Chapter 1Elyria Avenue

Foreword

Toni Morrison had a desk before she had a readership, and the desk belonged to other people's books. This is the fact I kept returning to, the one that would not settle. For eighteen years — the better part of two decades, the years in which most writers who are going to matter have already announced themselves — she made her living from other people's manuscripts, and for thirteen of them she went to a no-window office on the ninth floor of a midtown building and spent her working days deciding which manuscripts by other people would become books and which would not. She acquired them. She argued their sentences into shape across three drafts. She fought the marketing department for their jackets and the sales force for their placement, and she sent them out into a country that had not asked for them. Then, at four in the morning, before the office, at a green card-table in a rented house up the Hudson, she wrote her own.

I have written before about women who came to public life as though to a courtroom — women who watched themselves become arguments, who learned to manage the version of themselves the country insisted on carrying around. What drew me to Morrison was that she had spent eighteen years on the other side of that transaction. Before she was ever a name to be handled, she was the person who did the handling: the one who read the slush, who took the cardboard box down from the mail cart, who decided. She understood publicity as a trade because she had practised the trade with her own hands. She had made other people into names. That is a rare vantage from which to be made a name yourself, and it changes everything that comes after — the Nobel, the broadcasts, the long campaign to pull her books off the shelves. She had built the machinery before she was ever fed into it.

I expected, when I began, to write mostly about the novels — about Sula and Beloved and the Nobel and the long argument they made with the country that produced them. And I did. But I kept finding myself somewhere else: in the editorial correspondence over a comma and a vernacular syntax, in the record of a scrapbook that arrived from the Bronx in a box she carried home on the train, in the plain arithmetic of a senior editor's salary set against a heavy yearly caseload. The record is unusually full — she left a paper trail, and the press wrote about her without pause from 1970 forward — and the fuller I read, the less the two halves of her life would consent to separate. The editor and the novelist were the same person, doing the same work, with the same hands, at different hours of the same day.

What I had taken for two careers turned out to be one discipline practised twice. The judgment she brought to Gayl Jones and Toni Cade Bambara and Angela Davis — the refusal to smooth a Black voice into a compromise with the standard-literary, the flat insistence that the reader come to the syntax and not the syntax to the reader — was the same judgment she would turn on her own pages before dawn. She had spent her days learning, on other people's manuscripts and at no risk to her own name, exactly what she would one day demand of herself. The desk was the rehearsal. By the time she sat down to Song of Solomon she was not a beginner in anything but her own byline. She was an editor of nearly a decade's standing who had finally consented to edit herself.

That is the argument of this book, and it is why I wanted to write it. We have grown used to the monument — the medal, the cathedral packed to its unfinished towers, the face that has come to mean American literature — and the monument stands directly on top of the workshop and hides it. She wanted to be read, not revered; she said so, near the end, in almost those words. What I have tried to recover is the woman at the card-table who wrote her name on the inside of the steel because the steel should know her hand, who had learned that habit from a welder in Lorain, and who never once mistook the reverence for the work.

I came to her the way you come to a writer you have admired from across a room for years and never quite finished thinking about. I leave her having sat, in the imagination, at the desk that came before the fame — which is the only chair from which the rest of it makes any sense.

— Eleanor Whitlock, New York

Chapter 1 · Elyria Avenue

1931

Lorain, Ohio, sat on the south shore of Lake Erie like a town made by accident. Steel had brought the immigrants in across two generations and was now keeping them, and the streets ran east-west between the lake and the lake-bound rail yards in long parallel lines that did not particularly distinguish one block from another. Czechs, Germans, Irish, Greeks, Italians, Serbs, Mexicans, and Black families lived next to one another on Elyria Avenue. They worked at the National Tube Company, the U.S. Steel mill, the Ford plant up in Lorain Heights, the shipyards at the river-mouth where the Black River ran into the lake. They sent their children to the same schools. Whatever segregation Lorain practised was not the segregation of the South. It was the segregation of habit and the lower wage scale and the door that did not quite open for the Black family.

