GRAND VIEW-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. -- The Hudson River extends from the back of Toni Morrison's house, illuminated and infinite, undimmed by an unseasonably drab spring afternoon. "It's interesting and soothing, and it changes constantly," she says from the comfort of a white armchair in her living room. "And at night, with the stars and the moon ..." The Nobel laureate has lived in this converted boathouse since the late 1970s, when she spotted a "For Sale" sign while driving by and soon agreed to pay the then-impractical sum of $120,000. Her commitment was tested, then confirmed, after the house burned down in 1993, destroying everything from private letters to her sons' report cards. But she had the house rebuilt and upgraded and so enjoys a setting both spacious and personal, with bookcases and paintings, plants and carvings, a patio and private dock. It's a Saturday, and the 81-year-old Morrison is in a relaxed, informal mood, wearing a gray blouse and slacks and dark slippers, a purple bandanna tied over her gray locks, her laugh easy and husky. You might mistake her for an ordinary neighbor ready for gardening until you see the pictures of her with James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Elie Wiesel among others, or learn that the low, wooden table by her chair was a prop from the film version of "Beloved," her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Morrison has a new novel out, "Home" (Knopf, $24), a brief, poetic story of Frank Money, a traumatized Korean War veteran who returns to the States in the 1950s. Morrison has long used fiction as a private and alternative history, whether the Civil War ("Beloved"), the 1920s ("Jazz") or colonial times ("A Mercy"). With "Home," she wanted to add some truth -- about war, about racism -- to the standard '50s narrative.
"I was really trying to take off that scab, or that veil, or whatever it is off the '50s," she says. "We're told that it was good times, postwar, GI Bill, people had jobs and the television was full of happy stories and so on, and that's it."
Like "Beloved," "Song of Solomon" and other Morrison novels, the book is a journey and a reckoning. Using bus money given to him by a pastor, Money travels from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago to his dreaded hometown, Lotus, Ga., "the worst place in the world," where nobody "knew anything or wanted to learn anything." Warned from the start that the North is no less racist than the South, he encounters violence and segregation and the lawlessness of police. Once in Georgia, he is almost relieved. At least the pace is "human," Money observes, there was "time to instruct one another, pray for one another, and chastise children in the pews of a hundred churches."
Morrison, a native of Lorain, Ohio, never lived in Georgia. But for "Home" she drew upon stories from her father, a native of Cartersville, Ga., and from her memories of the South when she was an undergraduate at Howard University in Washington, D.C. She was on tour with fellow theater students in the early '50s and was moved by how blacks took care of her and each other, a bond dramatized in "Home" and many of her works. She knew what to expect from the whites in the South, but the revelation was how "lovely and generous and capable" the blacks were.
"If we arrived at a town where the faculty had made arrangements to spend the night and either the place we thought was nice, wasn't, or they didn't want the students to stay there, one of them would go into a phone booth. They would check the yellow pages for a black church and then call up a minister and say, 'We're from Howard University and we're a little chagrined because we don't have a place to stay,' " Morrison says. "And the pastor would say, 'Call me back in 10 minutes.' And in 10 or 15 minutes he had rounded up his parishioners to take us in. We would go into these houses. And the women, they just fed us, took care of us, put us on these sweet-smelling sheets and cooked, and wouldn't take any money. We had to slip money under their pillows.
"And that happened everywhere. 'Where do we eat in this town that has no places where blacks can eat?' And somebody would say, 'Here is a man who was a chef at the Waldorf Astoria, but he's retired and he cooks sometimes for visitors.' And you go to his house and get the best meal of your life. But that was within the community. There really was a community, there really was a neighborhood."
Morrison has spent much of her life in the North. After graduating from Howard, she worked for years as an editor for Random House, then debuted as an author with "The Bluest Eye," published in 1970. Her breakthrough came in 1977 with "Song of Solomon," a Book-of-the-Month Club selection praised by New York Times critic John Leonard as a masterpiece akin to music. Her name reached ever higher. "Beloved" won the Pulitzer in 1988. The Nobel came five years later.
As she gets older, Morrison says, the world becomes more interesting and more distressing. She is appalled at some of the remarks about President Barack Obama and the speculation that he was not an American citizen.
Saying that her writing process was unchanged by the Nobel -- after a "few mental tricks" cleared the fog of success from her mind -- Morrison tries to challenge herself with every book.
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