Lady Laureate: meet the great Toni Morrison in an exclusive BIBR kitchen-table chat.

NOVEMBER NOT ONLY MARKS THE PUBLICATION OF TONI Morrison's eagerly anticipated eighth novel, Love, but it is also the tenth anniversary of her Nobel Prize for Literature. "It still feels like the first two or three years after," Morrison says about the decade since she received fire most distinguished of her many literary honors.

Morrison is the first black woman to receive a Nobel, preceded in literature by only two black men: Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, poet and novelist, in 1986; and Derek Walcott, the Caribbean born poet, in 1992. But Morrison is also the first and only American-born Nobel laureate for literature since 1962, the year novelist John Steinbeck received the award. (Yes, I'm talking about the writer whose novel East of Eden got the Oprah Book Club classic treatment just this fall).

When I had the rare opportunity to spend two hours last summer interviewing her for Black Issues Book Review, Morrison had also recently celebrated the 50th reunion of her I toward University graduating class. ("It was the first reunion I ever attended," she says. "It was delighful.") She had also just been feted at the Third Biennial Conference and Tenth Anniversary Celebration of the Toni Morrison Society, an organization of teachers, scholars, and serious readers dedicated to studying and sharing Morrison's work. "The notion that the Toni Morrison Society had been around for ten years just stunned me," says Morrison, who especially appreciates the tenor of an organization that also advocates for learning, literacy and good literature.

At 72, Toni Morrison is both regal in her bearing and down-to-earth in her manner. On a midsummer weekday morning, she cordially greeted me at the door of her Manhattan loft apartment. Located in the Soho district, on a block bordering both Chinatown and Little Italy, the minimalist one-bedroom loftspace is strikingly accented with black folk art figures. Apologizing for the closeness of the air inside this infrequently used pied-a-terre, Morrison admitted she had not spent a night there in months.

Only the week before had she returned from an international arts conference in Geneva, then there was the Morrison Society celebration, and she had just come into the city that morning from her Hudson River home in Sneden's Landing, where she prefers to stay when she isn't teaching at Princeton University (She has another house near the campus.) Her two grown sons both live outside New York City, each near one of her homes. The eldest, Ford, an architect, lives with his wife, a Princeton professor, and their two daughters, an infant and a toddler, in New Jersey. Her second son, Slade, a musician, visual artist and collaborator with his mother on four recent children's books, lives in upstate New York, not far from Sneden's Landing. He, too, has a daughter, who is 15. After raising two sons as a single mother, Toni Morrison is now the delighted grandmother of three girls.

Back in her Manhattan loft, Morrison paused only a moment in the living room before leading her guest into a spacious white and stainless-steel kitchen, where she had already comfortably settled herself at the table. Offering me a seat across from her and pouring ice water for me, she refilled her own glass and then sat back down. In the leisurely but purposeful conversation that followed, what was always apparent was Morrison's passionate interest in her people, as well as how literature and culture are created and renewed in a changing world. Her deep, rich laughter often punctuated our exchange.

Morrison the Novelist

The latest novel, Love, had been described in the promotional material from her publisher as "Morrison's most accessible work since Song of Solomon." This comparison to her third novel, published in 1977, was an effective selling point with me personally, because I remember being so irresistibly drawn into it. In contrast, her first two novels had made me so uncomfortable when I initially read them: As a college student, I found the searing portrait of internalized racial hatred and child sexual abuse in The Bluest Eye (1970) utterly painful, although Sula, her 1974 novella depicting betrayal among beloved girlhood friends, is less threatening to me now at midlife than it was when I read it as a naive 25-year-old.

But from the first, I passionately identified with Milkman Dead's quest in Song of Solomon to piece together and comprehend his family's fragmented history, claim his own unique identity and then fly. Morrison's singular command of language in Song of Solomon is also what made me truly appreciate the vast creative range within everyday black speech.

Upon reading Love, however, I found I didn't understand why the Knopf publicity department had brought up "accessibility" to link it to Song of Solomon. So I asked the author if she understood her publisher's description better than I did.

"To me Love is just as complicated as anything I've ever written," she says. "Nobody but white readers have suggested otherwise to me. So what I think they mean is, 'She's not talking so much about that slavery stuff!'"

Like Song of Solomon, Love is a multigenerational story, revealing the personal and communal legacy of a prominent black family. As Morrison scholars will tell you, Love is the third volume of a literary master's trilogy investigating the many complexities of love. This trilogy began with Beloved (1988), which deals with the conflicting impulses of a black mother's love under slavery and in freedom. Jazz (1993), the second installment, offers a take on romantic love and sexual jealousy in 1920s Harlem. This latest novel looks back from the 1970s to the 1940s and '50s to probe the full human spectrum of love's expressions through the prism of one family's tangled intimate lives,

Love's Charismatic Male Hero

The emotional center of Love is the charismatic Bill Cosey, the de ceased owner and host of the long-faded Cosey's Hotel and Resort in silk, North Carolina, described in the novel as "the best and best-known vacation spot for colored folk on the East Coast. Everybody came: Lil Green, Fatha Hines, T-Bone Walker, Jimmy Lunceford, the Drops of Joy, and guests from as far away as Michigan and New York couldn't wait to get down here."

