Toni Morrison sucks her teeth. The gesture, identified by linguists as rooted in Africa, produces something like the sound that horseback riders use to get their mounts moving, but Morrison’s version is sharper, wetter, and more expressive—of comic disapproval or, more often, an ingrained skepticism. The 1993 Nobel laureate is skeptical about so very many things: prizes and fame, critics, the teaching of creative writing, politics (of the electoral, racial, sexual, literary, and academic varieties), and virtually anything else anyone tries to sell her. Morrison isn’t buying it, generally speaking—at least not until she’s squeezed and weighed and probed it to her own exacting standards. And sometimes not even then.

From the beginning of her career, Morrison has bequeathed this teeth-sucking, and the fiercely independent, questioning mind-set it conveys, to many of her most memorable characters, most of them female. In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), a sassy young girl named Frieda sucks her teeth; so does the maverick title character of Morrison’s second novel, Sula (Knopf, 1973). So, too, do figures in several of her other books, including Jazz (Knopf, 1992), whose opening sentence (“Sth, I know that woman”) includes a transcription of the sound—the sound of intelligence irreverently asserting itself, like it or not.

The sucking of the teeth continues, literally and figuratively, in Morrison’s life and on the page. In an interview at the New York City offices of Random House—where for many years she worked as an editor—she fixes her interviewer, and by extension the world, with a gimlet eye. At seventy-seven, her cascade of silver dreadlocks set off against a cranberry blouse, she laughs often, easily, and sometimes wickedly, but it never quite balances the intensity of her assessing gaze. She’s always on guard, always suspicious of conventions, structures, and received wisdom from all sources.

That includes her own initial research for A Mercy, her new novel, set in late-seventeenth-century Virginia, published this month by Knopf. As part of her study of indentured servitude in that period, Morrison examined the manifests of ships that ferried a motley group of people from the British Isles to the New World, finding that 70 to 80 percent of them listed their occupation as servant.

Hah!

“I was trying to get beyond the Puritan, Plymouth Rock stuff, because I didn’t believe that, not for one minute,” says Morrison, sounding a bit like a detective in a crime novel. “I mean, I believe that, but I didn’t think it was the whole story. Why are you leaving a servant job to go to this unknown place on the other side of the ocean? What were they running from?” Her eyes light up with discovery. “Some of them were adventurers, but most of them were felons. Most of them were prostitutes. Most of them were children. Most of them were just people they didn’t want in Great Britain, and they gave them a choice: prison or transportation.”

In a few cases, even the poorest passengers from other backgrounds—stuffed belowdecks next to the animals, without light or air, enduring conditions not far removed from those of African slaves making their own middle passage—journeyed across the Atlantic for different reasons. In A Mercy, one of these, a sturdy and practical young woman named Rebekka, travels to meet her new husband, an enlightened Protestant named Jacob. Settled on his farm, Rebekka finds herself mistress of a strange trio of young slaves: Lina, a Native American, and Sorrow and Florens, both black. (On the periphery are two white male indentured servants whose terms of service are perennially extended.) Relations among the four women, always complex, grow deeper and even more interdependent when Jacob, known to the slaves as Sir, dies, leaving Rebekka infected with pox. To save her life, Florens is dispatched on a dangerous mission through inhospitable territory to find a free black man, a blacksmith who once worked at the farm and is believed to possess healing powers—and with whom she happens to be in abject, obsessive love.

Florens’s first-person account, which forms the novel’s narrative spine, alternates in contrapuntal fashion with the third-person stories of the other characters. Within this elegant structure—the book is also, at 167 pages, conspicuously compact—Morrison returns to the great theme of her Pulitzer Prize–winning Beloved: slavery and its tar pit of historical, political, and emotional implications.

