'Fresh Air' Favorites: Toni Morrison

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Today we continue our look back on the decade that just ended and play some of our staff's favorite interviews of the decade. Up next - my 2015 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, recorded after the publication of his book "Between The World And Me," which became a huge best-seller.

It addressed the fears many African American parents have that their sons will become victims of violence. The book is written in the form of a letter to Coates' teenage son. It draws on history as well as personal experience to discuss the different forms of violence young African Americans are especially vulnerable to from all directions - on the street, in school and from the police. Coates was born in 1975 and grew up in West Baltimore, where he says everyone had lost a child somehow - to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns.

Coates is a former national correspondent for The Atlantic magazine. He won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award for his cover story "The Case For Reparations" about the long history of what he calls white-imposed black disadvantage. Coates also relaunched the Marvel comic book series "Black Panther." And in 2019, he published his first novel "The Water Dancer," which reimagined the Underground Railroad.

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GROSS: Ta-Nehisi Coates, welcome back to FRESH AIR. You wrote this new book in response to the recent police shootings of African American people - children and adults. The book is addressed to your teenage son. So when you were growing up in West Baltimore, what did the police mean to you when you were your son's age?

TA-NEHISI COATES: They were another force. So there are two sides to this, you know, 'cause I don't want to be too cynical here. I, you know, am an American, and so I did understand them as representing, you know, some aspect of the state that I was a part of - some aspect of the country that I was a part of. But at the same time, there was definitely another part of me that basically recognized them as another element within the society, within the community with no real moral difference from the crews and the gangs and the, you know, packs of folks who dispensed violence throughout the neighborhood. The police were another force to be negotiated that could dispense violence.

And you know, I want to be, you know, really clear about that because when you're on the outside, it's very easy to, you know, label a group of, you know, a, quote, unquote, "gang" as criminal. But you know, when you live in the neighborhood, these are people who you see, who you talk to. I mean, everything does not always come to violence. You can negotiate things, you know? There are ways of, you know, dealing with folks. And I talk about that a little bit in the book. And the police were, in that respect, very much the same way. Just like there's a - you know, there's certain rules for how you deal with, you know, a certain crew that lives in a certain place, the police have certain rules for how you negotiate them, too, if you want to avoid violence.

GROSS: Did you ever see the police as possibly protecting you from violent forces within your own neighborhood?

COATES: Yes, I did. But I also saw the crews the same way, you know? (Laughter) That's the interesting thing. I saw many, you know, of my friends who would be labeled as criminals in the same way. The question, you know, for me was, when do you call what? You know what I mean? So if somebody breaks into your house, you would call the police. Again, I don't want to, you know, be overly cynical here. You would call the police.

But by the same token if, you know, you happen to be walking somewhere and five people jumped on you and, you know, did some degree of violence, you probably would not call the police. You might call, you know, some of your cousins or you might call some of your friends. So it really depended on what the case actually was.

GROSS: You had a college friend - you went to Howard University - a man named Prince Carmen Jones, who was shot and killed by a policeman. The policeman said it was in self-defense after Jones tried to run him over in his Jeep. And you and everyone who knew Prince Jones didn't believe that story. You write about this in your book. Tell us a little bit about him.

COATES: I went to college with Prince Jones. It's very funny because when you write, it becomes sort of abstract for a while. And then when people ask you about it, suddenly it becomes real again. I went to college with Prince Jones. We weren't, you know, best friends or great friends, but he was someone who I knew - who I, you know, spent time around, who I had, you know, just a great deal of affection for.

Prince was tall, probably about 6'4" or so, slender, a beautiful, beautiful man - very, very handsome, extremely intelligent. He was from Texas. He went to a magnet school in Texas for math and science - statewide magnet school. As his mom explained to me, he was the only African American student there. As I, you know, did the interviews for the book and talked to his mother, Mabel Jones, who lives in the Philadelphia area now - and when I talked to her, what I realized was he was from a very, very well-to-do family - a mother who had grown up in dirt poor poverty in Opelousas, La., whose folks were sharecroppers, who had, you know, basically worked her way out of poverty, had become a radiologist, had gone to LSU, had served in the Navy - you know, had basically done everything America tells you to do and had, you know, accumulated assets and some degree of wealth. And he was killed. He was killed. I mean, he was executed like an outlaw as far as I was concerned.

