Then one day I happened to pick up Alan Paton’s novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, the subject of one of Carey Francis’s talks. It may not have been a thriller or a detective novel, but the story of Pastor Stephen Kumalo going into the city to look for his sister Gertrude and his own prodigal son, Absalom, could just as easily have unfolded in Kenya. The theme reminded me of the plot line in Kenneth’s unfinished book. I even wondered if Alan Paton was black: how else could he capture so well the tone and the imagery of African speech? Cry, the Beloved Country whetted my appetite for books that reflected my social reality, but the library did not meet my needs. On further search, I found several copies of Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. It was my first autobiography. The similarities between the situation in the nineteenth-century American South and Kenya were eerily captured in Washington’s story.

It is as though to put black people into fiction or to imagine them in the future would be to participate in an unseemly exercise in political balance, as though black presence could only and ever be there to represent “blackness.” He can hear himself arguing now and he dislikes the sound of it.

He had thought of Tuymans and Dumas but now he thinks of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose portraits are all of fictional persons. There is an abundance of black presence in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, black people who do not exist anywhere but in her paintings, paintings that may be set in the past, present, or future.

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.

And so the Africans speak. The book’s impulse to get on with the real discovery of some truth by allowing peoples to speak for themselves is emblematic of Morrison’s editorship in many ways. She and the editors made no effort to limit the texts to those written to a white audience or to those that could be easily understood in a Western context. Rather, the tales, fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction alike were informed by social, political, and cultural experiences and traditions that challenged the primacy of Western ideals as universal. Ideally, this approach would prompt readers to understand that there were multiple worldviews, that Western ways of thinking and being were one among many.

What Morrison’s decision to publish the book revealed was her willingness if not determination to rewrite history more honestly in the tradition of the Black Studies movement, which challenged dominant narratives that mischaracterized, marginalized, and erased African and African diaspora contributions to world history. The look beyond the domestic and accepted histories of civilization held a unique appeal to Morrison. The interplay between culture-shifting books, literary books, and commercially successful ones exemplified her innovative approach to editing.