The third, palette, or color, is one of the last and most crucial of my decisions in developing a text. I don’t use color to “prettify” or please, or provide atmospherics, but to imply and delineate the themes within the narrative. Color says something directly or metaphorically. The red, white, and blue strokes at the beginning of Song of Solomon should lie quietly in the mind of the reader as the American flag background the action is commenting on. The withholding of color in Beloved, its repudiation of any color at all until it has profound meaning to the character: Baby Suggs hankering for some; Sethe’s startle when she is able to let it come into view; the drama of one patch of orange in a quilt of bleak greys. These studied distributions of color or its absence, the careful placement of white for its various connotations (the white, rather bridal dress of the figure praying next to Sethe; the dresses of the church ladies at the pie table in Tar Baby), the repetition of a collection of colors chosen to direct the reader to specific and related scenes in Paradise, do not mimic the choices of a Romare Bearden, but are clearly aligned with the process.
I am convinced that among the reasons Bearden must be widely viewed in galleries, should occupy the burgeoning attention of scholars to African American art, is only partly canon formation; is only minimally the quenching of nationalistic desire; is supplementally a tribute to his genius. The more significant reason in the exploration of the resonances, alignments, the connections, the intergenre sources of African American art is the resounding aesthetic dialogue among artists. Separating art forms, compartmentalizing them, is convenient for study, instruction, and institutions. But it is hardly representative of how artists actually work. The dialogue between Bearden and jazz music and musicians is an obvious beginning. The influence writers acknowledge is a further step. The borders established for the convenience of study are, I believe, not just porous, they are liquid. Locating instances of this liquidity is vital if African American art is to be understood for the complex work that it is and for the deep meaning it contains.
Romare Bearden sat in an airplane seat once and told me he would send me something. He did. An extraordinary, completely stunning portrait of a character in one of my books. Not his Pilate of 1979, but the Pilate in Song of Solomon—part of a series, I gather. Imagine my surprise at what he saw. Things I had not seen or known when I invented her. What he made of her earring, her hat, and her bag of bones—far beyond my word-bound description, heavy with the life that both energized and muted her; solitary, daring anyone to deprive her of her symbols, her history, her purpose. I had seen her determination, her wisdom, and her seductive eccentricity, but not the ferocity he saw and rendered.
Later on I acquired a watercolor of his, a row of Preservation Hall–type musicians standing before a riverboat, all in white with their traditional sashes of color. For the first time in a representation of black jazz musicians I saw stillness. Not the active, frenetic, unencumbered physical movement normally seen in renderings of musicians—but the quiet at the center. It was, in a word, sacred, contemplative. A glance into an otherwise obscured aspect of their art.
That kind of insight is rare indeed. Displaying it, underscoring it, analyzing it is far more compelling than merely enjoying it. The legacy enjoins us all to think deeply about what Romare Bearden has given us, and what African American art is imploring us to discover.
Faulkner and Women
I’M AMBIVALENT about what I’m about to do. On the one hand, I want to do what every writer wants to do, which is to explain everything to the reader first so that, when you read it, there will be no problems. My other inclination is to run out here and read it, then run off so that there would be no necessity to frame it. I have read from this manuscript three or four times before, and each time I learned something in the process of reading it, which was never true with any other book that I wrote. And so when I was invited to come to Oxford and speak to this conference about some aspect of “Faulkner and Women,” I declined, saying that I really couldn’t concentrate enough to collect remarks on “Faulkner and Women” because I was deeply involved in writing a book myself and I didn’t want any distractions whatsoever. And then very nicely the conference directors invited me to read from this manuscript that had me so obsessed, so that I could both attend the conference and associate myself in some real way with the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and also visit Mississippi and “spend the night,” as they say. So, on the one hand, I apologize for reading something that is not finished but is in process, but this was a way to satisfy my eagerness to visit the campus of the University of Mississippi, and I hope there will be some satisfaction rippling through the audience once I have finished. My other hesitation is simply because some of what I read may not appear in print, as a developing manuscript is constantly changing. Before reading to a group gathered to discuss “Faulkner and Women,” I would also like to add that in 1956 I spent a great deal of time thinking about Mr. Faulkner because he was the subject of a thesis that I wrote at Cornell. Such an exhaustive treatment of an author makes it impossible for a writer to go back to that author for some time afterward until the energy has dissipated itself in some other form. But I have to say, even before I begin to read, that there was for me not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect.
The title of the book is Beloved, and this is the way it begins:
[The author read from her work-in-progress and then answered questions from the audience.]
MORRISON: I am interested in answering questions from those of you who may have them. And if you’ll stand up and let me identify you before you ask a question, I’ll do the best I can.
QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, you mentioned that you wrote a thesis on Faulkner. What effect did Faulkner have on your literary career?
MORRISON: Well, I’m not sure that he had any effect on my work. I am typical, I think, of all writers who are convinced that they are wholly original and that if they recognized an influence they would abandon it as quickly as possible. But as a reader in the fifties and later, of course (I said 1956 because that’s when I was working on a thesis that had to do with him), I was concentrating on Faulkner. I don’t think that my response was any different from any other student at that time, inasmuch as there was in Faulkner this power and courage—the courage of a writer, a special kind of courage. My reasons, I think, for being interested and deeply moved by all his subjects had something to do with my desire to find out something about this country and that artistic articulation of its past that was not available in history, which is what art and fiction can do but sometimes history refuses to do. I suppose history can humanize the past also, but it frequently refuses to do so for perfectly logically good reasons. But there was an articulate investigation of an era that one or two authors provided and Faulkner was certainly at the apex of that investigation. And there was something else about Faulkner that I can only call “gaze.” He had a gaze that was different. It appeared, at that time, to be similar to a look, even a sort of staring, a refusal-to-look-away approach in his writing that I found admirable. At that time, in the fifties or the sixties, it never crossed my mind to write books. But then I did it, and I was very surprised myself that I was doing it, and I knew that I was doing it for some reasons that are not writerly ones. I don’t really find strong connections between my work and Faulkner’s. In an extraordinary kind of memorable way there are literary watersheds in one’s life. In mine, there are four or five, and I hope they are all ones that meet everybody’s criteria of who should be read, but some of them don’t. Some books are just awful in terms of technique but nevertheless they are terrific: they are too good to be correct. With Faulkner there was always something to surface. Besides, he could infuriate you in such wonderful ways. It wasn’t just complete delight—there was also that other quality that is just as important as devotion: outrage. The point is that with Faulkner one was never indifferent.