The officers were attempting to track down someone who they had believed had stolen a gun from another officer. Somehow they got it in their head that the Jeep that Prince was driving either belonged to the guy who stole the gun or one of his friends. They ran the plates on the Jeep. The Jeep came up with Prince's mother's address and Prince's mother's name in Philadelphia. They assumed that this, you know, could possibly mean that the Jeep was stolen when in fact all it meant was that his mother had bought it for him. They followed Prince Jones out from the suburbs of Maryland, where they, you know, first began tracking him, into Washington, D.C., and then out into Virginia, where they shot him within, you know, mere feet of his fiancee's home. The basic, you know, report from the officer was that Prince had attempted to back up his Jeep several times and rammed the car that the officer was driving, so he had to kill him. He had to shoot him because his life was in danger.

But I tried to imagine myself in Prince's shoes. The officer who was tracking him was not in a normal police cruiser. The officer was not in uniform. The officer, in fact, testified that he pulled out his gun, said police but did not - never showed Prince his badge. The officer was dressed in an undercover disguise like he was supposed to be a drug dealer. And you know, this is how insidious it gets. I have to imagine myself followed from the suburbs of Maryland, through D.C., out into Virginia - realizing at some point that I'm being followed, not having any idea that this is a cop and then having somebody pull a gun out on me and knowing that I'm near my fiancee's house. So it always seemed to me perfectly logical, you know, that Prince perceived that he was under threat.

GROSS: Was this ever investigated?

COATES: Yes, it was. Nothing came of it. It was investigated by the prosecutor's office out in Fairfax, Va., I believe. There was an internal investigation by the Prince George's County Police Department. The officer was not punished. There was a civil suit eventually, where the officer and the police department was found liable.

The Prince George's County Police Department was, at that time, under federal consent decree. They were being investigated. The Washington Post did a series of investigative articles on the Prince George's County Police Department around that time - around 2001, 2002 - and found that they were more likely than any other police department in the country to fire their guns.

The point that his mother made - and I think this is absolutely, absolutely crucial - according to the official record, Prince attempted to kill a police officer, and that's how he died. So according to the official record, it's actually his fault. He's the criminal. He's the one that actually instigated this. That's the last word on his name, which I just - I mean, that is terrible. It's just awful.

GROSS: We've been talking about fear of the police and anger at the police. But part of your book is how you lived in fear when you were your son's age - when you were a teenager - when you left the house 'cause there was a lot of violence in the neighborhood. And you say basically everyone in your neighborhood seemed to be reacting out of fear. You were afraid of other kids. You were afraid of your father's beatings. You write - (reading) when I was about your age, each day fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not.

So I guess I'm interested in, what were some of the behaviors you had to learn to protect yourself, just, like, walking to school, walking home from school, going to visit a friend?

COATES: Oh, God - don't walk to school by yourself, make sure you have at least five or six people with you. It's very interesting - when - (unintelligible) Philadelphia 76 - Allen Iverson, when he came into the league, there was all this critique because he went everywhere with a posse. And there was all this talk about posses. Why's Allen Iverson - and I immediately understood, you know? (Laughter) As a matter of physical safety, for many years, you're trained not to go, you know, into places that you don't know by yourself.

Getting back to those rules - don't go to certain neighborhoods unless you know somebody over there - unless, you know, your grandmother's there, unless you got a cousin there, unless you got a really, really close friend there. If you have a girlfriend in another neighborhood, you need to go with four, five or six other people. Guys need to be prepared. And you know, you need to, you know, be watching out. When you walk through the street, as my dad - I can hear my dad telling me this right now - walk like you have someplace to be. Keep aware. You know, keep your head on a swivel; make sure you're looking, you know, at everything.

