Toni Morrison -I'm not somebody else's version of who I am

The idea for a novel about a black girl made to feel so ugly by the culture around her that she prays for blue eyes, came out of an encounter Morrison had as a child. A fellow classmate confided to her the same dream of blue eyes, which, even as a 12-year-old, struck Morrison as grotesquely self-loathing. She remembered it. "I wanted to know how she got to that place."
She was Chloe Wofford then; Toni was a nickname that came out of her baptismal name, Anthony (after St Anthony), which she took at 12 when she joined the Catholic church. She knew who she was and puts it down to a combination of class – in her town, they were all poor together, black, white, Polish, Spanish – living in the same streets and attending the same high schools. Her parents were also fiercely resistant to outside influence. For a while, her family was on food aid, or "relief" as it was then known, a word Morrison finds preferable to today's language. "I liked that word. Because it was, like, it's just a pause. You're going to be all right, it's just 'relief'. And I remember my mother got some cornmeal or something and it had bugs in it. She wrote a letter to Franklin D Roosevelt. And his office answered! And the woman who dealt out this crap came to see my mother, and my mother said, 'You're giving us food with bugs in it?!' She was the type who tore eviction notices off the door."

When Morrison was in her early teens, she got a job as a domestic in a white family's house. Looking back, she is inclined to think her white employer had a point when she yelled at her for being useless at the job. "I was so stupid, I'd never had a vacuum cleaner, my mother used a mop! And she had a very elaborate stove, which I didn't know how to use." At the time, she says, she took it very personally and ran home in distress. Her mother told her to quit, but she wanted the two dollars a week. Her father gave her a long, stern lecture that has stayed with Morrison all her life.

"He said, 'Go to work, get your money and come home. You don't live there.'"

She was not obliged, he said, to live as they saw her in their imagination. 


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/13/toni-morrison-home-son-love?INTCMP=SRCH