Into this town, on Elyria Avenue, Chloe Ardelia Wofford was born on the eighteenth of February, 1931. Her father George Wofford had come up from Cartersville, Georgia, as a teenager, after white men lynched two Black businessmen on his street. Her mother Ramah Willis had come up from Greenville, Alabama, by way of Kentucky, in 1912 with the rest of her family — Ardelia and John Solomon Willis and their seven children, the migration arriving in the middle of the night by the Louisville and Nashville. Chloe was the second of four. The first, an older sister Lois, had come fifteen months before her. Two boys would come after her: George Jr., who would be called Sammy, and the youngest, Raymond. The four Wofford children grew up on Elyria Avenue inside a house that had a coal-stove in winter and a screen door in summer and a back yard in which her father grew tomatoes and Mary-Lou peppers and corn enough to put up.

George Wofford was a welder. He had three jobs at the height of the Depression and held them all simultaneously for seventeen years. His principal job was at the U.S. Steel mill where he stood at a furnace and let the steel rivers run past him in their channels and judged a seam by its colour, by the difference between the cherry-red of an over-heated weld and the orange-red of one that would hold. He welded at the Lorain shipyard as well. His night job, when he could get it, was at the auto plant. He had been a welder long enough, by the time Chloe was born, to develop the trade habit that he would keep until his retirement: when he had finished a particularly good seam — a perfect one, the kind that would never crack open — he would lift his goggles and write his name on the inside of the steel with a piece of soapstone. George Wofford, on the inside of a ship's keel where no one would ever read it. Asked once why he did it, when nobody would ever see the name, he said that he would know it was there. Forty years on, his daughter would say that she wrote her first novel because she wanted to read it — a book that did not yet exist until she put her name to it. She had inherited the trade habit. It was the same habit. The man and the woman were welders both.

Ramah Willis Wofford, who became Chloe Wofford's mother in 1931 and her teacher every day after, sang. She sang in the African Methodist Episcopal choir at the church on Vine Avenue. She sang at the kitchen sink while she cleaned greens. She sang going up the stairs and coming back down. The repertoire was prodigal. It moved without hesitation between the Jewel Song from Gounod's Faust — Ramah had taught herself the soprano line from the church choirmaster's loaned score — and the AME hymnal, and the spirituals her own mother had brought up from Greenville, and the new jazz on the radio that came in from Cleveland on Saturday nights. St. Louis Blues. Sweet Home Chicago. There Is a Balm in Gilead. The four-year-old Chloe, sitting on the kitchen floor sorting tin cans into the metal bucket and listening, learned that the human voice was the apparatus by which a day was held together. Years later, asked what music she wrote her novels to, she said she wrote them to her mother.

Then there were the others in the house. Ardelia Willis, the grandmother, came across in the afternoons from her own house on Tenth Street with a tin of biscuits, and she told the children stories. The stories were of Greenville, Alabama: the cotton-rows, the white-pillared planter's house at the end of the lane, the old men of slavery time who had still been there in Ardelia's own girlhood and had spoken the language. They were of the river crossings and the night journeys and the cousin who had gone to Tuskegee. They were of dreams. The Willis women dreamed forward and backward. If a dream came true, you remembered it; if it did not come true, you remembered why. Sometimes Ardelia put a knife under the bed to cut the labour pain of a niece across the river; sometimes she planted a copper penny under the front step against trouble. Chloe listened. She did not always believe, and she did not need to. The stories were the architecture inside which one moved.