Little things, like understanding that - I think about this all the time - that, like, the first really warm day of the spring or the summer when you're in school is actually a really, really dangerous day for you because there's going to be a lot of kids out and people are going to, you know, be feeling a certain way. And it's quite likely that, you know, some amount of violence might occur. And so you need to keep your eyes out on those particular days.

Thinking a lot about which way you want to walk - you know, this is just particular to my middle school - I think about this all the time. You know, did you want to walk down the hill, or should you walk up the hill? Should you take a long, circuitous route, as I would sometimes, you know, through other neighborhoods with other friends from those neighborhoods so that you avoid certain people at certain times because they're, you know, already home by then? (Laughter).

It's a laundry list. You know, I can remember having - you know, like lunchtime - you know, you might have a problem with somebody, or somebody might have a problem with you. So you say, well, I'm not going to lunch today. I'm going to, you know, spend my lunch period in the library, which is what I would do sometimes - because you don't want to get caught with certain folks.

And then it's the more insidious aspect of it, which is this - my disposition is not, you know, to the street at all. You know, it was not - anybody who knew me, you know, growing up would tell you there was nothing street about me at all. But you know, one of the first things I learned within my first year in middle school - because middle school's when you really start getting indoctrinated into this stuff - is that any sort of physically, you know, violent threat made to you has to be responded to with force. You just - I mean, you just - you can't tolerate, you know, anybody, you know, attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force.

This had - I mean, this had real repercussions. I mean, you know, like, I go to school ninth-grade year in my high school, you know, and I, you know, I got suspended for threatening a teacher.

GROSS: I was going to ask you about that 'cause you refer to that in your new book. And I don't feel like I understand why that happened. Like, what did you say or do that was so...

COATES: I felt like he disrespected me. It was the same - you know...

GROSS: By doing what?

COATES: He yelled at me in front of the class, like, really, really loudly. And again, I mean, this was the sort of thing that, you know, you couldn't tolerate.

GROSS: But that is what teachers do sometimes (laughter).

COATES: I know. I know. But see, it sounds like you're laughing because, like, it's funny if you've never been in the environment...

GROSS: No, I get it. I get it.

COATES: ...And all you have is your dignity. That's all you have. I mean, you know, teachers yell loudly at kids from time to time. You're exactly right. But if you live in an environment - you know, if you're, you know, from a place where all you have is, like, the basic, you know, sort of physical respect - you will talk to me in a respectful way - you don't have anything else to lean on. That's very serious. That's really, really, really serious. You know?

If somebody yelled at me now, it probably would - you know, I'd, you know, sort of walk away and laugh. Well, I've accumulated certain things. I have certain things. I have a family. You know, I feel, you know, great personal value in myself and in my work and in what I do. I feel, you know, deeply loved by everyone around me. I don't feel like I live in a particularly violent environment. I wouldn't perceive being yelled at, you know, as necessarily communicating to other people around me that they, too, could disrespect me at any moment.

GROSS: So you threaten the teacher, and then you're arrested. Like, what - how did that - what did you say? And...

COATES: I said something to the fact that, you know, if you say something like that to me again I'm going to knock you out. It was something - but it was a physical threat.

GROSS: Wow. OK.

COATES: And I - and in that moment, I was not like - it was not idle either. I was very angry. I was really angry.

GROSS: So who called the police - the teacher or the principal?

COATES: He did. We had school police. We had school police.

GROSS: Oh, school police. OK, yeah.

COATES: Yeah, he called the police. The teacher called the police. Police came. And I probably - as I recall it, I got into some sort of verbal thing with the police, too. The police handcuffed me and took me downstairs. They called my parents. They wrote up an arrest report and everything. Eventually, they unhandcuffed and released me and sent me home by myself to my parents.

And I - Jesus, I hate saying this. Well, maybe I - this is just what happened, OK? And I wrote the book. So - and I've written a book about this before. It's out there. It's the public record. They released me. I went home. My dad kicked my butt. And that was the moment, you know, where, like - and I've said this several times - where he says to my mom - and I see this clearly - you know, my mom was really, you know, upset - had never really been upset about, you know, my dad dealing out physical discipline. My mom would deal out physical discipline. My mom beat kids. I mean - you know? So - but it really upset my mom, the sight of it. You know, I was 14. I was, you know, becoming a big kid by then. And she tried to stop him, and he said to her, you know, either I can do it or the police.