But where Beloved, which was published by Knopf in 1987, combined the slow-building epic sweep of Greek tragedy with the mounting horror of a ghost story, A Mercy has the intimacy and speed of a chamber piece while still being impressively dense, like a small valise packed with enough outfits for a month in the country. It parses sometimes surprisingly fine distinctions between master and slave, male and female, black and white (and brown). It features a new entry in Morrison’s ever-growing inventory of the forces aligning themselves against freedom: a certain type of romantic love, which Florens is finally forced to confront as a kind of spiritual quicksand that threatens to swallow her sense of self. Above all, A Mercy brims with the omnipresence of the author’s questing, sifting brain, which the reader can feel inspecting each strand of the story, subjecting it to the closest scrutiny before weaving it into the whole. The result is both a compelling yarn and a meditation on the varieties and degrees of enslavement and liberation; it is as precise, taut, and tough-minded as Morrison herself.

“To me, this is her finest book since Beloved, and I’m very impressed and moved by it,” says Robert Gottlieb, her longtime editor at Knopf. “My personal favorites among her books are Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and this. It’s very intense.”

A Mercy may be a doubling back to Beloved, but it’s also, like that earlier book, closer to the bone than many readers will realize. Morrison’s grandfather was born a slave in Alabama, and her father, a ship welder named George Wofford, whose family had migrated from the South in the early twentieth century, distrusted whites. Raising his own family, with his wife, Ella Ramah Willis, in the small town of Lorain, Ohio, he had reason to. In the early years of the Great Depression, when Chloe Anthony Wofford (who later adopted her nickname, Toni) was about two years old, “people set our house on fire to evict us,” she told Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes in 1998.

The family held fast in Lorain, however, and Chloe, the second of four children, thrived in a household full of music, storytelling, folklore, and fairy tales. She graduated from high school with honors in 1949 and then studied English at Howard University—where she was the first in her family to receive a college degree—after which she attended graduate school at Cornell, where she earned a master’s degree (writing her thesis on the theme of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf). After a short stint at Texas Southern University, where she taught English, she started teaching at Howard, where she met and married another member of the faculty, the architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford and Slade Kevin.

The marriage was not a happy one, and she sought solace in a writers group, for which she wrote a short story about a young black girl who yearned for blue eyes. In 1964 she divorced, left Howard, and became an editor for Random House, working from Syracuse. In 1967 she transferred to Random House’s New York City office, where she became a senior editor known for discovering young black women writers including Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. Three years later The Bluest Eye, based on her short story, was published.

In 1973 Knopf published Sula, the first of her books to deal with one of her most enduring themes—friendships among black women—and the first edited by Gottlieb. “I said to her, ‘Sula is perfect. It’s like a sonnet. But you don’t have to do that again,’” he recalls. “She knew exactly what I meant, and of course she was thinking the same way. It wasn’t that what I said was a magic elixir or anything, but my saying it helped free her to do what she knew she had to do, which was expand and take chances. And the result, in the short term, was Song of Solomon.”

That book—the story of Milkman Dead (so named because of his unusually long period of breast-feeding), who goes in quest of an inheritance of gold—was Morrison’s breakthrough. Widely hailed as the best novel about African Americans since Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award with its lyrical prose, folkloric source material, and the flashes of magic realism—influenced by the work of Gabriel García Márquez—that would become one of her signatures.

“Gabriel García opened the world for me,” Morrison recalls. “When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, it was a wide-open door. I could put reality and mythology together in a way that was so assumptive and real. I was sneaking up on it in Sula”—in which the title character’s arrival in town is heralded by a plague of robins—“but it was like some road was beckoning, and I wouldn’t take it. It was a risk. Then, after Márquez, it was open to me, and I was totally in control of it.”

Years later, in Mexico, Márquez recited the plot of Song of Solomon back to her, “like I hadn’t heard it before,” Morrison recalls with a smile. “He said, ‘This happened, this happened, and then this happened.’ It was in Spanish, so it had to be translated, and it took about twelve minutes. But it was amazing, because he understood the structure, how everything related to everything else.” (Another person who liked to recite passages of the book to her, in a series of late-night phone conversations, was Marlon Brando. “I’m like, ‘Who does he think he is—I don’t have this kind of time!’ But he would say, ‘Remember this part?’ And [he had] that voice, so I couldn’t hang up.”)