John Solomon Willis, the grandfather, did not live to see the granddaughter publish, but in the years she was small he would come in the back door with his fiddle and stay for supper. He had been a sharecropper in Alabama who lost his land; he had dug coal in Kentucky; he had been a carpenter and a farmer and an itinerant fiddler whenever there were no nails to be driven and no fields to be worked. He sent money home from the violin. Chloe listened to him play on the back porch and watched the bow saw the air. Forty-two years later she would publish a novel about family and flight and a name hidden in a song — a novel in which a grandfather, Virginia-born, is shot dead defending his Pennsylvania farm, and in which his daughter, the one with no navel, the one named Pilate, pins the slip of paper bearing her own name inside a small brass box and wears it from her left ear like an earring. The novel would be called Song of Solomon, and somewhere beneath its Michigan streets and its Virginia song, the old man's fiddle was still playing.

So the four-year-old had four voices already in her ear. Her father's, telling ghost stories at the kitchen table after supper — the man at the crossroads, the woman who turned into a cat, the riverboat that came up the Black River with no captain. Her mother's, singing in transit between rooms. Her grandmother's, telling Greenville. Her grandfather's, on the violin. The four voices ran in and out of one another. They did not contradict. They were not a single voice, and the difference between them was what the child noted. By the time she was five Chloe Wofford had learned, without anyone teaching her, that a story is held by its voice and not by its facts; that the same fact rendered by two different voices became two different stories; that the who-is-telling-it was the architecture upon which the whole house stood.

1933–1937

The Depression was at its full weight when she was born. The father took every shift he could get. The grandmother brought biscuits from Tenth Street twice a week. The mother sang. The household held. Stories survived from those years, and the daughter repeated some of them in interviews fifty years later. They are not all sourced equally, and this book says which is which as it goes.

There was the fire. Chloe was two. The house on Elyria Avenue was rented, and the rent was four dollars a month, and the family could not pay it; the landlord — a white man whose name the family afterwards did not say — set fire to the house while the family was living in it. Everyone got out. The fire was put out. Nothing the landlord had done was prosecuted. Chloe later said that in the family's retelling this was not, primarily, a story about racism — the racism was assumed, was atmospheric, was the air. It was a story about her parents' refusal to be deformed by it. The family laughed at the landlord, she said in substance, because laughter was how you took a monstrous thing and distilled it down to a size a household could live with. Her mother did not cry. Her mother did not raise her voice.

There was the cafeteria line, and here the ground is softer. The story as the family told it is that a notice came home from Hawthorne Elementary saying the Woffords qualified for a free lunch, and that her mother took it back. This book has not found it in an interview, a memoir or a paper of record, and it does not know what was said or written on the notice; the circumstantial detail that usually accompanies the telling is not something a source supplies. What is attested, repeatedly and in her own words, is the household rule the story stands for: the Woffords paid for their lunches. They paid even when it was hard. Nothing was free except what people gave you and what you gave back. Chloe carried the lesson into the kitchen at four in the morning thirty years later, when she wrote the book she had needed to read because nobody else had written it. The novel was the lunch. She paid for it.

And there was the library. The Lorain Public Library on West Tenth Street had opened in 1904 with money from Andrew Carnegie, and by 1937 it was the place to which Chloe Wofford walked on Saturday mornings holding her grandmother's hand. Inside, on a low shelf in the children's room, the cards were arranged in alphabetical drawers with green leather hand-pulls and the books had Mylar jackets and you could take five at a time and keep them for two weeks. By the time Chloe was eight, the librarians had begun pulling books for her from the adult shelves. By the time Chloe was twelve, she was reading Dostoevsky.

This was not, in Lorain in 1943, a thing that twelve-year-old girls did. There was no precedent for it in the family or on the avenue. The grandmother told stories; the mother sang; the father welded. The reading was not in the family register. It came from the library, and from the librarians who put into Chloe Wofford's hands every Russian novel and every English novel that the building held. Crime and Punishment. Anna Karenina. Pride and Prejudice. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. The Sound and the Fury. That last one, Chloe read young and could not understand. She read it again in high school, and thought she understood about half. She read it again at Cornell and understood that what Faulkner was doing with time was what her grandmother had been doing all along on the back porch with the Greenville stories. The Sound and the Fury was a Black-grandmother method written down by a white man. The white man did not know it. The Black grandmother had not written it down because there had been no need. The novel was the lunch. You paid for it. You put your name on the inside of the steel.