And so I go through this thing in the book about fear. And what I understand now - and this don't make it OK, and this doesn't mean that it's what I would do. But what I understand now is how deeply afraid my parents were when they heard I got arrested. I remember my mom later, you know, after all this, you know, blew over - maybe, like, a couple hours later that same day - talking to me about it and just, like, crying - like, just breaking down and crying. And they are - there are African American families, you know, around this country - a large, large number of African - that just operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything, you know, to prevent that.

GROSS: We're listening to my 2015 interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, recorded after the publication of his best-selling book "Between The World And Me." We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's continue our series of interviews from the decade that just ended and hear more of the interview I recorded in 2015 with Ta-Nehisi Coates after the publication of his book "Between The World And Me."

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GROSS: Your son is named Samori.

COATES: Samori, yes.

GROSS: And tell us who you named him after and how your name guided you - or didn't guide you - in deciding how to name your son.

COATES: Well, the first thing is my name is difficult to pronounce. So while I wanted to give him a name with some meaning and I had - you know, some sense of, you know, the black diaspora, I wanted (laughter) people to be able to pronounce his name. That was really, really important to me. I wanted, you know, people to be able to read it and basically be able to say it.

Samori is named for Samori Ture, who was, you know - during the period of colonialism, was one of the last and rather more effective folks to try to resist French colonialism in West Africa. And I gave him that name, you know, thinking about struggle and thinking about resistance - because Samori Ture ultimately failed. His country, his nation was ultimately colonized. But I gave him that name thinking about the idea that resistance means something even when you're not successful, that struggle means something even when you're not successful - that struggle and resistance in and of themselves are values. And I've tried to communicate that to him all his life.

GROSS: Your piece on reparations, which was a cover story for The Atlantic a year ago and won a bunch of awards - among other things, it documented government housing regulations and private housing covenants that prevented African American people from moving into certain buildings or into certain neighborhoods. It forced many African Americans to buy overpriced homes in ghettoized neighborhoods - is, what you describe, the history of white-imposed disadvantage.

Do you see that in your neighborhood - in the neighborhood you grew up in in Baltimore - and do you think the fact that were raised in that neighborhood had anything to do with the kind of government-imposed...

COATES: Yes.

GROSS: ...Restrictions...

COATES: Yes.

GROSS: ...And private covenants (ph) that you...

COATES: Yes.

GROSS: ...Later wrote about?

COATES: Yes. It's not even theory. I mean, it's just - there is a great book - I believe it's called "Not In My Neighborhood" - about redlining in Baltimore. Yes. Yes, yes. I mean, I - you know, you can - any person listening to this program right now can go and Google redlining map for any major city. Baltimore was one of those cities. Like, we got to be very clear about what housing segregation meant and what - and just forgive me. I'm going to try to unspool this for a second.

We had a period in the 19 - late 1930s into the 1940s, into the early 1950s, where there was a huge, huge investment made into housing and homeownership in this country. And the basic idea was that we needed to, you know, create, you know, a broader middle class. And so folks were given money - you know, government-backed loans effectively - to move into, you know, certain neighborhoods to better their lives. Folks were given money through the GI Bill, you know, to get better education. You know, a social safety net was erected in this country.

In almost every case - when you go through every one of these laws - when you go through FHA loans, when you go through Social Security, when you go through unemployment, when you go even through welfare, when you go through the GI Bill - at every level, you can find discrimination against black people.

