4. Escaping the Chrysalis

“Whatever these African writers were talking about,” she told Black Issues Book Review founding editor Susan McHenry, “it wasn’t about color.”

They weren’t explaining anything to white people, though they may have commented on social conditions under colonialism. In one of Chinua Achebe’s stories for example: A man leaves his home and saying goodbye to his wife, he touches her hair— a very small subtle gesture you’d never see in Black writing in America back then. I realized that with all the books I’d read by contemporary Black American writers— men that I admired, or was sometimes disturbed by— I felt they were not talking to me. I was sort of eavesdropping as they talked over my shoulder to the real (white) reader. Take Ralph Ellisons’s Invisible Man: That title alone got me. Invisible to whom?

Morrison had begun to execute this project of dismissing the white gaze in her own fiction. But taking up this work in her editorship required far more nuance. Publishers wanted books that appealed to general audiences, and textbooks were the most conservative in this regard. Teaching some and reminding others that African literature was a long, rich tradition that far exceeded the stereotypical ways Africans had their literature presented was delicate work.

Her editorial choices reflected her belief that books could provoke thought and foster critical discourse. Her assumption, one that would persist through the years, was that a good editor could collaborate with the author to produce a book that revealed a writer’s individual achievement alongside the book’s more general efforts to shift perspectives. The nonfiction books she edited during these years foreshadowed her interest in publishing books that engage directly with social and cultural reorientations. Far from a disparate hodgepodge, those early books helped craft an editorial identity that positioned her as a serious professional, as one with a gift for helping authors on her list render complex and uncomfortable topics more legible, and as one committed to using her role as a tool for social change.

Morrison took risks publishing voices some deemed marginal and, by extension, challenged Random House to remain true to its legacy of prioritizing artistry and quality over market trends around the same time publishing conglomerates had begun to drift toward privileging commercial viability above all else.

For Morrison, the exploration of the ordinariness of Black women, individually and as a group, was a venture into the extraordinary. The need for acid and outrage was indisputable, yes; but universalizing Black women’s discrete experiences was uniquely appealing and necessary.

Author by author, book by book, Morrison was determined to build an editorial identity that mirrored her belief that the cultural terrain was best traversed when every kind of author was given meaningful opportunities for storytelling. While Black women writers were being published in record numbers, Morrison looked beyond the trend and acquired novels by Black male writers as well. No doubt she was interested and invested in celebrating the success women writers were experiencing. She was among these writers, after all. But her ability to edit all kinds of fiction challenged the simplistic notion that affinity with one group had to come at the expense of another. There was more than enough room across the rich literary landscape for all. Publishing Gayle Jones’s fiction would certainly prove this.

Through her editorial choices, Morrison emphasized that history is a living, breathing entity shaped by the stories we tell and how we tell them. Publishing these books helped brandish her reputation as a culture worker whose productivity as an editor could be rivaled only by her rising prominence as an important writer.