- Did you want to run away?
Did you want to fly?
- Oh, yes.
I used different words for it because I think
being a woman limited me in some regard.
I thought only of certain kinds of art forms
I wanted to be involved in, and they included dancing,
I wanted, really, to be Maria Tallchief most of my life.
But that's why the book is about men,
because when I thought of that idea,
I couldn't use women characters to explicate that idea.
- Which you had done in your previous novels.
- My previous books are all, the major characters are women,
young women, older women, and they are the ones,
they're the center of the book,
and it's sort of closed, like a room or like a house.
But this book, because it was about both freedom and escape
and abandonment and triumph, had to be about men.
And it was an enormous difference for me,
a huge difference is I never really tried
to become that intimate with a character,
a man, to try to feel what it was really like
to think about dominion, power, those kinds of things,
what are alien to me, in a way,
although I have done sketches of men,
I've been a little fearful of going rather deeply inside.
- [Interviewer] When did you know
that you were going to be a writer?
- I never thought about it.
I started to write when I was in a lonely place.
And I was writing really for me
and not for publication and not for anybody.
It was a way of talking then, so I talked to myself a lot.
And then, later, I writ more and more,
and I had a larger story that looked like a novel,
and I sent it to some people and they sent it back
and that happened a lot, and then finally
there was an editor who had seen it but was about to move,
(clears throat)
excuse me, to another publishing company.
And he said, when I move, I'd like to see it again.
And he went to Holt and he bought it.
And by that time I had begun to write, you see,
and I didn't wanna stop, I didn't wanna think any other way,
it was so terrific to be able to see the world that way.
It was coherent, things that were disorganized for me before
made sense when I manipulated it.
I saw colors and remembered music
and language, all the things that, I guess,
had made life interesting, I could employ,
and it was just a way of, it was a way of thinking
and a way of feeling, it was a way of life.
I even know now, I certainly hope
that I am a successful writer,
but I know that if there were no publishing companies
left in the world, I would still do it.
When we used to read Homer, and it was always
extraordinary to me that he never
had a villain that was only that.
The cyclops, you know, who ate those men
and was really an awful, awful monster,
there's that marvelous passage, you know,
when he's talking to the sheep
as they're going out of the cave
and all the men are underneath, and this last one,
and he talks to him as though he were his friend.
And at that moment, you feel very sorry
for this man that 20 pages earlier
had been eating human beings.
And I was a little annoyed by Ulysses
for calling him names and tricking him.
That ability to see both sides.
- Toni Morrison, why, in a period of 10, 20 years,
when many people would say, equal justice under the law,
better housing, better schools,
these are the things we should consider ourselves with,
in fact, and perhaps in our fiction.
Why is it that you have dared to go all the way out
and say, storytelling, myth, belief in magic,
these are also important?
- Well it's truth, it's not fact,
I know, but it is truth, and that's where truth lies,
in our myths, in our songs, that's where the seeds are.
It's not possible to constantly hone on the crisis.
You have to have the love, and you have to have the magic,
that's also life, and I regard it even though
it may sound as though I'm dealing in fantasy.
I don't think so, I find it all terribly realistic
because I regard my responsibilities as a black writer
as someone who must bear witness.
Someone who must record the way it used to be.
The way it ought to be, I leave to the sociologists.
But I want to make sure that a little piece
of the world that I knew, a little piece that I knew,
doesn't get forgotten.