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.)
Brought up in a nurturing, religious environment, Morrison says, "We were taught that as individuals we had value, irrespective of what the future might hold for us. The women of the black community, whether aunt, grandmother, or neighbor, served as a tightly woven safety net." The oral tradition, carried on by both men and women, cushioned blows to self-esteem with stories and songs about the Underground Railroad, daring rescues, and other perils and triumphs of black history. In addition, Morrison absorbed stories about the post-Reconstruction South from her maternal grandparents, John Solomon and Ardelia Willis, who emigrated from Alabama in 1912.
Stronger than the men in Morrison's memory, the women of the black community were, as she says, "liberated women of the world, who could shroud the dead, nudge African violets into bloom, make beautiful biscuits, plow; they could hold you in their arms, honey, and you'd think you were in heaven." Morrison felt an obligation to these larger-than-life role models, and she recognized that "whatever I did was easy in comparison with what they had to go through."
