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  • On Meeting Toni Morrison
  • Sarah Ladipo Manyika (bio)

I

"Here is the house."

—Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, 1970.

The house commands a view. Square and solid, it sits on an embankment rising from the Hudson River. Meticulously maintained, its clapboard sidings and balcony railings are painted in shades of tan and river grey, with an ivory picket fence around the perimeter. The entrance is on the side of the house, hidden from public view. The door opens and a woman who says she is Nadine lets us in. I've come with Mario Kaiser, friend and writer, who has arranged this interview with a German magazine. Nadine leads the way downstairs to the study and announces us.

Ms. Morrison is dressed in black—trousers, caftan, woolen cap—and seated opposite a woman whose back is towards us. This other woman is a journalist and asks us if we can give her more time. We look to Ms. Morrison, who seems to sense our concern. "I'll give you all the time you need," she says. "Just make yourself at home."

Back upstairs, Nadine is frying onions and peppers which sends out a comforting smell of any number of cuisines that I love. The aroma from the kitchen has me thinking of food in Ms. Morrison's novels and how she often uses food to hint at what simmers beneath the surface. There's the smoke curling from the soft white insides of biscuits in Beloved (1987), the terrible crash of Mrs. Breedlove's berry cobbler in The Bluest Eye, the hastily abandoned vegetable chopping in Paradise (1997). In God Help the Child (2015), her most recent novel, Queen prepares a "united nations" soup which tastes like "manna." I imagine the soup smelling like Nadine's cooking. "Something healthy for Mrs. Morrison," says Nadine, who is from Jamaica. [End Page 138]


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Robert McCurdy, Toni Morrison, 2006.

Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; on loan from Ian and Annette Cumming. ©Robert McCurdy.

Ms. Morrison has said make yourself at home. I glance at Mario, whose look of concentration is befitting of the award-winning writer that he is. Meticulously, he writes in a reporter's notepad, while my gaze darts from kitchen to living room to the deck jutting out over the Hudson. A flock of seagulls transports me to the opening pages of Jazz (1992), then to Ms. Morrison's Nobel Prize Lecture and her parable of an old blind woman. In this parable, several children have come to visit the blind woman, thinking they can test the limits of her wisdom. One asks, [End Page 139] "Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead." The woman is silent for a long time before she finally speaks:

"I don't know," she says. "I don't know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands."

The bird becomes a metaphor for language and the story, a profound meditation on the complex truths surrounding narrative—its dangers and its power. Have we thought hard enough, deeply enough, about the questions we are about to ask this 86-year-old writer? Will we be able to go beyond the limits of questions and answers and gain wisdom?

As we wait for Ms. Morrison to receive us, and I'm trying to take in what surrounds me, I reach for a photograph album. Such albums were ubiquitous in my Lagos-Jos-Nairobi childhood, so I smile at the familiarity of posed, family shots, flicking through wedding photographs of Ms. Morrison's eldest son, Ford. Later, I will wish that I had breathed more deeply, more slowly, had taken in more details of the home, the books on tables, and the memories in the pictures.

What I do remember is that the ceiling, walls, and carpet of the living room are all subtle variations of the dove-grey Hudson river they overlook; that light pours through the windows on all sides; not a bright light, but enough to give the room...

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