THENEWYORKER,JULY27, 2020 37
ist.... We are determined to bring to
the large community of Black artists and
Black people in general this man’s work.”
The racial climate in the mid-seven-
ties made it especially hard for Morri-
son to promote certain books—books
that might be taken as too radical. Mor-
rison remembered that the marketing
department balked when she wanted
to have a publication party in a club on
125th Street. No one from Random
House came—it was rumored that some-
one in management had cautioned the
staff about the danger—except the pub-
licist and her assistant, who said it was
the best party they’d ever been to. A cou-
ple of news crews showed up, however,
and the party was on the evening news,
giving the book hundreds of thousands
of dollars’ worth of free publicity, by Mor-
rison’s reckoning. Similarly, Morrison
said, when she brought out Muhammad
Ali’s autobiography, “The Greatest,” in
1976, all the department stores that were
approached about hosting the book sign-
ing backed out, fearing riots and loot-
ing. When E. J. Korvette’s, the now de-
funct department store, agreed to host
the signing, Morrison brought in mem-
bers of the Nation of Islam, who came
with their families, as peacekeepers. She
also installed a white friend, a woman
who worked in the sales department, to
guard Ali. “You stand right next to Ali,”
she said. “And when people come up
and punch him—‘Hey, Champ!’—you
stop them. Because he’s not going to say
it ever, that it hurts when you get a thou-
sand little taps. And when you think Ali
is tired give him a baby to play with. He
likes babies.” Two thousand people came
to E. J. Korvette’s, on a rainy night, and,
with the Brothers of the Nation of Islam
milling around in the crowd, everything
was serene and orderly.
Throughout the seventies, Morrison
worked as a teacher at Yale, SUNY Pur-
chase, Bard, Rutgers, and SUNY Albany.
“Random paid about ten cents, so Toni
took on teaching jobs,” Jason Epstein
recalled. In a 1998 interview, she said,
“When I wanted a raise, in my employ-
ment world, they would give me a little
woman’s raise and I would say, ‘No. This
is really low.’ And they would say, ‘But,’
and I would say, ‘No, you don’t under-
stand. You’re the head of the household.
You know what you want. That’s what
I want. I want that. I am on serious busi-
ness now. This is not girl playing. This
is not wife playing. This is serious busi-
ness. I am the head of a household, and
I must work to pay for my children.’”“
T
he Bluest Eye” had made the lit-
erary establishment take notice.
In “Sula,” which was published three
years later, Morrison’s little colored girls
grew up and occupied a more com-
pletely rendered world. “The Bluest
Eye” was divided by seasons; “Sula” was
divided into years, stretching from 1919
to 1965. Again, the story is set in a small
Ohio town, in a neighborhood called
the Bottom. (“A joke. A nigger joke.
That’s the way it got started.”) Sula Mae
Peace, Morrison’s heroine, is the prog-
eny of an eccentric household run by
formidable women. She leaves the Bot-
tom in order to reinvent herself. Mor-
rison does not relay what Sula does when
she ventures into the world, but her re-
turn is catastrophic. (The first sign of
impending disaster is a plague of rob-
ins.) Her return also brings about a con-
frontation with her grandmother Eva—a
parable of the New Negro Woman con-
fronting the Old World.At Eva’s house there were four dead rob-
ins on the walk. Sula stopped and with her toe
pushed them into the bordering grass....
When Sula opened the door [Eva] raised her
eyes and said, “I might have knowed them birds
meant something. Where’s your coat?”
Sula threw herself on Eva’s bed. “The rest
of my stuff will be on later.”
“I should hope so. Them little old furry
tails ain’t going to do you no more good than
they did the fox that was wearing them.”
“Don’t you say hello to nobody when you
ain’t seen them for ten years?”
“If folks let somebody know where they is
and when they coming, then other folks can
get ready for them. If they don’t—if they just
pop in all sudden like—then they got to take
whatever mood they find.”
“How you been doing, Big Mamma?”
“Gettin’ by. Sweet of you to ask. You was
quick enough when you wanted something.
When you needed a little change or ...”
“Don’t talk to me about how much you gave
me, Big Mamma, and how much I owe you or
none of that.”
“Oh? I ain’t supposed to mention it?”
“OK. Mention it.” Sula shrugged and turned
over on her stomach, her buttocks toward Eva.
“You ain’t been in this house ten seconds
and already you starting something.”
“Takes two, Big Mamma.”
“Well, don’t let your mouth start nothing
that your ass can’t stand. When you gone to
get married? You need to have some babies.
It’ll settle you.”“I don’t want to make somebody else. I
want to make myself.”...
“Pus mouth! God’s going to strike you!”
“Which God? The one watched you burn
Plum [Eva’s son]?”
“Don’t talk to me about no burning. You
watched your own mamma. You crazy roach!
You the one should have been burnt!”
“But I ain’t. Got that? I ain’t. Any more
fires in this house, I’m lighting them!”Where I come from, this dialogue
doesn’t sound so much fictional as doc-
umentary; it could be about the women—
sisters and cousins—who passed Mor-
rison’s books on to me when I was
growing up, women who didn’t know
they were “marginal.”
Morrison’s interest was in spoken lan-
guage, heightened and dramatized. (Bob
Gottlieb told me that he was always in-
serting commas into Morrison’s sen-
tences and she was always taking them
out.) In describing her style, Morrison
said, “I thought, Well, I’m going to drop
‘g’s where the black people dropped ‘g’s,
and the white people on the same street
in the same part of the state don’t. But
there was a distinction in the language
and it wasn’t in the spelling. It was some-
place else.” Morrison went on, “Maybe
it’s because African languages are so
tonal, so that with the little shifts in pro-
nunciation, the little shifts in placement,
something else happens.
“I was just determined to take the lan-
guage that for me was so powerfully met-
aphoric, economical, lunatic, and intelli-
gent at the same time—just these short
sentences or these developments of ideas
that was the language of my family and
neighbors and so on—and not make it
exotic or comic or slumming.” Zora Neale
Hurston, the nineteen-thirties novelist
and folklorist, was an example, Morrison
said, of a black writer who treated dia-
logue as a transcript to show white peo-
ple how it really was in the Florida
swamps. Morrison’s aim was different.
“Street language is lyrical, plus it has this
blend of the standard English and the
sermonic, as well as the colloquial, you
know—that is what I wanted to polish
and show, and make it a literary vehicle,”
Morrison said. (She has succeeded in this
to the point of irritating some readers.
James Wood, in a review of “Paradise” ti-
tled “The Color Purple,” wrote, “Morri-
son is so besotted with making poetry,
with the lyrical dyeing of every moment,
that she cannot grant characters their