Dissatisfied with her pace and injured by her critique of his writing style, Land arrived unannounced on Morrison’s office in early summer. He expressed feelings of distrust of her and Random House. She cautioned him, first, against attempting to publish a book with an editor or company for which he had contempt. It was a fool’s errand. She followed up with a letter to make sure he got the point. She warned:

I cannot be strong-armed. It is simply an ineffective tactic because it makes me angry and uncooperative. Also it rips the thread of trust I assumed existed between us. . . .

We have been working on this since last November. I am excited about it, but very apprehensive about the turns your impatience have [sic] taken. None of this has to do with anything other than human frailty and the structures of vanity— mine and yours, but I think it terribly important to articulate these things at the precise moment they can be helpful.

What began as an exchange between writers with mutual respect devolved rather quickly into a series of miscommunications. Initially, Morrison suggested to Jordan that she could get a contract rather quickly, In a matter of days. Weeks went by, however, with no word from Morrison. What Jordan did not know was that Morrison needed to find a way to respond to Silberman’s concerns about how well Jordan could perform as a novelist. There was, still, the matter of the Simon and Schuster contract; and Silberman was scheduled for a monthlong vacation.

Even as she had some sense of how shy Jones was, Morrison was taken aback by the timidity Jones expressed in the letter. This same writer who wrote the unimaginable seemed uncertain about everything and uncomfortable with anything other than writing.

I don’t know what an agent-writer relationship should be. . . . I feel like I’m in this really strange situation when all I really want to do is to be writing. I wouldn’t even think about contracts. . . . Everything else seems scary and I am really unsure about myself and what I should be doing/saying. I hope that you will forgive me if in all the things coming at me for me to do and say, I have chosen the wrong thing(s) to do or say.

Morrison relented and hoped Durham would make good on his word. But he also had to convince Silberman to let him work at his own pace. “Try this my way,” he wrote. "Allow me the exotic pleasure this time of calling you first with the work, rather than vice versia [sic]. I am highly conscious of the overhangings. But now that I’ve got the ball, I run faster and better when I give myself the illusion I’m in charge of it and the whistle wont blow before I wrap it up. I beat deadlines when I feel no deadlines.

The fact that she knew the letter was coming and they had resolved the problem did little to avert Morrison’s annoyance with the first letter. Flummoxed, she wrote:

I will probably always be befuddled about what you imagine this publishing company to be and about your reasons for ascribing sinister motives to a copyediting mistake of placing your name after Miller Williams. I can only assume you had some bad experiences with other publishers.

We make errors, Jim, and I am sure that I will never be wholly free of that frailty. What I (we) don’t do is spend time thinking up silly ways to tell the world on a book jacket that one of our own authors is racially inferior to his co-author and/or has done “less” work. . . . But more than the misunderstanding, I regret the absence of trust which is the single most important ingredient to exist between author and editor. I wish you thought I deserved it.