30 THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020
PROFILES OCTOBER27, 2003
GHOSTS IN THE HOUSE
How Toni Morrison fostered a generation of black writers.BY HILTONALS
N
o. 2245 Elyria Avenue in Lo-
rain, Ohio, is a two-story frame
house surrounded by look-
alikes. Its small front porch is littered
with the discards of former tenants: a
banged-up bicycle wheel, a plastic patio
chair, a garden hose. Most of its win-
dows are boarded up. Behind the house,
which is painted lettuce green, there’s a
patch of weedy earth and a heap of rust-
ing car parts. Seventy-two years ago, the
novelist Toni Morrison was born here,
in this small industrial town twenty-five
miles west of Cleveland, which most
citydwellers would consider “out there.”
The air is redolent of nearby Lake Erie
and new-mown grass.
From Morrison’s birthplace it’s a cou-
ple of miles to Broadway, where there’s
a pizzeria, a bar with sagging seats, and
a brown building that sells dingy and di-
lapidated secondhand furniture. 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 Broad-
way and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain,
Ohio,” she wrote. “It does not recede into
its background of leaden sky, nor har-
monize with the gray frame houses and
black telephone poles around it. Rather,
it foists itself on the eye of the passerby
in a manner that is both irritating and
melancholy. 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.”
Love and disaster and all the other
forms of human incident accumulate in
Morrison’s fictional houses. In the board-
ing house where the heroine of Morri-
son’s second novel, “Sula,” lives, “there
were rooms that had three doors, oth-
ers that opened on the porch only and
were inaccessible from any other part
of the house; others that you could get
to only by going through somebody’s
bedroom.” This is the gothic, dreamlike
structure in whose front yard Sula’s
mother burns to death, “gesturing and
bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the-box,”
while Sula stands by watching, “not be-
cause she was paralyzed, but because
she was interested.”
Morrison’s houses don’t just shelter
human dramas; they have dramas of their
own. “124 was spiteful,” she writes in the
opening lines of “Beloved” (1987). “Full
of a baby’s venom. The women in the
house knew it and so did the children.
For years each put up with the spite in
his own way.” Living and dead ghosts
ramble through No. 124, chained to a
history that claims its inhabitants. 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 entrepre-
neur, and haunted by his memory.M
orrison spends about half her time
in a converted boathouse that
overlooks the Hudson in Rockland
County. The boathouse is a long, nar-
row, blue structure with white trim and
large windows. A decade ago, when
Morrison was in Princeton, where she
teaches, it burned to the ground. Be-
cause it was a very cold winter, the water
the firefighters used froze several im-
portant artifacts, including Morrison’s
manuscripts. “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. She shook
her head and said, “Let’s not go there.”
We were in the third-floor parlor,
furnished with overstuffed chairs cov-
ered in crisp gray linen, where we talked
over the course of two days last summer.
Sun streamed through the windows and
a beautiful blue-toned abstract painting
by the younger of her two sons, Slade,hung on the wall. As we chatted, Mor-
rison wasn’t in the least distracted by the
telephone ringing or the activities of her
housekeeper or her secretary. She is
known for her powers of concentration.
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 en-
gagement with a satisfying structure of
redemption.” She reads and rereads nov-
els by Ruth Rendell and Martha Grimes.
Morrison had on a white shirt over a
black leotard, black trousers, and a pair
of high-heeled alligator sandals. Her long
silver dreadlocks cascaded down her back
and were gathered at the end by a silver
clip. When she was mock-amazed by an
insight, she flushed. 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. But if she is asked a
question she doesn’t appreciate, a veil de-
scends over her eyes, discontinuing the
conversation. (When I tried to elicit her
opinion about the novels of one of her
contemporaries, she said, “I hear the movie
is fab,” and turned away.) Morrison’s con-
versation, like her fiction, is conducted
in high style. She underlines important
points by making showy arabesques with
her fingers in the air, and when she is
amused she lets out a cry that’s followed
by a fusillade of laughter.
“You know, my sister Lois was just
here taking care of me,” she said. “I had
a cataract removed in one eye. Suddenly,
the world was so bright. And I looked
at myself in the mirror and wondered,
Who is that woman? When did she get
to be that age? My doctor said, ‘You
have been looking at yourself through
the lens that they shoot Elizabeth Tay-
lor through.’ I couldn’t stop wondering
how I got to be this age.”
When “The Bluest Eye” was pub-
lished, in 1970, Morrison was unknown
and thirty-nine years old. The initial print