From our archives: A 1981 interview with Toni Morrison
The following is a reprint of aĂÂ 1981 article "Toni Morrison; writing from the inside out."
"Stuff." That's what Toni Morrison's newest novel, "Tar Baby," is full of -- in the best sense. In the rich sense you get from the way she says "stuff." She's talking about how in "Tar Baby" the trees and river of the jungle have opinions about everything. Even the butterflies hang on the curtains and gossip.
This is not just to be cute, says this winner of a 1977 National Book Award for her novel "Song of Solomon." "Tar Baby" is the fourth in a string of novels drawn from black life. It is the most ambitious, but it has the personality and lyricism of her first, "The Bluest Eye."
"Stories are told for reasons other than information," Morrison continues. "That's the way people learn things. That's the way the Bible is; the story is trying to explain the universe."
"Since I had important information, I just tried to put it together in a way that could be absorbed. . . . Even the most innocent story is full of stuff that is really important information, the way dreams are." When she says it, the word is not a catchall. She leaves some air around it in a sentence, comes down on it, and it's specific, representing a wealth of things close to one's heart -- in her work, close to the hearts of black people -- that musn't get lost.
In "Tar Baby," it starts with the champion daisy trees, who are muttering because their companions have been chopped down to make way for houses on Isle des Chevaliers in the Caribbean. It continues with the "poor, insulted, brokenhearted river . . . poor demented stream," which, because its course was changed by excavations, has sulkily turned into a tar pit. All
