THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 33
that Morrison was not made to follow
in her footsteps. “I remember going out
side to hang some clothes on the line,”
she said. “And I held the pants up, I
hooked them by the inside pockets. And
whatever else I was doing, it was com
pletely wrong. Then my mother or my
grandmother came out and they just
started to laugh, because I didn’t know
how to hang up clothes.” Her parents
seemed to have different expectations for
her, anyway. “I developed a kind of indi
vidualism—apart from the family—that
was very much involved in my own day
dreaming, my own creativity, and my own
reading. But primarily—and this has been
true all my life—not really minding what
other people said, just not minding.”
The Woffords told their children sto
ries and sang songs. After dinner, their
grandfather would sometimes take out
his violin and everyone would dance.
And no matter how many times Ramah
told the ghost stories she had learned
from her mother and her Auntie Bell in
Alabama, Chloe always wanted to hear
more. She used to say, “Mama, please tell
the story about this or that,” her mother
recalled in a 1982 interview with the Lo
rain Journal. “Finally I’d get tired of tell
ing the stories over and over again. So
I made up a new story.” Ramah’s stories
sparked Morrison’s imagination. She fell
in love with spoken language.
Morrison always lived, she said, “below
or next to white people,” and the schools
were integrated—stratification in Lorain
was more economic than racial—but in
the Wofford house there was an intense
suspicion of white people. In a 1976 essay,
Morrison recalled watching her father
attack a white man he’d discovered lurk
ing in their apartment building. “My fa
ther, distrusting every word and every
gesture of every white man on earth, as
sumed that the white man who crept up
the stairs one afternoon had come to mo
lest his daughters and threw him down
the stairs and then our tricycle after him.
(I think my father was wrong, but con
sidering what I have seen since, it may
have been very healthy for me to have
witnessed that as my first blackwhite
encounter.)” I asked her about the story.
“The man was a threat to us, we thought,”
Morrison replied. “He scared us. I’m sure
that man was drunk, you know, but the
important thing was the notion that my
father was a protector, and particularlyagainst the white man. Seeing that phys
ical confrontation with a white man and
knowing that my father could win thrilled,
excited, and pleased me. It made me know
that it was possible to win.”
Morrison’s family was spread along a
color spectrum. “My greatgrandmother
was very black, and because we were light
skinned blacks, she thought that we had
been ‘tampered with,’” she said. “She
found lighterskinned blacks to be im
pure—which was the opposite of whatthe world was saying about skin color
and the hierarchy of skin color. My fa
ther, who was lightskinned, also pre
ferred darkerskinned blacks.” Morrison,
who didn’t absorb her father’s racism,
continues to grapple with these ideas and
argue against their implications. In a tele
vision interview some years ago, she said
that in art “there should be everything
from Hasidic Jews to Walter Lippmann.
Or, as I was telling a friend, there should
be everything from reggae hair to Ralph
Bunche. There should be an effort to
strengthen the differences and keep them,
so long as no one is punished for them.”
Morrison addressed her greatgrand
mother’s notion of racial purity in “Par
adise,” where it is the oppressive basis for
a Utopian community formed by a group
of dark blacks from the South.
As a child, Morrison read virtually
everything, from drawingroom come
dies to Theodore Dreiser, from Jane Aus
ten to Richard Wright. She was compil
ing, in her head, a reading list to mine
for inspiration. At Hawthorne Junior
High School, she read “Huckleberry
Finn” for the second time. “Fear and alarm
are what I remember most about my first
encounter” with it, she wrote several years
ago. “My second reading of it, under the
supervision of an English teacher in ju
nior high school, was no less uncomfort
able—rather more. It provoked a feeling
I can only describe now as muffled rage,
as though appreciation of the work re
quired my complicity in and sanction ofsomething shaming. Yet the satisfactions
were great: riveting episodes of flight, of
cunning; the convincing commentary on
adult behavior, watchful and insouciant;
the authority of a child’s voice in lan
guage cut for its renegade tongue and
sharp intelligence. Nevertheless, for the
second time, curling through the plea
sure, clouding the narrative reward, was
my original alarm, coupled now with a
profoundly distasteful complicity.”
When she was twelve years old, Mor
rison converted to Catholicism, taking
Anthony as her baptismal name, after
St. Anthony. Her friends shortened it to
Toni. In junior high, one of her teachers
sent a note home to her mother: “You
and your husband would be remiss in
your duties if you do not see to it that
this child goes to college.” Shortly before
graduating from Lorain High School—
where she was on the debating team, on
the yearbook staff, and in the drama club
(“I wanted to be a dancer, like Maria Tall
chief ”)—Morrison told her parents that
she’d like to go to college. “I want to be
surrounded by black intellectuals,” she
said, and chose Howard University, in
Washington, D.C. In support of her de
cision, George Wofford took a second
union job, which was against the rules of
U.S. Steel. In the Lorain Journal article,
Ramah Wofford remembered that his
supervisors found out and called him on
it. “‘Well, you folks got me,’” Ramah re
called George’s telling them. “‘I am doing
another job, but I’m doing it to send my
daughter to college. I’m determined to
send her and if I lose my job here, I’ll get
another job and do the same.’ It was so
quiet after George was done talking, you
could have heard a pin drop.... And they
let him stay and let him do both jobs.”
To give her daughter pocket money,
Ramah Wofford worked in the rest room
of an amusement park, handing out tow
els. She sent the tips to her daughter with
care packages of canned tuna, crackers,
and sardines.
Morrison loved her classes at How
ard, but she found the social climate
stifling. In Washington in the late for
ties, the buses were still segregated and
the black high schools were divided by
skin tone, as in the Deep South. The
system was replicated at Howard. “On
campus itself, the students were very
much involved in that ranking, and your
TOMI UM, JANUARY 23, 2017 skin gave you access to certain things,”