We get to know Cosey through the memories of five women who survive and love him: his granddaughter, his widow, two former employees, and a homeless young girl known as Junior, who is drawn into the Coseys' orbit.

All the elements we've come to expect from a Morrison novel are hauntingly present in Love: provocative, sometimes mysterious but al ways precisely named characters; her symphonic sense of language; and her deft command of the puzzle pieces of narrative that can initially challenge a reader. By the end of the book, the complete tapestry Morrison has woven shines forth clearly to the patient and attentive.

Although many people are aware of Toni Morrison's skills and contributions as a writer, few people today realize she was a pioneering editor, first in textbook publishing and then consumer trade. Morrison left her full-time job at Random House in 1983, to focus on her own work mad return to teaching. But back in the days when you could count on one hand the number of books by black authors pub fished every year, Toni Morrison was often the midwife of record. She has edited the short-story collections and two novels by Toni Cade Bambara, one posthumously. (Before she died in 1996, Bambara became Morrison's friend and a reader Morrison trusted to critique her own work.) Morrison also edited important memoirs, among them Angela Davis's. She discovered and published the work of the late Henry Dumas, among many gifted writers of fiction. She is responsible, too, for a unique documentary history of black popular and folk culture, The Black Book (1974).

Morrison the Editor

Morrison describes her entry into publishing as almost accidental yet somehow fated. After graduating from Howard in 1953, she earned a master's degree in literature from Cornell University, and taught at historically black Texas Southern University until she was invited to take an instructor's position at her alma mater, Howard University.

Back in Washington, D.C., she met and married a Caribbean-born architect. She was a mother of one son and pregnant with her youngest when she left the marriage and returned to live with her mother back in her hometown, Lorrain, Ohio.

Morrison thought perhaps she would find a teaching job at nearby Oberlin, Case Western Reserve or maybe Lorrain Community College. "For some reason, I don't understand," she said, her subscription to the then brand-new New York Review of Books was "forwarded to my mother's house." The review carried a classified ad for an editor's position in a textbook company in Syracuse. It listed leaching experience as one of the qualifications they were looking for in a candidate. "And I said to my mother, 'This sounds just like me.' And she said, 'Well you ought to apply.' But I didn't. And then by some fluke, two more copies of that same issue found their way to my mother's house. 'That looks like a sign,' said my mother. 'Why don't you write them?'

"So I did, and I went for an interview, and eventually was hired," recalls Morrison. "At the interview they told me, 'This company has been purchased by Random House--that is why we're expanding--and in a year, we're going to move to New York City. Are you willing to go with us?'" She accepted the job, moved to Syracuse, where she gave birth to her second son, and then worked until she moved her young family to Queens, New York, so she could work in Manhattan.

In 1966, when she became a textbook editor, she was asked to help produce suitable material for newly integrated public schools that mandated all textbooks represent a diverse population. For Morrison, it was more than a professional task, it was a personal mission. "Here I am a senior editor in textbook literature for high schools and colleges, so I thought up some textbooks like Contemporary African Literature," she recalls. She had been introduced to African literature only recently herself through visits to Africa House, a cultural center near where she lived. "Reading it affected me in quite a profound way," she says.

"Whatever these African writers were talking about, it wasn't about color. They weren't explaining anything to white people, though they may have commented on social conditions under colonialism. In one of Chinua Achebe's stories, lot example: A man leaves his home and saying goodbye to his wife, he touches her hair--a very small subtle gesture you'd never see in black writing in America back then. I realized that with all the books I'd read by contemporary black American writers--men that I admired, or was sometimes disturbed by--I felt they were not talking to me. I was sort of eavesdropping as they talked over my shoulder to the real (white) reader. Take Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: That title alone got me. Invisible to whom?"

The Gift of African Literature

Reading African writers empowered Morrison to see the world new when she wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye. "Maybe I'm wrong in my feelings about the impact of the white gaze on African American literature, but I know that eliminating it from my imagination was an important thing.

"This was so early, I didn't even know any black women writers, except for one short story I had read by Zora Neale Hurston," she admitted. Indeed, among the first black women writers she discovered were Ama Ata Aidoo, a Ghanaian playwright, poet and novelist, and Bessie Head, the late Botswanan-born novelist. These were the women she included in her Contemporary African Writing textbook anthology. Ironically, Morrison met Ama Ata Aidoo in person for the very first time at the 2003 Toni Morrison Society gala; the society had flown Aidoo in from Africa to be a featured panelist and speaker.

