The World Has Changed (36 page)

But the culture doesn’t deserve those good people if violence is the only thing that will move them. If people are going to sit back in front of the television set and only be moved because you’re dying, they don’t deserve you. I think the culture is sick. The thing to do is to think of ways not to give in to the culture, to affirm what you believe to be stronger and more important. Great importance is attached to an assassination, as if people will rise up and great changes will happen. But that doesn’t happen. People can forget overnight.

Flannery O’Connor said that anybody who’s outlived her childhood has enough material to last her the rest of her life. I draw heavily on my childhood and what I knew and what I saw and felt. But after
Meridian
I have slowly moved away from that. I’m creating situations and characters that are really much removed from what I knew as a child.

I was very much into my community, but at the same time I had this sense of almost always knowing I was observing it. Even with things like my father’s funeral I was very aware that, on one level, my father was dead and therefore that meant great, weighty stuff. But I was also very observant about everybody’s reaction to everything and remembered with great alertness everything that was said.

I will always draw on my background because it was so rich, and I always recognized it as being rich. I really have liked it. Richard Wright, for example, found very little in his childhood to like and admire, and he often felt it was barren; I feel just the opposite. When I go back to Eatonton, Georgia, I get these new reverberations of things, new enlightenment; I understand on a deeper level. That will probably always be somewhere in the work. But
Meridian
was set almost equally in New York and Mississippi, and I think that means something. In my own life I have had the kind of mobility that has taken me not just all over the South but all over the country.

I would not have missed having a child. It was tough going at times, but I think children connect us to the natural world and the natural processes of life in a way that you can’t really grasp. In the long labor and the sheer pain involved I felt like I was connected to women wherever they are and whatever condition they are in, in a way that I had never
felt. It was a bonding with my mother, with her mother, with my great-grandmother. I understood as never before what it was like for women and what it is still like for women all over the world.

I thought about my mother. Finally, they gave me what they call a saddle block so that I didn’t have all the pain at the end, but you know, she had eight children, and I remember her saying that the pain increased with each child, didn’t diminish. They claim it diminishes, and she claimed that she had forgotten it, but I don’t think so. So, I felt like, with [my daughter], I was given this information, this knowledge, and I think it just made me more humble in the face of what women go through in order to populate the earth. They provide all the workers, they provide all the teachers, and they provide the labor force that keeps everything moving. Which is why I think there should be a moratorium on birth until the planet has gotten back into a shape that really can sustain a high quality of life. I just don’t see the point of everybody continuing to have children, even one. I mean I think that one is good, but I think it’s really very thoughtless for people to continue to populate an overpopulated earth when they haven’t attended to the earth so they can keep sustaining this.

There is much revision in my novels. I started
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
at MacDowell, a writers’ colony in New Hampshire, and I worked on it through several winter months. Three years later, when I finished it, I had changed everything except one line, and then I changed that line. I have four or five complete drafts of that novel. Since
Meridian
was written in a different way—not chronological—I revised the sections a great deal. Do you know that I had a great fight with my editor because the original jacket was of a little black girl who looked exactly like a cockroach wearing a dress? They tried to sneak that cover over on me. We had this huge fight and I made them change it. Nevertheless, the novels take a lot of revision. They don’t really write themselves, but a lot of them are just somehow formed. I might work on the dialogue to make it sharper.

The ideas for the novels come from wanting to understand something. With
Grange
I wanted to understand what happened in family life over a period of years. And I wanted to understand the concept of self-hatred and family hatred, the kind of destructive thing that
Brownfield exemplified. I wanted to understand Brownfield and also to understand people who could be Brownfield but were not. I wanted to know what made the difference. Everything starts from wanting to understand something, whether it’s a person or just an event. For instance, the scenes in
Grange
when Brownfield notices that whenever a white man comes around, Grange’s behavior changes completely—those scenes come from living in a culture that produces that kind of reaction. I have seen people change their behavior because there are white people around them. My father’s behavior changed. He just lived in a culture that was intent on destroying him, so he built up defenses of various sorts.

In
Meridian
I started out being really concerned about some of the things that people did to each other in the sixties in the name of change, in the name of revolution. I wanted to see what qualities we were giving up in exchange for other qualities. Somehow part of it really understands the questions, not just understands the answers. Sometimes when you start, you just have the vaguest notion of where you’re going, and you don’t even know what things are important to work with. This has nothing to do with that, but it may show you what I mean. My regret is that Langston Hughes died before I knew what to ask him.

I live in a culture where storytelling is routine, where memory is long and rich. I was born into this huge family where everybody told stories, and it was my function to make some sense out of all of it, to write it down and present it. It’s not just me knowing; it’s what they’ve let me know.

In college I loved Camus. He was just a beautiful man. I [also] really love the Russian writers. I’m a moralist. I’m very concerned about moral questions, and I have definite feelings about what is right and what is not. Russian writers have a kind of essential passion, and they can engage in that kind of questioning of the universe and of human interactions. They really care. I like that. I don’t like writers who don’t care. I think writers should care desperately. I just discovered the poetry of Anna Akhmatova. She’s typical of the Russians in that she has passion and political sensibility. The Russians live completely in their world on every level. There is no worrying about how their political involvement will be perceived. This poem is called “The Last Toast”:

Isn’t that terrific? I think that is so true. God hasn’t saved us. I really thought for so long that God had saved black people. I thought that we were really saved. However, we’re not.