In the '40s and '50s, we're erecting a modern class, and housing is the biggest one because housing is how most folks accumulate wealth in this country. You can see broad - I mean, just systemic discrimination against African Americans. If you were a black family in Baltimore, Md., in the 19 - say - '50s, when my grandmother was raising children in the projects - in the Gilmor Homes projects in Baltimore, Md., and you wanted to buy into a certain neighborhood, well, you didn't have freedom. You didn't have - I mean, you were lucky if, first of all, you accumulated the money in the first place to buy in a certain neighborhood. And when you did, you certainly did not have the right to live wherever you wanted. You didn't have the same choice that other Americans had. If you wanted - you know, you said, well, I don't like this neighborhood; there's too much crime; the schools aren't good enough. Let me move over - well, you didn't have that right.

GROSS: My impression of you is that you've tried to channel the kind of anger that you do feel - having studied systemic racism in the U.S., you've tried to channel that into explanation - you know, into investigation and explanation. How did this happen? What are the lasting, continuing consequences? And how do we talk about that?

COATES: Right. That gets me as close to peace - yes, yes, yes. And it's mostly - you know, quite frankly, Terry, it's selfish. I mean, it's mostly explanation for myself. If I can make it comprehensible, if I can understand it, maybe - I can't make peace with it. It doesn't make it OK. But I get it. I get it. It's not mysterious. It's not mysterious. And I think, like, that's one of the, you know, the worst aspects of racism. It's - you know, you feel a certain way about living in America and about your country and about how you're treated. And yet so much of everything around you portrays it as though it's mysterious. But it's not. It's not after, you know, you do, you know, some amount of reading, you know, about the country, you know, and about its society - it's not mysterious. It gives me a weird sense of relief, by the way.

GROSS: Relief?

COATES: Yeah, yeah, 'cause I'm not crazy. (Laughter).

GROSS: Right, OK. (Laughter).

COATES: I'm not crazy. When I was in Baltimore, you know, and I reacted that certain way - you know, even the ways that I'm deeply ashamed of, I was not crazy. I was not crazy. You know, I was in a situation, and I was trying to the best I can. I did not always make the wisest choices, but I was not crazy. I was not any lazier than anybody else. I was not any less hard-working. I was not any more lacking in morals. I had a father (laughter). You know, I had a mother. I was loved. I had people around me. I was just in a situation. You know? And had any, you know, other human been in a similar situation, it's quite likely that they might have reacted the same way.

GROSS: Ta-Nehisi Coates, thank you so much for talking with us.

COATES: Thank you so much, Terry.

GROSS: Ta-Nehisi Coates, recorded in 2015 after the publication of his book "Between The World And Me." After a break, we'll continue our series of interviews from the decade that just ended and hear my 2015 interview with Toni Morrison, who influenced many writers, including Ta-Nehisi Coates. She died last year.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. This week, we're playing some of our staff's favorite interviews from the decade that just ended - next, my 2015 interview with Toni Morrison, one of the most celebrated writers of our time. She died last August at the age of 88. Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 for her novel "Beloved" about a former slave looking back on her life after the Civil War. In 1993, Morrison became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. In 2012, President Obama awarded Morrison the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. When she died last year, former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith wrote, I know that many of us who devoted our lives to writing were first led to imagine such a thing was possible by Toni Morrison, whose work shed light upon lives - black lives - that we recognized as unmistakably familiar.

When we spoke, Morrison had just published her novel "God Help The Child." It begins with the line, it's not my fault. Those words are spoken by an African American woman explaining she has no idea why she gave birth to such a dark-skinned baby. The mother is embarrassed by her daughter's darkness and wants to distance herself. The daughter is scarred by not having her mother's love. The novel is about those childhood wounds that leave a lasting mark even into adulthood.

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GROSS: Toni Morrison, welcome back to FRESH AIR. I'd like to start by asking you to do a reading from your new novel. So this is from very early in the novel, where Sweetness, the mother, who is light-skinned African American, is talking about how shocking and upsetting it was to give birth to a daughter with very dark skin - as she describes it, midnight black, Sudanese black. So would you pick up from there with the reading?

TONI MORRISON: Sure.

