Reading Minds
by Claudia Dreifus
On the cover of Toni Morrison's new photo book for children, Remember: The Journey to School Integration (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), there's a large black-and-white picture, taken during the 1950s of two little girls, one black and one white, facing each other in a newly integrated schoolroom somewhere in the South. "I think she likes me," the caption reads, "but how can I tell? What will I do if she hates me?"
"I thought that children could see history through that picture," says Morrison, 73, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature. "School integration and the civil rights movement is a triumphant story. It paid off."
In her unusual book, Morrison presents 53 photographs of children and adults caught in the struggle to integrate the nation's public schools and gives them her imagined dialogue.
Some of the photographs are famous. One shows Elizabeth Eckford—one of the famous Little Rock Nine students—sitting in frightened isolation at the Central High School cafeteria. "I eat alone," reads the caption written by Morrison. "No one looks at me. I can't (won't) look at them."
"I just started picking out the ones where I felt I could imagine the language of the people in the picture," says Morrison, now a professor of humanities at Princeton University.
"Imagine all the fear, the stubbornness, the discipline those kids went through," she says. "I wonder how many now would let their children do something like that for the good of the community."
