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.'