(Reading) I hate to say it, but from the very beginning in the maternity ward, the baby, Lula Ann, embarrassed me. Her birth skin was pale, like all babies, even African ones, but it changed fast. I thought I was going crazy when she turned blue-black right before my eyes. I know I went crazy for a minute because once, just for a few seconds, I held a blanket over her face and pressed. But I couldn't do that no matter how much I wished she hadn't been born with that terrible color. I even thought of giving her away to an orphanage someplace, and I was scared to be one of those mothers who put their babies on church steps. Recently, I heard about a couple in Germany, white as snow, who had a dark-skinned baby nobody could explain - twins, I believe; one white, one colored - but I don't know if it's true. All I know is that for me, nursing her was like having a pickaninny sucking my teat. I went to bottle-feeding soon as I got home. My husband Louis is a porter, and when he got back off the rails, he looked at me like I was really crazy and looked at her like she was from the planet Jupiter. He wasn't a cussing man, so when he said, goddamn, what the hell is this, I knew we were in trouble. That's what did it, what caused the fights between me and him. It broke our marriage to pieces. We had three good years together, but when she was born, he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she was a stranger - more than that, an enemy. He never touched her. I never did convince him that I ain't never ever fooled around with another man. He was dead sure I was lying. We argued and argued till I told him her blackness must be from his own family, not mine.

GROSS: That's Toni Morrison reading from her new novel "God Help The Child." So the mother distances herself from the daughter because of the daughter's dark skin. The father leaves, thinking this child must not be his because he, too, is lighter-skinned. And that sets the whole story in motion, and I'm wondering why you chose color - you know, the level of blackness - as a central part of the story.

MORRISON: Well, I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error. It's socially constructed, it's culturally enforced, and it has some advantages for certain people. But this is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.

GROSS: So were there times in your life when you've been exposed to that kind of hierarchy of color within the African American community?

MORRISON: I have. I didn't have it until I went away to college. I didn't know there was this kind of preference. But I noticed, in addition to the outside world of Washington, D.C., which at that time - this is 1949, 1950 - there were very obvious stated, written differences between what white people were able to do and what black people were able to do. But on the campus, where I felt safe and welcome, I began to realize that this idea of the lighter, the better, and the darker, the worse, was really - had an impact on sororities, on friendships, on all sorts of things. And it was stunning to me.

GROSS: And you went to a traditionally African American college, Howard University.

MORRISON: Yes.

GROSS: There was a New York Times Magazine cover story about you recently, and in that article, you described, when you were young, witnessing your father throw a white man down the stairs because your father thought this man was coming up the stairs after his daughters. Was your father afraid that this man was coming to abuse you and your sisters?

MORRISON: I think he thought so.

GROSS: Do...

MORRISON: I think his own experience in Georgia would have made him think that any white man bumbling up the stairs toward our apartment was not there for any good. And since we were little girls, he assumed that. I think he made a mistake. I mean, I really think the man was drunk. I don't think he was really trailing us. But the interesting thing was, A, the white man was - he survived. B, the real thing for me was I thought - I felt profoundly protected and defended. I was not happy because after my father threw him down the steps all the way out into the street, he threw our tricycle after him. That was a little bit of a problem since we needed our tricycle.

But that made me think that there was some deviltry, something evil, about white people, which is exactly what my father thought. He was very, very serious in his hatred of white people. What mitigated it was my mother, who was exactly the opposite, who never rejected or accepted anybody based on race or color or religion or any of that. Everybody was an individual whom she approved of or disapproved of based on her perception of them as individuals.

GROSS: It sounds - you said that this incident made you feel protected. It sounds terrifying, though, for two reasons. One is that your father basically gave you a idea that this man was coming upstairs to do you harm. And two, watching your father not only throw him down the stairs but throwing your tricycle down the stairs after him - it sounds like that would be a little frightening to see also.

MORRISON: Well, if it was you and a black man was coming up the stairs after a little white girl and the white father threw the black man down, that wouldn't disturb you.

GROSS: I'm trying to think that through. I guess, you know, I think...

MORRISON: My father felt about...

GROSS: It's a product of being in this, like, not very violent, working-class, middle-class family where I didn't see a lot of violence when I was growing up. So any violent act would probably have been very unnerving to me.

