- 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 And I was writing really for me and not for publication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.