In the early eighties Knopf published Morrison’s fourth novel, Tar Baby, and she left her job at Random House. She resumed her academic career, teaching first at the State University of New York, Albany, then at Princeton. In 1993, a year before her mother died—her father had passed away back in 1975—she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. “She had a class scheduled that afternoon,” recalls her Princeton colleague, poet Paul Muldoon. “The world’s press had beaten a six-lane highway to her door, but she absolutely refused to meet with them till she’d finished that class. I think that says a lot about her.”

Morrison, who reads her reviews, approaches the publication of A Mercy with a mixture of confidence and a certain resignation. Although Beloved was widely acclaimed—and in 2006 was named “the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years” by 125 leading writers, critics, and scholars polled by the New York Times—it also has its detractors.

“They didn’t ask me,” Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award–winning novel Middle Passage (Atheneum, 1990), says of the Times poll. “I think Ms. Morrison is somebody who can write a very elegant, poetic prose line. But I’m a writer who values such things as plot, structure, and character development, which I didn’t quite feel were present in Beloved.”

Johnson was also among those troubled by the literary brouhaha surrounding Beloved in 1988, when forty-eight black writers, including Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, John Edgar Wideman, and Ernest J. Gaines, signed an open letter in the Times noting that Morrison “has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize.”

“Lo and behold,” Johnson says ruefully, “she gets the Pulitzer.”

Poet Nikky Finney, one of the signers of the Times letter, resents the implication of foul play. “Toni Morrison changed the landscape of American literature with The Bluest Eye, and has been changing it with every other book she’s published,” says Finney, an African American woman and writer-in-residence at Smith College. “There’s no one writing today about the history of this country like Morrison does, yet she too often gets relegated to questions about race. Her narratives arc the whole American experience, and yet they get slotted into questions about black people. That’s a really narrow view. She’s writing more honest narratives about the interplay of the human heart and the human mind than anybody else today.”

Still, Morrison’s relationship with critics seems to have shifted since Beloved. Especially post-Nobel, certain former champions—notably Michiko Kakutani—have soured on Morrison, whose recent novels they seem to regard as having become too explicitly political and, in some cases, too openly feminist. In the Times Kakutani dismissed Paradise (Knopf, 1999), about a community of women murdered by the men of an all-black settlement, as “a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing,” then criticized Love (Knopf, 2003) as “didactic” and “haphazard.”

Morrison sucks her teeth. “It read like a book report to me—an eleventh-grade book report,” she says of Kakutani’s Paradise slam. “I would not have expected that of a Princeton freshman. The level of execution—not what she thought about it, ‘heavy-handed’ or whatever, but how it was written. I was surprised that she was so careless.”

Responding to the “political” rap, her gaze sharpens. “All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying, ‘We love the status quo.’ We’ve just dirtied the word ‘politics,’ made it sound like it’s unpatriotic or something.” Morrison laughs derisively. “That all started in the period of state art, when you had the communists and fascists running around doing this poster stuff, and the reaction was ‘No, no, no; there’s only aesthetics.’ My point is that it has to be both: beautiful and political at the same time. I’m not interested in art that is not in the world. And it’s not just the narrative, it’s not just the story; it’s the language and the structure and what’s going on behind it. Anybody can make up a story.”

Of course, her novels were implicitly political from the first. The Bluest Eye was a lyrical yet harrowing portrait of internalized racism and its result, black family dysfunction, while Sula posited black sisterhood as a key survival mechanism, even as the author herself was—and remains—somewhat at odds with the women’s movement. “It was for white women, as far as I was concerned, and I was annoyed at that time and much later because affirmative action has helped more white women than anybody,” she says. “They don’t have to apologize for getting into those medical schools. They don’t have to say, ‘We were not taking something away from white guys.’ If it’s labeled black, then all of a sudden there’s a problem. But no group of white women defended affirmative action, even though they were the largest beneficiaries of it. And then they started saying that sisterhood was powerful, as if it were this brand-new idea!”