MORRISON: Well, it was my father, who could do no wrong. So I didn't think of it as, oh, look; my father is a violent man. He never, you know, spanked us. He never quarreled with us. He never argued with us. He was dedicated, and he was sweet. So he did this thing to protect his children. Now, I lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all. One high school - we all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the south or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all pretty much, until the end of the war, very, very poor. My neighbors were from - my mother's neighbors who brought her stuffed cabbage were from Czechoslovakia - what used to be called Czechoslovakia.

So that - I'm not at all a person who has been reared or raised in a community in which these racial lines were that pronounced. Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.

GROSS: You know...

MORRISON: I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

GROSS: I think it must have been hard for your father to hate white people and to live in a neighborhood in which there was a lot of white people.

MORRISON: Well, you know, my father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, Ga., as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

GROSS: We're listening to my 2015 interview with Toni Morrison. She died last year. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. This week, we're featuring interviews from the decade that just ended. Let's get back to my 2015 interview with Toni Morrison, who died last year. We spoke after Morrison had published her final novel "God Help The Child."

The main character's birth name is Lula Ann Bridewell. When she's 16, she changes it to Ann Bride. Two years later, she changes it to one name - Bride. And she's in the fashion world, in the cosmetics world. It's a very, you know, signature kind of name to have. Names are very important in your fiction. There's often - people often have nicknames. And I'm interested in hearing about why names have such real and symbolic importance in your stories.

MORRISON: Well, there's a whole history, I think, in naming. In the beginning of black people being in this country, they lost their names, and they were given names by their masters. And so they didn't have names, and they began to call one another, you know, decades later, by nicknames. I don't think I knew any of my father's friends - male friends - by their real names. I remember them only by their nicknames.

And also, there was an honesty. Sometimes, the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you Shorty, and if you were angry, they would call you The Devil. I remember a man in the neighborhood who was called Jim the Devil - always those three words. Have you seen Jim the Devil? No (laughter). And then you think of the musicians - Satchmo, Louis Armstrong. What is Satchmo? That's Satchel Mouth. Or you think about them giving themselves royal names - Duke and Count and King. You know, it's a very personal identification, trying to move away, maybe, from the history of having no name and then personalizing it - on one hand, to give you a name that's embarrassing in order to make you confront it, deal with now; and then later on, more charming names, moving away from humiliating names like Satchmo.

GROSS: So your birth name is Chloe Wofford. Morrison was your married name when you were married, but you you've been divorced a long time - since 1974. And Toni was shortened from Anthony, which was the name when you were...

MORRISON: Baptized.

GROSS: ...Baptized. And so am I right in saying that you became a Catholic when you were 12? That's what I read.

MORRISON: Yeah, I did.

GROSS: So let's start with your name. Once you started being called Toni, did you feel different from being called Chloe?

MORRISON: I never felt like anything other than Chloe. You know, my name, Chloe - nobody could pronounce it properly outside my family. In school, the teachers called me Chlo (ph) or Chlovee (ph) or Chlorie (ph) because it was spelled that way. It's much more common now, but I couldn't bear to have people mispronounce my name. But the person I was was this person who was called Chloe. And then there's a wing of my family who are all Catholics, and I - and one of them was a cousin with whom I was very close, and she was a Catholic. And so I got baptized, et cetera, and I chose St. Anthony of Padua as the baptismal name.

So then I go away, and the people in Washington, they don't know how to pronounce C-H-L-O-E. So somebody mistakenly called me Toni because she couldn't hear Chloe. So I said, uh-huh. Yeah, so I don't care. Call me Toni. It's easy. You don't have mispronounce my name. And then I meant to put my maiden name in the first book I wrote. As a matter of fact, I called the publisher and said, oh, by the way, I don't want Toni Morrison to be on the book. And they said, it's too late. They've already sent it to the Library of Congress. But I really would have preferred Toni Wofford.

GROSS: We're listening to the interview I recorded with Toni Morrison in 2015. Morrison died last year. We'll hear more of the interview after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GERALD CLAYTON'S "SOUL STOMP")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. This week, we're featuring interviews from the decade that just ended. Let's get back to my 2015 interview with Toni Morrison, who died last year. We spoke after Morrison had published her final novel, "God Help The Child."

