Manchild in the Promised
Land. The year after she left teaching, Morrison gravitated
toward writing. She joined a monthly literary symposium in 1962 and contributed stories that she
had begun in high school. Chief among them was a story she read aloud about a black girl who
wanted to make up for her shortcomings by petitioning God for blue eyes.

By that time, Morrison's 1957 marriage to Jamaican architect Harold Morrison had produced a son,
Harold Ford, born in 1962. She ended the marriage in 1965, returned to Lorain for a year and a
half (during which her second child, Slade Kevin, was born), and renewed her literary outlet as an
antidote to loneliness. Explaining her urge to write, she emphasizes a need for
wanted to read. No one had written them yet, so I wrote them.

From 1965 to 1983, Morrison served as a textbook editor at Random House, working from her
home in Syracuse, New York. The move from Ohio alarmed her mother, who admonished,
don't have anybody there.
with you. There is no need for the community if you have a sense of it inside.

Tending to two small sons and a demanding job, she still managed to plug away at The Bluest Eye,
her
personal
therapy
for
depression
and
isolation.
Set
in
the
Midwest,
the
story
centers
on
a
compelling, unloved child, Pecola Breedlove, a victim of incest and a survivor of ego abuse. As
Morrison describes the compulsion to complete the manuscript,
perspective,
no
power,
no
authority,
no
self
-
just
this
brutal
sense
of
irony,
melancholy,
and
a
trembling
respect
for
words.
I
wrote
like
someone
with
a
dirty
habit.
Secretly
-
compulsively
-
slyly.
finds
no
reclamation.
As
Morrison
concludes
Pecola's
tragic
destruction,

the
edge
of
my
town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late.

By the time the manuscript was complete in 1968, Morrison had risen to the rank of senior editor
at Random House company headquarters in New York City, where, as developer of black talent,
she
groomed
such
stars
as Angela Davis,
Toni Cade Bambara,
Wesley
Brown,
Gayl
Jones, and
Muhammad Ali. She reports that her own first novel sold for racial reasons: The company wanted
a black writer in its stable. When the black fiction market burgeoned, Morrison reminded herself
that the trend reflected the honor accorded the struggles of the black race. To steady herself on
such holy ground, she repeated a mantra recalling the
in my family face, and whenever I would feel overwhelmed, that's all I had to think about.

As
a
senior
editor,
Morrison
became
immersed
in
contemporary
literature
and
was
aware of
an
upsurge in black literary voices. Buoyed by this upsurge, in 1969, she returned to the classroom
for a year as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at State University of New York in
Purchase. She settled into a renovated boathouse outside the town of Nyack and kept writing. Four
years later, she completed Sula, her second novel, which continues her demarcation of the black
woman's world, with its secret power, perversity, unity, and mysticism. The critics were divided on
the character's murder of her drug-dealing son, a sign of something sinister and unsettling and an
omen of ghetto life in the coming decades. More popular than The Bluest Eye, the second novel
was excerpted in Redbook and featured as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate.

As Morrison's name began to take on public recognition, her byline appeared more frequently on
book reviews for the New York Times. In 1974, she compiled a memory album, The Black Book,
which
was
introduced
by
Bill
Cosby
as
a

journey
of
Black
America.
Composed
of
oddments
from
slave
narratives,
advertising,
photographs,
media
clippings,
recipes,
and
patent
office records, the book revealed three centuries of black history in the United States. The research
was almost like a remedial cultural education for Morrison - an education that had been denied
previously.
Her

archeology
provided
a
cache
of
motifs,
themes,
and
images
for
later
fiction.
It
also
unearthed
a
clipping
from
a
nineteenth-century
magazine
that
would
inspire
Beloved.

During the next decade, visiting lecturer posts drew Morrison to Yale from 1975-1977 and Bard
College from 1979-1980. The need to express beliefs and truths from her active imagination led in
1977 to the publication of Song of Solomon, a Midwestern saga strongly influenced by the death
of her father. Like a patchwork vision of her collective unconscious, the novel draws on family
lore and a wisdom sprung from survival. In Morrison's words, her forebears became
into my own interior life.
The
novel's
success,
a
popular
television
interview
with
Dick
Cavett,
and
inclusion
in
the
PBS
series

Within
four
years,
Morrison
followed
up
on
the
promise
of
earlier
works
with
Tar
Baby.
In
a
provocative departure from her earlier all-black casts, Tar Baby introduced the ambivalent Jadine,
a
world- weary
traveler
who
searches
for
self-actualization
among
West
Indian
servant-caste
relatives through a brief fling with a mysterious black man. Critics were divided as to the direction
that
Morrison
seemed
to
be
moving
as
she
departed
from
less
familiar
themes,
characters,
and
settings.
Nonetheless,
Morrison
became
the
first
black
woman
championed
in
a
cover
story
for
Newsweek, which heralded her as the top black writer in the United States. Her response was a
teasing
one-liner:

you
really
going
to
put
a
middle-aged,
gray-haired,
colored
lady
on
the
cover of this magazine?

In January 1986, the New York State Writers Institute commissioned Morrison to write Dreaming
Emmett, a dramatization of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till by Mississippi racists in the
1950s.
Having
proven
herself
worthy
of
stage
production
from
the
writing
of
the
musical
Storyville
and
a
screen
version
of
Tar
Baby,
she
felt
equal
to
the
task
of
recreating
the
grisly
murder, which was presented in Albany by the Capital Repertory Company.

Three years after Dreaming Emmett was produced, Morrison published her fifth novel, Beloved.
With
this
novel,
Morrison
returned
to
a
focus
on
women.
The
novel
arose
from
Morrison's
ten-year contemplation of a slave narrative featuring Margaret Garner, a Kentucky slave woman
who murdered one of her four children in 1855 rather than submit her family to what Morrison
terms

Beloved probes the paradox of motherhood within slavery. This paradox is revealed through the
humiliation
of
Sethe
(the
character
inspired
by
Garner)
and
her
desperate
murder
of
her
infant
daughter.
Intent
on honoring
an extraordinary
act
of
maternal
love,
Morrison
had
incubated
the
characters for two years and then withdrew into her house and wrote Sethe's story in longhand.
Strengthened by research provided by writer Michael Blitz from sources as far away as Brazil and
Spain, she salted the powerful narrative with details about labor opportunities for blacks along the