Morrison laughs. “Sisterhood was so critical among black women because there wasn’t anybody else. And our dependency on one another—in my life, my mother’s life—it was a real thing. We saved one another’s lives for generations. When I was writing Sula, I was talking about a relationship that fell apart, because I wanted the reader to miss it.”

And if the later novels are more willing to frame their characters and situations within the larger context of Morrison’s deepening sense of American history—and at times to underline those meanings—her editor sees it as only natural. “The times have changed, and we’re older, and we know more, I hope,” Gottlieb says. “Like any intelligent person, Toni has evolved. At first, I’m sure, the issue was, ‘Can I write a novel?’ That was the main impulse, and The Bluest Eye proved that she could. But as you grow more sure of yourself, you become freer to look outside yourself, and her political consciousness developed. She became a great figure, too, which gives you both more freedom and more responsibility. That [Nobel] prize liberates people to say what they want to say more openly.”

Increasingly, Morrison has been doing just that. Her book of critical essays, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992), was a biting critique of white American writers’ handling of black characters and themes. The same year, she edited Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (Pantheon Books). Today, she’s a member of the editorial board of the Nation, a leading liberal journal, and a public endorser of Barack Obama who worries about the presidential election. “The one thing that Republicans really, really hate is voters—they really do not like people to vote,” she says, again sucking her teeth. “And anything they can do to stop that…or steal it, they will.”

Novelist Reynolds Price, one of Morrison’s oldest and closest friends, isn’t surprised by her flowering as a cultural commentator. “I think the Nobel Prize gave Toni a podium from which to make a number of comments upon politics, sociology, whatever,” says Price, who developed a bond with Morrison when they served together on panels for the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1970s. “But any such podium is likely to attract attention from the world, and there are a number of people who wish Toni would just shut up. That has aroused a certain amount of ire and rejection. As a person who’s gotten my own share of bad reviews, I know how she feels. As Truman Capote said, ‘Once I’ve published a book, all I want to hear is praise.’”

In any case, Morrison’s friends say, becoming famous hasn’t changed her. “When I first knew her, she was not the very iconic figure that she now is, but I’m always delighted to see that she’s survived the Nobel,” says Price, who cherishes the memory of a dinner at Russell Banks’s home in the late 1980s, during which he and Morrison surprised Banks and another guest, their Princeton colleague Joyce Carol Oates, with their madcap sense of humor. “At one point I was playing with Toni’s pigtails and she said she’d cut one off and send it to me—I don’t think Joyce quite understood us,” Price recalls with a laugh. “Since then, I’ve always felt that within five minutes of our winding up at the same table or in the same room, my friendship with Toni is essentially where we left it the last time. She’s certainly not high-hat, or anything else that she once deplored in others.”

Perhaps that’s because everyday life has its ways of reminding Morrison that being a Nobel laureate gets you only so far. “It doesn’t help you write better, and then you have to get the prize out of your head,” she says. “You have to wait till it’s gone—the gaze of the prize; otherwise you’re just doing somebody else’s business. And people do say nice things, but not really. I go to the airport and these two black girls are there at the security desk pushing the luggage through, and they say, ‘Oh! Toni Morrison! We love you, honey, we love you! My mother loves you! Your books, my God! Take off your shoes.’”

Which sends her now into uproarious laughter.

Morrison’s humor may come in handy again soon. As her relationship with the critical establishment has deteriorated in recent years, she also increasingly faces pressure from fellow writers and scholars who take issue with what they see as Morrison’s failure to engage fully with contemporary African American life. Prominent among these is Johnson, whose recent essay in the American Scholar, “The End of the Black American Narrative,” invites fiction writers to consider leaving slavery and its long aftermath—what Johnson calls the “group victimization” story—behind. African Americans are now so successful and so diverse, he argues, that the slavery era has lost its potency as a lens through which to view the black experience.