In both talks, Aidoo underscored how she had initially had a difficult time reading Morrison's Beloved. In 1994-95, Aidoo was in the United States teaching at Oberlin College. She was mourning a good friend who had just died, the Nigerian novelist Flora Nwapa, and another good friend was dying in Kenya. Meanwhile, Aidoo found herself additionally perturbed and distracted by the media circus surrounding the O.J. Simpson trial. In this frame of mind, Aidoo repeatedly tried and failed to read Beloved. "I couldn't get beyond the first chapter," she confessed, and her struggle with the text was a "secret shame" she kept to herself for six years, when at last she consumed the book in compulsive marathon sessions. "It was if I thought the book might hop up and run away from me," she says of how she inhaled the novel finally. According to Aidoo, this is what Morrison's work demands: "You are not going to be reading me when you haven't sorted yourself out," she said, drolly mimicking the voice of a demanding judge or teacher. "I'm not here to help you unwind."

In a keynote to the gala, Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University (the first black woman president in the Ivy League), put it this way: "Why does this brilliant talent hang so heavily? Why do we labor so to understand her work in its breadth of influence and magnitude of meaning on the world stage?" As provost at Princeton University in 1991, Simmons was responsible for the academic appointment Morrison holds now. Once Simmons primed the university's interest in the writer (who had already won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Beloved), the Faculty committee asked to review Morrison's academic portfolio. But Morrison was offended that Princeton would put her through a bureaucratic application process when they knew very well who she was and why they wanted her.

To break this impasse, without telling either Morrison or Princeton, Simmons had her office type up and prepare Toni Morrison's application file. Thus began an institutional affiliation that continues until today, where Morrison teaches American literature and creative writing.

A Mother and a Professional Collaborator

Since 1999, Morrison has also enjoyed producing children's books in collaboration with her son, Slade. The first, The Big Box (Hyperion), originated in a story Slade made up when he was a child, the result of mother son conversations about personal freedom, prompted by a conflict Slade was having at school with his teacher. The second also grew from intimate Morrison family interactions during Slade's childhood: The mother recalled that when she received her $3,000 advance for her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she decided to "blow it" on a family vacation in Aruba with her sons and her parents. ("Best money I ever spent!" she maintains.) On that trip they all remember so fondly, when the youngest of the vacation party, Slade, got fed up with being ordered around by everyone else, the tea of The Book of Mean People (2002) was born.

The latest two books, published this year by Simon & Schuster, came from a more conventional adult collaboration (one collaborating adult just happens to have given birth to the other). Who's Got Game? The Grasshopper? or the Ant? and Who's Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse? are creative retellings of two familiar Aesop's Fables, but in the Morrison versions, the moral of the story is less definitively resolved, allowing many ambiguities. For example, the grasshopper doesn't just loaf all summer; he's a gifted artist whose music inspires the ant to work harder. So shouldn't the ant have recognized the grasshopper's contribution to his life and well being by sharing his harvest bounty? And while the lion learns about humility from the mouse, perhaps the mouse is revealed to be, in passive-aggressive fashion, a controlling, manipulative bully! Morrison confesses to some vanity about her capacity to see the world through a child's eyes, but actually writing for children is a joyful breakthrough she has reached with the help of her son, who also injects a little hip-hop rhythm and attitude in the verse.

In addition to her work, what has always been important to Toni Morrison at this time of the year is hearth and home and making a comfortable environment for her family to enjoy fire holidays. Back in 2000, because of a very critical period in the gestation of Love, combined with her awareness of the approaching holidays, she missed an historic photo op, when all the living Nobel laureates were invited to Oslo to observe the 100th anniversary of the international prizes. Toni Morrison is not in that picture, because she just couldn't get herself to Oslo; she had other pressing business. What kept the first black woman to win a Nobel from this 100th anniversary photo op? She was at home, working hard like any other black woman, making Christmas for her family, but also doing some heavy lifting on her extraordinary novel Love.

Susan McHenry is BIBR's founding editor and consulting editor. For further information about the Toni Morrison Society, go to their Web site at www.gsu.edu/~wwwtms.

Black Issues Book Review's Founding Editor Susan McHenry is now BIBR's consulting editor and a contributing writer to Essence (for which she has worked in various capacities since 1997). McHenry sits down with the majestic author Toni Morrison, who discusses her career and her new novel, Love. Our cover story begins on page 28. In previous years, McHenry helped launch Emerge magazine and held pivotal staff positions at Ms., Working Woman and Quarterly Black Review of Books.