Toni Morrison dedicated Beloved, her 1987 masterpiece recently named by The New York Times as the best American novel of the past 25 years, to the '60 million and more' black people said to have died under America's slave trade. There was no monument to commemorate American slaves, she lamented at the time, not even a bench by the side of the road. Recently, an international society of Morrison scholars and admirers gathered to lay a bench on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, by what was once a port for slave ships. 'I really liked it because it was simple and unpretentious; it was open, anyone could sit there,' says Morrison. The Nobel laureate is more than just a literary figure: to many, she's an icon who helped reclaim the African-American experience from white history. Even though critics sometimes find her prose abstruse, they sell in the millions. When Beloved was passed over for the National Book Award, several African-American writers issued a statement of protest and it subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize. Now 78, and with her ninth novel A Mercy published in paperback, Morrison is keen to shake off the image of national conscience. At a talk in London, she corrected an audience member who called her a spokesperson for the African-American community: 'I don't speak for you. I speak to you.' For most of her four decades as a novelist, Morrison embraced being categorised as a 'black woman writer', choosing to see it as liberating rather than limiting. 'That whole labelling business is just so tiresome - you can't escape it, but you can try to own it,' she says. 'I don't think I was successful at all.' Beloved shows how slavery prevented black women from being able to care for their children. It was inspired by an old newspaper clipping Morrison read about an escaped slave, Margaret Garner, who killed her daughter rather than see her returned to bondage. A Mercy explores similar territory, following a black slave, Florens, who is separated from her mother and sent to work for an Anglo-Dutch farmer. But A Mercy is set in the late 1600s, two centuries before Beloved, when slavery was not yet linked to skin colour. Morrison wanted to imagine what it felt like to be a slave but not subject to racism. 'That's why I had to go back before the institutionalisation of racism, when it became law.' European nations were laying claim to the land in the 17th century, and Morrison 'was interested in who those people who came to the continent were - the ordinary people who were running away from something and hoping to find it in this new world'. When the farmer dies, his charges - among them a native American servant and two white indentured labourers - struggle to hold up in the harsh terrain. After his widow also falls sick, Florens sets out to find a blacksmith with curative powers - a free African man. 'I was trying to erase racism from the American narrative, to take it out and see people from different places, different classes, different parts of the world, trying to form a family, a kind of unit.' Morrison's publishers pushed the hardback's appearance forward to coincide with last year's US election. The novel's portrayal of racial commingling now has added currency. Barack Obama asked Morrison for her endorsement, and she wrote him a letter describing him as 'the man for this time'. His presidential victory is seen as a landmark for racial progress but Morrison says her decision to back Obama against Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with race. 'I'm not interested in him because of his race. It's overdone. It's like Othello - everybody plays that role like the play is about his being a Moor ... The play's not about that at all.' Observing the discussion of race in the lead-up to the election, Morrison felt as if a boil was being pierced - a cleansing process that would allow people to finally talk about something else. 'People tried to say it and not say it, then use it and reject it, then try to develop a language that was about race, where you could say alien, foreigner - everything except race.' Upon awarding Morrison the Nobel Prize in 1993, the Swedish Academy praised her as a writer of 'visionary force and poetic import' who 'delves into language itself, a language she wants to liberate from the fetters of race'. The author grew up in the poor steel mill town of Lorain, Ohio, which was divided along class lines rather than by race. Her neighbours came from many cultures. Racism was an abstraction. 'My parents were from the deep south, so I knew there was another world, but it was their past, not my present.' She studied at Howard University, where she later taught before becoming a book editor. There the author, born Chloe Wofford, picked up the nickname 'Toni' (an abbreviation of her middle name, Anthony). Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is about a black girl who dreams of blue eyes and blond hair. The novel was hardly autobiographical; she wrote it because 'I never read about 'me' in any of the literature I loved - 'me' meaning one of the most vulnerable people in the society: a child, a female, and a black female child.' Morrison worked on it for five years, raising her two sons alone after divorcing their father in 1964. There were few black female literary voices in the 1960s and they didn't offer models for the gritty fiction she aspired to write. 'Most were about how really and truly noble characters were in the black world. I was writing about what the pain really was.' It heartens her that critics no longer read African-American fiction mostly as sociology. Now, 'they talk about it as literature - about the language, the structure, its relationship to other kinds of novels. You can't just get away with saying: 'This is a black world novel'.' Writer's notes Name: Toni Morrison Age: 78 Born: Lorain, Ohio Lives: New York City and New Jersey Family: divorced from Harold Morrison; sons Harold and Slade Genre: literary fiction Other jobs: taught English literature at Howard and Princeton universities; editor at Random House Current project: a new novel Latest book: A Mercy (2008) Other books: The Bluest Eye (1970); Sula (1973); Song of Solomon (1977); Tar Baby (1981); Beloved (1987); Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992); Jazz (1992); Paradise (1998); Love (2003); What Moves at the Margin: Selected Non-Fiction (2008) What the papers say: 'As a prose-poem, A Mercy is largely successful. As a novel or even novella, it lacks the immediacy, forward motion and brilliant plotting that has made Beloved a deservedly popular classic.' The Daily Telegraph