Johnson’s essay doesn’t take specific aim at Morrison. But in a phone interview from Seattle, where he is an English professor at the University of Washington, it’s clear that he sees her novelistic material as in need of refreshment—a thesis arguably supported by the choice of subject for her new novel.

“I think writers should be free to go wherever their imaginations take them, but I do think clearly that slavery-era stories and segregation-era stories are stories about the past,” says Johnson, an African American who admittedly has written a number of such stories himself. “If there’s something fresh there, I say chase it down to the last page. But we do need a new narrative about black Americans living in America today.”

As for A Mercy, which Johnson hasn’t read, “I don’t want to say she’s beating a dead horse,” he says. “But she probably feels more comfortable writing about that period, as opposed to maybe something more contemporary.”

Provided with a copy of Johnson’s essay, Morrison doesn’t disagree with some of its points. She’s impressed, she says, by the potential of Edwidge Danticat and writers from many parts of the African diaspora; she’s also interested in younger “post-black” writers who, she notes with a kind of wonder, are singularly uninterested in the past. But as Morrison points out, her fiction never concerned itself with black identity politics per se, and this was deliberate.

“I know I’m of the generation that’s supposed to be hanging on desperately to the good old days of dogs and hoses and how we all survived, but I was never interested in that,” she says with a laugh. “What’s true is that that generation relied on white guilt as a stepping-off point to gain respect or resources or what have you. But where blackness becomes a product, I’m out. You can sell it, withhold it, mock it, imitate it. It makes money. And that’s too bad. Because when you start selling it, oh please! That’s over, or should be over. For me, I’m writing about African Americans in the same way that James Joyce wrote about Irish people. They don’t look like race books to me. This is just what I’m interested in, and when I lose interest in it, I’ll write about something else. I don’t feel as though I have to put race in, or wave it like a flag. The young black writers certainly don’t feel that obligation, and I don’t see why they should.”

On the other hand, she says in a steely voice, “Slavery can never be exhausted as a narrative. Nor can the Holocaust; nor can the potato famine; nor can war. To say slavery is over is to be ridiculous. There is nothing in those catastrophic events of human life that is exhaustible at all.”

Finney agrees. “When I’m reading her, I’m always lifting my eyes above the text toward something going on in contemporary life, even if she’s writing about 1863. What’s happening with Barack Obama is a wonderful thing, and it will bring new narratives to the pens of black and white writers. But think of his wife, who’s being made to seem ‘uppity’ and unfeminine—where does that come from? Does it fall from the heavens? The fact is that we have not fully looked at what slavery did to black people and white people. And now we’re supposed to cut off our feet—our feet being the foundational moment when this country came to be—and walk on ahead? We’re still hurting, and the only way to stop is to look forward and backward. If we don’t, we will never get the answers we need. We will make up some answer that will fit the moment, and it will be a pebble in our shoe, for the rest of our lives and our children’s lives. From what Morrison is laying down, we can learn something about who we are and how we got here.”

The Johnson/Morrison dialogue has already begun to pick up steam within academic circles. Marc C. Conner, who has edited books about Johnson and Morrison and is involved with scholarly societies devoted to their bodies of work, says the clash of these literary titans has been a hot topic at a number of recent literature conferences—so much so that it threatens to generate more heat than light. At a conference in May, he says, a Morrison supporter rose to her feet and declared, “You can’t compare these two; she’s better than he is.” Replied Conner: “That’s not cultural analysis. That’s keeping score.”

