Personal Background
An unflinching champion of her race and its heritage, Toni Morrison confesses to "[thinking] the unthinkable." In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, she explores infanticide, rape, seduction, madness, passion, wisdom, alienation, powerlessness, regret, tyranny, and the supernatural. A bold novelist, she has staked out fictional turf on which to dramatize the fact that black people, the center of her microcosms, are not marginal racial anomalies, but a genuine human society. In rebuttal of less inclusive philosophies, Morrison states: "There is a notion out in the land that there are black people or Indians or some other marginal group, and if you write about the world from that point of view, somehow it is considered lesser." Rejecting anything other than full membership in humanity for black people, she asserts her credo: "We are people, not aliens. We live, we love, and we die."
Childhood
Although reared in the North, Toni Morrison is the genetic and historical offspring of southern traditions. These traditions derive from her maternal grandfather, a carpenter and farmer who, seeing no chance for advancement in Kentucky's racism and poverty, moved his family to Ohio. Morrison's father, sharecropper George Wofford, had similar reasons to escape racial oppression in Georgia and relocate in northern shipyards, where he found welding jobs that he supplemented by washing cars. In the relative calm of the far north, Wofford, an embittered racist, still found reasons to distrust "every word and every gesture of every white man on earth." In contrast, Morrison's mother, Ramah Willis Wofford, a more educated, trusting person than her husband, offered her family a gentler, less vitriolic point of view concerning race relations.
The second of the four Wofford children, Morrison (née Chloe Anthony Wofford) was born February 18, 1931, and grew up on the western fringe of Cleveland, which sits on the south shore of Lake Erie. In the multicultural environment of Lorain, Ohio—a steel town of around 75,000, blending Czech, German, Irish, Greek, Italian, Serb, Mexican, and black suburbanites—Morrison experienced exclusion but did not suffer the intense racism leveled at other black writers, as demonstrated in the autobiographies of Maya Angelou, Dick Gregory, and Richard Wright. Although a landlord torched their apartment with the Woffords inside in 1933, Ramah, in order to foster mental health, taught her daughter to avoid animosity. (However, an experience with insect-riddled food from the welfare dole provoked Mrs. Wofford to write a letter of complaint to President Franklin Roosevelt.)
