When you don’t know what else to do, when you’re really stuck and filled with despair and self-loathing and boredom, but you can’t just leave your work alone for a while and wait, you might try telling part of your history—part of a character’s history—in the form of a letter. The letter’s informality just might free you from the tyranny of perfectionism.

Morrison ended the letter with a trace of humility. She set that modesty aside quickly, however, and reinforced her letter with honest bravado, concluding with a final pitch about her confidence in the book.

I suspect this letter should include some information about myself— something to prevent you from ignoring this letter— but that’s probably presumptuous [sic] if not just a waste of letter reading time. Let me just say. . . :I want to publish books about us— black people— that will make some sense— to give joy, to pass on some grandeur to all those black children (born and unborn) who need to get to the horizon with something under their arms besides Dick and Jane and the Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire. . . . I have already published some books that I believe do that. I know the one I have described to you will do more.

Morrison returned the manuscript as requested but also took a moment to write to Jordan directly.

Last Thursday I returned your material to your lawyer at her request. I didn’t want to call you with if-y information— only with a yes or no. . . . I can’t figure out why you didn’t trust me; I know you wanted things settled but, had no idea there was a time crisis involved; . . . I would have felt so much better if you had given me the deadline and the ultimatum yourself. Keep doing the work though, I love it.

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.

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.