“It’s a good thing not to let this devolve into something simplified, because Johnson’s essay is extraordinarily important, especially in the year of Obama, and it does seem to go against Morrison’s fictional material,” Conner, who is white, says in an interview from Washington and Lee University, where he is an English professor and director of the African-American Studies program. “I think Johnson is exactly right that the simplest form of the narrative of victimization is no longer accurate for contemporary African American culture. And it’s a little troubling that her work is always looking backward, rather than at the present. That being said, I think she deserves the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, and I agree that Beloved is one of the greatest novels of the century.”

How much attention Morrison pays to all this is unclear. She’s an extraordinarily busy woman, with a book tour on the way and a multitude of interview requests to satisfy (or not). Now a professor emerita at Princeton, she plans to teach one more semester next spring in the interdisciplinary “atelier” concept she developed there in the nineties, in which students work with professional artists in various media—who over the years have included novelist A. S. Byatt, theater and opera director Peter Sellars, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and composer Richard Danielpour (with whom Morrison later collaborated on Margaret Garner, an opera based on the same source material as Beloved).

At first, when Morrison was considering retirement at age sixty-five, the atelier was her response to burnout. “In the creative writing department, I was not challenged, I think,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “Once in a while I had a really good student, but you never know whom you’re going to get; they just pass the students out randomly to avoid clubbishness. And so I was bored. It was okay to be half-engaged, and I don’t like to work that way; it’s just not worth my time to sort of come in and write things in the margin. So I thought, if I was going to stay here, what would make me interested? Creative writing wasn’t getting it—there was no juice in it for me.”

Another factor in Morrison’s thinking at the time was that she has always been skeptical of the value of creative writing programs in general. “I thought they were a good way for writers to say what they know to people who were interested, and to get paid, and to have some protection and some dignity that was separate from the publishing industry,” she says. “For students, I thought it wasn’t going to help at all. I thought it was going to make them think that that could be taught. And it can’t. My feeling was, you can take something and make it a little bit better by editing it—or you can throw it in the trash, or whatever—but you cannot teach vision. Talent you can hone, but the essential thing, the compulsion to create—where you know that if you don’t do it, something dies in you—that’s there or it’s not. And I thought that part was going to be watered down in the sort of creative writing industry.”

In recent years, however, Morrison has changed her mind—“not altogether, but partly, because I see interesting writers coming out of those programs,” she says. Even so, she adds, “Sometimes they’re a little too academic, and I hear in their prose a question to some critic somewhere: ‘Is this okay?’”

For Morrison, the solution was the atelier, which at first was regarded by some at the university as of questionable value—“just some junk that kids do at camp,” she says. There were also questions about the usefulness of the collaborations to creative writing students, which Morrison found maddening. “I don’t think writers write in isolation,” she says. “All this business about going home to your little desk—it’s nonsense. I don’t know any writer in history who did not know painters, listen to music. I think the myth of the isolated, starving, horrified, lonely guy or girl—a room of one’s own—I mean, please. You’re surrounded by people who are thoughtful, who are doing other things that you can learn from. There are historians in your group. There are musicians. And they add to what you know.”

For Conner, who was a graduate student at Princeton, the atelier was more evidence of Morrison’s innovation. “So many writers ensconced in their comfortable Ivy League chair will just teach their semester and vanish,” he says. “Here she was, injecting new conceptions of the arts at Princeton, as she herself was entering her seventh decade.”

That’s the Morrison whom Price knows too. “Toni has worked unusually hard, and kept at it,” he says. “She’s gone through a lot, and one of the miracles of her life and career is how she’s sort of sucked her teeth and gone on—not only with her increasingly brilliant writing but with her life.”

For now, Morrison finds herself pleased with life and work. She has a special affection for Florens from A Mercy, who learns the hard way that even love is no substitute for independent thinking. “She turns into something fairly feral, a tough-minded person who’s willing to stand up for herself,” she says in a tone that suggests she could be speaking just as easily of someone else. “Too bad about the guy, but at least she’s meaner. And she might survive this.”

At this prospect, Toni Morrison smiles a dazzling smile.

Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.