In a powerful and reflective 1988 interview, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison spoke candidly about her evolving belief in the spiritual connection between Black people and their ancestors, and how those connections informed her literary genius.
When asked if she believed that unknown ancestors could still be “working through us” and that we retain some form of ancestral memory, Morrison replied without hesitation:
“I do now… I do now.”
Morrison, whose novels like Beloved, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye explore the depths of Black identity, memory, and generational trauma, explained that while her formal education initially taught her to reject indigenous knowledge, her creative process led her back to it.
“My whole education, you know, was to make sure I didn’t believe things like that,” she said. “And I dismissed all sorts of things that were indigenous in my family… discredited ways of knowing that discredited people always have.”
But when she began writing fiction, Morrison said she found herself drawn to those very sources she was taught to ignore.
“That was the place where I had to go. That’s where the information was. That’s where the images were. That’s where the language, the color came—in these tales, folk tales, attitudes, the normal, easy acceptance of signs,” she explained.
Her comment—“And then things began to happen that were really quite startling”—speaks to the transformative nature of trusting intuition, history, and collective memory in the creative process.
This moment, now resurfaced on social media and shared by scholars and cultural critics alike, reminds us of Morrison’s deep reverence for Black ancestral knowledge—a theme that permeates her entire body of work and continues to resonate in contemporary conversations around race, history, and healing.