So the opening quote in your book - and it stands on a page alone before the book begins - is, suffer little children to come...

MORRISON: Oh, yeah.

GROSS: ...Unto me, and forbid them not. And it's...

MORRISON: It's what Jesus said...

GROSS: Yeah. It's when Jesus...

MORRISON: ...Says Luke.

GROSS: Jesus wants to bless the children, so he's basically saying, let the children come to me. Do not...

MORRISON: Yeah.

GROSS: ...Forbid them from coming.

MORRISON: They were holding them back.

GROSS: Yeah. The disciples wanted to hold them back. Yeah.

MORRISON: Right.

GROSS: So it just made me wonder if you have spent a lot of time reading the Bible, either through your mother's religion when you were young - and she was very religious - or as a Catholic or as a literary person.

MORRISON: I think as a scholar, because it's gone through so many hands, so many translations - even the people who were writing it - you know, the scribes - were changing things. Numbers changed. What was seven now becomes six, et cetera. So it's an interesting project, but that's the way I approach it now. But in my mother's church, everybody read the Bible, and it was mostly about music. My mother had the most beautiful voice I have ever heard in my life. She could sing anything - classical, jazz, blues, opera.

GROSS: You know, many people have commented on the musicality of your writing. Do you think you tried to emulate her music in your prose?

MORRISON: I didn't do it consciously or deliberately, but if it's there, then I am positive that that's part of it. You know, part of it for me is the sound. You know, I'm a radio child, you know, with the ear up against the gauze, where you hear stories - you know those little stories they used to play on the radio for 15 minutes? So for me, the sound of the text is very important, so important that I read all of my books for the audiobooks so that the reader can hear what I hear.

GROSS: So just one more question - you didn't start writing till you were 39 or 40. Is that because you didn't have the time or didn't know you had it in you? Like, what was the point in which you said, I'm going to write a novel? What changed?

MORRISON: When I was teaching at Howard University, and I was young - in my 20s - and I joined a group of faculty and writers who met, I think, once a month to read to each other and critique each other - some of them were professional writers, and some were not. And so I brought to these meetings little things I had written for classes as an undergraduate - some fiction, some not, and so on. And they had really, really good lunches, really good food during these meetings. But they wouldn't let you continue to come if you were just reading old stuff, so I had to think up something new if I was going to continue to have this really good food and really good company outside of the - my colleagues.

So I started writing. And I remember very clearly I was writing was a pencil. I was sitting on the couch, writing with a pencil, trying to think up something and remembering what I just described. And I was - the tablet was that legal pad, you know, yellow with the lines. And I had a baby. My older son was barely walking, and he spit up on the tablet. And I was doing something really interesting, I think, with the sentence because I wrote around the puke because I figured I could always wipe that away, but I might not get that sentence again.

So I wrote a bit of that. I went to the meetings. They thought it was very interesting. It was just, you know, maybe five or six pages. And they were very encouraging. And then I left, and I went to Syracuse, et cetera, et cetera. And in the mornings, before my children were awake, I would go back and finish that. And then it took five years, by the way, to write that little book because I wasn't thinking about publishing. I was thinking about the narrative and what I want to say, you know? So that's really how I got started.

GROSS: Toni Morrison, thank you so much for talking with us. I really appreciate it.

MORRISON: You're very welcome.

GROSS: Toni Morrison recorded in 2015. She died last August. She was 88.

We've been playing some favorite interviews from the decade that just ended. If you've been enjoying these recordings from our archive, check out our new archive website, which has decades of interviews, some dating back as early as the 1970s, when FRESH AIR was a local show in Philadelphia. You can search by name or subject, make playlists. It's at freshairarchive.org. That's freshairarchive.org.

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Mooj Zadie, Seth Kelley and Joel Wolfram. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. I'm Terry Gross.

(SOUNDBITE OF JASON MORAN'S "LULU'S BACK IN TOWN")

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