1937–1943

In the summer of 1937, when Chloe was six, her family's circumstances improved marginally. George Wofford, a welder in Lorain's steel and shipbuilding trades, earned a modest rise in his wages — the product of years of application against the racial hierarchy of the mill floor. The raise was, by 1937, enough to ease the pressure on the Elyria Avenue house and to allow Ramah Wofford to reduce her domestic work.

George Wofford began to take the four children to the Lorain Public Library on Saturday afternoons. The Saturday-afternoon library trip was the family's secular ceremony. George did not read books himself — he read the Lorain Journal and the Cleveland Plain Dealer and occasionally the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black newspaper that circulated through the neighbourhood on Thursdays — but he understood that the library was the institution that the family had the right to use and had been paying taxes toward, and he believed in the exercise of rights.

The library on West Tenth Street had its tensions. The children's room was racially mixed; the adult reading room, in practice, was predominantly white. One librarian in the adult room had a habit, in those early years, of watching the Wofford children in the manner of a person watching a display case. George Wofford noticed and said nothing. He sat his four children down at the library table with their chosen books and sat himself across from them and read the Plain Dealer. He did not look up at the librarian. He read his newspaper. The children read their books. In time the watching librarian retired, and the librarians who remained did not watch the Wofford children. They handed them books.

The Catholic name

There was one more inheritance. In 1943, when she was twelve, Chloe became Catholic.

The Wofford household had been Methodist, AME, with the mother in the choir and the father at the back of the church on the Sundays he was not at the mill. None of the four children had been forced to the rail. But Chloe, at twelve, had been arrested by the figure of Saint Anthony of Padua — the Franciscan friar who, according to the legends, had preached to the fish when the human congregation refused to listen. The story was the saint on the riverbank, and the fish coming up out of the water to line themselves up and listen.

The grandmother was not there to be told. Ardelia Willis had died the previous August, six months before her granddaughter's twelfth birthday, and the tin of biscuits had stopped coming across from Tenth Street.

Chloe insisted. Her parents were consulted. Her father said that if Chloe wanted to be a Catholic he was not going to stand in her way. Her mother, the AME choir singer, said that God was God. Chloe was baptised and took the confirmation name Anthony, after the Franciscan who preached to the fish. Within a week the family had begun to call her Toni — the diminutive of the confirmation name, which then displaced the baptism name — and the schoolteachers picked up the new name within a month, and by Christmas of 1943 Toni Wofford had begun to be the name on every paper Chloe Ardelia handed in.

It was not a permanent erasure of Chloe. The name on her birth certificate stayed Chloe Ardelia Wofford. The name on her library card stayed Chloe Wofford. The grandmother whose name she carried had been dead sixteen months by that Christmas and never heard the new one at all. But by twelve the daughter had taken a name from the Catholic Church and from the Lives of the Saints and from a fish-story about a saint who preached to the fish, and that name became the public name. Decades later, asked why she wrote under the name Toni Morrison and not under her birth name, she would reflect that she had come to regard the choice as a mistake — that Chloe was the writer and Toni the public person who read at universities. But by then the public person had her name on three or four million books and there was no calling her back.

Each of these details — the welder's signature on the inside of the steel, the fire, the cafeteria line, the librarian's adult shelves, the conversion at twelve, the renaming — would survive into the later interviews. The daughter remembered them with a particularity that was the family's own particularity. Stories were not embellished. Stories were not invented. Stories were laid down at the time and lifted out forty years later, and the who-is-telling-it had not changed: it was still the four-year-old on the kitchen floor with the four voices in the air. Lorain, Ohio, in the 1930s, was the workshop. The novelist, when she came, would build out of nothing else.