Victor Hugo was another influence. He was also a moralist and very compassionate and big. I like really big writers who have scope and who see things in a distance. I love Flannery O’Connor, but it was very upsetting when I read in some of her correspondence that she referred to black people as “nigger.” The Brontës were influential.
Jane Eyre
was one of my favorite books. I loved that sense of life intensity that you see in Mr. Rochester. I love writers who make you feel the cold when it’s a cold, gray day. There are people who influence you. And there are people you discover later on, and you know that you’re on the same wavelength and that you would give anything to have had them earlier. That’s where Tillie Olsen comes in, that’s where Zora comes in, that’s actually where Toomer comes in. I didn’t read
Cane
until 1967, and I didn’t read Zora until the seventies.

I wanted to play the piano, and I think I would have been good at it. But piano lessons were fifty cents, and I tried very hard, but I couldn’t raise it every week. Then I wanted to draw, but I wasn’t that good. I think writing was just all that was left. I became really interested because of my oldest sister, “Molly,” who left Eatonton when I was an infant. There was no high school for black people, so she had to go away. She’s twelve years older than I am. When she was thirteen, she left to go to Macon High School. And she was a great reader. I was an infant, but she would come back, especially after she went off to college. She went off to Morris Brown in Atlanta, and when she came home in the summers, she
would read to us. She would tell us stories. She introduced us to a new kind of aesthetic. My mother was part Cherokee, and she had that real Indian belief that basically you let things live where they grow. When you grow them, you don’t cut them; you just let them be. But my sister, who actually looks very much like my mother’s grandmother, very Cherokee looking, had gone to school. She knew that there were people who actually cut flowers and brought them into the house. This was a different way of looking at things.

My father and mother, even though they went through the fifth grade and the fourth grade respectively, loved education, really worshipped education. They were that generation of black people who would do anything to educate their child, and so they let my sister go because they wanted her to be educated. They read to us, things like the newspaper. Whenever books were thrown out by any white person they worked for, they were happy to have them, bring them back, and they would read to us. So we always had books in the house. I think that was unusual because many people like my parents did not have books around, or they did not appreciate them enough to take them out of the trash when someone was throwing them out. But my parents worshipped reading. They thought it was just the greatest thing. Of course, by the time I was [born], they were rather exhausted, and that’s where my sister came in. She came back for the summers, and she would read. You know the song “God Bless Mother Africa”? When I was six or seven years old, my sister taught me that song. It’s incredible. The ANC [African National Congress] was around then, trying to teach people what was going on in South Africa. She was obviously very moved by the struggle, and she learned that song, and she taught it to me. Those are the kinds of things that influenced me a lot.

I also had great teachers in the sense that they loved my family and me. They knew my family, they cared about me. I wasn’t just another little face. My mother had to take me to the fields, and I would trail along behind her as she chopped cotton, or I’d fall asleep out at the edge of the field where she couldn’t really look after me because she had to work. When I was four I went to school, and my first-grade teacher, who is still alive, gave me books for my birthday and gave me my first clothing.

When I was eight or nine or ten, I was writing, and I kept a notebook because my life has had its trials. I learned very early that this was a way to deal with pain and isolation. I also had brothers. They were very
brutal in some of their ways, and they were brought up not to be gentle with animals or younger siblings. I learned that you could put things on paper, but a safer method was actually to just keep them in your head. So I have kept until very recently the habit of writing very long and complex works in my mind before I write them because I always feel that’s the safe way.

I don’t consider myself a southern writer. I think I’m dealing with regions inside people. The people are in the South, but I really just leave that up to other people to decide. If people can only understand the work by placing it in a context, that’s fine. But I’m really trying to understand people and how they get to be the way they are. The region is the heart and the mind, not the section of the country.

There are many reasons I am still not at ease with the southern label. Part of it is that any kind of label limits. It tends to make what you’re dealing with seem localized, when in fact your main focus is to find out why people act the way they do. Wherever people are, that’s where you are. Also, when you think of southern writers, you think of white southern writers. I don’t really have any interest in integrating southern writers. On the other hand, how can I possibly ever not be considered a southern writer since I am a southerner and since I write?

The only time I know of that an autobiography did not work was Zora Hurston’s autobiography. An autobiography is very difficult to write. It’s the hardest writing if it’s going to mean something, and if it’s going to be honest. The hardest thing in the world is to write down what you really think, what you’re really feeling. The tendency is that you’re thinking, “I am a rotten person,” but by the time you get it down on the paper, it’s, “Well, I’m not so rotten.” Zora suffered from that.

She also had to placate this “godmother” of hers. This woman [Charlotte Mason Osgood] financed Zora’s expeditions into the South to do folklore. She gave money to almost all the [Harlem] Renaissance people, including Langston Hughes. She really thought that black people were these wonderful, exotic primitives and that she could read their minds. She thought she could read Zora’s mind. Zora would have a party with her friends and would say, “Let me call Godmother.” So
at five o’clock in the morning, Zora would gather her friends around and call Godmother. Zora would say, “Godmother?” and Godmother would say, “Yes, Zora?” “Godmother, do you know what I’m thinking now?” And Godmother would say, “Oh yes, you’re thinking this, or that.” And Zora would have a big laugh. It was really hokey and a sad example of how, in order to get work done, people have to do so many terrible things.