Elderism #29

I’ve always loved the seeming disparity between the highly stylized, incantatory prose of Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and her more spontaneous public persona. A friend of mine who was a colleague of Morrison’s in the English department at Princeton once overheard Morrison–who used to bomb around campus in a tiny, red sportscar–telling someone in the faculty lounge,

“Honey, she’s not my friend–she’s my agent!”

There’s a Q and A with La Morrison in this month’s AARP wherein the 77 year-old explains that what she values in life now is humor:

“…what’s really important is humor–the way you see through things. And I don’t mean just ‘Ho, ho, ho!’ but real irony about the diabolical nature of things.”

Morrison’s interest in diabolicalism led her to set her new book about early American colonists and their slaves, A Mercy, in late 1600’s Virginia, long before slavery had ossified or even matured as an institution:

“I was very interested in separating racism from slavery. The assumption has always been, in this country, that [slavery] began with a few colonists, and then came the Africans, and that relationship is the reason for much of the slavery that still exists in this country. And I didn’t believe it, because nobody is born [a racist]. Racism is constructed. It was an insisted-upon protection for the landed and the aristocrats.”